ps of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated iron.
And once there was a marching body of white men in the foreground and a
complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them
over this fence and talking eagerly amongst themselves.

"All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,"
said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....

But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that
it was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that
eventful background while Benham talked to him.

When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
background the greater share of his attention....

11

It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long
talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated
the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it
was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched
and corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he
read. The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's
voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered
conversation.

But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
mere marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally
after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who
restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing
about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of
Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a
dozen times or more to the idea that he was a "prig." He seemed to be
defending himself against some inner accusation, some unconquerable
doubt of the entire adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by
omission exercised the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and
he drew far closer to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham
ever suspected....

At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
completely justified in his treatme