Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought the noble life a human possibility.  Perhaps man, like the ape and the hyaena and the tapeworm and many other of God’s necessary but less attractive creatures, is not for such exalted ends.  That doubt never seems to have got a lodgment in Benham’s skull; though at times one might suppose it the basis of White’s thought.  You will find in all Benham’s story, if only it can be properly told, now subdued, now loud and amazed and distressed, but always traceable, this startled, protesting question, “But why the devil aren’t we?” As though necessarily we ought to be.  He never faltered in his persuasion that behind the dingy face of this world, the earthy stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself and all of us, lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory, things unspeakable.  At first it seemed to him that one had only just to hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and hammering, he was still convinced there was something, something in the nature of an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than one had supposed at first, a little more difficult to secure, but still in that nature, which would suddenly roll open for mankind the magic cave of the universe, that precious cave at the heart of all things, in which one must believe.

And then life—­life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just isn’t. . . .

2

Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming research.  He was not the prophet or preacher of his idea.  It was too living and intricate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely about.  It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have shamed him.  He drew all sorts of reserves about him, he wore his manifest imperfections turned up about him like an overcoat in bitter wind.  He was content to be inexplicable.  His thoughts led him to the conviction that this magnificent research could not be, any more than any other research can be, a solitary enterprise, but he delayed expression; in a mighty writing and stowing away of these papers he found a relief from the unpleasant urgency to confess and explain himself prematurely.  So that White, though he knew Benham with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow who had renewed his friendship, and had shared his last days and been a witness of his death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise and with a sense of added elucidation.

And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so entirely unshaped for publication.  “But this will never make a book,” said White with a note of personal grievance.  His hasty promise in their last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to a task he now found impossible.  He would have to work upon it tremendously; and even then he did not see how it could be done.