couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from her. What remained to tell was—attenuated. He could not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to inspire a son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.
“You must make good friends,” she said. “Isn't young Lord Breeze at your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at Cambridge.”
He knew one of the Baptons.
“Poff,” she said suddenly, “has it ever occurred to you what you are going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?”
Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. “My father said something. He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair—that kind of thing.”
“You will be quite well off,” she repeated, without any complicating particulars. “You will be so well off that it will be possible for you to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you. Nothing. …”
“But—HOW well off?”
“You will have several thousands a year.”
“Thousands?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“But—Mother, this is rather astounding. … Does this mean there are estates somewhere, responsibilities?”
“It is just money. Investments.”
“You know, I've imagined—. I've thought always I should have to DO something.”
“You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've got to keep out of—holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston. …”
5
Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life. He did not choose among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was going to be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days. And he talked VAGUELY of wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen ought to have at least the beginnings of SAVOIR FAIRE.
Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity, by his account, seemed a huge featureless place—and might he not conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself—except quite at the wrong moment. And there was this Billy Prothero. BILLY! Like a goat or something. People called William don't get their Christian name insisted upon unless they are vulnerable somewhere. Any form of William stamps a weakness, Willie, Willy, Will, Billy, Bill; it's a fearful handle for one's friends. At any rate Poff had escaped that. But this Prothero!
“But who IS this Billy Prothero?” she asked one evening in the walled garden.
“He was at Minchinghampton.”
“But who IS he? Who is his father? Where does he come from?”
Benham sought in his mind for a space. “I don't know,” he said at last. Billy had always been rather reticent about his people. She demanded descriptions. She demanded an account of Billy's furniture, Billy's clothes, Billy's form of exercise. It dawned upon Benham that for some inexplicable reason she was hostile to Billy. It was like the unmasking of an ambuscade. He had talked a lot about Prothero's ideas and the discussions of social reform and social service that went on in his rooms, for Billy read at unknown times, and was open at all hours to any argumentative caller. To Lady Marayne all ideas were obnoxious, a form of fogging; all ideas, she held, were queer ideas. “And does he call himself a Socialist?” she asked. “I THOUGHT he would.”
“Poff,” she cried suddenly, “you're not a SOCIALIST?”
“Such a vague term.”
“But these friends of yours—they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties and everything complete.”
“They have ideas,” he evaded. He tried to express it better. “They give one something to take hold of.”
She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him, very seriously. “I hope,” she said with all her heart, “that you will have nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!”
“They make a case.”
“Pooh! Any one can make a case.”
“But—”
“There's no sense in them. What is the good of talking about upsetting everything? Just disorder. How can one do anything then? You mustn't. You mustn't. No. It's nonsense, little Poff. It's absurd. And you may spoil so much. … I HATE the way you talk of it. … As if it wasn't all—absolutely—RUBBISH. …”
She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends, as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had never thought about anything in all her life for more than half an hour—and it had always turned out remarkably well.
Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go on telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?
“I wish sometimes,” his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp note in her voice, “that you wouldn't look quite so like your father.”
“But I'm NOT like my father!” said Benham puzzled.
“No,” she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason, “so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression. …”
She jumped to her feet. “Poff,” she said, “I want to go and see the evening primroses pop. You and I are talking nonsense. THEY don't have ideas anyhow. They just pop—as God meant them to do. What stupid things we human beings are!”
Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.
6
Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of Lady Marayne for all that disappointed her in Benham. He had to become the symbol, because she could not think of complicated or abstract things, she had to make things personal, and he was the only personality available. She fretted over his existence for some days therefore (once she awakened and thought about him in the night), and then suddenly she determined to grasp her nettle. She decided to seize and obliterate this Prothero. He must come to Chexington and be thoroughly and conclusively led on, examined, ransacked, shown up, and disposed of for
