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+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Secret Places of the Heart by
+H. G. Wells, #16 in our series by H. G. Wells
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+The Secret Places of the Heart
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+May, 1999  [Etext #1734]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Secret Places of the Heart by
+H. G. Wells, #16 in our series by H. G. Wells
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+
+
+THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART
+
+BY H. G. WELLS
+
+1922
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Chapter
+
+1. THE CONSULTATION
+
+2. LADY HARDY
+
+3. THE DEPARTURE
+
+4. AT MAIDENHEAD
+
+5. IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES
+
+6. THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE
+
+7. COMPANIONSHIP
+
+8. FULL MOON
+
+9. THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY
+
+
+
+THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+THE CONSULTATION
+
+Section 1
+
+The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was
+accustomed to let in visitors who had this air of being
+annoyed and finding one umbrella too numerous for them. It
+mattered nothing to her that the gentleman was asking for Dr.
+Martineau as if he was asking for something with an
+unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of
+his umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive
+mahogany stand. "What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the
+door of the consulting room.
+
+"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly
+with its distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond
+Hardy."
+
+The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in
+undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in
+which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world
+eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished
+specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase
+containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical
+works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs,
+a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any
+collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the
+promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost
+of the three windows and stared out despondently at Harley
+Street.
+
+For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty
+jacket on its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.
+
+"Damned fool I was to come here," he said..."DAMNED fool!
+
+"Rush out of the place? . . .
+
+"I've given my name." . . .
+
+He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended
+not to hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can
+do for me," he said.
+
+"I'm sure _I_ don't," said the doctor. "People come here and
+talk."
+
+There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the
+figure that confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height
+wanted at least three inches of Sir Richmond's five feet
+eleven; he was humanly plump, his face was round and pink and
+cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of the full moon, of
+what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air and
+exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short
+or he had braced them too high so that he seemed to have
+grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been
+dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric
+personality; this amiable presence dispelled his preconceived
+resistances.
+
+Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been
+running upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets,
+seemed intent only on disavowals. "People come here and talk.
+It does them good, and sometimes I am able to offer a
+suggestion.
+
+"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded
+the idea.
+
+"I'm jangling damnably...overwork.. . . ."
+
+"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork.
+Overwork never hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can
+work--good straightforward work, without internal resistance,
+until he drops,--and never hurt himself. You must be working
+against friction."
+
+"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to
+death. . . . And it's so DAMNED important I SHOULDN'T break
+down. It's VITALLY important."
+
+He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering
+gesture of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags.
+I explode at any little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily
+for ten minutes and I can't leave off working."
+
+"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond
+Hardy? In the papers. What is it?"
+
+"Fuel."
+
+"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly
+can't afford to have you ill."
+
+"I AM ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that
+Commission."
+
+"Your technical knowledge--"
+
+"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the
+national fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's
+what I'm up against. You don't know the job I have to do. You
+don't know what a Commission of that sort is. The moral
+tangle of it. You don't know how its possibilities and
+limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long before a
+single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole
+thing with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as
+daylight. I might have seen it at first. . . . Three experts
+who'd been got at; they thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour
+men who'd do anything you wanted them to do provided you
+called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the socialist art
+critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
+nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway
+managers, oil profiteers, financial adventurers. . . . "
+
+He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the
+days before the war it was different. Then there was
+abundance. A little grabbing or cornering was all to the
+good. All to the good. It prevented things being used up too
+fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia was
+tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all
+this is altered. We're living in a different world. The
+public won't stand things it used to stand. It's a new
+public. It's--wild. It'll smash up the show if they go too
+far. Everything short and running shorter--food, fuel,
+material. But these people go on. They go on as though
+nothing had changed. . . . Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn
+them. There are men on that Commission who would steal the
+brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in
+it. . . . It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles. It's--!
+But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."
+
+"You think there may be a smash-up?"
+
+"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."
+
+"A social smash-up."
+
+"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"
+
+"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All
+sorts of people I find think that," said the doctor. "All
+sorts of people lie awake thinking of it."
+
+"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"
+
+The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too,"
+he said and seemed to reflect. But he was observing his
+patient acutely--with his ears.
+
+"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and
+left his sentence unfinished.
+
+"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered
+swiftly what line of talk he had best follow.
+
+Section 2
+
+"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor.
+"It's at the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new
+state of mind. Before the war it was abnormal--a phase of
+neurasthenia. Now it is almost the normal state with whole
+classes of intelligent people. Intelligent, I say. The others
+always have been casual and adventurous and always will be. A
+loss of confidence in the general background of life. So that
+we seem to float over abysses."
+
+"We do," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in
+the days of our assurance. There is a discord, a jarring."
+
+The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and
+dreadful sense of responsibility for the universe.
+Accompanied by a realization that the job is overwhelmingly
+too big for us."
+
+"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond.
+"Anyhow, what else is there to do? We MAY keep things
+together. . . . "I've got to do my bit. And if only I could
+hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows. But that's
+where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous
+to work well in my life. And never have I been so slack and
+weak-willed and inaccurate. ... Sloppy. . . . Indolent. . . .
+VISCIOUS! . . . "
+
+The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted
+him. "What's got hold of me? What's got hold of me? I used to
+work well enough. It's as if my will had come untwisted and
+was ravelling out into separate strands. I've lost my unity.
+I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to recover my vigour. At
+any cost."
+
+Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out
+of his mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr. Martineau, is
+this: it's fatigue. It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much
+effort. On too high a level. And too austere. One strains and
+fags. FLAGS! 'Flags' I meant to say. One strains and flags
+and then the lower stuff in one, the subconscious stuff,
+takes control."
+
+There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this,
+and the doctor drew in the corners of his mouth and gave his
+head a critical slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond
+raise his voice and quicken his speech. "I want," he said, "a
+good tonic. A pick-me-up, a stimulating harmless drug of some
+sort. That's indicated anyhow. To begin with. Something to
+pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to the scratch
+again."
+
+"I don't like the use of drugs," said the doctor.
+
+The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to
+disappointment. "But that's not reasonable," he cried.
+"That's not reasonable. That's superstition. Call a thing a
+drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug. Everything that
+affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise
+is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response
+to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I
+want food. When I'm overactive and sleepless I want
+tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I want pulling together."
+
+"But we don't know how to use drugs," the doctor objected.
+
+"But you ought to know."
+
+Dr. Martineau fixed his eye on a first floor window sill on
+the opposite side of Harley Street. His manner suggested a
+lecturer holding on to his theme.
+
+"A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs--
+all sorts of drugs--and work them in to our general way of
+living. I have no prejudice against them at all. A time will
+come when we shall correct our moods, get down to our
+reserves of energy by their help, suspend fatigue, put off
+sleep during long spells of exertion. At some sudden crisis
+for example. When we shall know enough to know just how far
+to go with this, that or the other stuff. And how to wash out
+its after effects . . . . I quite agree with you,--in
+principle . . . . But that time hasn't come yet. . . .
+Decades of research yet. . . . If we tried that sort of thing
+now, we should be like children playing with poisons and
+explosives. . . . It's out of the question."
+
+"I've been taking a few little things already. Easton Syrup
+for example."
+
+"Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the
+way. Has it done you any good--any NETT good? It has--I can
+see--broken your sleep."
+
+The doctor turned round again to his patient and looked up
+into his troubled face.
+
+"Given physiological trouble I don't mind resorting to a
+drug. Given structural injury I don't mind surgery. But
+except for any little mischief your amateur drugging may have
+done you do not seem to me to be either sick or injured.
+You've no trouble either of structure or material. You are--
+worried--ill in your mind, and otherwise perfectly sound.
+It's the current of your thoughts, fermenting. If the trouble
+is in the mental sphere, why go out of the mental sphere for
+a treatment? Talk and thought; these are your remedies. Cool
+deliberate thought. You're unravelled. You say it yourself.
+Drugs will only make this or that unravelled strand behave
+disproportionately. You don't want that. You want to take
+stock of yourself as a whole--find out where you stand.
+
+"But the Fuel Commission?"
+
+"Is it sitting now?"
+
+"Adjourned till after Whitsuntide. But there's heaps of work
+to be done.
+
+"Still," he added, "this is my one chance of any treatment."
+
+The doctor made a little calculation. "Three weeks. . . .
+It's scarcely time enough to begin."
+
+"You're certain that no regimen of carefully planned and
+chosen tonics--"
+
+"Dismiss the idea. Dismiss it." He decided to take a plunge.
+"I've just been thinking of a little holiday for myself. But
+I'd like to see you through this. And if I am to see you
+through, there ought to be some sort of beginning now. In
+this three weeks. Suppose. . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond leapt to his thought. "I'm free to go anywhere."
+
+"Golf would drive a man of your composition mad?"
+
+"It would."
+
+"That's that. Still--. The country must be getting beautiful
+again now,--after all the rain we have had. I have a little
+two-seater. I don't know. . . . The repair people promise to
+release it before Friday."
+
+"But _I_ have a choice of two very comfortable little cars.
+Why not be my guest?"
+
+"That might be more convenient."
+
+"I'd prefer my own car."
+
+"Then what do you say?"
+
+"I agree. Peripatetic treatment."
+
+"South and west. We could talk on the road. In the evenings.
+By the wayside. We might make the beginnings of a treatment.
+. . . A simple tour. Nothing elaborate. You wouldn't bring a
+man?"
+
+"I always drive myself."
+
+Section 3
+
+"There's something very pleasant, said the doctor, envisaging
+his own rash proposal, "in travelling along roads you don't
+know and seeing houses and parks and villages and towns for
+which you do not feel in the slightest degree responsible.
+They hide all their troubles from the road. Their backyards
+are tucked away out of sight, they show a brave face; there's
+none of the nasty self-betrayals of the railway approach. And
+everything will be fresh still. There will still be a lot of
+apple-blossom--and bluebells. . . . And all the while we can
+be getting on with your affair."
+
+He was back at the window now. "I want the holiday myself,"
+he said.
+
+He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder. "Have you noted
+how fagged and unstable EVERYBODY is getting? Everybody
+intelligent, I mean."
+
+"It's an infernally worrying time."
+
+"Exactly. Everybody suffers."
+
+"It's no GOOD going on in the old ways--"
+
+"It isn't. And it's a frightful strain to get into any new
+ways. So here we are.
+
+"A man," the doctor expanded, "isn't a creature in vacuo.
+He's himself and his world. He's a surface of contact, a
+system of adaptations, between his essential self and his
+surroundings. Well, our surroundings have become--how shall I
+put it?--a landslide. The war which seemed such a definable
+catastrophe in 1914 was, after all, only the first loud crack
+and smash of the collapse. The war is over and--nothing is
+over. This peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded
+phrase. The slide goes on,--it goes, if anything, faster,
+without a sign of stopping. And all our poor little
+adaptations! Which we have been elaborating and trusting all
+our lives! . . . One after another they fail us. We are
+stripped. . . . We have to begin all over again. . . . I'm
+fifty-seven and I feel at times nowadays like a chicken new
+hatched in a thunderstorm."
+
+The doctor walked towards the bookcase and turned.
+
+"Everybody is like that...it isn't--what are you going to do?
+It isn't--what am I going to do? It's--what are we all going
+to do! . . Lord! How safe and established everything was in
+1910, say. We talked of this great war that was coming, but
+nobody thought it would come. We had been born in peace,
+comparatively speaking; we had been brought up in peace.
+There was talk of wars. There were wars--little wars--that
+altered nothing material. . . . Consols used to be at 112 and
+you fed your household on ten shillings a head a week. You
+could run over all Europe, barring Turkey and Russia, without
+even a passport. You could get to Italy in a day. Never were
+life and comfort so safe--for respectable people. And we WERE
+respectable people. . . . That was the world that made us
+what we are. That was the sheltering and friendly greenhouse
+in which we grew. We fitted our minds to that. . . . And here
+we are with the greenhouse falling in upon us lump by lump,
+smash and clatter, the wild winds of heaven tearing in
+through the gaps."
+
+Upstairs on Dr. Martineau's desk lay the typescript of the
+opening chapters of a book that was intended to make a great
+splash in the world, his PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE. He had his
+metaphors ready.
+
+"We said: 'This system will always go on. We needn't bother
+about it.' We just planned our lives accordingly. It was like
+a bird building its nest of frozen snakes. My father left me
+a decent independence. I developed my position; I have lived
+between here and the hospital, doing good work, enormously
+interested, prosperous, mildly distinguished. I had been born
+and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed that
+someone else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I
+never enquired."
+
+"Nor did I" said Sir Richmond, "but--"
+
+"And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on.
+"Nobody had ever steered the ship. It was adrift."
+
+"I realized that. I--"
+
+"It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by
+faith--as children do, as the animals do. At the back of the
+healthy mind, human or animal, has been this persuasion:
+'This is all right. This will go on. If I keep the rule, if I
+do so and so, all will be well. I need not trouble further;
+things are cared for.'"
+
+"If we could go on like that!" said Sir Richmond.
+
+"We can't. That faith is dead. The war--and the peace--have
+killed it."
+
+The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance
+to the full moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote
+things. "It may very well be that man is no more capable of
+living out of that atmosphere of assurance than a tadpole is
+of living out of water. His mental existence may be
+conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable
+of sustained social life. He may become frantically self-
+seeking--incoherent . . . a stampede. . . . Human sanity
+may--DISPERSE.
+
+"That's our trouble," the doctor completed. "Our fundamental
+trouble. All our confidences and our accustomed adaptations
+are destroyed. We fit together no longer. We are--loose. We
+don't know where we are nor what to do. The psychology of the
+former time fails to give safe responses, and the psychology
+of the New Age has still to develop."
+
+Section 4
+
+"That is all very well," said Sir Richmond in the resolute
+voice of one who will be pent no longer. "That is all very
+well as far as it goes. But it does not cover my case. I am
+not suffering from inadaptation. I HAVE adapted. I have
+thought things out. I think--much as you do. Much as you do.
+So it's not that. But-- . . . Mind you, I am perfectly clear
+where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the
+breakup of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another
+system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly.
+Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in
+human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted. We used to
+say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've
+muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of
+world, planned and scientific, has to be got going.
+Civilization renewed. Rebuilding civilization--while the
+premises are still occupied and busy. It's an immense
+enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some ways
+it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips
+my imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work.
+Working as I do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall
+presently join up. . . The attempt may fail; all things human
+may fail; but on the other hand it may succeed. I never had
+such faith in anything as I have in the rightness of the work
+I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where my
+difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self
+says all that I have been saying, but--  The rest of me
+won't follow. The rest of me refuses to attend, forgets,
+straggles, misbehaves."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all.
+'Amazingly,' if you like. . . . I have this unlimited faith
+in our present tremendous necessity--for work--for devotion;
+I believe my share, the work I am doing, is essential to the
+whole thing--and I work sluggishly. I work reluctantly. I
+work damnably."
+
+"Exact--" The doctor checked himself . "All that is
+explicable. Indeed it is. Listen for a moment to me! Consider
+what you are. Consider what we are. Consider what a man is
+before you marvel at his ineptitudes of will. Face the
+accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand
+generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And
+that ape again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his
+forebear. A man's body, his bodily powers, are just the body
+and powers of an ape, a little improved, a little adapted to
+novel needs. That brings me to my point. CAN HIS MIND AND
+WILL BE ANYTHING BETTER? For a few generations, a few
+hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out
+on the darknesses of life. . . . But the substance of man is
+ape still. He may carry a light in his brain, but his
+instincts move in the darkness. Out of that darkness he draws
+his motives."
+
+"Or fails to draw them," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Or fails. . . . And that is where these new methods of
+treatment come in. We explore that failure. Together. What
+the psychoanalyst does-and I will confess that I owe much to
+the psychoanalyst--what he does is to direct thwarted,
+disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of their
+own nature. Which they have been accustomed to ignore and
+forget. They come to us with high ambitions or lovely
+illusions about themselves, torn, shredded, spoilt. They are
+morally denuded. Dreams they hate pursue them; abhorrent
+desires draw them; they are the prey of irresistible yet
+uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs. The
+first thing we ask them is this: 'What else could you
+expect?'"
+
+"What else could I expect?" Sir Richmond repeated, looking
+down on him. "H'm!"
+
+"The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly
+unselfish, inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you are
+ever anything else. . . . Do you realize that a few million
+generations ago, everything that stirs in us, everything that
+exalts human life, self-devotions, heroisms, the utmost
+triumphs of art, the love--for love it is--that makes you and
+me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round
+world, was latent in the body of some little lurking beast
+that crawled and hid among the branches of vanished and
+forgotten Mesozoic trees? A petty egg-laying, bristle-covered
+beast it was, with no more of the rudiments of a soul than
+bare hunger, weak lust and fear. . . . People always seem to
+regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance. It
+isn't: it's a vital fact of the utmost practical importance.
+That is what you are made of. Why should you expect--because
+a war and a revolution have shocked you--that you should
+suddenly be able to reach up and touch the sky?"
+
+"H'm!" said Sir Richmond. "Have I been touching the sky!"
+
+"You are trying to play the part of an honest rich man."
+
+"I don't care to see the whole system go smash."
+
+"Exactly," said the doctor, before he could prevent himself.
+
+"But is it any good to tell a man that the job he is
+attempting is above him--that he is just a hairy reptile
+twice removed--and all that sort of thing?"
+
+"Well, it saves him from hoping too much and being too
+greatly disappointed. It recalls him to the proportions of
+the job. He gets something done by not attempting everything.
+. . . And it clears him up. We get him to look into himself,
+to see directly and in measurable terms what it is that puts
+him wrong and holds him back. He's no longer vaguely
+incapacitated. He knows."
+
+"That's diagnosis. That's not treatment."
+
+"Treatment by diagnosis. To analyze a mental knot is to untie
+it."
+
+"You propose that I shall spend my time, until the Commission
+meets, in thinking about myself. I wanted to forget myself."
+
+"Like a man who tries to forget that his petrol is running
+short and a cylinder missing fire. . . . No. Come back to the
+question of what you are," said the doctor. "A creature of
+the darkness with new lights. Lit and half-blinded by science
+and the possibilities of controlling the world that it opens
+out. In that light your will is all for service; you care
+more for mankind than for yourself. You begin to understand
+something of the self beyond your self. But it is a partial
+and a shaded light as yet; a little area about you it makes
+clear, the rest is still the old darkness--of millions of
+intense and narrow animal generations. . . . You are like
+someone who awakens out of an immemorial sleep to find
+himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a
+great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless
+mountains--in a sunless universe. You are not alone in it.
+You are not lord of all you survey. Your leadership is
+disputed. The darkness even of the room you are in is full of
+ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers and
+purposes. . . . They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws
+suddenly out of the darkness into the light of your
+attention. They snatch things out of your hand, they trip
+your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and cluster behind
+you. Wherever your shadow falls, they creep right up to you,
+creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The
+souls of apes, monkeys, reptiles and creeping things haunt
+the passages and attics and cellars of this living house in
+which your consciousness has awakened . . . . "
+
+The doctor gave this quotation from his unpublished book the
+advantages of an abrupt break and a pause.
+
+Sir Richmond shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "And you
+propose a vermin hunt in the old tenement?"
+
+"The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to
+take stock and know what is there."
+
+"Three weeks of self vivisection."
+
+"To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself.
+As an opening. . . . It will take longer than that if we are
+to go through with the job."
+
+It is a considerable--process."
+
+"It is."
+
+"Yet you shrink from simple things like drugs!"
+
+"Self-knowledge--without anaesthetics."
+
+"Has this sort of thing ever done anyone any good at all?"
+
+"It has turned hundreds back to sanity and steady work."
+
+"How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be?
+Anyhow--we can break off at any time. . . . We'll try it.
+We'll try it. . . . And so for this journey into the west of
+England. . . . And--if we can get there--I'm not sure that we
+can get there--into the secret places of my heart.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+LADY HARDY
+
+The patient left the house with much more self possession
+than he had shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau had thrust
+him back from his intenser prepossessions to a more
+generalized view of himself, had made his troubles objective
+and detached him from them. He could even find something
+amusing now in his situation. He liked the immense scope of
+the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that
+most of it was entirely true--and, in some untraceable
+manner, absurd. There were entertaining possibilities in the
+prospect of the doctor drawing him out--he himself partly
+assisting and partly resisting.
+
+He was a man of extensive reservations. His private life was
+in some respects exceptionally private.
+
+"I don't confide . . . . Do I even confide in myself? I
+imagine I do . . . . Is there anything in myself that I
+haven't looked squarely in the face? . . . How much are we
+going into? Even as regards facts?
+
+"Does it really help a man--to see himself?. . ."
+
+Such thoughts engaged him until he found himself in his
+study. His desk and his writing table were piled high with a
+heavy burthen of work. Still a little preoccupied with Dr.
+Martineau's exposition, he began to handle this
+confusion. . . .
+
+At half past nine he found himself with three hours of good
+work behind him. It had seemed like two. He had not worked
+like this for many weeks. "This is very cheering," he said.
+"And unexpected. Can old Moon-face have hypnotized me?
+Anyhow--. . . Perhaps I've only imagined I was ill. . . .
+Dinner?" He looked at his watch and was amazed at the time.
+"Good Lord! I've been at it three hours. What can have
+happened? Funny I didn't hear the gong."
+
+He went downstairs and found Lady Hardy reading a magazine in
+a dining-room armchair and finely poised between devotion and
+martyrdom. A shadow of vexation fell athwart his mind at the
+sight of her.
+
+"I'd no idea it was so late," he said. "I heard no gong."
+
+"After you swore so at poor Bradley I ordered that there
+should be no gongs when we were alone. I did come up to your
+door about half past eight. I crept up. But I was afraid I
+might upset you if I came in."
+
+"But you've not waited--"
+
+"I've had a mouthful of soup." Lady Hardy rang the bell.
+
+"I've done some work at last," said Sir Richmond, astride on
+the hearthrug.
+
+"I'm glad," said Lady Hardy, without gladness. "I waited for
+three hours."
+
+Lady Hardy was a frail little blue-eyed woman with uneven
+shoulders and a delicate sweet profile. Hers was that type of
+face that under even the most pleasant and luxurious
+circumstances still looks bravely and patiently enduring. Her
+refinement threw a tinge of coarseness over his eager
+consumption of his excellent clear soup.
+
+"What's this fish, Bradley?" he asked.
+
+"Turbot, Sir Richmond."
+
+"Don't you have any?" he asked his wife.
