The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.

Benham’s things were all packed up and the room had an air of having been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive cataclysm.  One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited.  For example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were lying side by side on the bed.  The clock on the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces.  All the looking-glasses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables.  And there was a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room.  The head chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third floor, to her aid.  The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the matter.  Finally they invoked the manager.  He was still contemplating the scene of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned him of Benham’s return.

Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly tranquil.

“I had a kind of nightmare,” he said.  “I am fearfully sorry to have disarranged your room.  You must charge me for the inconvenience as well as for the damage.”

31

“An aristocrat cannot be a lover.”

“One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life and the intricacies of another human being.  I do not mean that one may not love.  One loves the more because one does not concentrate one’s love.  One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears. . . .

“But if one does not give one’s whole love and life into a woman’s hands I do not think one can expect to be loved.

“An aristocrat must do without close personal love. . . .”

This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper.  The writing ended halfway down the page.  Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning.  And it was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations.  Its incompleteness made its expression perfect. . . .

There Benham’s love experience ended.  He turned to the great business of the world.  Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when they could not be altogether dismissed.  Whatever stirrings of blood or imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what mankind may do.