te
guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been
written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's
journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....

"I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort
to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so
easily settled with....

"One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one
is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
torment....

"And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a
man....

"There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....

"There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....

"One does....

"There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted and
the one who distrusts...."

After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.

20

Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child.
He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful
fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking
care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had gone astray
temporarily on the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov
and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined
to get to India by way of Herat and for the first time in his life
rode out into an altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately
because he found himself disposed to funk the journey, and because
discouragements were put in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all
the ways of living he had known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten,
saddle-sore, hungry and, above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread
of fever, and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses
of quinine. He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in May.
He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was well with
Amanda.

He had not ex