+
+"I've had a little fish, " said Lady Hardy.
+
+When Bradley was out of the room, Sir Richmond remarked: "I
+saw that nerves man, Dr. Martineau, to-day. He wants me to
+take a holiday. "
+
+The quiet patience of the lady's manner intensified. She said
+nothing. A flash of resentment lit Sir Richmond's eyes. When
+he spoke again, he seemed to answer unspoken accusations.
+"Dr. Martineau's idea is that he should come with me."
+
+The lady adjusted herself to a new point of view.
+
+"But won't that be reminding you of your illness and
+worries?"
+
+"He seems a good sort of fellow. . . . I'm inclined to like
+him. He'll be as good company as anyone. . . . This TOURNEDOS
+looks excellent. Have some."
+
+"I had a little bird," said Lady Hardy, "when I found you
+weren't coming."
+
+"But I say--don't wait here if you've dined. Bradley can see
+to me."
+
+She smiled and shook her head with the quiet conviction of
+one who knew her duty better. "Perhaps I'll have a little ice
+pudding when it comes," she said.
+
+Sir Richmond detested eating alone in an atmosphere of
+observant criticism. And he did not like talking with his
+mouth full to an unembarrassed interlocutor who made no
+conversational leads of her own. After a few mouthfuls he
+pushed his plate away from him. "Then let's have up the ice
+pudding," he said with a faint note of bitterness.
+
+"But have you finished--?"
+
+"The ice pudding!" he exploded wrathfully. "The ice pudding!"
+
+Lady Hardy sat for a moment, a picture of meek distress.
+Then, her delicate eyebrows raised, and the corners of her
+mouth drooping, she touched the button of the silver table-
+bell.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+THE DEPARTURE
+
+Section 1
+
+No wise man goes out upon a novel expedition without
+misgivings. And between their first meeting and the appointed
+morning both Sir Richmond Hardy and Dr. Martineau were the
+prey of quite disagreeable doubts about each other,
+themselves, and the excursion before them. At the time of
+their meeting each had been convinced that he gauged the
+other sufficiently for the purposes of the proposed tour.
+Afterwards each found himself trying to recall the other with
+greater distinctness and able to recall nothing but queer,
+ominous and minatory traits. The doctor's impression of the
+great fuel specialist grew ever darker, leaner, taller and
+more impatient. Sir Richmond took on the likeness of a
+monster obdurate and hostile, he spread upwards until like
+the Djinn out of the bottle, he darkened the heavens. And he
+talked too much. He talked ever so much too much. Sir
+Richmond also thought that the doctor talked too much. In
+addition, he read into his imperfect memory of the doctor's
+face, an expression of protruded curiosity. What was all this
+problem of motives and inclinations that they were "going
+into" so gaily? He had merely consulted the doctor on a
+simple, straightforward need for a nervous tonic--that was
+what he had needed--a tonic. Instead he had engaged himself
+for--he scarcely knew what--an indiscreet, indelicate, and
+altogether undesirable experiment in confidences.
+
+Both men were considerably reassured when at last they set
+eyes on each other again. Indeed each was surprised to find
+something almost agreeable in the appearance of the other.
+Dr. Martineau at once perceived that the fierceness of Sir
+Richmond was nothing more than the fierceness of an
+overwrought man, and Sir Richmond realized at a glance that
+the curiosity of Dr. Martineau's bearing had in it nothing
+personal or base; it was just the fine alertness of the
+scientific mind.
+
+Sir Richmond had arrived nearly forty minutes late, and it
+would have been evident to a much less highly trained
+observer than Dr. Martineau that some dissension had arisen
+between the little, ladylike, cream and black Charmeuse car
+and its owner. There was a faint air of resentment and
+protest between them. As if Sir Richmond had been in some way
+rude to it.
+
+The cap of the radiator was adorned with a little brass
+figure of a flying Mercury. Frozen in a sprightly attitude,
+its stiff bound and its fixed heavenward stare was highly
+suggestive of a forced and tactful disregard of current
+unpleasantness.
+
+Nothing was said, however, to confirm or dispel this
+suspicion of a disagreement between the man and the car. Sir
+Richmond directed and assisted Dr. Martineau's man to adjust
+the luggage at the back, and Dr. Martineau watched the
+proceedings from his dignified front door. He was wearing a
+suit of fawn tweeds, a fawn Homburg hat and a light Burberry,
+with just that effect of special preparation for a holiday
+which betrays the habitually busy man. Sir Richmond's brown
+gauntness was, he noted, greatly set off by his suit of grey.
+There had certainly been some sort of quarrel. Sir Richmond
+was explaining the straps to Dr. Martineau's butler with the
+coldness a man betrays when he explains the uncongenial
+habits of some unloved intimate. And when the moment came to
+start and the little engine did not immediately respond to
+the electric starter, he said: "Oh! COME up, you--!"
+
+His voice sank at the last word as though it was an entirely
+confidential communication to the little car. And it was an
+extremely low and disagreeable word. So Dr. Martineau decided
+that it was not his business to hear it. . . .
+
+It was speedily apparent that Sir Richmond was an experienced
+and excellent driver. He took the Charmeuse out into the
+traffic of Baker Street and westward through brisk and busy
+streets and roads to Brentford and Hounslow smoothly and
+swiftly, making a score of unhesitating and accurate
+decisions without apparent thought. There was very little
+conversation until they were through Brentford. Near
+Shepherd's Bush, Sir Richmond had explained, "This is not my
+own particular car. That was butted into at the garage this
+morning and its radiator cracked. So I had to fall back on
+this. It's quite a good little car. In its way. My wife
+drives it at times. It has one or two constitutional
+weaknesses--incidental to the make--gear-box over the back
+axle for example--gets all the vibration. Whole machine
+rather on the flimsy side. Still--"
+
+He left the topic at that.
+
+Dr. Martineau said something of no consequence about its
+being a very comfortable little car.
+
+Somewhere between Brentford and Hounslow, Sir Richmond
+plunged into the matter between them. "I don't know how deep
+we are going into these psychological probings of yours," he
+said. "But I doubt very much if we shall get anything out of
+them."
+
+"Probably not," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"After all, what I want is a tonic. I don't see that there is
+anything positively wrong with me. A certain lack of energy--
+"
+
+"Lack of balance," corrected the doctor. "You are wasting
+energy upon internal friction. "But isn't that inevitable? No
+machine is perfectly efficient. No man either. There is
+always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the individual
+idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as
+she ought to pull--she never does. She's low in her class. So
+with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of
+energy waste. Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to
+me. (Damn that omnibus! All over the road!)"
+
+"We don't deny the imperfection--" began the doctor.
+
+"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir
+Richmond, opening up another line of thought.
+
+"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it.
+"These new methods of treatment are based on the idea of
+imperfection. We begin with that. I began with that last
+Tuesday. . . ."
+
+Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and
+for that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of
+accumulations. Your psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me,
+with a notion of stripping down to something fundamental. The
+ape before was a tangle of accumulations, just as we are. So
+it was with his forebears. So it has always been. All life is
+an endless tangle of accumulations."
+
+"Recognize it," said the doctor.
+
+"And then?" said Sir Richmond, controversially.
+
+"Recognize in particular your own tangle."
+
+"Is my particular tangle very different from the general
+tangle? (Oh! Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a
+creature of undecided will, urged on by my tangled heredity
+to do a score of entirely incompatible things. Mankind, all
+life, is that."
+
+"But our concern is the particular score of incompatible
+things you are urged to do. We examine and weigh--we weigh--"
+
+The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and
+ultimately disastrous struggle began between Sir Richmond and
+the little Charmeuse car. The doctor stopped in mid-sentence.
+
+It was near Taplow station that the mutual exasperation of
+man and machine was brought to a crisis by the clumsy
+emergence of a laundry cart from a side road. Sir Richmond
+was obliged to pull up smartly and stopped his engine. It
+refused an immediate obedience to the electric starter. Then
+it picked up, raced noisily, disengaged great volumes of
+bluish smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition
+to run on any gear but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought
+aloud, unpleasing thoughts. He addressed the little car as a
+person; he referred to ancient disputes and temperamental
+incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse, ill-bred
+man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There
+were some moments of hope, dashed by the necessity of going
+dead slow behind an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not
+notice the outstretched arm of the driver of the van, and
+stalled his engine for a second time. The electric starter
+refused its office altogether.
+
+For some moments Sir Richmond sat like a man of stone.
+
+"I must wind it up " he said at last in a profound and awful
+voice. "I must wind it up."
+
+"I get out, don't I?" asked the doctor, unanswered, and did
+so. Sir Richmond, after a grim search and the displacement
+and replacement of the luggage, produced a handle from the
+locker at the back of the car and prepared to wind.
+
+There was a little difficulty. "Come UP!" he said, and the
+small engine roared out like a stage lion.
+
+The two gentlemen resumed their seats. The car started and
+then by an unfortunate inadvertency Sir Richmond pulled the
+gear lever over from the first speed to the reverse. There
+was a metallic clangour beneath the two gentlemen, and the
+car slowed down and stopped although the engine was still
+throbbing wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke still
+streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle
+breeze. The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by
+a gaunt madman, mouthing vileness, who had only a minute or
+so before been a decent British citizen. He made some blind
+lunges at the tremulous but obdurate car, but rather as if he
+looked for offences and accusations than for displacements to
+adjust. Quivering and refusing, the little car was
+extraordinarily like some recalcitrant little old
+aristocratic lady in the hands of revolutionaries, and this
+made the behaviour of Sir Richmond seem even more outrageous
+than it would otherwise have done. He stopped the engine, he
+went down on his hands and knees in the road to peer up at
+the gear-box, then without restoring the spark, he tried to
+wind up the engine again. He spun the little handle with an
+insane violence, faster and faster for--as it seemed to the
+doctor--the better part of a minute. Beads of perspiration
+appeared upon his brow and ran together; he bared his teeth
+in a snarl; his hat slipped over one eye. He groaned with
+rage. Then, using the starting handle as a club, he assailed
+the car. He smote the brazen Mercury from its foothold and
+sent it and a part of the radiator cap with it flying across
+the road. He beat at the wings of the bonnet, until they bent
+in under his blows. Finally, he hurled the starting-handle at
+the wind-screen and smashed it. The starting-handle rattled
+over the bonnet and fell to the ground. . . .
+
+The paroxysm was over. Ten seconds later this cataclysmal
+lunatic had reverted to sanity--a rather sheepish sanity.
+
+He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned his
+back on the car. He remarked in a voice of melancholy
+detachment: "It was a mistake to bring that coupe."
+
+Dr. Martineau had assumed an attitude of trained observation
+on the side path. His hands rested on his hips and his hat
+was a little on one side. He was inclined to agree with Sir
+Richmond. "I don't know," he considered. "You wanted some
+such blow-off as this."
+
+"Did I? "
+
+"The energy you have! That car must be somebody's whipping
+boy."
+
+"The devil it is!" said Sir Richmond, turning round sharply
+and staring at it as if he expected it to display some
+surprising and yet familiar features. Then he looked
+questioningly and suspiciously at his companion.
+
+"These outbreaks do nothing to amend the originating
+grievance," said the doctor. "No. And at times they are even
+costly. But they certainly lift a burthen from the nervous
+system. . . . And now I suppose we have to get that little
+ruin to Maidenhead."
+
+"Little ruin!" repeated Sir Richmond. "No. There's lots of
+life in the little beast yet."
+
+He reflected. "She'll have to be towed." He felt in his
+breast pocket. "Somewhere I have the R.A.C. order paper, the
+Badge that will Get You Home. We shall have to hail some
+passing car to take it into Maidenhead."
+
+Dr. Martineau offered and Sir Richmond took and lit a
+cigarette.
+
+For a little while conversation hung fire. Then for the first
+time Dr. Martineau heard his patient laugh.
+
+"Amazing savage," said Sir Richmond. "Amazing savage!"
+
+He pointed to his handiwork. "The little car looks ruffled.
+Well it may."
+
+He became grave again. "I suppose I ought to apologize.
+
+"Dr. Martineau weighed the situation. "As between doctor and
+patient," he said. "No."
+
+"Oh!" said Sir Richmond, turned to a new point of view. "But
+where the patient ends and the host begins. . . . I'm really
+very sorry." He reverted to his original train of thought
+which had not concerned Dr. Martineau at all. "After all, the
+little car was only doing what she was made to do."
+
+Section 2
+
+The affair of the car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's
+mind. Hitherto Dr. Martineau had perceived the possibility
+and danger of a defensive silence or of a still more
+defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond had once given
+himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to an
+unlimited extent. He embarked upon an apologetic discussion
+of the choleric temperament.
+
+He began as they stood waiting for the relief car from the
+Maidenhead garage. "You were talking of the ghosts of apes
+and monkeys that suddenly come out from the darkness of the
+subconscious . . . ."
+
+"You mean--when we first met at Harley Street?"
+
+"That last apparition of mine seems to have been a gorilla at
+least."
+
+The doctor became precise. Gorillaesque. We are not descended
+from gorillas."
+
+"Queer thing a fit of rage is!"
+
+"It's one of nature's cruder expedients. Crude, but I doubt
+if it is fundamental. There doesn't seem to be rage in the
+vegetable world, and even among the animals--? No, it is not
+universal." He ran his mind over classes and orders. "Wasps
+and bees certainly seem to rage, but if one comes to think,
+most of the invertebrata show very few signs of it."
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Sir Richmond. "I've never seen a
+snail in a towering passion or an oyster slamming its shell
+behind it. But these are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which
+is after all a smouldering sort of rage. And take any more
+active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not a smashing and
+swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a disciplined, cold-
+blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will
+rage dangerously."
+
+"A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has
+ever seen a furious rabbit?"
+
+"Don't the bucks fight?" questioned Sir Richmond.
+
+Dr. Martineau admitted the point.
+
+"I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can
+remember. I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I
+once threw a fork at my elder brother and it stuck in his
+forehead, doing no serious damage--happily. There were whole
+days of wrath--days, as I remember them. Perhaps they were
+only hours. . . . I've never thought before what a peculiar
+thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage? They
+used to say it was the devil. If it isn't the devil, then
+what the devil is it? "After all," he went on as the doctor
+was about to answer his question; "as you pointed out, it
+isn't the lowlier things that rage. It's the HIGHER things
+and US."
+
+"The devil nowadays," the doctor reflected after a pause, "so
+far as man is concerned, is understood to be the ancestral
+ape. And more particularly the old male ape."
+
+But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. "Life
+itself, flaring out. Brooking no contradiction." He came
+round suddenly to the doctor's qualification. "Why male?
+Don't little girls smash things just as much?"
+
+"They don't," said Dr. Martineau. "Not nearly as much."
+
+Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. "I suppose you have
+watched any number of babies?"'
+
+"Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do.
+There's a lot of rage about most of them at first, male or
+female. "
+
+"Queer little eddies of fury. . . . Recently--it happens--
+I've been seeing one. A spit of red wrath, clenching its
+fists and squalling threats at a damned disobedient
+universe."
+
+The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and
+questioningly at his companion's profile.
+
+"Blind driving force," said Sir Richmond, musing.
+
+"Isn't that after all what we really are?" he asked the
+doctor. "Essentially--Rage. A rage in dead matter, making it
+alive."
+
+"Schopenhauer," footnoted the doctor. "Boehme."
+
+"Plain fact, "said Sir Richmond. "No Rage--no Go."
+
+"But rage without discipline?"
+
+"Discipline afterwards. The rage first."
+
+"But rage against what? And FOR what?"
+
+"Against the Universe. And for--? That's more difficult. What
+IS the little beast squalling itself crimson for? Ultimately?
+. . . What is it clutching after? In the long run, what will
+it get?"
+
+("Yours the car in distress what sent this?" asked an
+unheeded voice.)
+
+"Of course, if you were to say 'desire'," said Dr. Martineau,
+"then you would be in line with the psychoanalysts. They talk
+of LIBIDO, meaning a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks
+of it at times almost as if it were the universal driving
+force."
+
+"No," said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. "Not
+desire. Desire would have a definite direction, and that is
+just what this driving force hasn't. It's rage."
+
+"Yours the car in distress what sent this?" the voice
+repeated. It was the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car.
+He was holding up the blue request for assistance that Sir
+Richmond had recently filled in.
+
+The two philosophers returned to practical matters.
+
+Section 3
+
+For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse
+car with Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the brass Mercury
+lay unheeded in the dusty roadside grass. Then it caught the
+eye of a passing child.
+
+He was a bright little boy of five. From the moment when he
+caught the gleam of brass he knew that he had made the find
+of his life. But his nurse was a timorous, foolish thing.
+"You did ought to of left it there, Masterrarry," she said.
+
+"Findings ain't keepings nowadays, not by no manner of means,
+Masterrarry.
+
+"Yew'd look silly if a policeman came along arsting people if
+they seen a goldennimage.
+
+"Arst yer 'ow you come by it and look pretty straight at
+you."
+
+All of which grumblings Master Harry treated with an
+experienced disregard. He knew definitely that he would never
+relinquish this bright and lovely possession again. It was
+the first beautiful thing he had ever possessed. He was the
+darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was
+crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic
+penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen
+and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual
+beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a
+thing of a different order.
+
+There was to be much conflict and distress, tears and wrath,
+before the affinity of that cleanlimbed, shining figure and
+his small soul was recognized. But he carried his point at
+last. The Mercury became his inseparable darling, his symbol,
+his private god, the one dignified and serious thing in a
+little life much congested by the quaint, the burlesque, and
+all the smiling, dull condescensions of adult love.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+AT MAIDENHEAD
+
+Section 1
+
+The little Charmeuse was towed to hospital and the two
+psychiatrists took up their quarters at the Radiant Hotel
+with its pleasant lawns and graceful landing stage at the
+bend towards the bridge. Sir Richmond, after some trying work
+at the telephone, got into touch with his own proper car. A
+man would bring the car down in two days' time at latest, and
+afterwards the detested coupe could go back to London. The
+day was still young, and after lunch and coffee upon a sunny
+lawn a boat seemed indicated. Sir Richmond astonished the
+doctor by going to his room, reappearing dressed in tennis
+flannels and looking very well in them. It occurred to the
+doctor as a thing hitherto unnoted that Sir Richmond was not
+indifferent to his personal appearance. The doctor had no
+flannels, but he had brought a brown holland umbrella lined
+with green that he had acquired long ago in Algiers, and this
+served to give him something of the riverside quality.
+
+The day was full of sunshine and the river had a Maytime
+animation. Pink geraniums, vivid green lawns, gay awnings,
+bright glass, white paint and shining metal set the tone of
+Maidenhead life. At lunch there had been five or six small
+tables with quietly affectionate couples who talked in
+undertones, a tableful of bright-coloured Jews who talked in
+overtones, and a family party from the Midlands, badly
+smitten with shyness, who did not talk at all. "A resort, of
+honeymoon couples," said the doctor, and then rather
+knowingly: "Temporary honeymoons, I fancy, in one or two of
+the cases."
+
+"Decidedly temporary," said Sir Richmond, considering the
+company--"in most of the cases anyhow. The two in the corner
+might be married. You never know nowadays."
+
+He became reflective. . . .
+
+After lunch and coffee he rowed the doctor up the river
+towards Cliveden.
+
+"The last time I was here," he said, returning to the
+subject, "I was here on a temporary honeymoon."
+
+The doctor tried to look as though he had not thought that
+could be possible.
+
+"I know my Maidenhead fairly well," said Sir Richmond.
+"Aquatic activities, such as rowing, punting, messing about
+with a boat-hook, tying up, buzzing about in motor launches,
+fouling other people's boats, are merely the stage business
+of the drama. The ruling interests of this place are love--
+largely illicit--and persistent drinking. . . . Don't you
+think the bridge charming from here?"
+
+"I shouldn't have thought--drinking," said Dr. Martineau,
+after he had done justice to the bridge over his shoulder.
+
+"Yes, the place has a floating population of quiet
+industrious soakers. The incurable river man and the river
+girl end at that."
+
+Dr. Martineau encouraged Sir Richmond by an appreciative
+silence.
+
+"If we are to explore the secret places of the heart," Sir
+Richmond went on, "we shall have to give some attention to
+this Maidenhead side of life. It is very material to my case.
+I have,--as I have said--BEEN HERE. This place has beauty and
+charm; these piled-up woods behind which my Lords Astor and
+Desborough keep their state, this shining mirror of the
+water, brown and green and sky blue, this fringe of reeds and
+scented rushes and forget-me-not and lilies, and these
+perpetually posing white swans: they make a picture. A little
+artificial it is true; one feels the presence of a
+Conservancy Board, planting the rushes and industriously
+nicking the swans; but none the less delightful. And this
+setting has appealed to a number of people as an invitation,
+as, in a way, a promise. They come here, responsive to that
+promise of beauty and happiness. They conceive of themselves
+here, rowing swiftly and gracefully, punting beautifully,
+brandishing boat-hooks with ease and charm. They look to
+meet, under pleasant or romantic circumstances, other
+possessors and worshippers of grace and beauty here. There
+will be glowing evenings, warm moonlight, distant voices
+singing. . . .There is your desire, doctor, the desire you
+say is the driving force of life. But reality mocks it. Boats
+bump and lead to coarse ungracious quarrels; rowing can be
+curiously fatiguing; punting involves dreadful indignities.
+The romance here tarnishes very quickly. Romantic encounters
+fail to occur; in our impatience we resort to--accosting.
+Chilly mists arise from the water and the magic of distant
+singing is provided, even excessively, by boatloads of cads--
+with collecting dishes. When the weather keeps warm there
+presently arises an extraordinary multitude of gnats, and
+when it does not there is a need for stimulants. That is why
+the dreamers who come here first for a light delicious brush
+with love, come down at last to the Thamesside barmaid with
+her array of spirits and cordials as the quintessence of all
+desire."
+
+"I say," said the doctor. "You tear the place to pieces."
+
+"The desires of the place," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"I'm using the place as a symbol."
+
+He held his sculls awash, rippling in the water.
+
+"The real force of life, the rage of life, isn't here," he
+said. "It's down underneath, sulking and smouldering. Every
+now and then it strains and cracks the surface. This stretch
+of the Thames, this pleasure stretch, has in fact a curiously
+quarrelsome atmosphere. People scold and insult one another
+for the most trivial things, for passing too close, for
+taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose. Most
+of these notice boards on the bank show a thoroughly nasty
+spirit. People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats. You
+hear people quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk
+along the towing path. There is remarkably little happy
+laughter here. The RAGE, you see, is hostile to this place,
+the RAGE breaks through. . . . The people who drift from one
+pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the
+riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of pleasure, trying
+to forget the rage. . . ."
