This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a confession, not a diary.  It was—­nothing definable.  It went into no conceivable covers.  It was just, White decided, a proliferation.  A vast proliferation.  It wanted even a title.  There were signs that Benham had intended to call it the aristocratic life, and that he had tried at some other time the title of an essay on aristocracy.  Moreover, it would seem that towards the end he had been disposed to drop the word “aristocratic” altogether, and adopt some such phrase as the larger life.  Once it was life set free.  He had fallen away more and more from nearly everything that one associates with aristocracy—­at the end only its ideals of fearlessness and generosity remained.

Of all these titles the aristocratic life seemed at first most like a clue to White.  Benham’s erratic movements, his sudden impulses, his angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be pure adventurousness, could all be put into system with that.  Before White had turned over three pages of the great fascicle of manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found the word “Bushido” written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice repeated.  “That was inevitable,” said White with the comforting regret one feels for a friend’s banalities.  “And it dates . . . [unreadable] this was early. . . .”

“Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy,” he read presently, “has still to be discovered and understood.  This is the necessary next step for mankind.  As far as possible I will discover and understand it, and as far as I know it I will be it.  This is the essential disposition of my mind.  God knows I have appetites and sloths and habits and blindnesses, but so far as it is in my power to release myself I will escape to this. . . .”

3

White sat far into the night and for several nights turning over papers and rummaging in untidy drawers.  Memories came back to him of his dead friend and pieced themselves together with other memories and joined on to scraps in this writing.  Bold yet convincing guesses began to leap across the gaps.  A story shaped itself. . . .

The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at
Minchinghampton School.

Benham had come up from his father’s preparatory school at Seagate.  He had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and manners, a boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes that went dark and deep with excitement.  Several times White had seen him excited, and when he was excited Benham was capable of tensely daring things.  On one occasion he had insisted upon walking across a field in which was an aggressive bull.  It had been put there to prevent the boys taking a short cut to the swimming place.  It had bellowed tremendously