It was a real research, it was documented.In the rooms in Westhaven Street that at last were as much as one could call his home, he had accumulated material for--one hesitates to call it a book--let us say it was an analysis of, a guide to the noble life.
There after his tragic death came his old friend White, the journalist and novelist, under a promise, and found these papers; he found them to the extent of a crammed bureau, half a score of patent files quite distended and a writing-table drawer-full, and he was greatly exercised to find them.They were, White declares, they are still after much experienced handling, an indigestible aggregation.
On this point White is very assured.When Benham thought he was gathering together a book he was dreaming, White says.There is no book in it....
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.
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 ONARISTOCRACY.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.