+
+"Isn't it that there is some greater desire at the back of
+the human mind?" the doctor suggested. "Which refuses to be
+content with pleasure as an end?"
+
+"What greater desire?" asked Sir Richmond, disconcertingly.
+
+"Oh! . . . " The doctor cast about.
+
+"There is no such greater desire," said Sir Richmond. "You
+cannot name it. It is just blind drive. I admit its
+discontent with pleasure as an end--but has it any end of its
+own? At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking
+its desire and hasn't found it."
+
+"Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an
+afternoon smile under his green umbrella. "Go on."
+
+Section 2
+
+"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond,
+"I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift
+down this backwater.) "
+
+"Big these trees are," said the doctor with infinite
+approval.
+
+"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant
+motives I am. I do not seem to deserve to be called a
+personality. I cannot discover even a general direction. Much
+more am I like a taxi-cab in which all sorts of aims and
+desires have travelled to their destination and got out. Are
+we all like that?"
+
+"A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain
+thread of memory?" said the doctor and considered. "More than
+that. More than that. We have leading ideas, associations,
+possessions, liabilities."
+
+"We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us
+from complete dispersal."
+
+"Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a
+consistency, that we call character."
+
+"It changes."
+
+"Consistently with itself."
+
+"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir
+Richmond, going off at a tangent. "My sentimental education.
+I wonder if it differs very widely from yours or most men's."
+
+"Some men are more eventful in these matters than others,"
+said the doctor,--it sounded--wistfully.
+
+"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I
+suspect, whether they are eventful or not. The brakes may be
+strong or weak but the drive is the same. I can't remember
+much of the beginnings of curiosity and knowledge in these
+matters. Can you?"
+
+"Not much," said the doctor. "No."
+
+"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions,
+monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't
+remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may
+have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy
+curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall
+anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively
+interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy,
+and a certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative
+slavishness--not towards actual women but towards something
+magnificently feminine. My first love--"
+
+Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was
+Britannia as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I
+must have been a very little chap at the time of the
+Britannia affair. I just clung to her in my imagination and
+did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little later, a
+secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the
+Crystal Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can
+remember,--for all of them. But I don't remember anything
+very monstrous or incestuous in my childish imaginations,--
+such things as Freud, I understand, lays stress upon. If
+there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort in my
+case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a
+child which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and
+sees a lot of pictures of the nude human body, and so on,
+gets its mind shifted off any possible concentration upon the
+domestic aspect of sex. I got to definite knowledge pretty
+early. By the time I was eleven or twelve."
+
+"Normally? "
+
+"What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be
+forgetting much secret and shameful curiosity. I got my ideas
+into definite form out of a little straightforward
+physiological teaching and some dissecting of rats and mice.
+My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of his
+times and my people believed in him. I think much of this
+distorted perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds
+about sex and develops into evil vices and still more evil
+habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things."
+
+"Not entirely," said the doctor.
+
+"Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes
+through the stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's
+PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN."
+
+"I've not read it."
+
+"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up
+in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of
+purity and decency and under threats of hell fire."
+
+"Horrible!"
+
+"Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that
+make young people write unclean words in secret places. "
+
+"Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters
+nowadays. Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode."
+
+"On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and
+clean," said Sir Richmond. "What stands out in my memory now
+is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely
+and kind and powerful and wonderful. That ruled my secret
+imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my mind as I
+grew up."
+
+"The mother complex," said Dr. Martineau as a passing
+botanist might recognize and name a flower.
+
+Sir Richmond stared at him for a moment.
+
+"It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any
+mother or any particular woman at all. Far better to call it
+the goddess complex."
+
+"The connexion is not perhaps immediately visible," said the
+doctor.
+
+"There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond. "The women of my
+adolescent dreams were stripped and strong and lovely. They
+were great creatures. They came, it was clearly traceable,
+from pictures sculpture--and from a definite response in
+myself to their beauty. My mother had nothing whatever to do
+with that. The women and girls about me were fussy bunches of
+clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream
+world of love and worship."
+
+"Were you co-educated?"
+
+"No. But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger
+than myself, and there were plenty of girls in my circle. I
+thought some of them pretty--but that was a different affair.
+I know that I didn't connect them with the idea of the loved
+and worshipped goddesses at all, because I remember when I
+first saw the goddess in a real human being and how amazed I
+was at the discovery. . . . I was a boy of twelve or
+thirteen. My people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney
+Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the Marsh
+accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a
+little old forgotten silent wind-bitten village crouching
+under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water there were
+miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage
+brown woman. Shining and with a texture--the very same. And
+one day as I was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy
+fashion,--there were some ribs of a wrecked boat buried in
+the sand near a groin and I was busy with them--a girl ran
+out from a tent high up on the beach and across the sands to
+the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and not
+in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to
+inflict on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a
+blue handkerchief. She ran swiftly and gracefully, intent
+upon the white line of foam ahead. I can still remember how
+the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as she went
+past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have
+ever seen--to this day. She lifted up her arms and thrust
+through the dazzling white and green breakers and plunged
+into the water and swam; she swam straight out for a long way
+as it seemed to me, and presently came in and passed me again
+on her way back to her tent, light and swift and sure. The
+very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful. Suddenly
+I realized that there could be living people in the world as
+lovely as any goddess. . . . She wasn't in the least out of
+breath.
+
+"That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I
+doubt sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else. I kept
+the thing very secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing
+so secret. Until now I have never told a soul about it. I
+resorted to all sorts of tortuous devices and excuses to get
+a chance of seeing her again without betraying what it was I
+was after."
+
+Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.
+
+"And did you meet her again?"
+
+"Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person
+and not recognized her. A day or so later I was stabbed to
+the heart by the discovery that the tent she came out of had
+been taken away. "
+
+"She had gone?"
+
+"For ever."
+
+Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.
+
+Section 3
+
+"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things,"
+Sir Richmond resumed presently. "Never. I do not think any
+man is. We are too much plastered-up things, too much the
+creatures of a tortuous and complicated evolution."
+
+Dr. Martineau, under his green umbrella, nodded his conceded
+agreement.
+
+"This--what shall I call it?--this Dream of Women, grew up in
+my mind as I grew up--as something independent of and much
+more important than the reality of Women. It came only very
+slowly into relation with that. That girl on the Dymchurch
+beach was one of the first links, but she ceased very
+speedily to be real--she joined the women of dreamland at
+last altogether. She became a sort of legendary incarnation.
+I thought of these dream women not only as something
+beautiful but as something exceedingly kind and helpful. The
+girls and women I met belonged to a different
+creation. . . ."
+
+Sir Richmond stopped abruptly and rowed a few long strokes.
+
+Dr. Martineau sought information.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "there was a sensuous element in these
+dreamings?"
+
+"Certainly. A very strong one. It didn't dominate but it was
+a very powerful undertow."
+
+"Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to
+concentrate? To group itself about a single figure, the sort
+of thing that Victorians would have called an ideal?"
+
+"Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There
+was always a tremendous lot of variety in my mind. In fact
+the thing I liked least in the real world was the way it was
+obsessed by the idea of pairing off with one particular set
+and final person. I liked to dream of a blonde goddess in her
+own Venusberg one day, and the next I would be off over the
+mountains with an armed Brunhild."
+
+"You had little thought of children?"
+
+"As a young man?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"None at all. I cannot recall a single philoprogenitive
+moment. These dream women were all conceived of, and I was
+conceived of, as being concerned in some tremendous
+enterprise--something quite beyond domesticity. It kept us
+related--gave us dignity. . . . Certainly it wasn't babies."
+
+"All this is very interesting, very interesting, from the
+scientific point of view. A PRIORI it is not what one might
+have expected. Reasoning from the idea that all instincts and
+natural imaginations are adapted to a biological end and
+seeing that sex is essentially a method of procreation, one
+might reasonably expect a convergence, if not a complete
+concentration, upon the idea of offspring. It is almost as if
+there were other ends to be served. It is clear that Nature
+has not worked this impulse out to any sight of its end. Has
+not perhaps troubled to do so. The instinct of the male for
+the female isn't primarily for offspring--not even in the
+most intelligent and farseeing types. The desire just points
+to glowing satisfactions and illusions. Quite equally I think
+the desire of the female for the male ignores its end. Nature
+has set about this business in a CHEAP sort of way. She is
+like some pushful advertising tradesman. She isn't frank
+with us; she just humbugs us into what she wants with us. All
+very well in the early Stone Age--when the poor dear things
+never realized that their mutual endearments meant all the
+troubles and responsibilities of parentage. But NOW--!"
+
+He shook his head sideways and twirled the green umbrella
+like an animated halo around his large broad-minded face.
+
+Sir Richmond considered. "Desire has never been the chief
+incentive of my relations with women. Never. So far as I can
+analyze the thing, it has been a craving for a particular
+sort of life giving companionship."
+
+"That I take it is Nature's device to keep the lovers
+together in the interest of the more or less unpremeditated
+offspring."
+
+"A poor device, if that is its end. It doesn't keep parents
+together; more often it tears them apart. The wife or the
+mistress, so soon as she is encumbered with children, becomes
+all too manifestly not the companion goddess. . . ."
+
+Sir Richmond brooded over his sculls and thought.
+
+"Throughout my life I have been an exceedingly busy man. I
+have done a lot of scientific work and some of it has been
+very good work. And very laborious work. I've travelled much.
+I've organized great business developments. You might think
+that my time has been fairly well filled without much
+philandering. And all the time, all the time, I've been--
+about women--like a thirsty beast looking for water. . . .
+Always. Always. All through my life."
+
+Dr. Martineau waited through another silence.
+
+"I was very grave about it at first. I married young. I
+married very simply and purely. I was not one of those young
+men who sow a large crop of wild oats. I was a fairly decent
+youth. It suddenly appeared to me that a certain smiling and
+dainty girl could make herself into all the goddesses of my
+dreams. I had but to win her and this miracle would occur. Of
+course I forget now the exact things I thought and felt then,
+but surely I had some such persuasion. Or why should I have
+married her? My wife was seven years younger than myself,--a
+girl of twenty. She was charming. She is charming. She is a
+wonderfully intelligent and understanding woman. She has made
+a home for me--a delightful home. I am one of those men who
+have no instinct for home making. I owe my home and all the
+comfort and dignity of my life to her ability. I have no
+excuse for any misbehaviour--so far as she is concerned. None
+at all. By all the rules I should have been completely
+happy. But instead of my marriage satisfying me, it presently
+released a storm of long-controlled desires and imprisoned
+cravings. A voice within me became more and more urgent.
+'This will not do. This is not love. Where are your
+goddesses? This is not love.' . . . And I was unfaithful to
+my wife within four years of my marriage. It was a sudden
+overpowering impulse. But I suppose the ground had been
+preparing for a long time. I forget now all the emotions of
+that adventure. I suppose at the time it seemed beautiful and
+wonderful. . . . I do not excuse myself. Still less do I
+condemn myself. I put the facts before you. So it was."
+
+"There were no children by your marriage?"
+
+"Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive. We
+have had three. My daughter was married two years ago. She is
+in America. One little boy died when he was three. The other
+is in India, taking up the Mardipore power scheme again now
+that he is out of the army. . . . No, it is simply that I was
+hopelessly disappointed with everything that a good woman and
+a decent marriage had to give me. Pure disappointment and
+vexation. The anti-climax to an immense expectation built up
+throughout an imaginative boyhood and youth and early
+manhood. I was shocked and ashamed at my own disappointment.
+I thought it mean and base. Nevertheless this orderly
+household into which I had placed my life, these almost
+methodical connubialities . . . ."
+
+He broke off in mid-sentence.
+
+Dr. Martineau shook his head disapprovingly.
+
+"No," he said, "it wasn't fair to your wife."
+
+"It was shockingly unfair. I have always realized that. I've
+done what I could to make things up to her. . . . Heaven
+knows what counter disappointments she has concealed. . . .
+But it is no good arguing about rights and wrongs now. This
+is not an apology for my life. I am telling you what
+happened.
+
+"Not for me to judge," said Dr. Martineau. "Go on."
+
+"By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had
+satisfied none but the most transitory desires and I had
+incurred a tremendous obligation. That obligation didn't
+restrain me from making desperate lunges at something vaguely
+beautiful that I felt was necessary to me; but it did cramp
+and limit these lunges. So my story flops down into the
+comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable,
+married man. . .I was still driven by my dream of some
+extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought
+it like an area sneak. Gods! What a story it is when one
+brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and
+sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world--somewhere.
+Hidden away from me. I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear
+lost thing, now in the corners of a smiling mouth, now in
+dark eyes beneath a black smoke of hair, now in a slim form
+seen against the sky. Often I cared nothing for the woman I
+made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding
+from me . . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond's voice altered.
+
+"I don't see what possible good it can do to talk over these
+things." He began to row and rowed perhaps a score of
+strokes. Then he stopped and the boat drove on with a whisper
+of water at the bow and over the outstretched oar blades.
+
+"What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried.
+"What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She
+drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even
+get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief.
+See what a fantastic thing I am when you take the machine to
+pieces! I have been a busy and responsible man throughout my
+life. I have handled complicated public and industrial
+affairs not unsuccessfully and discharged quite big
+obligations fully and faithfully. And all the time, hidden
+away from the public eye, my life has been laced by the
+thread of these--what can one call them? --love adventures.
+How many? you ask. I don't know. Never have I been a whole-
+hearted lover; never have I been able to leave love alone. .
+. . Never has love left me alone.
+
+"And as I am made, said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence,
+"AS I AM MADE--I do not believe that I could go on without
+these affairs. I know that you will be disposed to dispute
+that.
+
+Dr. Martineau made a reassuring noise.
+
+"These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally
+necessary. It is only latterly that I have begun to perceive
+this. Women MAKE life for me. Whatever they touch or see or
+desire becomes worth while and otherwise it is not worth
+while. Whatever is lovely in my world, whatever is
+delightful, has been so conveyed to me by some woman. Without
+the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in
+the world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much,
+valuing nothing."
+
+He paused.
+
+"You are, I think, abnormal," considered the doctor.
+
+"Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a
+wasting fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no
+kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The
+world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud,
+logical necessity and utter desolation--with nothing whatever
+worth fighting for. Whatever justifies effort, whatever
+restores energy is hidden in women . . . ."
+
+"An access of sex," said Dr. Martineau. " This is a
+phase. . . ."
+
+"It is how I am made," said Sir Richmond.
+
+A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. "It
+isn't how you are made. We are getting to something in all
+this. It is, I insist, a mood of how you are made. A
+distinctive and indicative mood."
+
+Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.
+
+"I would go through it all again. . . . There are times when
+the love of women seems the only real thing in the world to
+me. And always it remains the most real thing. I do not know
+how far I may be a normal man or how far I may not be, so to
+speak, abnormally male, but to me life has very little
+personal significance and no value or power until it has a
+woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say
+anything that matters a woman must be present as a medium. I
+don't mean that it has no significance mentally and
+logically; I mean that irrationally and emotionally it has no
+significance. Works of art, for example, bore me, literature
+bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores
+me, unless I find in it some association with a woman's
+feeling. It isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture
+is fine or a mountain valley lovely, but that it doesn't
+matter a rap to me whether it is or whether it isn't until
+there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if you like to
+call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness or
+pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes
+in and breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even
+rest until a woman makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I
+do without women and that is work, joylessly but effectively,
+and latterly for some reason that it is up to you to
+discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."
+
+Section 4
+
+"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous
+visit here. It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago. We
+rowed down this same backwater. I can see my companion's
+hand--she had very pretty hands with rosy palms--trailing in
+the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly under her
+sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected
+from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was
+one of those people who seem always to be happy and to
+radiate happiness.
+
+"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a
+thoroughly bad lot. She had about as much morality, in the
+narrower sense of the word, as a monkey. And yet she stands
+out in my mind as one of the most honest women I have ever
+met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of that
+effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her
+candid blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner. . . .
+But--no! She was really honest.
+
+"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet
+rushes and crushed them in her hand. She adds a remembered
+brightness to this afternoon.
+
+"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman
+who was here with me came nearest to being my friend. You
+know, what we call virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap
+to any real friendliness with a man. Until she gets to an age
+when virtue and fidelity are no longer urgent practical
+concerns, a good woman, by the very definition of feminine
+goodness, isn't truly herself. Over a vast extent of her
+being she is RESERVED. She suppresses a vast amount of her
+being, holds back, denies, hides. On the other hand, there is
+a frankness and honesty in openly bad women arising out of
+the admitted fact that they are bad, that they hide no
+treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious and
+delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal.
+Intellectually they seem to be more manly and vigorous
+because they are, as people say, unsexed. Many old women,
+thoroughly respectable old women, have the same quality.
+Because they have gone out of the personal sex business.
+Haven't you found that?"
+
+"I have never," said the doctor, known what you call an
+openly bad woman,--at least, at all intimately. . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion.
+"You have avoided them!"
+
+"They don't attract me."
+"They repel you?"
+
+"For me," said the doctor, "for any friendliness, a woman
+must be modest. . . . My habits of thought are old-fashioned,
+I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there
+were no barriers, no reservation, that in any fashion she
+might more than meet me half way . . . "
+
+His facial expression completed his sentence.
+
+"Now I wonder," whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a
+moment before he carried the great research into the
+explorer's country. "You are afraid of women?" he said, with
+a smile to mitigate the impertinence.
+
+"I respect them."
+
+"An element of fear."
+
+"Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like.
+Anyhow I do not let myself go with them. I have never let
+myself go."
+
+"You lose something. You lose a reality of insight."
+
+There was a thoughtful interval.
+
+"Having found so excellent a friend," said the doctor, "why
+did you ever part from her?"
+
+Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau's
+face remained slantingly interrogative. He had found the
+effective counterattack and he meant to press it. "I was
+jealous of her," Sir Richmond admitted. "I couldn't stand
+that side of it."
+
+Section 5
+
+After a meditative silence the doctor became briskly
+professional again.
+
+"You care for your wife," he said. "You care very much for
+your wife. She is, as you say, your great obligation and you
+are a man to respect obligations. I grasp that. Then you tell
+me of these women who have come and gone. . . . About them
+too you are perfectly frank. . . There remains someone
+else." Sir Richmond stared at his physician.
+
+"Well," he said and laughed. "I didn't pretend to have made
+my autobiography anything more than a sketch."
+
+"No, but there is a special person, the current person."
+
+"I haven't dilated on my present situation, I admit."
+
+"From some little things that have dropped from you, I should
+say there is a child."
+
+"That," said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, "is a good
+guess." "Not older than three." "Two years and a half."
+
+"You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated. At
+any rate, you can't go to her. That leaves you at loose ends,
+because for some time, for two or three years at least, you
+have ceased to be--how shall I put it?--an emotional
+wanderer." "I begin to respect your psychoanalysis."
+
+"Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine
+companionship for weary men. I guess she is a very jolly
+companion to be with, amusing, restful--interesting."
+
+"H'm," said Sir Richmond. "I think that is a fair
+description. When she cares, that is. When she is in good
+form."
+
+"Which she isn't at present," hazarded the doctor. He
+exploded a mine of long-pent exasperation.
+
+"She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever
+known. Health is a woman's primary duty. But she is incapable
+of the most elementary precautions. She is maddeningly
+receptive to every infection. At the present moment, when I
+am ill, when I am in urgent need of help and happiness, she
+has let that wretched child get measles and she herself won't
+let me go near her because she has got something disfiguring,
+something nobody else could ever have or think of having,
+called CARBUNCLE. Carbuncle!"
+
+"It is very painful," said Dr. Martineau. "No doubt it is,"
+said Sir Richmond.
+
+"No doubt it is." His voice grew bitter. He spoke with
+deliberation. "A perfectly aimless, useless illness,--and as
+painful as it CAN be."
+
+He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously. And indeed he had
+slammed a door. The doctor realized that for the present
+there was no more self-dissection to be got from Sir
+Richmond.
+
+For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up
+to the foaming weir to the left of the lock by an occasional
+stroke. Now with a general air of departure he swung the boat
+round and began to row down stream towards the bridge and the
+Radiant Hotel.
+
+"Time we had tea," he said,
+
+Section 6
+
+After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the
+lawn, brooding darkly--apparently over the crime of the
+carbuncle. The doctor went to his room, ostensibly to write
+a couple of letters and put on a dinner jacket, but really to
+make a few notes of the afternoon's conversation and meditate
+over his impressions while they were fresh.
+
+His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he
+sank. . . A number of very discrepant things were busy in his
+mind. He had experienced a disconcerting personal attack.
+There was a whirl of active resentment in the confusion.
+
+"Apologetics of a rake," he tried presently.
+
+"A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing. Every
+third manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some
+such undertow of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an
+imaginative laxity, the temptations of the trip to London--
+weakness masquerading as a psychological necessity. The Lady
+of the Carbuncle seems to have got rather a hold upon him.
+She has kept him in order for three or four years."
+
+The doctor scrutinized his own remarks with a judicious
+expression.
+
+"I am not being fair. He ruffled me. Even if it is true, as I
+said, that every third manufacturer from the midlands is in
+much the same case as he is, that does not dismiss the case.
+It makes it a more important one, much more important: it
+makes it a type case with the exceptional quality of being
+self-expressive. Almost too selfexpressive.
+
+"Sir Richmond does, after all, make out a sort of case for
+himself. . . .
+
+"A valid case?"
+
+The doctor sat deep in his chair, frowning judicially with
+the fingers of one hand apposed to the fingers of the other.
+"He makes me bristle because all his life and ideas challenge
+my way of living. But if I eliminate the personal element? "
+
+He pulled a sheet of note-paper towards him and began to jot
+down notes with a silver-cased pencil. Soon he discontinued
+writing and sat tapping his pencil-case on the table. "The
+amazing selfishness of his attitude! I do not think that
+once--not once--has he judged any woman except as a
+contributor to his energy and peace of mind. . . . Except in
+the case of his wife. . . .
+
+"For her his habit of respect was formed before his ideas
+developed. . . .
+
+"That I think explains HER. . . .
+
+"What was his phrase about the unfortunate young woman with
+the carbuncle? . . . 'Totally Useless and unnecessary
+illness,' was it? . . .
+
+"Now has a man any right by any standards to use women as
+this man has used them?
+
+"By any standards?"
+
+The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the
+corners of his mouth drawn in.
