"And so," he said breaking unconsciously into English, "let us begin by burning these BEASTLY mortgages!"And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the fire.The assenting faces became masks of horror.A score of hands clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled the room.Some one caught at his throat from behind."Don't kill him!" cried some one."He fought for us!"6
An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled and battered condition to his hotel.He found his friend in anxious consultation with the hotel proprietor.
"We were afraid that something had happened to you," said his friend.
"I got a little involved," said Benham.
"Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?"
"Very probably," said Benham.
"And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?""It was a complicated misunderstanding," said Benham."Oh! pardon!
I'm rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding."7
Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
"I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of view," he said....
"I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
"It's odd, too, that I remember saying, ‘Let's burn these mortgages,' and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for mortgage...."It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings.His aristocratic impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and time after time it was only too manifest to White that Benham's pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of his disinterested observations extremely.His explorations in Hayti had been terminated abruptly by an affair with a native policeman that had necessitated the intervention of the British Consul.It was begun with that suddenness that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the policeman.It was in the main street of Cap Haytit of representative men.I went about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all about me.I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black dragons.They were crouching here and away there in France and England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are hooded....And I had never thought very much about them before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit to call them out to action.Just out of hatred and nationalism and faction...."Then came a queer fancy.
"Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the happiness of life.It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous plot of the rebel metals against sensation.That is why in particular half-living people seem to love these things.La Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny of the strong man over men.Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong machine....
"Science is either slave or master.These people--I mean the German people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over the scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ren, and the policeman had just clubbed an unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument of Haytien discipline.His blow was a repartee, part of a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an entirely unjustifiable blow.
He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry him away.He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog, and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry.By the local standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect of his indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him on these occasions was always very considerable.Unhappily these characteristics could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was approaching the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on the shoulder that was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his colleague overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British citizenship.
The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he was after two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience, and much meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his enquiries into Indian conditions.They too turned for the most part on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for human brotherhood.At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper articles and heated controversies.
