The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer’s superior knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British citizenship.

The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he was after two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience, and much meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.

Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his enquiries into Indian conditions.  They too turned for the most part on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for human brotherhood.  At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper articles and heated controversies.

The effect of India upon Benham’s mind was a peculiar mixture of attraction and irritation.  He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the other.  “I came to see India,” he wrote, “and there is no India.  There is a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air, quietly scorning everybody else.”

His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham’s shadow had fallen upon it.

“You unendurable snob!” said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful and inadvisable:  “By Heaven, you shall eat it! . . .”

8

Benham’s detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in his character as to seem almost instinctive.  But he had too a very clear reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve.  They had always, he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they had ever been before.  He believed that the evil and horror of war was becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought into being to prevent it.

In the drawer full of papers labelled “Politics,” White found a paper called “The Metal Beast.”  It showed that for a time Benham had been greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days piling up in every country in Europe.  He had gone to Essen, and at Essen he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial way to London.