+
+For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing
+an increasing part in the good doctor's life. He was writing
+this book of his, writing it very deliberately and
+laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, but much more was
+he dreaming and thinking about this book. Its publication was
+to mark an epoch in human thought and human affairs
+generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment
+in the doctor's own little world. It was to bring home to
+people some various aspects of one very startling
+proposition: that human society had arrived at a phase when
+the complete restatement of its fundamental ideas had become
+urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate,
+partial adjustments to two centuries of changing conditions
+had to give place to a rapid reconstruction of new
+fundamental ideas. And it was a fact of great value in the
+drama of these secret dreams that the directive force towards
+this fundamentally reconstructed world should be the pen of
+an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected
+of any great excesses of enterprise.
+
+The written portions of this book were already in a highly
+polished state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal
+with a smooth urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the
+thoughts of one intelligent being could possibly be shocking
+to another. Upon this the doctor was very insistent. Conduct,
+he held, could never be sufficiently discreet, thought could
+never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat a
+law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a
+natural law. That the social well-being demands. But as a
+scientific man, in one's stated thoughts and in public
+discussion, the case was altogether different. There was no
+offence in any possible hypothesis or in the contemplation of
+any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was
+bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and
+spirit of the game, but if one was not playing that game
+then there was no reason why one should not contemplate the
+completest reversal of all its methods and the alteration and
+abandonment of every rule. Correctness of conduct, the doctor
+held, was an imperative concomitant of all really free
+thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things
+that must be divorced absolutely from revolutionary conduct.
+It was to the neglect of these obvious principles, as the
+doctor considered them, that the general muddle in
+contemporary marital affairs was very largely due. We left
+divorce-law revision to exposed adulterers and marriage
+reform to hot adolescents and craving spinsters driven by the
+furies within them to assertions that established nothing and
+to practical demonstrations that only left everybody
+thoroughly uncomfortable. Far better to leave all these
+matters to calm, patient men in easy chairs, weighing typical
+cases impartially, ready to condone, indisposed to envy.
+
+In return for which restraint on the part of the eager and
+adventurous, the calm patient man was prepared in his
+thoughts to fly high and go far. Without giving any
+guarantee, of course, that he might not ultimately return to
+the comfortable point of inaction from which he started.
+
+In Sir Richmond, Dr. Martineau found the most interesting and
+encouraging confirmation of the fundamental idea of THE
+PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, the immediate need of new criteria
+of conduct altogether. Here was a man whose life was
+evidently ruled by standards that were at once very high and
+very generous. He was overworking himself to the pitch of
+extreme distress and apparently he was doing this for ends
+that were essentially unselfish. Manifestly there were many
+things that an ordinary industrial or political magnate would
+do that Sir Richmond would not dream of doing, and a number
+of things that such a man would not feel called upon to do
+that he would regard as imperative duties. And mixed up with
+so much fine intention and fine conduct was this disreputable
+streak of intrigue and this extraordinary claim that such
+misconduct was necessary to continued vigour of action.
+
+"To energy of thought it is not necessary," said Dr.
+Martineau, and considered for a time. "Yet--certainly--I am
+not a man of action. I admit it. I make few decisions.
+
+"The chapters of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE dealing with
+women were still undrafted, but they had already greatly
+exercised the doctor's mind. He found now that the case of
+Sir Richmond had stirred his imagination. He sat with his
+hands apposed, his head on one side, and an expression of
+great intellectual contentment on his face while these
+emancipated ideas gave a sort of gala performance in his
+mind.
+
+The good doctor did not dislike women, he had always guarded
+himself very carefully against misogyny, but he was very
+strongly disposed to regard them as much less necessary in
+the existing scheme of things than was generally assumed.
+Women, he conceded, had laid the foundations of social life.
+Through their contrivances and sacrifices and patience the
+fierce and lonely patriarchal family-herd of a male and his
+women and off spring had grown into the clan and tribe; the
+woven tissue of related families that constitute the human
+comity had been woven by the subtle, persistent protection of
+sons and daughters by their mothers against the intolerant,
+jealous, possessive Old Man. But that was a thing, of the
+remote past. Little was left of those ancient struggles now
+but a few infantile dreams and nightmares. The greater human
+community, human society, was made for good. And being made,
+it had taken over the ancient tasks of the woman, one by one,
+until now in its modern forms it cherished more sedulously
+than she did, it educated, it housed and comforted, it
+clothed and served and nursed, leaving the wife privileged,
+honoured, protected, for the sake of tasks she no longer did
+and of a burthen she no longer bore. "Progress has
+TRIVIALIZED women," said the doctor, and made a note of the
+word for later consideration.
+
+"And woman has trivialized civilization," the doctor tried.
+
+"She has retained her effect of being central, she still
+makes the social atmosphere, she raises men's instinctive
+hopes of help and direction. Except," the doctor stipulated,
+"for a few highly developed modern types, most men found the
+sense of achieving her a necessary condition for sustained
+exertion. And there is no direction in her any more.
+
+"She spends," said the doctor, "she just spends. She spends
+excitingly and competitively for her own pride and glory, she
+drives all the energy of men over the weirs of gain. . . .
+
+"What are we to do with the creature?" whispered the doctor.
+
+Apart from the procreative necessity, was woman an
+unavoidable evil? The doctor's untrammelled thoughts began to
+climb high, spin, nose dive and loop the loop. Nowadays we
+took a proper care of the young, we had no need for high
+birth rates, quite a small proportion of women with a gift in
+that direction could supply all the offspring that the world
+wanted. Given the power of determining sex that science was
+slowly winning today, and why should we have so many women
+about? A drastic elimination of the creatures would be quite
+practicable. A fantastic world to a vulgar imagination, no
+doubt, but to a calmly reasonable mind by no means fantastic.
+But this was where the case of Sir Richmond became so
+interesting. Was it really true that the companionship of
+women was necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it
+the fact that the drive of life towards action, as
+distinguished from contemplation, arose out of sex and needed
+to be refreshed by the reiteration of that motive? It was a
+plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor's ideas
+of natural selection and of the conditions of a survival that
+have made us what we are. It was in tune with the Freudian
+analyses.
+
+"SEX NOT ONLY A RENEWAL OF LIFE IN THE SPECIES," noted the
+doctor's silver pencil; "SEX MAY BE ALSO A RENEWAL OF ENERGY
+IN THE INDIVIDUAL."
+
+After some musing he crossed out "sex" and wrote above it
+"sexual love."
+
+"That is practically what he claims, Dr. Martineau said. "In
+which case we want the completest revision of all our
+standards of sexual obligation. We want a new system of
+restrictions and imperatives altogether."
+
+It was a fixed idea of the doctor's that women were quite
+incapable of producing ideas in the same way that men do, but
+he believed that with suitable encouragement they could be
+induced to respond quite generously to such ideas. Suppose
+therefore we really educated the imaginations of women;
+suppose we turned their indubitable capacity for service
+towards social and political creativeness, not in order to
+make them the rivals of men in these fields, but their moral
+and actual helpers. "A man of this sort wants a mistress-
+mother," said the doctor. "He wants a sort of woman who cares
+more for him and his work and honour than she does for child
+or home or clothes or personal pride. "But are there such
+women? Can there be such a woman?"
+
+"His work needs to be very fine to deserve her help. But
+admitting its fineness? . . .
+
+"The alternative seems to be to teach the sexes to get along
+without each other.
+
+"A neutralized world. A separated world. How we should jostle
+in the streets! But the early Christians have tried it
+already. The thing is impossible.
+
+"Very well, then, we have to make women more responsible
+again. In a new capacity. We have to educate them far more
+seriously as sources of energy--as guardians and helpers of
+men. And we have to suppress them far more rigorously as
+tempters and dissipaters. Instead of mothering babies they
+have to mother the race. . . . "
+
+A vision of women made responsible floated before his eyes.
+
+"Is that man working better since you got hold of him? If
+not, why not? "Or again,--Jane Smith was charged with
+neglecting her lover to the common danger. . . . The
+inspector said the man was in a pitiful state, morally quite
+uncombed and infested with vulgar, showy ideas. . . ."
+
+The doctor laughed, telescoped his pencil and stood up.
+
+Section 7
+
+It became evident after dinner that Sir Richmond also had
+been thinking over the afternoon's conversation.
+
+He and Dr. Martineau sat in wide-armed cane chairs on the
+lawn with a wickerwork table bearing coffee cups and little
+glasses between them. A few other diners chatted and
+whispered about similar tables but not too close to our
+talkers to disturb them; the dining room behind them had
+cleared its tables and depressed its illumination. The moon,
+in its first quarter, hung above the sunset, sank after
+twilight, shone brighter and brighter among the western
+trees, and presently had gone, leaving the sky to an
+increasing multitude of stars. The Maidenhead river wearing
+its dusky blue draperies and its jewels of light had
+recovered all the magic Sir Richmond had stripped from it in
+the afternoon. The grave arches of the bridge, made complete
+circles by the reflexion of the water, sustained, as if by
+some unifying and justifying reason, the erratic flat flashes
+and streaks and glares of traffic that fretted to and fro
+overhead. A voice sang intermittently and a banjo tinkled,
+but remotely enough to be indistinct and agreeable.
+
+"After all," Sir Richmond began abruptly," the search for
+some sort of sexual modus vivendi is only a means to an end.
+One does not want to live for sex but only through sex. The
+main thing in my life has always been my work. This
+afternoon, under the Maidenhead influence, I talked too much
+of sex. I babbled. Of things one doesn't usually . . . "
+
+"It was very illuminating," said the doctor.
+
+"No doubt. But a temporary phase. It is the defective bearing
+talks. . . . Just now--I happen to be irritated."
+
+The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor's face.
+
+"The work is the thing," said Sir Richmond. So long as one
+can keep one's grip on it."
+
+"What," said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and
+sending wreaths of smoke up towards the star-dusted zenith,
+"what is your idea of your work? I mean, how do you see it in
+relation to yourself--and things generally?"
+
+"Put in the most general terms?"
+
+"Put in the most general terms."
+
+"I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It
+is hard to put something one is always thinking about in
+general terms or to think of it as a whole. . . . Now. . . .
+Fuel? . . .
+
+"I suppose it was my father's business interests that pushed
+me towards specialization in fuel. He wanted me to have a
+thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific
+training was less easy to get for a boy than it is today. And
+much more inspiring when you got it. My mind was framed, so
+to speak, in geology and astronomical physics. I grew up to
+think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in
+history and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman
+empire. I don't know what your pocket map of the universe is,
+the map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other
+general ideas. To me this planet is a little ball of oxides
+and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface. And
+we, the minutest particles in that tarnish. Who can
+nevertheless, in some unaccountable way, take in the idea of
+this universe as one whole, who begin to dream of taking
+control of it."
+
+"That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view.
+I suppose I have much the same general idea of the world. On
+rather more psychological lines."
+
+"We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something
+that is only just beginning to be aware of what it is--and
+what it might be."
+
+"Exactly," said the doctor. "Good."
+
+He went on eagerly. "That is precisely how I see it. You and
+I are just particles in the tarnish, as you call it, who are
+becoming dimly awake to what we are, to what we have in
+common. Only a very few of us have got as far even as this.
+These others here, for example . . . ."
+
+He indicated the rest of Maidenhead by a movement.
+
+"Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy
+solicitudes fill them up. They haven't begun to get out of
+themselves."
+
+"We, I suppose, have," doubted Sir Richmond.
+
+"We have."
+
+The doctor had no doubt. He lay back in his chair, with his
+hands behind his head and his smoke ascending vertically to
+heaven. With the greatest contentment he began quoting
+himself. "This getting out of one's individuality--this
+conscious getting out of one's individuality--is one of the
+most important and interesting aspects of the psychology of
+the new age that is now dawning. As compared with any
+previous age. Unconsciously, of course, every true artist,
+every philosopher, every scientific investigator, so far as
+his art or thought went, has always got out of himself,--has
+forgotten his personal interests and become Man thinking for
+the whole race. And intimations of the same thing have been
+at the heart of most religions. But now people are beginning
+to get this detachment without any distinctively religious
+feeling or any distinctive aesthetic or intellectual impulse,
+as if it were a plain matter of fact. Plain matter of fact,
+that we are only incidentally ourselves. That really each one
+of us is also the whole species, is really indeed all life. "
+
+"A part of it."
+
+"An integral part-as sight is part of a man . . . with no
+absolute separation from all the rest--no more than a
+separation of the imagination. The whole so far as his
+distinctive quality goes. I do not know how this takes shape
+in your mind, Sir Richmond, but to me this idea of actually
+being life itself upon the world, a special phase of it
+dependent upon and connected with all other phases, and of
+being one of a small but growing number of people who
+apprehend that, and want to live in the spirit of that, is
+quite central. It is my fundamental idea. We,--this small
+but growing minority--constitute that part of life which
+knows and wills and tries to rule its destiny. This new
+realization, the new psychology arising out of it is a fact
+of supreme importance in the history of life. It is like the
+appearance of self-consciousness in some creature that has
+not hitherto had self-consciousness. And so far as we are
+concerned, we are the true kingship of the world.
+Necessarily. We who know, are the true king. . . .I wonder
+how this appeals to you. It is stuff I have thought out very
+slowly and carefully and written and approved. It is the very
+core of my life. . . . And yet when one comes to say these
+things to someone else, face to face. . . . It is much more
+difficult to say than to write."
+
+Sir Richmond noted how the doctor's chair creaked as he
+rolled to and fro with the uneasiness of these intimate
+utterances.
+
+"I agree," said Sir Richmond presently. "One DOES think in
+this fashion. Something in this fashion. What one calls one's
+work does belong to something much bigger than ourselves.
+
+"Something much bigger," he expanded.
+
+"Which something we become," the doctor urged, "in so far as
+our work takes hold of us."
+
+Sir Richmond made no answer to this for a little while. "Of
+course we trail a certain egotism into our work," he said.
+
+"Could we do otherwise? But it has ceased to be purely
+egotism. It is no longer, 'I am I' but 'I am part.'. . . One
+wants to be an honourable part."
+
+"You think of man upon his planet," the doctor pursued. "I
+think of life rather as a mind that tries itself over in
+millions and millions of trials. But it works out to the same
+thing."
+
+"I think in terms of fuel," said Sir Richmond.
+
+He was still debating the doctor's generalization. "I suppose
+it would be true to say that I think of myself as mankind on
+his planet, with very considerable possibilities and with
+only a limited amount of fuel at his disposal to achieve
+them. Yes. . . . I agree that I think in that way. . . . I
+have not thought much before of the way in which I think
+about things--but I agree that it is in that way. Whatever
+enterprises mankind attempts are limited by the sum total of
+that store of fuel upon the planet. That is very much in my
+mind. Besides that he has nothing but his annual allowance of
+energy from the sun."
+
+"I thought that presently we were to get unlimited energy
+from atoms," said the doctor.
+
+"I don't believe in that as a thing immediately practicable.
+No doubt getting a supply of energy from atoms is a
+theoretical possibility, just as flying was in the time of
+Daedalus; probably there were actual attempts at some sort of
+glider in ancient Crete. But before we get to the actual
+utilization of atomic energy there will be ten thousand
+difficult corners to turn; we may have to wait three or four
+thousand years for it. We cannot count on it. We haven't it
+in hand. There may be some impasse. All we have surely is
+coal and oil,--there is no surplus of wood now--only an
+annual growth. And water-power is income also, doled out day
+by day. We cannot anticipate it. Coal and oil are our only
+capital. They are all we have for great important efforts.
+They are a gift to mankind to use to some supreme end or to
+waste in trivialities. Coal is the key to metallurgy and oil
+to transit. When they are done we shall either have built up
+such a fabric of apparatus, knowledge and social organization
+that we shall be able to manage without them--or we shall
+have travelled a long way down the slopes of waste towards
+extinction. . . . To-day, in getting, in distribution, in use
+we waste enormously. . . .As we sit here all the world is
+wasting fuel fantastically."
+
+"Just as mentally--educationally we waste," the doctor
+interjected.
+
+"And my job is to stop what I can of that waste, to do what I
+can to organize, first of all sane fuel getting and then sane
+fuel using. And that second proposition carries us far. Into
+the whole use we are making of life.
+
+"First things first," said Sir Richmond. If we set about
+getting fuel sanely, if we do it as the deliberate,
+co-operative act of the whole species, then it follows that
+we shall look very closely into the use that is being made of
+it. When all the fuel getting is brought into one view as a
+common interest, then it follows that all the fuel burning
+will be brought into one view. At present we are getting fuel
+in a kind of scramble with no general aim. We waste and lose
+almost as much as we get. And of what we get, the waste is
+idiotic.
+
+"I won't trouble you," said Sir Richmond, "with any long
+discourse on the ways of getting fuel in this country. But
+land as you know is owned in patches and stretches that were
+determined in the first place chiefly by agricultural
+necessities. When it was divided up among its present owners
+nobody was thinking about the minerals beneath. But the
+lawyers settled long ago that the landowner owned his land
+right down to the centre of the earth. So we have the
+superficial landlord as coal owner trying to work his coal
+according to the superficial divisions, quite irrespective of
+the lie of the coal underneath. Each man goes for the coal
+under his own land in his own fashion. You get three shafts
+where one would suffice and none of them in the best possible
+place. You get the coal coming out of this point when it
+would be far more convenient to bring it out at that--miles
+away. You get boundary walls of coal between the estates,
+abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each coal owner
+sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you know
+of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over
+the country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get
+it into the silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful,
+airpoisoning, fog-creating fireplace.
+
+"And this stuff," said Sir Richmond, bringing his hand down
+so smartly on the table that the startled coffee cups cried
+out upon the tray; "was given to men to give them power over
+metals, to get knowledge with, to get more power with."
+
+"The oil story, I suppose, is as bad."
+
+"The oil story is worse. . . .
+
+"There is a sort of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce
+parenthesis, "that the supplies of oil are inexhaustible--
+that you can muddle about with oil anyhow. . . . Optimism of
+knaves and imbeciles. . . . They don't want to be pulled up
+by any sane considerations. . . ."
+
+For some moments he kept silence--as if in unspeakable
+commination.
+
+"Here I am with some clearness of vision--my only gift; not
+very clever, with a natural bad temper, and a strong sexual
+bias, doing what I can to get a broader handling of the fuel
+question--as a common interest for all mankind. And I find
+myself up against a lot of men, subtle men, sharp men,
+obstinate men, prejudiced men, able to get round me, able to
+get over me, able to blockade me. . . . Clever men--yes, and
+all of them ultimately damned--oh! utterly damned--fools.
+Coal owners who think only of themselves, solicitors who
+think backwards, politicians who think like a game of cat's-
+cradle, not a gleam of generosity not a gleam."
+
+"What particularly are you working for?" asked the doctor.
+
+"I want to get the whole business of the world's fuel
+discussed and reported upon as one affair so that some day it
+may be handled as one affair in the general interest."
+
+"The world, did you say? You meant the empire?"
+
+"No, the world. It is all one system now. You can't work it
+in bits. I want to call in foreign representatives from the
+beginning."
+
+"Advisory--consultative?"
+
+"No. With powers. These things interlock now internationally
+both through labour and finance. The sooner we scrap this
+nonsense about an autonomous British Empire complete in
+itself, contra mundum, the better for us. A world control is
+fifty years overdue. Hence these disorders. "
+
+"Still--it's rather a difficult proposition, as things are."
+
+"Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond
+in the tone of one who swears. "Don't I know that perhaps
+it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I
+say, let's try to get it done. And everybody says, difficult,
+difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only
+real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another
+says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted!
+Every decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares? Along this
+line of comprehensive scientific control the world has to go
+or it will retrogress, it will muddle and rot. . . ."
+
+"I agree," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"So I want a report to admit that distinctly. I want it to go
+further than that. I want to get the beginnings, the germ, of
+a world administration. I want to set up a permanent world
+commission of scientific men and economists--with powers,
+just as considerable powers as I can give them--they'll be
+feeble powers at the best--but still some sort of SAY in the
+whole fuel supply of the world. A say--that may grow at last
+to a control. A right to collect reports and receive accounts
+for example, to begin with. And then the right to make
+recommendations. . . . You see? . . . No, the international
+part is not the most difficult part of it. But my beastly
+owners and their beastly lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of
+what they call their freedom of action. And my labour men,
+because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself, sit and watch and
+suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at and too
+incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a
+world control on scientific lines even less than the owners.
+They try to think that fuel production can carry an unlimited
+wages bill and the owners try to think that it can pay
+unlimited profits, and when I say; 'This business is
+something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it's a
+service and a common interest,' they stare at me--" Sir
+Richmond was at a loss for an image. "Like a committee in a
+thieves' kitchen when someone has casually mentioned the
+law."
+
+"But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?"
+
+"It can be done. If I can stick it out."
+
+"But with the whole Committee against you!"
+
+"The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn't against
+me. Every individual is . . . ."
+
+Sir Richmond found it difficult to express. "The psychology
+of my Committee ought to interest you. . . . It is probably a
+fair sample of the way all sorts of things are going
+nowadays. It's curious. . . . There is not a man on that
+Committee who is quite comfortable within himself about the
+particular individual end he is there to serve. It's there I
+get them. They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately
+I admit, but they are bitter and obstinate because they
+pursue them against an internal opposition--which is on my
+side. They are terrified to think, if once they stopped
+fighting me, how far they might not have to go with me."
+
+"A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very
+closely with my own ideas."
+
+"A world conscience? World conscience? I don't know. But I do
+know that there is this drive in nearly every member of the
+Committee, some drive anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is
+the same drive that drives me. But I am the most driven. It
+has turned me round. It hasn't turned them. I go East and
+they go West. And they don't want to be turned round.
+Tremendously, they don't."
+
+"Creative undertow," said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it
+were. "An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology
+of a new age strengthened by education--it may play a
+directive part."
+
+"They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this
+creative undertow--if you like to call it that--we do get
+along. I am leader or whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of
+a bolting flock. . . .I believe they will report for a
+permanent world commission; I believe I have got them up to
+that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League
+of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this
+League of Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-
+tracking arrangement for all sorts of important world issues.
+And they will find they have to report for some sort of
+control. But there again they will shy. They will report for
+it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down
+again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They
+will alter the composition of the Committee so as to make it
+innocuous."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far
+as Britain is concerned with muck of the colonial politician
+type and tame labour representatives, balance with shady new
+adventurer millionaires, get in still shadier stuff from
+abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame experts after
+their own hearts,--experts who will make merely advisory
+reports, which will not be published. . . ."
+
+"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the
+cloak of YOUR Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing
+more?"
