He was clear he must go alone.  It was useless to go to Prothero, one weak man going to a weaker.  Prothero he was convinced could help him not at all, and the strange thing is that this conviction had come to him and had established itself incontestably because of that figure at the street corner, which had for just one moment resembled Prothero.  By some fantastic intuition Benham knew that Prothero would not only participate but excuse.  And he knew that he himself could endure no excuses.  He must cut clear of any possibility of qualification.  This thing had to be stopped.  He must get away, he must get free, he must get clean.  In the extravagance of his reaction Benham felt that he could endure nothing but solitary places and to sleep under the open sky.

He wanted to get right away from London and everybody and lie in the quiet darkness and stare up at the stars.

His plans grew so definite that presently he was in his dressing-gown and turning out the maps in the lower drawer of his study bureau.  He would go down into Surrey with a knapsack, wander along the North Downs until the Guildford gap was reached, strike across the Weald country to the South Downs and then beat eastward.  The very thought of it brought a coolness to his mind.  He knew that over those southern hills one could be as lonely as in the wilderness and as free to talk to God.  And there he would settle something.  He would make a plan for his life and end this torment.

When Merkle came in to him in the morning he was fast asleep.

The familiar curtain rings awakened Benham.  He turned his head over, stared for a moment and then remembered.

“Merkle,” he said, “I am going for a walking tour.  I am going off this morning.  Haven’t I a rucksack?”

“You ’ave a sort of canvas bag, sir, with pockets to it,” said Merkle.  “Will you be needing the very ’eavy boots with ’obnails—­ Swiss, I fancy, sir—­or your ordinary shooting boots?”

“And when may I expect you back, sir?” asked Merkle as the moment for departure drew near.

“God knows,” said Benham, “I don’t.”

“Then will there be any address for forwarding letters, sir?”

Benham hadn’t thought of that.  For a moment he regarded Merkle’s scrupulous respect with a transient perplexity.

 “I’ll let you know, Merkle,” he said.  “I’ll let you know.”

For some days at least, notes, telephone messages, engagements, all this fuss and clamour about nothing, should clamour for him in vain. . . .

11

“But how closely,” cried White, in a mood of cultivated enthusiasm; “how closely must all the poor little stories that we tell to-day follow in the footsteps of the Great Exemplars!  A little while ago and the springtime freshness of Tobias irradiated the page.  Now see! it is Christian—.”

Indeed it looked extremely like Christian as Benham went up across the springy turf from Epsom Downs station towards the crest of the hill.  Was he not also fleeing in the morning sunlight from the City of Destruction?  Was he not also seeking that better city whose name is Peace?  And there was a bundle on his back.  It was the bundle, I think, that seized most firmly upon the too literary imagination of White.