Part 57

“I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.”

“Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow not idleness.”

“There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy. You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet.”

“Just eggs and bacon!”

“Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy, and get aired.”

“How can one?”

“Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!”

“It's an infernally warm morning.

“Walk with me to Grantchester.”

“We might go by boat. You could row.”

“WALK.”

“I ought to do these papers.”

“You weren't doing them.”

“No....”

“Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--”

“Leave your wife!”

“Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one talk to you?”

“You pull things down to your own level,” said Benham as they went through the heat to Grantchester.

“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero.

“Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline and training some sort of falsity!”

“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.”

For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....

The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.

“I'm not talking of Love,” he said, remaining persistently outrageous. “I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically possible....

“But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?”

“Then why don't we up and find out?” said Billy.

He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? “What is the wisdom of the ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where that wisdom was born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic....”

“Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?” protested Benham.