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The Boy Grows Up4
As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his mother`s affection for him blossomed into a passion. She made him come down to London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went about with him; she made him squire her to theatres and take her out to dinners and sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she had him with her at Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir Godfrey had given her. And always when they parted she looked into his eyes to see if they were still clean--whatever she meant by that--and she kissed his forehead and cheeks and eyes and lips. She began to make schemes for his career, she contrived introductions she judged would be useful to him later.
Everybody found the relationship charming. Some of the more conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the Reverend Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but that was all. As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way he wasn`t, either at Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the TIMES. But even the most conscientious of us are not obliged to go to Seagate or read the Educational Supplement of the TIMES.
Lady Marayne`s plans for her son`s future varied very pleasantly. She was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly of the large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they mentioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered until a newer growth came to oust it. She saw her son a diplomat, a prancing pro-consul, an empire builder, a trusted friend of the august, the bold leader of new movements, the saviour of ancient institutions, the youngest, brightest, modernest of prime ministers-- or a tremendously popular poet. As a rule she saw him unmarried-- with a wonderful little mother at his elbow. Sometimes in romantic flashes he was adored by German princesses or eloped with Russian grand-duchesses! But such fancies were HORS D`OEUVRE. The modern biography deals with the career. Every project was bright, every project had GO--tremendous go. And they all demanded a hero, debonnaire and balanced. And Benham, as she began to perceive, wasn`t balanced. Something of his father had crept into him, a touch of moral stiffness. She knew the flavour of that so well. It was a stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness. She tried not to admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it was there. But it was there.
"Tell me all that you are doing NOW," she said to him one afternoon when she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor. "How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden speech? If you`re for politics, Poff, that`s your game. Have you begun it?"
She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt, a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated face warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful, sat at her feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that now at last they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it would be possible ever to love any other woman so much as he did her.
He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All sorts of things that seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn`t accept, 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. . . ."
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