He was
writing a book, "an enormous sort of book." He laughed with a touch
of shyness. It was about "everything," about how to live and how
not to live. And "aristocracy, and all sorts of things." White was
always curious about other people's books. Benham became earnest
and more explicit under encouragement, and to talk about his book
was soon to talk about himself. In various ways, intentionally and
inadvertently, he told White much. These chance encounters, these
intimacies of the train and hotel, will lead men at times to a stark
frankness of statement they would never permit themselves with
habitual friends.
About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
considering how insistent it was becoming. But the wide
propositions of the Research Magnificent, with its large
indifference to immediate occurrences, its vast patience, its
tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory
with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about
them. For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast
inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he
was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid
little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and
afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of
disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the muffled
galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night, of
groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated
iron.
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