+
+"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of
+doing right--indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing
+right--and still leave things just exactly what they were
+before. And as I suffer under the misfortune of seeing the
+thing rather more clearly, I have to shepherd the conscience
+of the whole Committee. . . . But there is a conscience
+there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee."
+
+He turned appealingly to the doctor. "Why should I have to be
+the conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this
+exhausting inhuman job? . . . . In their hearts these others
+know. . . . Only they won't know. . . . Why should it fall
+on me?"
+
+"You have to go through with it," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"I have to go through with it, but it's a hell of utterly
+inglorious squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting
+the same fight within themselves that they fight with me.
+They know exactly where I am, that I too am doing my job
+against internal friction. The one thing before all others
+that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high
+horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of
+special moral superiority to men who are on the whole as good
+men as I am or better. That shows all the time. You see the
+sort of man I am. I've a broad streak of personal vanity. I
+fag easily. I'm short-tempered. I've other things, as you
+perceive. When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore, I
+get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable
+sense of ill usage. Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be
+working with me steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly
+witty. He gets a laugh round the table at my expense. Young
+Dent, the more intelligent of the labour men, reads me a
+lecture in committee manners. Old Cassidy sees HIS opening
+and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me
+spluttering self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down,
+and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report
+dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case.
+Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You
+see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and
+an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great
+deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the
+doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own
+consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible
+little piggy-wigs and not bother any more about what is to
+happen to mankind in the long run. . . . Do you begin to
+realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin, that
+that Committee is for me?"
+
+"You have to go through with it," Dr. Martineau repeated.
+
+"I have. If I can. But I warn you I have been near breaking
+point. And if I tumble off the high horse, if I can't keep
+going regularly there to ride the moral high horse, that
+Committee will slump into utter scoundrelism. It will turn
+out a long, inconsistent, botched, unreadable report that
+will back up all sorts of humbugging bargains and sham
+settlements. It will contain some half-baked scheme to pacify
+the miners at the expense of the general welfare. It won't
+even succeed in doing that. But in the general confusion old
+Cassidy will get away with a series of hauls that may run
+into millions. Which will last his time--damn him! And that
+is where we are. . . . Oh! I know! I know! . . . . I must do
+this job. I don't need any telling that my life will be
+nothing and mean nothing unless I bring this thing
+through. . . .
+
+"But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!"
+
+The doctor watched his friend's resentful black silhouette
+against the lights on the steely river, and said nothing for
+awhile.
+
+"Why did I ever undertake to play it?" Sir Richmond appealed.
+"Why has it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am,
+why am I not a poor thing altogether?"
+
+Section 8
+
+"I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the
+doctor after an interval.
+
+"I am INTOLERABLE to myself."
+
+"And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as
+you do. You want help; you want reassurance. And you feel
+they can give it."
+
+"I wonder if it has been quite like that," Sir Richmond
+reflected.
+
+By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the
+mother complex. "You want help and reassurance as a child
+does," he said. "Women and women alone seem capable of giving
+that, of telling you that you are surely right, that
+notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that even when
+you are wrong it doesn't so much matter, you are still in
+spirit right. They can show their belief in you as no man
+can. With all their being they can do that."
+
+"Yes, I suppose they could."
+
+"They can. You have said already that women are necessary to
+make things real for you."
+
+"Not my work," said Sir Richmond. "I admit that it might be
+like that, but it isn't like that. It has not worked out like
+that. The two drives go on side by side in me. They have no
+logical connexion. All I can say is that for me, with my
+bifid temperament, one makes a rest from the other, and is so
+far refreshment and a renewal of energy. But I do not find
+women coming into my work in any effectual way. "
+
+The doctor reflected further. "I suppose," he began and
+stopped short.
+
+He heard Sir Richmond move in his chair, creaking an
+interrogation.
+
+"You have never," said the doctor, "turned to the idea of
+God?"
+
+Sir Richmond grunted and made no other answer for the better
+part of a minute.
+
+As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling
+star streaked the deep blue above them.
+
+"I can't believe in a God," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Something after the fashion of a God," said the doctor
+insidiously.
+
+"No," said Sir Richmond. "Nothing that reassures."
+
+"But this loneliness, this craving for companionship. . . ."
+
+"We have all been through that," said Sir Richmond. "We have
+all in our time lain very still in the darkness with our
+souls crying out for the fellowship of God, demanding some
+sign, some personal response. The faintest feeling of
+assurance would have satisfied us."
+
+"And there has never been a response?"
+
+"Have YOU ever had a response?"
+
+"Once I seemed to have a feeling of exaltation and security."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been
+reading William James on religious experiences and I was
+thinking very much of Conversion. I tried to experience
+Conversion. . . ."
+
+"Yes? "
+
+"It faded."
+
+"It always fades," said Sir Richmond with anger in his voice.
+"I wonder how many people there are nowadays who have passed
+through this last experience of ineffectual invocation, this
+appeal to the fading shadow of a vanished God. In the night.
+In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak to me! Does he answer?
+In the silence you hear the little blood vessels whisper in
+your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on the
+darkness. . . . "
+
+Dr. Martineau sat without a word.
+
+"I can believe that over all things Righteousness rules. I
+can believe that. But Righteousness is not friendliness nor
+mercy nor comfort nor any such dear and intimate things. This
+cuddling up to Righteousness! It is a dream, a delusion and a
+phase. I've tried all that long ago. I've given it up long
+ago. I've grown out of it. Men do--after forty. Our souls
+were made in the squatting-place of the submen of ancient
+times. They are made out of primitive needs and they die
+before our bodies as those needs are satisfied. Only young
+people have souls, complete. The need for a personal God,
+feared but reassuring, is a youth's need. I no longer fear
+the Old Man nor want to propitiate the Old Man nor believe he
+matters any more. I'm a bit of an Old Man myself I discover.
+Yes. But the other thing still remains. "
+
+"The Great Mother of the Gods," said Dr. Martineau--still
+clinging to his theories.
+
+"The need of the woman," said Sir Richmond. "I want mating
+because it is my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I
+am a social animal and I want it from another social animal.
+Not from any God--any inconceivable God. Who fades and
+disappears. No. . . .
+
+"Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know.
+Perhaps it lasts as long as life does. How can I tell?"
+
+He was silent for a little while. Then his voice sounded in
+the night, as if he spoke to himself. "But as for the God of
+All Things consoling and helping! Imagine it! That up there--
+having fellowship with me! I would as soon think of cooling
+my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with those
+stars."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+
+IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES
+
+
+Section 1
+
+A gust of confidence on the part of a person naturally or
+habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of
+recoil. At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed
+to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each
+had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of
+intimacy. They discussed the weather, which seemed to be
+settling down to the utmost serenity of which the English
+spring is capable, they talked of Sir Richmond's coming car
+and of the possible routes before them. Sir Richmond produced
+the Michelin maps which he had taken out of the pockets of
+the little Charmeuse. The Bath Road lay before them, he
+explained, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Silbury
+Hill which overhangs Avebury. Both travellers discovered a
+common excitement at the mention of Avebury and Silbury Hill.
+Both took an intelligent interest in archaeology. Both had
+been greatly stimulated by the recent work of Elliot Smith
+and Rivers upon what was then known as the Heliolithic
+culture. It had revived their interest in Avebury and
+Stonehenge. The doctor moreover had been reading Hippisley
+Cox's GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND.
+
+Neither gentleman had ever seen Avebury, but Dr. Martineau
+had once visited Stonehenge.
+
+"Avebury is much the oldest," said the doctor. They must have
+made Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C. It may be five
+thousand years old or even more. It is the most important
+historical relic in the British Isles. And the most
+neglected. "
+
+They exchanged archaeological facts. The secret places of the
+heart rested until the afternoon.
+
+Then Sir Richmond saw fit to amplify his confessions in one
+particular.
+
+Section 2
+
+The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise
+as the morning advanced. They had walked by the road to
+Marlow and had lunched at a riverside inn, returning after a
+restful hour in an arbour on the lawn of this place to tea at
+Maidenhead. It was as they returned that Sir Richmond took up
+the thread of their overnight conversation again.
+
+"In the night," he said, "I was thinking over the account I
+tried to give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out
+of drawing."
+
+"Facts?" asked the doctor.
+
+"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the
+proportions. . . . I don't know if I gave you the effect of
+something Don Juanesque? . . ."
+
+"Vulgar poem," said the doctor remarkably." I discounted
+that."
+
+"Vulgar!"
+
+"Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a
+kitchen."
+
+Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing
+that used to be called a pet aversion.
+
+"I don't want you to think that I run about after women in an
+habitual and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt
+them in the interests of my work and energy. Your questions
+had set me theorizing about myself. And I did my best to
+improvise a scheme of motives yesterday. It was, I perceive,
+a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My nocturnal
+reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things
+that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the
+wanderings of desire have no single drive. All sorts of
+motives come in, high and low, down to sheer vulgar
+imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true in it all
+was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue phase
+falls naturally into these complications because they are
+more attractive to his type and far easier and more
+refreshing to the mind, at the outset, than anything else.
+And they do work a sort of recovery in him, They send him
+back to his work refreshed--so far, that is, as his work is
+concerned."
+
+"At the OUTSET they are easier," said the doctor.
+
+Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the
+outset counts. The more tired one is the more readily one
+moves along the line of least resistance. . . .
+
+"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of
+my work goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it.
+What I said about that was near the truth of things. . . .
+
+"But there is another set of motives altogether, "Sir
+Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the ground for
+his real business, "that I didn't go into at all yesterday."
+
+He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before
+you realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much
+swayed by my affections."
+
+Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine
+self-reproach in Sir Richmond's voice.
+
+"I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond
+of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration
+and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing.
+They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and
+hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little
+and human and suddenly I find they've GOT me. I'm distressed.
+I'm filled with something between pity and an impulse of
+responsibility. I become tender towards them. I am impelled
+to take care of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure
+them, to make them stop hurting at any cost. I don't see why
+it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people
+that grips me most, but it is. I don't know why it should be
+their failures that gives them power over me, but it is. I
+told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just
+now. SHE'S got me in that way; she's got me tremendously."
+
+"You did not speak of her yesterday with any morbid excess of
+pity," the doctor was constrained to remark.
+
+"I abused her very probably. I forget exactly what I
+said. . . ."
+
+The doctor offered no assistance.
+
+"But the reason why I abuse her is perfectly plain. I abuse
+her because she distresses me by her misfortunes and instead
+of my getting anything out of her, I go out to her. But I DO
+go out to her. All this time at the back of my mind I am
+worrying about her. She has that gift of making one feel for
+her. I am feeling that damned carbuncle almost as if it had
+been my affair instead of hers.
+
+"That carbuncle has made me suffer FRIGHTFULLY. . . . Why
+should I? It isn't mine."
+
+He regarded the doctor earnestly. The doctor controlled a
+strong desire to laugh.
+
+"I suppose the young lady--" he began.
+
+"Oh! SHE puts in suffering all right. I've no doubt about
+that.
+
+"I suppose," Sir Richmond went on, "now that I have told you
+so much of this affair, I may as well tell you all. It is a
+sort of comedy, a painful comedy, of irrelevant affections."
+
+The doctor was prepared to be a good listener. Facts he would
+always listen to; it was only when people told him their
+theories that he would interrupt with his "Exactly."
+
+"This young woman is a person of considerable genius. I don't
+know if you have seen in the illustrated papers a peculiar
+sort of humorous illustrations usually with a considerable
+amount of bite in them over the name of Martin Leeds?
+
+"Extremely amusing stuff."
+
+"It is that Martin Leeds. I met her at the beginning of her
+career. She talks almost as well as she draws. She amused me
+immensely. I'm not the sort of man who waylays and besieges
+women and girls. I'm not the pursuing type. But I perceived
+that in some odd way I attracted her and I was neither wise
+enough nor generous enough not to let the thing develop."
+
+"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"I'd never had to do with an intellectually brilliant woman
+before. I see now that the more imaginative force a woman
+has, the more likely she is to get into a state of extreme
+self-abandonment with any male thing upon which her
+imagination begins to crystallize. Before I came along she'd
+mixed chiefly with a lot of young artists and students, all
+doing nothing at all except talk about the things they were
+going to do. I suppose I profited by the contrast, being
+older and with my hands full of affairs. Perhaps something
+had happened that had made her recoil towards my sort of
+thing. I don't know. But she just let herself go at me."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before.
+It was her wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't
+my contemporary and as able as I was. As able to take care of
+herself. All sorts of considerations that I should have shown
+to a sillier woman I never dreamt of showing to her. I had
+never met anyone so mentally brilliant before or so helpless
+and headlong. And so here we are on each other's hands! "
+
+"But the child?
+
+"It happened to us. For four years now things have just
+happened to us. All the time I have been overworking, first
+at explosives and now at this fuel business. She too is full
+of her work.
+
+"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with
+it. And in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably
+fond of each other. 'Fond' is the word. But we are both too
+busy to look after either ourselves or each other.
+
+"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as
+if he delivered a weighed and very important judgment.
+
+"You see very much of each other?"
+
+"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South
+Cornwall, and we sometimes snatch a few days together, away
+somewhere in Surrey or up the Thames or at such a place as
+Southend where one is lost in a crowd of inconspicuous
+people. "Then things go well--they usually go well at the
+start--we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is
+creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of
+humour, with a keenness of appreciation . . . . "
+
+"But things do not always go well?"
+
+"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man
+who measures his words, "are apt to go wrong. . . . At the
+flat there is constant trouble with the servants; they bully
+her. A woman is more entangled with servants than a man.
+Women in that position seem to resent the work and freedom of
+other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as they
+would leave a man; they make trouble for her. . . . And when
+we have had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in
+particular has gone wrong--"
+
+Sir Richmond stopped short.
+
+"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor
+sounded.
+
+"Almost always."
+
+"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.
+
+"It is difficult to describe. . . . The essential
+incompatibility of the whole thing comes out."
+
+The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.
+
+"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work
+anywhere. All she wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on
+the other hand turns back to the Fuel Commission . . . ."
+
+"Then any little thing makes trouble."
+
+"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to
+the same discussion; whether we ought really to go on
+together."
+
+"It is you begin that?"
+
+"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I
+am about. She is as fond of me as I am of her."
+
+"Fonder perhaps."
+
+'I don't know. But she is--adhesive. Emotionally adhesive.
+All she wants to do is just to settle down when I am there
+and go on with her work. But then, you see, there is MY
+work."
+
+"Exactly. . . . After all it seems to me that your great
+trouble is not in yourselves but in social institutions.
+Which haven't yet fitted themselves to people like you two.
+It is the sense of uncertainty makes her, as you say,
+adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a new age
+Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one--"
+
+"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a
+little testily.
+
+"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular
+situation, that it is not the individuals to blame but the
+misfit of ideas and forms and prejudices."
+
+"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying
+suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to
+the peculiarities of our position. . . . She could be
+cleverer. Other women are cleverer. Any other woman almost
+would be cleverer than she is."
+
+"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is.
+She would just be any other woman."
+
+"Perhaps she would," said Sir Richmond darkly and
+desperately. "Perhaps she would. Perhaps it would be better
+if she was."
+
+Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.
+
+"But here you see that it is that in my case, the fundamental
+incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider
+conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social
+institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change
+them to suit an individual case. That would be like
+suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano.
+As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She
+is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my
+duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and
+treats fuel--and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is
+an attack. We quarrel on that. It isn't as though I found it
+so easy to stick to my work that I could disregard her
+hostility. And I can't bear to part from her. I threaten it,
+distress her excessively and then I am overcome by sympathy
+for her and I go back to her. . . . In the ordinary course of
+things I should be with her now."
+
+"If it were not for the carbuncle?"
+
+"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me
+to see her disfigured. She does not understand--" Sir
+Richmond was at a loss for a phrase--"that it is not her good
+looks."
+
+"She won't let you go to her?"
+
+"It amounts to that. . . . And soon there will be all the
+trouble about educating the girl. Whatever happens, she must
+have as good a chance as--anyone. . . . "
+
+"Ah! That is worrying you too!"
+
+"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier.
+It needs constant tact and dexterity to fix things up.
+Neither of us have any. It needs attention. . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond mused darkly.
+
+Dr. Martineau thought aloud. "An incompetent delightful
+person with Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of
+expression. She must be attractive to many people. She could
+probably do without you. If once you parted."
+
+Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.
+
+"You think I ought to part from her? On her account?"
+
+"On her account. It might pain her. But once the thing was
+done--"
+
+"I want to part. I believe I ought to part."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"But then my affection comes in."
+
+"That extraordinary--TENDERNESS of yours?"
+
+"I'm afraid."
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Anyone might get hold of her--if I let her down. She hasn't
+a tithe of the ordinary coolheaded calculation of an average
+woman. . . . I've a duty to her genius. I've got to take care
+of her."
+
+To which the doctor made no reply.
+
+"Nevertheless the idea of parting has been very much in my
+mind lately."
+
+"Letting her go FREE?"
+
+"You can put it in that way if you like."
+
+"It might not be a fatal operation for either of you."
+
+"And yet there are moods when parting is an intolerable idea.
+When one is invaded by a flood of affection.". . . . And old
+habits of association."
+
+Dr. Martineau thought. Was that the right word,--affection?
+Perhaps it was.
+
+They had come out on the towing path close by the lock and
+they found themselves threading their way through a little
+crowd of boating people and lookers-on. For a time their
+conversation was broken. Sir Richmond resumed it.
+
+"But this is where we cease to be Man on his Planet and all
+the rest of it. This is where the idea of a definite task,
+fanatically followed to the exclusion of all minor
+considerations, breaks down. When the work is good, when we
+are sure we are all right, then we may carry off things with
+a high hand. But the work isn't always good, we aren't always
+sure. We blunder, we make a muddle, we are fatigued. Then the
+sacrificed affections come in as accusers. Then it is that we
+want to be reassured."
+
+"And then it is that Miss Martin Leeds--?"
+
+"Doesn't," Sir Richmond snapped.
+
+Came a long pause.
+
+"And yet--
+
+"It is extraordinarily difficult to think of parting from
+Martin."
+
+Section 3
+
+In the evening after dinner Dr. Martineau sought, rather
+unsuccessfully, to go on with the analysis of Sir Richmond.
+
+But Sir Richmond was evidently a creature of moods. Either he
+regretted the extent of his confidences or the slight
+irrational irritation that he felt at waiting for his car
+affected his attitude towards his companion, or Dr.
+Martineau's tentatives were ill-chosen. At any rate he would
+not rise to any conversational bait that the doctor could
+devise. The doctor found this the more regrettable because it
+seemed to him that there was much to be worked upon in this
+Martin Leeds affair. He was inclined to think that she and
+Sir Richmond were unduly obsessed by the idea that they had
+to stick together because of the child, because of the look
+of the thing and so forth, and that really each might be
+struggling against a very strong impulse indeed to break off
+the affair. It seemed evident to the doctor that they jarred
+upon and annoyed each other extremely. On the whole
+separating people appealed to a doctor's mind more strongly
+than bringing them together. Accordingly he framed his
+enquiries so as to make the revelation of a latent antipathy
+as easy as possible.
+
+He made several not very well-devised beginnings. At the
+fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he
+said, "I can't fiddle about any more with my motives
+to-day."
+
+An awkward silence followed. On reflection Sir Richmond
+seemed to realize that this sentence needed some apology. "I
+admit," he said, "that this expedition has already been a
+wonderfully good thing for me. These confessions have made me
+look into all sorts of things-squarely. But--
+
+"I'm not used to talking about myself or even thinking
+directly about myself. What I say, I afterwards find
+disconcerting to recall. I want to alter it. I can feel
+myself wallowing into a mess of modifications and
+qualifications."
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"I want a rest anyhow. . . ."
+
+There was nothing for Dr. Martineau to say to that.
+
+The two gentlemen smoked for some time in a slightly
+uncomfortable silence. Dr. Martineau cleared his throat twice
+and lit a second cigar. They then agreed to admire the bridge
+and think well of Maidenhead. Sir Richmond communicated
+hopeful news about his car, which was to arrive the next
+morning before ten--he'd just ring the fellow up presently to
+make sure--and Dr. Martineau retired early and went rather
+thoughtfully to bed. The spate of Sir Richmond's confidences,
+it was evident, was over.
+
+Section 4
+
+Sir Richmond's car arrived long before ten, brought down by a
+young man in a state of scared alacrity--Sir Richmond had
+done some vigorous telephoning before turning in,--the
+Charmeuse set off in a repaired and chastened condition to
+town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two investigators
+into the springs of human conduct were able to resume their
+westward journey. They ran through scattered Twyford with its
+pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities
+of Reading, by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up
+long wooded slopes to Savernake forest, where they found the
+road heavy and dusty, still in its war-time state, and so
+down a steep hill to the wide market street which is
+Marlborough. They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the
+afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest
+artificial mound in Europe. They left the car by the roadside
+and clambered to the top and were very learned and
+inconclusive about the exact purpose of this vast heap of
+chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before the
+temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.
+
+Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road
+into the wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn
+there kept by pleasant people, and they garaged the car in
+the cowshed and took two rooms for the night that they might
+the better get the atmosphere of the ancient place. Wonderful
+indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already two
+thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a
+great wall of earth with its ditch most strangely on its
+inner and not on its outer side; and within this enclosure
+gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that,
+even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete. A whole
+village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for
+the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall
+is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and
+paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre. There
+are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when
+it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part
+the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed.
+To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow
+creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons
+change. Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare
+sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow
+here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and
+hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that
+forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of
+England, these roads already disused when the Romans made
+their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced
+for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury
+and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the
+Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn,
+and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.
+
+The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed
+the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up
+the down to the northward to get a general view of the
+village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm
+April sunset. The matter of their conversation remained
+prehistoric. Both were inclined to find fault with the
+archaeological work that had been done on the place. "Clumsy
+treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said. "They bore into Silbury
+Hill and expect to find a mummified chief or something
+sensational of that sort, and they don't, and they report
+nothing. They haven't sifted finely enough; they haven't
+thought subtly enough. These walls of earth ought to tell
+what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods
+they used. Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a
+cattle land? Were these hills covered by forests? I don't
+know. These archaeologists don't know. Or if they do they
+haven't told me, which is just as bad. I don't believe they
+know.
+
+"What trade came here along these tracks? So far as I know,
+they had no beasts of burthen. But suppose one day someone
+were to find a potsherd here from early Knossos, or a
+fragment of glass from Pepi's Egypt."
