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.
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