Part 40

“This coast is magnificent,” she said presently.

“It's hideous,” he answered. “It's as ugly as a heap of slag.”

“It's nature at its wildest.”

“That's Amanda at her wildest.”

“Well, isn't it?”

“No! This land isn't nature. It's waste. Not wilderness. It's the other end. Those hills were covered with forests; this was a busy civilized coast just a little thousand years ago. The Venetians wasted it. They cut down the forests; they filled the cities with a mixed mud of population, THAT stuff. Look at it”!--he indicated the sleepers forward by a movement of his head.

“I suppose they WERE rather feeble people,” said Amanda.

“Who?”

“The Venetians.”

“They were traders--and nothing more. Just as we are. And when they were rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested. Much as we do.”

Amanda surveyed him. “We don't rest.”

“We idle.”

“We are seeing things.”

“Don't be a humbug, Amanda. We are making love. Just as they did. And it has been--ripping. In Salona they made love tremendously. They did nothing else until the barbarians came over the mountains....”

“Well,” said Amanda virtuously, “we will do something else.”

He made no answer and her expression became profoundly thoughtful. Of course this wandering must end. He had been growing impatient for some time. But it was difficult, she perceived, to decide just what to do with him....

Benham picked up the thread of his musing.

He was seeing more and more clearly that all civilization was an effort, and so far always an inadequate and very partially successful effort. Always it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in the sense that it was the work of minorities, who took power, who had a common resolution against the inertia, the indifference, the insubordination and instinctive hostility of the mass of mankind. And always the set-backs, the disasters of civilization, had been failures of the aristocratic spirit. Why had the Roman purpose faltered and shrivelled? Every order, every brotherhood, every organization carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. Must the idea of statecraft and rule perpetually reappear, reclothe itself in new forms, age, die, even as life does--making each time its almost infinitesimal addition to human achievement? Now the world is crying aloud for a renascence of the spirit that orders and controls. Human affairs sway at a dizzy height of opportunity. Will they keep their footing there, or stagger? We have got back at last to a time as big with opportunity as the early empire. Given only the will in men and it would be possible now to turn the dazzling accidents of science, the chancy attainments of the nineteenth century, into a sane and permanent possession, a new starting point.... What a magnificence might be made of life!

He was aroused by Amanda's voice.

“When we go back to London, old Cheetah,” she said, “we must take a house.”

For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of divergence.

“Why?” he asked at length.

“We must have a house,” she said.

He looked at her face. Her expression was profoundly thoughtful, her eyes were fixed on the slumbering ships poised upon the transparent water under the mountain shadows.

“You see,” she thought it out, “you've got to TELL in London. You can't just sneak back there. You've got to strike a note of your own. With all these things of yours.”

“But how?”

“There's a sort of little house, I used to see them when I was a girl and my father lived in London, about Brook Street and that part. Not too far north.... You see going back to London for us is just another adventure. We've got to capture London. We've got to scale it. We've got advantages of all sorts. But at present we're outside. We've got to march in.”

Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.