+
+The place had stirred up his imagination. He wrestled with
+his ignorance as if he thought that by talking he might
+presently worry out some picture of this forgotten world,
+without metals, without beasts of burthen, without letters,
+without any sculpture that has left a trace, and yet with a
+sense of astronomical fact clear enough to raise the great
+gnomon of Silbury, and with a social system complex enough to
+give the large and orderly community to which the size of
+Avebury witnesses and the traffic to which the green roads
+testify.
+
+The doctor had not realized before the boldness and
+liveliness of his companion's mind. Sir Richmond insisted
+that the climate must have been moister and milder in those
+days; he covered all the downlands with woods, as Savernake
+was still covered; beneath the trees he restored a thicker,
+richer soil. These people must have done an enormous lot with
+wood. This use of stones here was a freak. It was the very
+strangeness of stones here that had made them into sacred
+things. One thought too much of the stones of the Stone Age.
+Who would carve these lumps of quartzite when one could carve
+good oak? Or beech--a most carvable wood. Especially when
+one's sharpest chisel was a flint. "It's wood we ought to
+look for," said Sir Richmond. "Wood and fibre." He declared
+that these people had their tools of wood, their homes of
+wood, their gods and perhaps their records of wood. "A peat
+bog here, even a few feet of clay, might have pickled some
+precious memoranda. . . . No such luck. . . . Now in
+Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron
+age--half way to our own times--quite beautifully pickled."
+
+Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir
+Richmond nor the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the
+riddle why the ditch was inside and not outside the great
+wall.
+
+"And what was our Mind like in those days?" said Sir
+Richmond. "That, I suppose, is what interests you. A vivid
+childish mind, I guess, with not a suspicion as yet that it
+was Man ruling his Planet or anything of that sort."
+
+The doctor pursed his lips. "None," he delivered judicially.
+"If one were able to recall one's childhood--at the age of
+about twelve or thirteen--when the artistic impulse so often
+goes into abeyance and one begins to think in a troubled,
+monstrous way about God and Hell, one might get something
+like the mind of this place."
+
+"Thirteen. You put them at that already? . . . These people,
+you think, were religious?"
+
+"Intensely. In that personal way that gives death a nightmare
+terror. And as for the fading of the artistic impulse,
+they've left not a trace of the paintings and drawings and
+scratchings of the Old Stone people who came before them."
+
+"Adults with the minds of thirteen-year-old children.
+Thirteen-year-old children with the strength of adults--and
+no one to slap them or tell them not to. . . . After all,
+they probably only thought of death now and then. And they
+never thought of fuel. They supposed there was no end to
+that. So they used up their woods and kept goats to nibble
+and kill the new undergrowth. DID these people have goats? "
+
+"I don't know," said the doctor. So little is known."
+
+"Very like children they must have been. The same unending
+days. They must have thought that the world went on for ever-
+just as they knew it--like my damned Committee does. . . .
+With their fuel wasting away and the climate changing
+imperceptibly, century by century. . . . Kings and important
+men followed one another here for centuries and centuries. .
+. . They had lost their past and had no idea of any future. .
+. . They had forgotten how they came into the land . . . When
+I was a child I believed that my father's garden had been
+there for ever. . . .
+
+"This is very like trying to remember some game one played
+when one was a child. It is like coming on something that one
+built up with bricks and stones in some forgotten part of the
+garden. . . . "
+
+
+"The life we lived here," said the doctor, has left its
+traces in traditions, in mental predispositions, in still
+unanalyzed fundamental ideas."
+
+"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond.
+"Presently we shall remember a lot more about all this. We
+shall remember what it was like to live in this place, and
+the long journey hither, age by age out of the south. We
+shall remember the sacrifices we made and the crazy reasons
+why we made them. We sowed our corn in blood here. We had
+strange fancies about the stars. Those we brought with us out
+of the south where the stars are brighter. And what like were
+those wooden gods of ours? I don't remember. . . . But I
+could easily persuade myself that I had been here before."
+
+They stood on the crest of the ancient wall and the setting
+sun cast long shadows of them athwart a field of springing
+wheat.
+
+"Perhaps we shall come here again," the doctor carried on Sir
+Richmond's fancy; "after another four thousand years or so,
+with different names and fuller minds. And then I suppose
+that this ditch won't be the riddle it is now."
+
+"Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused.
+"Our muddles were unconscious. We drifted from mood to mood
+and forgot. There was more sunshine then, more laughter
+perhaps, and blacker despair. Despair like the despair of
+children that can weep itself to sleep. . . . It's
+over. . . . Was it battle and massacre that ended that long
+afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some
+exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine? Or
+did strange men bring a sickness--measles, perhaps, or the
+black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our
+woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into
+the land across the southern sea? I can't remember. . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond turned about. "I would like to dig up the bottom
+of this ditch here foot by foot--and dry the stuff and sift
+it--very carefully. . . . Then I might begin to remember
+things."
+
+Section 5
+
+In the evening, after a pleasant supper, they took a turn
+about the walls with the moon sinking over beyond Silbury,
+and then went in and sat by lamplight before a brightly fussy
+wood fire and smoked. There were long intervals of friendly
+silence.
+
+"I don't in the least want to go on talking about myself, "
+said Sir Richmond abruptly.
+
+"Let it rest then," said the doctor generously.
+
+"To-day, among these ancient memories, has taken me out of
+myself wonderfully. I can't tell you how good Avebury has
+been for me. This afternoon half my consciousness has seemed
+to be a tattooed creature wearing a knife of stone. . . . "
+
+"The healing touch of history."
+
+"And for the first time my damned Committee has mattered
+scarcely a rap. "
+
+Sir Richmond stretched himself in his chair and blinked
+cheerfully at his cigar smoke.
+
+"Nevertheless," he said, "this confessional business of yours
+has been an excellent exercise. It has enabled me to get
+outside myself, to look at myself as a Case. Now I can even
+see myself as a remote Case. That I needn't bother about
+further. . . . So far as that goes, I think we have done all
+that there is to be done."
+
+"I shouldn't say that--quite--yet," said the doctor.
+
+"I don't think I'm a subject for real psychoanalysis at all.
+I'm not an overlaid sort of person. When I spread myself out
+there is not much indication of a suppressed wish or of
+anything masked or buried of that sort. What you get is a
+quite open and recognized discord of two sets of motives."
+
+The doctor considered. "Yes, I think that is true. Your
+LIBIDO is, I should say, exceptionally free. Generally you
+are doing what you want to do--overdoing, in fact, what you
+want to do and getting simply tired."
+
+"Which is the theory I started with. I am a case of fatigue
+under irritating circumstances with very little mental
+complication or concealment."
+
+"Yes," said the doctor. "I agree. You are not a case for
+psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, at all. You are in open
+conflict with yourself, upon moral and social issues.
+Practically open. Your problems are problems of conscious
+conduct."
+
+"As I said."
+
+"Of what renunciations you have consciously to make."
+
+Sir Richmond did not answer that. . . .
+
+"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for
+magnanimity. This day particularly has been a good day. When
+we stood on this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be
+standing outside myself in an immense still sphere of past
+and future. I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw
+myself four thousand years away, and all my distresses as
+very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in
+London the case is altogether different; after three hours or
+so of the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed
+moment of personality. There is no past any longer, there is
+no future, there is only the rankling dispute. For all those
+three hours, perhaps, I have been thinking of just what I had
+to say, just how I had to say it, just how I looked while I
+said it, just how much I was making myself understood, how I
+might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented,
+challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used
+up. At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding,
+desperately fighting, pin-point of SELF. . . . One goes back
+to one's home unable to recover. Fighting it over again. All
+night sometimes . . . . I get up and walk about the room and
+curse . . . . Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame
+of mind to Westminster?"
+
+"When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor,
+unhelpfully. He added after some seconds, "Milton knew of
+these troubles. 'Not without dust and heat' he wrote--a great
+phrase."
+
+"But the dust chokes me," said Sir Richmond.
+
+He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay
+beside him on the table. But he did not open it. He held it
+in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all
+that evening. "I do not think that I shall stir up my motives
+any more for a time. Better to go on into the west country
+cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past."
+
+"I can prescribe nothing better," said Dr. Martineau.
+"Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on
+one or two of your minor entanglements."
+
+"I don't want to think of them, said Sir Richmond. "Let me
+get right away from everything. Until my skin has grown
+again."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH
+
+THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE
+
+Section 1
+
+Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over
+the downs round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and
+Netheravon and Amesbury to Stonehenge.
+
+Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now,
+with Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a poorer thing
+than he had remembered it to be. Sir Richmond was frankly
+disappointed. After the real greatness and mystery of the
+older place, it seemed a poor little heap of stones; it did
+not even dominate the landscape; it was some way from the
+crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was
+further dwarfed by the colossal air-ship hangars and
+clustering offices of the air station that the great war had
+called into existence upon the slopes to the south-west. "It
+looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old giantess had
+left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more
+impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that
+capped the neighbouring crests.
+
+The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to
+pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side
+of the road stood a travelstained middle-class automobile,
+with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things
+therein--a family automobile with father no doubt at the
+wheel. Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at its tail.
+
+They were impeded at the entrance by a difference of opinion
+between the keeper of the turnstile and a small but resolute
+boy of perhaps five or six who proposed to leave the
+enclosure. The custodian thought that it would be better if
+his nurse or his mother came out with him.
+
+"She keeps on looking at it, " said the small boy. "It isunt
+anything. I want to go and clean the car."
+
+"You won't SEE Stonehenge every day, young man," said the
+custodian, a little piqued.
+
+"It's only an old beach," said the small boy, with extreme
+conviction. "It's rocks like the seaside. And there isunt no
+sea."
+
+The man at the turnstile mutely consulted the doctor.
+
+"I don't see that he can get into any harm here," the doctor
+advised, and the small boy was released from archaeology.
+
+He strolled to the family automobile, produced an EN-TOUT-CAS
+pocket-handkerchief and set himself to polish the lamps with
+great assiduity. The two gentlemen lingered at the turnstile
+for a moment or so to watch his proceedings. "Modern child,"
+said Sir Richmond. "Old stones are just old stones to him.
+But motor cars are gods."
+
+"You can hardly expect him to understand--at his age," said
+the custodian, jealous for the honor of Stonehenge. . . .
+
+"Reminds me of Martin's little girl," said Sir Richmond, as
+he and Dr. Martineau went on towards the circle. "When she
+encountered her first dragon-fly she was greatly delighted.
+'0h, dee' lill' a'eplane,' she said."
+
+As they approached the grey old stones they became aware of a
+certain agitation among them. A voice, an authoritative bass
+voice, was audible, crying, "Anthony!" A nurse appeared
+remotely going in the direction of the aeroplane sheds, and
+her cry of "Master Anthony" came faintly on the breeze. An
+extremely pretty young woman of five or six and twenty became
+visible standing on one of the great prostrate stones in the
+centre of the place. She was a black-haired, sun-burnt
+individual and she stood with her arms akimbo, quite frankly
+amused at the disappearance of Master Anthony, and offering
+no sort of help for his recovery. On the greensward before
+her stood the paterfamilias of the family automobile, and he
+was making a trumpet with his hands in order to repeat the
+name of Anthony with greater effect. A short lady in grey
+emerged from among the encircling megaliths, and one or two
+other feminine personalities produced effects of movement
+rather than of individuality as they flitted among the
+stones. "Well," said the lady in grey, with that rising
+intonation of humorous conclusion which is so distinctively
+American, "those Druids have GOT him."
+
+"He's hiding," said the automobilist, in a voice that
+promised chastisement to a hidden hearer. "That's what he is
+doing. He ought not to play tricks like this. A great boy who
+is almost six."
+
+"If you are looking for a small, resolute boy of six," said
+Sir Richmond, addressing himself to the lady on the rock
+rather than to the angry parent below, "he's perfectly safe
+and happy. The Druids haven't got him. Indeed, they've failed
+altogether to get him. 'Stonehenge,' he says, 'is no good.'
+So he's gone back to clean the lamps of your car."
+
+"Aa-oo. So THAT'S it! " said Papa. "Winnie, go and tell Price
+he's gone back to the car. . . . They oughtn't to have let
+him out of the enclosure. . . ."
+
+The excitement about Master Anthony collapsed. The rest of
+the people in the circles crystallized out into the central
+space as two apparent sisters and an apparent aunt and the
+nurse, who was packed off at once to supervise the lamp
+cleaning. The head of the family found some difficulty, it
+would seem, in readjusting his mind to the comparative
+innocence of Anthony, and Sir Richmond and the young lady on
+the rock sought as if by common impulse to establish a
+general conversation. There were faint traces of excitement
+in her manner, as though there had been some controversial
+passage between herself and the family gentleman.
+
+"We were discussing the age of this old place," she said,
+smiling in the frankest and friendliest way. "How old do YOU
+think it is?"
+
+The father of Anthony intervened, also with a shadow of
+controversy in his manner. "I was explaining to the young
+lady that it dates from the early bronze age. Before
+chronology existed. . . . But she insists on dates."
+
+"Nothing of bronze has ever been found here," said Sir
+Richmond.
+
+"Well, when was this early bronze age, anyhow?" said the
+young lady.
+
+Sir Richmond sought a recognizable datum. "Bronze got to
+Britain somewhere between the times of Moses and Solomon."
+
+"Ah! " said the young lady, as who should say, 'This man at
+least talks sense.'
+
+"But these stones are all shaped," said the father of the
+family. "It is difficult to see how that could have been done
+without something harder than stone."
+
+"I don't SEE the place," said the young lady on the stone. "I
+can't imagine how they did it up--not one bit."
+
+"Did it up!" exclaimed the father of the family in the tone
+of one accustomed to find a gentle sport in the intellectual
+frailties of his womenkind.
+
+"It's just the bones of a place. They hung things round it.
+They draped it."
+
+"But what things?" asked Sir Richmond.
+
+"Oh! they had things all right. Skins perhaps. Mats of
+rushes. Bast cloth. Fibre of all sorts. Wadded stuff."
+
+"Stonehenge draped! It's really a delightful idea;" said the
+father of the family, enjoying it.
+
+"It's quite a possible one," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Or they may have used wicker," the young lady went on,
+undismayed. She seemed to concede a point. "Wicker IS
+likelier."
+
+"But surely," said the father of the family with the
+expostulatory voice and gesture of one who would recall
+erring wits to sanity, "it is far more impressive standing
+out bare and noble as it does. In lonely splendour."
+
+"But all this country may have been wooded then," said Sir
+Richmond. "In which case it wouldn't have stood out. It
+doesn't stand out so very much even now."
+
+"You came to it through a grove," said the young lady,
+eagerly picking up the idea.
+
+"Probably beech," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Which may have pointed to the midsummer sunrise," said Dr.
+Martineau, unheeded.
+
+"These are NOVEL ideas," said the father of the family in the
+reproving tone of one who never allows a novel idea inside
+HIS doors if he can prevent it.
+
+"Well," said the young lady, "I guess there was some sort of
+show here anyhow. And no human being ever had a show yet
+without trying to shut people out of it in order to make them
+come in. I guess this was covered in all right. A dark
+hunched old place in a wood. Beech stems, smooth, like
+pillars. And they came to it at night, in procession, beating
+drums, and scared half out of their wits. They came in THERE
+and went round the inner circle with their torches. And so
+they were shown. The torches were put out and the priests did
+their mysteries. Until dawn broke. That is how they worked
+it."
+
+"But even you can't tell what the show was, V.V." said the
+lady in grey, who was standing now at Dr. Martineau's elbow.
+
+"Something horrid," said Anthony's younger sister to her
+elder in a stage whisper.
+
+"BLUGGY," agreed Anthony's elder sister to the younger, in a
+noiseless voice that certainly did not reach father.
+"SQUEALS! . . . ."
+
+This young lady who was addressed as "V.V." was perhaps one
+or two and twenty, Dr. Martineau thought,--he was not very
+good at feminine ages. She had a clear sun-browned
+complexion, with dark hair and smiling lips. Her features
+were finely modelled, with just that added touch of breadth
+in the brow and softness in the cheek bones, that faint
+flavour of the Amerindian, one sees at times in American
+women. Her voice was a very soft and pleasing voice, and she
+spoke persuasively and not assertively as so many American
+women do. Her determination to make the dry bones of
+Stonehenge live shamed the doctor's disappointment with the
+place. And when she had spoken, Dr. Martineau noted that she
+looked at Sir Richmond as if she expected him at least to
+confirm her vision. Sir Richmond was evidently prepared to
+confirm it.
+
+With a queer little twinge of infringed proprietorship, the
+doctor saw Sir Richmond step up on the prostrate megalith and
+stand beside her, the better to appreciate her point of view.
+He smiled down at her. "Now why do you think they came in
+THERE?" he asked.
+
+The young lady was not very clear about her directions. She
+did not know of the roadway running to the Avon river, nor of
+the alleged race course to the north, nor had she ever heard
+that the stones were supposed to be of two different periods
+and that some of them might possibly have been brought from a
+very great distance.
+
+Section 2
+
+Neither Dr. Martineau nor the father of the family found the
+imaginative reconstruction of the Stonehenge rituals quite so
+exciting as the two principals. The father of the family
+endured some further particulars with manifest impatience, no
+longer able, now that Sir Richmond was encouraging the girl,
+to keep her in check with the slightly derisive smile proper
+to her sex. Then he proclaimed in a fine loud tenor, "All
+this is very imaginative, I'm afraid." And to his family,
+"Time we were pressing on. Turps, we must go-o. Come,
+Phoebe!"
+
+As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came
+floating back. "Talking wanton nonsense. . . . Any
+professional archaeologist would laugh, simply laugh. . . ."
+
+He passed out of the world.
+
+With a faint intimation of dismay Dr. Martineau realized that
+the two talkative ladies were not to be removed in the family
+automobile with the rest of the party. Sir Richmond and the
+younger lady went on very cheerfully to the population,
+agriculture, housing and general scenery of the surrounding
+Downland during the later Stone Age. The shorter, less
+attractive lady, whose accent was distinctly American, came
+now and stood at the doctor's elbow. She seemed moved to play
+the part of chorus to the two upon the stone.
+
+"When V.V. gets going," she remarked, "she makes things come
+alive."
+
+Dr. Martineau hated to be addressed suddenly by strange
+ladies. He started, and his face assumed the distressed
+politeness of the moon at its full. "Your friend," he said,
+"interested in archaeology? "
+
+"Interested!" said the stouter lady. "Why! She's a fiend at
+it. Ever since we came on Carnac. "
+
+"You've visited Carnac?"
+
+"That's where the bug bit her." said the stout lady with a
+note of querulous humour. "Directly V.V. set eyes on Carnac,
+she just turned against all her up-bringing. 'Why wasn't I
+told of this before?' she said. 'What's Notre Dame to this?
+This is where we came from. This is the real starting point
+of the MAYFLOWER. Belinda,' she said, 'we've got to see all
+we can of this sort of thing before we go back to America.
+They've been keeping this from us.' And that's why we're here
+right now instead of being shopping in Paris or London like
+decent American women."
+
+The younger lady looked down on her companion with something
+of the calm expert attention that a plumber gives to a tap
+that is misbehaving, and like a plumber refrained from
+precipitate action. She stood with the backs of her hands
+resting on her hips.
+
+"Well," she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir
+Richmond and the rest to the doctor. "it is nearer the
+beginnings of things than London or Paris."
+
+"And nearer to us, " said Sir Richmond.
+
+"I call that just--paradoxical," said the shorter lady, who
+appeared to be called Belinda.
+
+"Not paradoxical," Dr. Martineau contradicted gently. "Life
+is always beginning again. And this is a time of fresh
+beginnings."
+
+"Now that's after V.V.'s own heart," cried the stout lady in
+grey. "She'll agree to all that. She's been saying it right
+across Europe. Rome, Paris, London; they're simply just done.
+They don't signify any more. They've got to be cleared away."
+
+"You let me tell my own opinions, Belinda," said the young
+lady who was called V.V. "I said that if people went on
+building with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals for two
+thousand years, it was time they were cleared up and taken
+away."
+
+"Corinthian capitals?" Sir Richmond considered it and laughed
+cheerfully. "I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of
+thing."
+
+"The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument! "
+said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. "It gave
+me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might
+understand English. "
+
+The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at
+herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. "When one is
+travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics
+in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with
+Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me
+for everything in Europe that I don't want and have no sort
+of use for. It isn't a bad sort of capital in its way, florid
+and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;--and that a whole
+continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get
+past it! . . ."
+
+"It's the classical tradition."
+
+"It puzzles me."
+
+"It's the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed
+spread by the Romans all over western Europe."
+
+"And it smothers the history of Europe. You can't see Europe
+because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble
+Arches and ARCS DE TRIOMPHE. You never get away from it. It
+is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech
+and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can't sit down.
+'The empire, gentlemen--the Empire. Empire.' Rome itself is
+perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round
+stupid arches as though it couldn't imagine that you could
+possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter's and that
+frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of
+Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They
+will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes
+on."
+
+"AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"This Roman empire seems to be Europe's first and last idea.
+A fixed idea. And such a poor idea! . . . America never came
+out of that. It's no good-telling me that it did. It escaped
+from it. . . . So I said to Belinda here, 'Let's burrow, if
+we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of
+people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus
+weeds got hold of us.'"
+
+"I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly
+Corinthian, something called the Capitol," Sir Richmond
+reflected. "And other buildings. A Treasury."
+
+"That is different," said the young lady, so conclusively
+that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on that
+score.
+
+"A last twinge of Europeanism," she vouchsafed. "We were
+young in those days."
+
+"You are well beneath the marble here."
+
+She assented cheerfully.
+
+"A thousand years before it."
+"Happy place! Happy people!"
+
+"But even this place isn't the beginning of things here.
+Carnac was older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have
+you heard in America of Avebury? It may have predated this
+place, they think, by another thousand years."
+
+"Avebury?" said the lady who was called Belinda.
+
+"But what is this Avebury?" asked V.V. "I've never heard of
+the place."
+
+"I thought it was a lord," said Belinda.
+
+Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau,
+embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder of Avebury.
+Possibly he exaggerated Avebury. . . .
+
+It was Dr. Martineau who presently brought this disquisition
+upon Avebury to a stop by a very remarkable gesture. He
+looked at his watch. He drew it out ostentatiously, a thick,
+respectable gold watch, for the doctor was not the sort of
+man to wear his watch upon his wrist. He clicked it open and
+looked at it. Thereby he would have proclaimed his belief
+this encounter was an entirely unnecessary interruption of
+his healing duologue with Sir Richmond, which must now be
+resumed.
