Part 62

“I tell you she won't come!” he said.

“Billy!” said Benham, “you should make her!”

“I can't.”

“If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--”

“But I don't love her like that,” said Prothero, shrill with anger. “I tell you I don't love her like that.”

Then he lunged into further deeps. “It's the other men,” he said, “it's the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand? The memories--she must have memories--they come between us. It's something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails. One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....”

“MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.

“I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her his very own woman now? You--you don't seem to understand--ANYTHING. She's nobody's woman--for ever. That--that might-have-been has gone for ever.... It's nerves--a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life and-- She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....”

And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.

The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken fragments in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December--he never learnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.

Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go. Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with every mile of distance.

In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant resemblance to Anna....

In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back. “But now I had the damned frontier,” he wrote, “between us.”

It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the “damned frontier” tip the balance against him.

Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. “I can't stand this business,” he wrote. “It has things in it, possibilities of emotional disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it, I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....

“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you about my dismal feelings....”

After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.

“There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,” he wrote. “A levity. I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those tear-compelling German emanations....

“And, Benham, I have found a friend.

“A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not understand these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest accident brought us together. There was something that drew us together. A sort of instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....”

“Good heavens!” said Benham. “A sort of instinct!”

“I told her all about Anna!”

“Good Lord!” cried Benham.

“She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....”

Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.

“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were too clean for him.”

Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief, to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming friendships.

The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would withdraw processionally to the combination room....