CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID

1

Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913.  Sometimes the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection, sometimes with great bitterness.  When he met White in Johannesburg during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.  It was her suggestion that they should meet.

About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction.  He could not persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble step.  Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life.  Like all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unexpected way. . . .  He had been ready for noble deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle.  He could not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could not banish her from his mind.

During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing accepted.  Meanwhile he worked.  His nervous irritability increased, but it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.

Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put together under his headings of the first three “Limitations.”  He had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded.  Amanda.  Amanda.  Amanda.  He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his brain.

Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere prelude to the real work of a man’s life, which was to serve this dream of a larger human purpose.  The bulk of his work was to discover and define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life.  One cannot be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to an end.  To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more comprehensive, more beautiful,