+
+But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to
+have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking
+about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to
+light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a
+chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too
+quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found
+himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate
+the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where
+their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some
+way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir
+Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The
+luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young
+lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with
+Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr.
+Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was
+to be thrust into an extreme proximity with him and the
+balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.
+
+Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine
+historical imagination before, and he was evidently very
+greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was
+to be got out of this encounter.
+
+Section 3
+
+Sir Richmond displayed a complete disregard of the sufferings
+of Dr. Martineau, shamefully compressed behind him. Of these
+he was to hear later. He ran his overcrowded little car,
+overcrowded so far as the dicky went, over the crest of the
+Down and down into Amesbury and on to Salisbury, stopping to
+alight and stretch the legs of the party when they came in
+sight of Old Sarum.
+
+"Certainly they can do with a little stretching," said Dr.
+Martineau grimly.
+
+This charming young woman had seized upon the imagination of
+Sir Richmond to the temporary exclusion of all other
+considerations. The long Downland gradients, quivering very
+slightly with the vibration of the road, came swiftly and
+easily to meet and pass the throbbing little car as he sat
+beside her and talked to her. He fell into that expository
+manner which comes so easily to the native entertaining the
+visitor from abroad.
+
+"In England, it seems to me there are four main phases of
+history. Four. Avebury, which I would love to take you to see
+to-morrow. Stonehenge. Old Sarum, which we shall see in a
+moment as a great grassy mound on our right as we come over
+one of these crests. Each of them represents about a thousand
+years. Old Sarum was Keltic; it, saw the Romans and the
+Saxons through, and for a time it was a Norman city. Now it
+is pasture for sheep. Latest as yet is Salisbury,--English,
+real English. It may last a few centuries still. It is little
+more than seven hundred years old. But when I think of those
+great hangars back there by Stonehenge, I feel that the next
+phase is already beginning. Of a world one will fly to the
+ends of, in a week or so. Our world still. Our people, your
+people and mine, who are going to take wing so soon now, were
+made in all these places. We are visiting the old homes. I am
+glad I came back to it just when you were doing the same
+thing."
+
+"I'm lucky to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller,"
+she said; "with a car."
+
+"You're the first American I've ever met whose interest in
+history didn't seem--" He sought for an inoffensive word.
+
+"Silly? Oh! I admit it. It's true of a lot of us. Most of us.
+We come over to Europe as if it hadn't anything to do with us
+except to supply us with old pictures and curios generally.
+We come sight-seeing. It's romantic. It's picturesque. We
+stare at the natives--like visitors at a Zoo. We don't
+realize that we belong. . . . I know our style. . . . But we
+aren't all like that. Some of us are learning a bit better
+than that. We have one or two teachers over there to lighten
+our darkness. There's Professor Breasted for instance. He
+comes sometimes to my father's house. And there's James
+Harvey Robinson and Professor Hutton Webster. They've been
+trying to restore our memory."
+
+"I've never heard of any of them," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"You hear so little of America over here. It's quite a large
+country and all sorts of interesting things happen there
+nowadays. And we are waking up to history. Quite fast. We
+shan't always be the most ignorant people in the world. We
+are beginning to realize that quite a lot of things happened
+between Adam and the Mayflower that we ought to be told
+about. I allow it's a recent revival. The United States has
+been like one of those men you read about in the papers who
+go away from home and turn up in some distant place with
+their memories gone. They've forgotten what their names were
+or where they lived or what they did for a living; they've
+forgotten everything that matters. Often they have to begin
+again and settle down for a long time before their memories
+come back. That's how it has been with us. Our memory is just
+coming back to us."
+
+"And what do you find you are?"
+
+"Europeans. Who came away from kings and churches-@-and
+Corinthian capitals."
+
+"You feel all this country belongs to you?"
+
+"As much as it does to you."
+Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. "But if I say that
+America belongs to me as much as it does to you?"
+
+"We are one people," she said.
+
+"We"
+
+"Europe. These parts of Europe anyhow. And ourselves."
+
+"You are the most civilized person I've met for weeks and
+weeks." "Well, you are the first civilized person I've met in
+Europe for a long time. If I understand you."
+
+"There are multitudes of reasonable, civilized people in
+Europe."
+
+"I've heard or seen very little of them.
+
+"They're scattered, I admit."
+
+"And hard to find."
+
+"So ours is a lucky meeting. I've wanted a serious talk to an
+American for some time. I want to know very badly what you
+think you are up to with the world,--our world. "
+
+"I'm equally anxious to know what England thinks she is
+doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult to
+understand. On any hypothesis-that is honourable to her."
+"H'm," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"I assure you we don't like it. This Irish business. We feel
+a sort of ownership in England. It's like finding your
+dearest aunt torturing the cat."
+
+"We must talk of that," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"I wish you would."
+
+"It is a cat and a dog--and they have been very naughty
+animals. And poor Aunt Britannia almost deliberately lost her
+temper. But I admit she hits about in a very nasty fashion."
+
+"And favours the dog."
+
+"She does."
+
+"I want to know all you admit."
+
+"You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the
+pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury. If you are
+free?"
+
+"We're travelling together, just we two. We are wandering
+about the south of England on our way to Falmouth. Where I
+join a father in a few days' time, and I go on with him to
+Paris. And if you and your friend are coming to the Old
+George--"
+
+"We are," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And
+seeing Avebury to-morrow. Why not? Perhaps if we did as the
+Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate
+something of the extreme informality of our behaviour."
+
+"My name is Hardy. I've been a munition manufacturer. I was
+slightly wounded by a stray shell near Arras while I was
+inspecting some plant I had set up, and also I was hit by a
+stray knighthood. So my name is now Sir Richmond Hardy. My
+friend is a very distinguished Harley Street physician.
+Chiefly nervous and mental cases. His name is Dr. Martineau.
+He is quite as civilized as I am. He is also a philosophical
+writer. He is really a very wise and learned man indeed. He
+is full of ideas. He's stimulated me tremendously. You must
+talk to him."
+
+Sir Richmond glanced over his shoulder at the subject of
+these commendations. Through the oval window glared an
+expression of malignity that made no impression whatever on
+his preoccupied mind.
+
+"My name," said the young lady, "is Grammont. The war whirled
+me over to Europe on Red Cross work and since the peace I've
+been settling up things and travelling about Europe. My
+father is rather a big business man in New York."
+
+"The oil Grammont?"
+
+"He is rather deep in oil, I believe. He is coming over to
+Europe because he does not like the way your people are
+behaving in Mesopotamia. He is on his way to Paris now. Paris
+it seems is where everything is to be settled against you.
+Belinda is a sort of companion I have acquired for the
+purposes of independent travel. She was Red Cross too. I must
+have somebody and I cannot bear a maid. Her name is Belinda
+Seyffert. From Philadelphia originally. You have that?
+Seyffert, Grammont?"
+
+"And Hardy?" "Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau."
+
+"And-Ah!--That great green bank there just coming into sight
+must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away
+when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop
+here for a little while. . . . "
+
+Then it was that Dr. Martineau was grim about the stretching
+of his legs.
+
+Section 4
+
+The sudden prospect which now opened out before Sir Richmond
+of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming
+companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with
+this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self-
+examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate
+possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard
+of Dr. Martineau's possible objections to any such
+modification of their original programme. When they arrived
+in Salisbury, the doctor did make some slight effort to
+suggest a different hotel from that in which the two ladies
+had engaged their rooms, but on the spur of the moment and in
+their presence he could produce no sufficient reason for
+refusing the accommodation the Old George had ready for him.
+He was reduced to a vague: "We don't want to inflict
+ourselves--" He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any
+adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert,
+before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst
+the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And
+only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the
+engagements to which Sir Richmond had committed himself.
+
+"I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow,"
+said Sir Richmond. "These ladies were nearly missing it."
+
+The thing took the doctor's breath away. For the moment he
+could say nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An
+objection formulated itself very slowly. "But that dicky," he
+whispered.
+
+His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the
+completeness of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had
+been a cathedral city; it was essentially and purely that.
+The church at its best, in the full tide of its mediaeval
+ascendancy, had called it into being. He was making some
+extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the
+buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss
+Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory
+qualifications. "Our age will leave the ruins of hotels,"
+said Sir Richmond. "Railway arches and hotels."
+
+"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the
+Empire comes nearest to it . . . . "
+
+As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant
+to walk round and about Salisbury. He foresaw that walk with
+the utmost clearness. In front and keeping just a little
+beyond the range of his intervention, Sir Richmond would go
+with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring
+up the rear. "If I do," he muttered, "I'll be damned!" an
+unusually strong expression for him.
+
+"You said--?" asked Miss Seyffert.
+
+"That I have some writing to do--before the post goes," said
+the doctor brightly.
+
+"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with
+ill-concealed dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a
+fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest
+fashion when he said this.
+
+"I'm afraid," said the doctor mulishly. "Impossible."
+
+(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")
+
+Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first
+to look for shops," she said. "There's those things you want
+to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can
+all go together as far as that. And while you are shopping,
+if you wouldn't mind getting one or two things
+for me. . . ."
+
+It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be
+let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also
+clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he
+might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and
+eager to resume with him. . . .
+
+Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He
+could think over his notes. . . .
+
+But in reality he thought over nothing but the little
+speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the
+unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that
+were being made without his consent in their common
+programme. . . .
+
+For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting
+and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America.
+"Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't
+correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively
+reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he
+judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl"
+with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible
+purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less
+appropriate for her than the word "boy." She had an air of
+having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far
+she had lived each several year of her existence in a
+distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental
+profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could talk
+with her as if he talked with a man like himself--but with a
+zest no man could give him.
+
+It was evident that the good things she had said at first
+came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert
+thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of
+those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever
+women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking
+for effect at all, she was talking because she was
+tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of
+history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as
+she was.
+
+Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made
+their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact
+gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-
+iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum,
+aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and
+the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon
+the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old
+houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some
+moments surveying it.
+
+"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir
+Richmond. "But why, I wonder, did we build it? "
+
+"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with
+her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp
+against the blue. "I've been away for so long-over there-that
+I forget altogether. Why DID we build it?"
+
+She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and
+thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her
+mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in
+Europe. "My friend, the philosopher," he had said, "will not
+have it that we are really the individuals we think we are.
+You must talk to him--he is a very curious and subtle
+thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he
+says, passing thoughts. We are--what does he call it? --Man
+on his Planet, taking control of life."
+
+"Man and woman," she had amended.
+
+But just as man on his planet taking control of life had
+failed altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on
+the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss
+Grammont and Sir Richmond found very great difficulty in
+recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.
+
+"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond.
+"But the impulse was losing its force. "
+
+She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly
+quizzical expression.
+
+But he had his reply ready.
+
+"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were
+already very clever engineers. What interested us here wasn't
+the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display
+our power over stone. We made it into reeds and branches. We
+squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest
+and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think people have
+ever feared and worshipped in this--this artist's lark--as
+they did in Stonehenge?"
+
+"I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here,"
+she said.
+
+Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. "The spirit of the
+Gothic cathedrals," he said, "is the spirit of the sky-
+scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition.
+The Freemasons on the building could hardly refrain from
+jeering at the little priest they had left down below there,
+performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his altar. He was
+just their excuse for doing it all."
+
+"Sky-scrapers?" she conceded. "An early display of the sky-
+scraper spirit. . . . You are doing your best to make me feel
+thoroughly at home."
+
+"You are more at home here still than in that new country of
+ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do
+begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other
+cathedrals we built in Europe. . . . It was the fun of
+building made us do it. . . "
+
+"H'm," she said. "And my sky-scrapers?"
+
+"Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most
+about America. It's still large enough, mentally and
+materially, to build all sorts of things. . . . Over here,
+the sites are frightfully crowded. . . . "
+
+"And what do you think we are building now? And what do you
+think you are building over here?"
+
+"What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up.
+I believe it is time we began to build in earnest. For
+good. . . ."
+
+"But are we building anything at all?"
+
+"A new world."
+
+"Show it me," she said.
+
+"We're still only at the foundations," said Sir Richmond."
+Nothing shows as yet."
+
+"I wish I could believe they were foundations."
+
+"But can you doubt we are scrapping the old? . . ."
+
+It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so
+they strolled to and fro round and about the west end and
+along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging
+their ideas very frankly and freely about the things that had
+recently happened to the world and what they thought they
+ought to be doing in it.
+
+Section 5
+
+After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a
+corner of the smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished
+hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the
+second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed from tweedy
+pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but
+definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their
+coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of
+Miss Grammont's hair and a necklace of the same colourings
+kept the peace between her jolly sun-burnt cheek and her soft
+untanned neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included
+a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a
+plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr.
+Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.
+
+The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of
+the steady continuity of Sir Richmond's duologue with Miss
+Grammont. Miss Seyffert's methods were too discursive and
+exclamatory. She broke every thread that appeared. The Old
+George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss
+Seyffert laced the entire evening with her recognition of the
+fact. "Just look at that old beam!" she would cry suddenly. "
+To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot
+in America!"
+
+Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she
+chose. After the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy
+contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat
+deep in a basket chair and spoke now and then. Miss Seyffert
+gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the
+cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.
+
+Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her
+chair threw out the statement that Italy was frightfully
+overpopulated. "In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a
+cheese. Nobody seems to be living. Everyone is too busy
+keeping alive."
+
+"Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules," said
+Miss Seyffert.
+
+"Little children working like slaves," said Miss Grammont.
+
+"And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the
+roadside. Who ought to be getting wages--sufficient. . . ."
+
+"Begging--from foreigners--is just a sport in Italy," said
+Sir Richmond. "It doesn't imply want. But I agree that a
+large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole
+world is. Don't you think so, Martineau?"
+
+"Well--yes--for its present social organization. "
+
+"For any social organization," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added
+amazingly: "I'm out for Birth Control all the time."
+
+A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of
+sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty
+coffee cup.
+
+"The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives," said
+Sir Richmond. "Which amount to nothing. Which do not even
+represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources,
+the fuel and surplus energy of the world."
+
+"I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives," Miss
+Grammont reflected.
+
+"Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are
+just vain repetitions--imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions
+of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all
+that they do has been done better before. Because they are
+crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as
+for liking their lives, they need never have had the chance."
+
+"How many people are there in the world?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"I don't know. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions
+perhaps."
+
+"And in your world?"
+
+"I'd have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At
+most. It would be quite enough for this little planet, for a
+time, at any rate. Don't you think so, doctor?"
+
+"I don't know," said Dr. Martineau. "Oddly enough, I have
+never thought about that question before. At least, not from
+this angle."
+
+"But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million
+aristocrats?" began Miss Grammont. "My native instinctive
+democracy--"
+
+"Need not be outraged," said Sir Richmond. "Any two hundred
+and fifty million would do, They'd be able to develop fully,
+all of them. As things are, only a minority can do that. The
+rest never get a chance."
+
+"That's what I always say," said Miss Seyffert.
+
+"A New Age," said Dr. Martineau; "a New World. We may be
+coming to such a stage, when population, as much as fuel,
+will be under a world control. If one thing, why not the
+other? I admit that the movement of thought is away from
+haphazard towards control--"
+
+"I'm for control all the time," Miss Seyffert injected,
+following up her previous success.
+
+"I admit", the doctor began his broken sentence again with
+marked patience, "that the movement of thought is away from
+haphazard towards control--in things generally. But is the
+movement of events?"
+
+"The eternal problem of man," said Sir Richmond. "Can our
+wills prevail?"
+
+There came a little pause.
+
+Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert. "If YOU
+are," said Belinda.
+
+"I wish I could imagine your world," said Miss Grammont,
+rising, "of two hundred and fifty millions of fully developed
+human beings with room to live and breathe in and no need for
+wars. Will they live in palaces? Will they all be healthy? .
+. . Machines will wait on them. No! I can't imagine it.
+Perhaps I shall dream of it. My dreaming self may be
+cleverer."
+
+She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they
+stood hand in hand, appreciatively. . . .
+
+"Well!" said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two
+Americans, "This is a curious encounter."
+
+"That young woman has brains," said Sir Richmond, standing
+before the fireplace. There was no doubt whatever which young
+woman he meant. But Dr. Martineau grunted.
+
+"I don't like the American type," the doctor pronounced
+judicially.
+
+"I do," Sir Richmond countered.
+
+The doctor thought for a moment or so. "You are committed to
+the project of visiting Avebury?" he said.
+
+"They ought to see Avebury, " said Sir Richmond.
+
+"H'm," said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts
+and staring at the fire. "Birth Control! I NEVER did."
+
+Sir Richmond smiled down on the top of the doctor's head and
+said nothing.
+
+"I think" said the doctor and paused. "I shall leave this
+Avebury expedition to you."
+
+"We can be back in the early afternoon," said Sir Richmond.
+"To give them a chance of seeing the cathedral. The chapter
+house here is not one to miss . . . . "
+
+"And then I suppose we shall go on?
+
+"As you please," said Sir Richmond insincerely.
+
+"I must confess that four people make the car at any rate
+seem tremendously overpopulated. And to tell the truth, I do
+not find this encounter so amusing as you seem to do. . . . I
+shall not be sorry when we have waved good-bye to those young
+ladies, and resume our interrupted conversation."
+
+Sir Richmond considered something mulish in the doctor's
+averted face.
+
+"I find Miss Grammont an extremely interesting--and
+stimulating human being.
+
+"Evidently."
+
+The doctor sighed, stood up and found himself delivering one
+of the sentences he had engendered during his solitary
+meditations in his room before dinner. He surprised himself
+by the plainness of his speech. "Let me be frank," he said,
+regarding Sir Richmond squarely. "Considering the general
+situation of things and your position, I do not care very
+greatly for the part of an accessory to what may easily
+develop, as you know very well, into a very serious
+flirtation. An absurd, mischievous, irrelevant flirtation.
+You may not like the word. You may pretend it is a
+conversation, an ordinary intellectual conversation. That is
+not the word. Simply that is not the word. You people eye one
+another. . . . Flirtation. I give the affair its proper name.
+That is all. Merely that. When I think--But we will not
+discuss it now. . . . Good night. . . . Forgive me if I put
+before you, rather bluntly, my particular point of view."
+
+Sir Richmond found himself alone. With his eyebrows raised.
+
+Section 6
+
+After twenty-four eventful hours our two students of human
+motives found themselves together again by the fireplace in
+the Old George smoking-room. They had resumed their overnight
+conversation, in a state of considerable tension.
+
+"If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said
+Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit
+it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place like this.
+
+I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau.
+"I am not coming on if these young women are."
+
+"But if you consider it scandalous--and really, Martineau,
+really! as one man to another, it does seem to me to be a bit
+pernickety of you, a broad and original thinker as you are--"
+
+"Thought is one matter. Rash, inconsiderate action quite
+another. And above all, if I spend another day in or near the
+company of Miss Belinda Seyffert I shall--I shall be
+extremely rude to her."
+
+"But," said Sir Richmond and bit his lower lip and
+considered.
+
+"We might drop Belinda," he suggested turning to his friend
+and speaking in low, confidential tones. "She is quite a
+manageable person. Quite. She could--for example--be left
+behind with the luggage and sent on by train. I do not know
+if you realize how the land lies in that quarter. It needs
+only a word to Miss Grammont. "
+
+There was no immediate reply. For a moment he had a wild hope
+that his companion would agree, and then he perceived that
+the doctor's silence meant only the preparation of an
+ultimatum.
+
+"I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more
+than I do to Miss Seyffert."
+
+Sir Richmond said nothing.
+
+"It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different
+angle if I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert has asked
+me if you were a married man."
+
+"And of course you told her I was."
+
+"On the second occasion."
+
+Sir Richmond smiled again.
+
+"Frankly," said the doctor, "this adventure is altogether
+uncongenial to me. It is the sort of thing that has never
+happened in my life. This highway coupling--"
+
+"Don't you think," said Sir Richmond, "that you are attaching
+rather too much--what shall I say--romantic?--flirtatious?--
+meaning to this affair? I don't mind that after my rather
+lavish confessions you should consider me a rather oversexed
+person, but isn't your attitude rather unfair,--unjust,
+indeed, and almost insulting, to this Miss Grammont? After
+all, she's a young lady of very good social position indeed.
+She doesn't strike you--does she?--as an undignified or
+helpless human being. Her manners suggest a person of
+considerable self-control. And knowing less of me than you
+do, she probably regards me as almost as safe as--a maiden
+aunt say. I'm twice her age. We are a party of four. There
+are conventions, there are considerations. . . . Aren't you
+really, my dear Martineau, overdoing all this side of this
+very pleasant little enlargement of our interests."
+
+"AM I?" said Dr. Martineau and brought a scrutinizing eye to
+bear on Sir Richmond's face.
+
+"I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so,"
+Sir Richmond admitted.
+
+"Then I shall prefer to leave your party."
+
+There were some moments of silence.
+
+"I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma," said
+Sir Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his voice.
+
+"It is not a dilemma," said Dr. Martineau, with a
+corresponding loss of asperity. "I grant you we discover we
+differ upon a question of taste and convenience. But before I
+suggested this trip, I had intended to spend a little time
+with my old friend Sir Kenelm Latter at Bournemouth. Nothing
+simpler than to go to him now . . . ."
+
+"I shall be sorry all the same."
+
+"I could have wished," said the doctor, "that these ladies
+had happened a little later. . . ."
+
+The matter was settled. Nothing more of a practical nature
+remained to be said. But neither gentleman wished to break
+off with a harsh and bare decision.
+
+"When the New Age is here," said Sir Richmond, "then, surely,
+a friendship between a man and a woman will not be subjected
+to the--the inconveniences your present code would set about
+it? They would travel about together as they chose?"
+
+"The fundamental principle of the new age," said the doctor,
+will be Honi soit qui mal y pense. In these matters. With
+perhaps Fay ce que vouldras as its next injunction. So long
+as other lives are not affected. In matters of personal
+behaviour the world will probably be much more free and
+individuals much more open in their conscience and honour
+than they have ever been before. In matters of property,
+economics and public conduct it will probably be just the
+reverse. Then, there will be much more collective control and
+much more insistence, legal insistence, upon individual
+responsibility. But we are not living in a new age yet; we
+are living in the patched-up ruins of a very old one. And
+you-- if you will forgive me--are living in the patched up
+remains of a life that had already had its complications.
