Benham sat musing in silence.  The thought of deliberate cruelty was always an actual physical distress to him.  He sat bathed in the dreamy afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing and crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten down under blow and anguish.  He saw eyes alight with terror and lips rolled back in agony, he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in his soul. . . .

He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes but humility.

There is in the medley of man’s composition, deeper far than his superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience.  Every natural sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a definite direction for his own partial life.  At the bottom of his heart he feels, even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is partial.  He is driven to join himself on.  He obeys decision and the appearance of strength as a horse obeys its rider’s voice.  One thinks of the pride, the uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all Emperors, and one forgets the universal docility that made him possible.  Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility.  It is the orderly peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to men.  There are kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of the unkingliness of men.

And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny, the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the earth. . . .  To the young American’s naive American response to any simply felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes a veritable prophet. . . .

“This is the root idea of aristocracy,” said Benham.

“I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed,” said the young American.

5

Benham’s notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences.  The adventure in Kieff had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality.  He was caught in the wheels of a pogrom.