t he has to
think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order....

Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This brings
me to God."

"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.

"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as
we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will
always fail himself in the solitary place. There must be something more
with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life
that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow. There can be
no courage beyond social courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd,
until there is in us the sense of God. But God is a word that covers a
multitude of meanings. When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I
defied God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions
and pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
do still deny him and repudiate him. That God I heard of first from my
nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the nursemaids
of mankind. But there is another God than that God of obedience, God the
immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from home and country, God
scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a nail-pierced body out of
death and came not to bring peace but a sword."

With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when
he died.

(Surely the man was not a Christian!)

"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you cannot
suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain because you
have identified your life with the honour of mankind and the insatiable
adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the possible death is
negligible and the possible achievement altogether outweighs it."...

White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.

He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always
taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this
was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to
him, a posthumous betrayal....

11

One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.
He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into the jungle
country in the hills above the Tapti.