+This young lady, whose charm and cleverness I admit, behaves
+as if the new age were already here. Well, that may be a very
+dangerous mistake both for her and for you. . . . This
+affair, if it goes on for a few days more, may involve very
+serious consequences indeed, with which I, for one, do not
+wish to be involved."
+
+Sir Richmond, upon the hearthrug, had a curious feeling that
+he was back in the head master's study at Caxton.
+
+Dr. Martineau went on with a lucidity that Sir Richmond found
+rather trying, to give his impression of Miss Grammont and
+her position in life.
+
+"She is," he said, "manifestly a very expensively educated
+girl. And in many ways interesting. I have been watching her.
+I have not been favoured with very much of her attention, but
+that fact has enabled me to see her in profile. Miss Seyffert
+is a fairly crude mixture of frankness, insincerity and self-
+explanatory egotism, and I have been able to disregard a
+considerable amount of the conversation she has addressed to
+me. Now I guess this Miss Grammont has had no mother since
+she was quite little."
+
+"Your guesses, doctor, are apt to be pretty good," said Sir
+Richmond.
+
+"You know that?"
+
+"She has told me as much."
+
+"H'm. Well--She impressed me as having the air of a girl who
+has had to solve many problems for which the normal mother
+provides ready made solutions. That is how I inferred that
+there was no mother. I don't think there has been any
+stepmother, either friendly or hostile? There hasn't been. I
+thought not. She has had various governesses and companions,
+ladies of birth and education, engaged to look after her and
+she has done exactly what she liked with them. Her manner
+with Miss Seyffert, an excellent manner for Miss Seyffert, by
+the bye, isn't the sort of manner anyone acquires in a day.
+Or for one person only. She is a very sure and commanding
+young woman."
+
+Sir Richmond nodded.
+
+"I suppose her father adores and neglects her, and whenever
+she has wanted a companion or governess butchered, the thing
+has been done. . . . These business Americans, I am told,
+neglect their womenkind, give them money and power, let them
+loose on the world. . . . It is a sort of moral laziness
+masquerading as affection. . . . Still I suppose custom and
+tradition kept this girl in her place and she was petted,
+honoured, amused, talked about but not in a harmful way, and
+rather bored right up to the time when America came into the
+war. Theoretically she had a tremendously good time."
+
+"I think this must be near the truth of her biography," said
+Sir Richmond.
+
+"I suppose she has lovers."
+
+"You don't mean--?" "No, I don't. Though that is a matter
+that ought to have no special interest for you. I mean that
+she was surrounded by a retinue of men who wanted to marry
+her or who behaved as though they wanted to marry her or who
+made her happiness and her gratifications and her
+condescensions seem a matter of very great importance to
+them. She had the flattery of an extremely uncritical and
+unexacting admiration. That is the sort of thing that
+gratifies a silly woman extremely. Miss Grammont is not silly
+and all this homage and facile approval probably bored her
+more than she realized. To anyone too intelligent to be
+steadily excited by buying things and wearing things and
+dancing and playing games and going to places of
+entertainment, and being given flowers, sweets, jewellery,
+pet animals, and books bound in a special sort of leather,
+the prospect of being a rich man's only daughter until such
+time as it becomes advisable to change into a rich man's
+wealthy wife, is probably not nearly so amusing as envious
+people might suppose. I take it Miss Grammont had got all she
+could out of that sort of thing some time before the war, and
+that she had already read and thought rather more than most
+young women in her position. Before she was twenty I guess
+she was already looking for something more interesting in the
+way of men than a rich admirer with an automobile full of
+presents. Those who seek find."
+
+"What do you think she found?"
+
+"What would a rich girl find out there in America? I don't
+know. I haven't the material to guess with. In London a girl
+might find a considerable variety of active, interesting men,
+rising politicians, university men of distinction, artists
+and writers even, men of science, men--there are still such
+men--active in the creative work of the empire.
+
+"In America I suppose there is at least an equal variety,
+made up of rather different types. She would find that life
+was worth while to such people in a way that made the
+ordinary entertainments and amusements of her life a
+monstrous silly waste of time. With the facility of her sex
+she would pick up from one of them the idea that made life
+worth while for him. I am inclined to think there was someone
+in her case who did seem to promise a sort of life that was
+worth while. And that somehow the war came to alter the look
+of that promise.
+
+"How?"
+
+"I don't know. Perhaps I am only romancing. But for this
+young woman I am convinced this expedition to Europe has
+meant experience, harsh educational experience and very
+profound mental disturbance. There have been love
+experiences; experiences that were something more than the
+treats and attentions and proposals that made up her life
+when she was sheltered over there. And something more than
+that. What it is I don't know. The war has turned an ugly
+face to her. She has seen death and suffering and ruin.
+Perhaps she has seen people she knew killed. Perhaps the man
+has been killed. Or she has met with cowardice or cruelty or
+treachery where she didn't expect it. She has been shocked
+out of the first confidence of youth. She has ceased to take
+the world for granted. It hasn't broken her but it has
+matured her. That I think is why history has become real to
+her. Which so attracts you in her. History, for her, has
+ceased to be a fabric of picturesque incidents; it is the
+study of a tragic struggle that still goes on. She sees
+history as you see it and I see it. She is a very grown-up
+young woman.
+
+"It's just that," said Sir Richmond. "It's just that. If you
+see as much in Miss Grammont as all that, why don't you want
+to come on with us? You see the interest of her."
+
+"I see a lot more than that. You don't know what an advantage
+it is to be as I am, rather cold and unresponsive to women
+and unattractive and negligible--negligible, that is the
+exact word--to them. YOU can't look at a woman for five
+minutes without losing sight of her in a mist of imaginative
+excitement. Because she looks back at you. I have the
+privilege of the negligible--which is a cool head. Miss
+Grammont has a startled and matured mind, an original mind.
+Yes. And there is something more to be said. Her intelligence
+is better than her character."
+
+"I don't quite see what you are driving at."
+
+"The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than
+their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we understand it,
+seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss
+Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character. And as I
+have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no
+discipline. . . . You also are a person of high intelligence
+and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You--
+on account of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss
+Martin Leeds--"
+"Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?"
+
+"This IS the confessional. It closes to-morrow morning but it
+is the confessional still. Look at the thing frankly. You, I
+say, are also at loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir,
+don't we both know that ever since we left London you have
+been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in
+petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha'porth of
+kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You're a stray man
+looking for a mistress. Miss Grammont being a woman is a
+little more selective than that. But if she's at a loose end
+as I suppose, she isn't protected by the sense of having made
+her selection. And she has no preconceptions of what she
+wants. You are a very interesting man in many ways. You carry
+marriage and entanglements lightly. With an air of being
+neither married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall
+in love with you."
+
+"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an
+ill-concealed eagerness.
+
+Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. "These
+miracles--grotesquely--happen," he said. "She knows nothing
+of Martin Leeds. . . . You must remember that. . . .
+
+"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the
+phrase goes, what is to follow?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he
+took counsel with them and then decided to take offence.
+
+"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous. You talk of falling
+in love as though it was impossible for a man and woman to be
+deeply interested in each other without that. And the gulf in
+our ages--in our quality! From the Psychologist of a New Age
+I find this amazing. Are men and women to go on for ever--
+separated by this possibility into two hardly communicating
+and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be
+friendship and companionship between men and women without
+passion?"
+
+"You ought to know even better than I do that there is not.
+For such people as you two anyhow. And at present the world
+is not prepared to tolerate friendship and companionship WITH
+that accompaniment. That is the core of this situation."
+
+A pause fell between the two gentlemen. They had smoothed
+over the extreme harshness of their separation and there was
+very little more to be said.
+
+"Well," said Sir Richmond in conclusion, "I am very sorry
+indeed, Martineau, that we have to part like this."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
+
+COMPANIONSHIP
+
+Section 1
+
+"Well," said Dr. Martineau, extending his hand to Sir
+Richmond on the Salisbury station platform, "I leave you to
+it."
+
+His round face betrayed little or no vestiges of his
+overnight irritation.
+
+"Ought you to leave me to it?" smiled Sir Richmond.
+
+"I shall be interested to learn what happens."
+
+"But if you won't stay to see!"
+
+"Now Sir, please," said the guard respectfully but firmly,
+and Dr. Martineau got in.
+
+Sir Richmond walked thoughtfully down the platform towards
+the exit.
+
+"What else could I do?" he asked aloud to nobody in
+particular.
+
+For a little while he thought confusedly of the collapse of
+his expedition into the secret places of his own heart with
+Dr. Martineau, and then his prepossession with Miss Grammont
+resumed possession of his mind. Dr. Martineau was forgotten.
+
+Section 2
+
+For the better part of forty hours, Sir Richmond had either
+been talking to Miss Grammont, or carrying on imaginary
+conversations with her in her absence, or sleeping and
+dreaming dreams in which she never failed to play a part,
+even if at times it was an altogether amazing and incongruous
+part. And as they were both very frank and expressive people,
+they already knew a very great deal about each other.
+
+For an American Miss Grammont was by no means
+autobiographical. She gave no sketches of her idiosyncrasies,
+and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her
+contemporaries about herself. She either concealed or she had
+lost any great interest in her own personality. But she was
+interested in and curious about the people she had met in
+life, and her talk of them reflected a considerable amount of
+light upon her own upbringing and experiences. And her liking
+for Sir Richmond was pleasingly manifest. She liked his turn
+of thought, she watched him with a faint smile on her lips as
+he spoke, and she spread her opinions before him carefully in
+that soft voice of hers like a shy child showing its
+treasures to some suddenly trusted and favoured visitor.
+
+Their ways of thought harmonized. They talked at first
+chiefly about the history of the world and the extraordinary
+situation of aimlessness in a phase of ruin to which the
+Great War had brought all Europe, if not all mankind. The
+world excited them both in the same way; as a crisis in which
+they were called upon to do something--they did not yet
+clearly know what. Into this topic they peered as into some
+deep pool, side by side, and in it they saw each other
+reflected.
+
+The visit to Avebury had been a great success. It had been a
+perfect springtime day, and the little inn had been delighted
+at the reappearance of Sir Richmond's car so soon after its
+departure. Its delight was particularly manifest in the cream
+and salad it produced for lunch. Both Miss Grammont and Miss
+Seyffert displayed an intelligent interest in their food.
+After lunch they had all gone out to the stones and the wall.
+Half a dozen sunburnt children were putting one of the
+partially overturned megaliths to a happy use by clambering
+to the top of it and sliding on their little behinds down its
+smooth and sloping side amidst much mirthful squealing.
+
+Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont had walked round the old
+circumvallation together, but Belinda Seyffert had strayed
+away from them, professing an interest in flowers. It was not
+so much that she felt they had to be left together that made
+her do this as her own consciousness of being possessed by a
+devil who interrupted conversations.
+
+When Miss Grammont was keenly interested in a conversation,
+then Belinda had learnt from experience that it was wiser to
+go off with her devil out of the range of any temptation to
+interrupt.
+
+"You really think," said Miss Grammont, "that it would be
+possible to take this confused old world and reshape it, set
+it marching towards that new world of yours--of two hundred
+and fifty million fully developed, beautiful and happy
+people?"
+
+"Why not? Nobody is doing anything with the world except
+muddle about. Why not give it a direction? "
+
+"You'd take it in your hands like clay?"
+
+"Obdurate clay with a sort of recalcitrant, unintelligent
+life of its own."
+
+Her imagination glowed in her eyes and warmed her voice. "I
+believe what you say is possible. If people dare."
+
+"I am tired of following little motives that are like flames
+that go out when you get to them. I am tired of seeing all
+the world doing the same. I am tired of a world in which
+there is nothing great but great disasters. Here is something
+mankind can attempt, that we can attempt."
+
+"And will? "
+
+"I believe that as Mankind grows up this is the business Man
+has to settle down to and will settle down to."
+
+She considered that.
+
+"I've been getting to believe something like this.
+But-- . . . it frightens me. I suppose most of us have this
+same sort of dread of taking too much upon ourselves."
+
+"So we just live like pigs. Sensible little piggywiggys. I've
+got a Committee full of that sort of thing. We live like
+little modest pigs. And let the world go hang. And pride
+ourselves upon our freedom from the sin of presumption.
+
+"Not quite that!"
+
+"Well! How do you put it?"
+
+"We are afraid," she said. "It's too vast. We want bright
+little lives of our own. "
+
+"Exactly--sensible little piggy-wiggys."
+
+"We have a right to life--and happiness.
+
+"First," said Sir Richmond, "as much right as a pig has to
+food. But whether we get life and happiness or fail to get
+them we human beings who have imaginations want something
+more nowadays. . . . Of course we want bright lives, of
+course we want happiness. Just as we want food, just as we
+want sleep. But when we have eaten, when we have slept, when
+we have jolly things about us--it is nothing. We have been
+made an exception of--and got our rations. The big thing
+confronts us still. It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it
+is the thing we have to think about. I do not know why it
+should be so, but I am compelled by something in my nature to
+want to serve this idea of a new age for mankind. I want it
+as my culminating want. I want a world in order, a
+disciplined mankind going on to greater things. Don't you?"
+
+"Now you tell me of it," she said with a smile, "I do."
+
+"But before--?"
+
+"No. You've made it clear. It wasn't clear before."
+
+"I've been talking of this sort of thing with my friend Dr.
+Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as talking. That
+perhaps is why I'm so clear and positive."
+
+"I don't complain that you are clear and positive. I've been
+coming along the same way. . . . It's refreshing to meet
+you."
+
+"I found it refreshing to meet Martineau." A twinge of
+conscience about Dr. Martineau turned Sir Richmond into a new
+channel. "He's a most interesting man," he said. "Rather shy
+in some respects. Devoted to his work. And he's writing a
+book which has saturated him in these ideas. Only two nights
+ago we stood here and talked about it. The Psychology of a
+New Age. The world, he believes, is entering upon a new phase
+in its history, the adolescence, so to speak, of mankind. It
+is an idea that seizes the imagination. There is a flow of
+new ideas abroad, he thinks, widening realizations,
+unprecedented hopes and fears. There is a consciousness of
+new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing the
+adolescence of our race. It is giving history a new and more
+intimate meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer
+relation with public affairs,--making them matter as formerly
+they didn't seem to matter. That idea of the bright little
+private life has to go by the board."
+
+"I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had
+been thinking over some such question before.
+
+"The private life," she said, "has a way of coming aboard
+again."
+
+Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of
+him.
+
+"You have some sort of work cut out for you," she said
+abruptly.
+
+"Yes. Yes, I have."
+
+"I haven't," she said.
+
+"So that I go about," she added, like someone who is looking
+for something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbing too
+searching a question at you--what you have found."
+
+Sir Richmond considered. "Incidentally," he smiled, " I want
+to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and
+barbaric person, your father. I am doing my best to help lay
+the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel
+production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commission in
+London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole
+world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington
+presently with proposals. "
+
+Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. "I suppose," she said,
+"poor father IS rather like an unbroken mule in business
+affairs. So many of our big business men in America are.
+He'll lash out at you."
+
+"I don't mind if only he lashes out openly in the sight of
+all men."
+
+She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely.
+
+"Tell me what you want to do to him. You find out so many
+things for me that I seem to have been thinking about in a
+sort of almost invisible half-conscious way. I've been
+suspecting for a long time that Civilization wasn't much good
+unless it got people like my father under some sort of
+control. But controlling father--as distinguished from
+managing him!" She reviewed some private and amusing
+memories. "He is a most intractable man."
+
+Section 3
+
+They had gone on to talk of her father and of the types of
+men who controlled international business. She had had
+plentiful opportunities for observation in their homes and
+her own. Gunter Lake, the big banker, she knew particularly
+well, because, it seemed, she had been engaged or was engaged
+to marry him. "All these people," she said, "are pushing
+things about, affecting millions of lives, hurting and
+disordering hundreds of thousands of people. They don't seem
+to know what they are doing. They have no plans in
+particular. . . . And you are getting something going that
+will be a plan and a direction and a conscience and a control
+for them? You will find my father extremely difficult, but
+some of our younger men would love it.
+
+"And," she went on; "there are American women who'd love it
+too. We're petted. We're kept out of things. We aren't
+placed. We don't get enough to do. We're spenders and wasters
+--not always from choice. While these fathers and brothers
+and husbands of ours play about with the fuel and power and
+life and hope of the world as though it was a game of poker.
+With all the empty unspeakable solemnity of the male. And
+treat us as though we ought to be satisfied if they bring
+home part of the winnings.
+
+"That can't go on," she said.
+
+Her eyes went back to the long, low, undulating skyline of
+the downs. She spoke as though she took up the thread of some
+controversy that had played a large part in her life. "That
+isn't going on," she said with an effect of conclusive
+decision.
+
+Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned
+from Salisbury station to the Old George after his farewell
+to Martineau. He recalled too the soft firmness of her
+profile and the delicate line of her lifted chin. He felt
+that this time at any rate he was not being deceived by the
+outward shows of a charming human being. This young woman had
+real firmness of character to back up her free and
+independent judgments. He smiled at the idea of any facile
+passion in the composition of so sure and gallant a
+personality. Martineau was very fine-minded in many respects,
+but he was an old maid; and like all old maids he saw man and
+woman in every encounter. But passion was a thing men and
+women fell back upon when they had nothing else in common.
+When they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark
+seemed to weave a fresh thread of common interest, then it
+wasn't so necessary. It might happen, but it wasn't so
+necessary. . . . If it did it would be a secondary thing to
+companionship. That's what she was,--a companion.
+
+But a very lovely and wonderful companion, the companion one
+would not relinquish until the very last moment one could
+keep with her.
+
+Her views about America and about her own place in the world
+seemed equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.
+
+"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen,"
+she had said. That didn't mean that she attached very much
+importance to her recently acquired vote. She evidently
+classified voters into the irresponsible who just had votes
+and the responsible who also had a considerable amount of
+property as well. She had no illusions about the power of the
+former class. It didn't exist. They were steered to their
+decisions by people employed, directed or stimulated by
+"father" and his friends and associates, the owners of
+America, the real "responsible citizens." Or they fell a prey
+to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries." But
+anyhow they were steered. She herself, it was clear, was
+bound to become a very responsible citizen indeed. She would
+some day, she laughed, be swimming in oil and such like
+property. Her interest in Sir Richmond's schemes for a
+scientific world management of fuel was therefore, she
+realized, a very direct one. But it was remarkable to find a
+young woman seeing it like that.
+
+Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards
+her. He despised and distrusted women generally, and it was
+evident he had made it quite clear to her how grave an error
+it was on her part to persist in being a daughter and not a
+son. At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was
+disposed to agree with father upon that. When Mr. Grammont's
+sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he
+gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up
+against the machinations of adventurers by means of trustees,
+partners, lawyers, advisers, agreements and suchlike
+complications, or for acquiring a workable son by marriage.
+To this last idea it would seem the importance in her life of
+the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed. But
+another mood of the old man's was distrust of anything that
+could not be spoken of as his "own flesh and blood," and then
+he would direct his attention to a kind of masculinization of
+his daughter and to schemes for giving her the completest
+control of all he had to leave her provided she never married
+nor fell under masculine sway. "After all," he would reflect
+as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's ideal,
+"there was Hetty Green."
+
+This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of
+seventeen from the educational care of an English gentlewoman
+warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe,
+and thrust her for the mornings and a moiety of the
+afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but
+competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down
+town. She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern
+independent of Mr. Grammont, because he feared his own people
+wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages
+and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned
+casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a
+trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent
+of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical
+Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a
+commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had
+really done responsible work.
+
+But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even
+for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party
+he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an
+improper familiarity with socialist ideas. This had produced
+a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of
+a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake. Gunter Lake, Sir
+Richmond gathered, wasn't half a bad fellow. Generally it
+would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of
+speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake
+had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his
+behaviour under bad treatment. There was some story, however,
+connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss
+Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell. About that story
+Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after
+his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely
+guessing.
+
+So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated
+up in fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond's
+mind in the course of a day and a half. The fragments came up
+as allusions or by way of illustration. The sustaining topic
+was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under
+scientific control, the Utopia of fully developed people
+fully developing the resources of the earth. For a number of
+trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the
+project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and
+presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was
+justified in doing. It was true that Dr. Martineau had not
+said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but
+also it was true that they had not crystallized out in Sir
+Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea
+of a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh
+rules of conduct and of different relationships between human
+beings. And it throws those who talk about it into the
+companionship of a common enterprise. To-morrow the New Age
+will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure
+of only a few human beings.
+
+So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to
+ask: "What are we to do with such types as father?" and to
+fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise. They had
+agreed by a tacit consent to a common conception of the world
+they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense
+organization of mature commonsense, healthy and secure,
+gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet
+beyond dreaming. They were prepared to think of the makers of
+the Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age
+savages as a phase, in their late childhood, and of this
+great world order Sir Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn
+was already at hand. And in such long perspectives, the
+states, governments and institutions of to-day became very
+temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed. Both
+these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion
+with an unwonted courage and freedom because the other one
+had been disposed to think in this fashion before. Sir
+Richmond was still turning over in his mind the happy mutual
+release of the imagination this chance companionship had
+brought about when he found himself back again at the
+threshold of the Old George.
+
+Section 4
+
+Sir Richmond Hardy was not the only man who was thinking
+intently about Miss Grammont at that particular moment. Two
+gentlemen were coming towards her across the Atlantic whose
+minds, it chanced, were very busily occupied by her affairs.
+One of these was her father, who was lying in his brass bed
+in his commodious cabin on the Hollandia, regretting his
+diminishing ability to sleep in the early morning now, even
+when he was in the strong and soothing air of mid-Atlantic,
+and thinking of V.V. because she had a way of coming into his
+mind when it was undefended; and the other was Mr. Gunter
+Lake on the Megantic, one day out from Sandy Hook, who found
+himself equally sleepless and preoccupied. And although Mr.
+Lake was a man of vast activities and complicated engagements
+he was coming now to Europe for the express purpose of seeing
+V.V. and having things out with her fully and completely
+because, in spite of all that had happened, she made such an
+endless series of delays in coming to America.
+
+Old Grammont as he appeared upon the pillow of his bed by the
+light of a rose-shaded bedside lamp, was a small-headed,
+grey-haired gentleman with a wrinkled face and sunken brown
+eyes. Years of business experience, mitigated only by such
+exercise as the game of poker affords, had intensified an
+instinctive inexpressiveness. Under the most solitary
+circumstances old Grammont was still inexpressive, and the
+face that stared at the, ceiling of his cabin and the problem
+of his daughter might have been the face of a pickled head in
+a museum, for any indication it betrayed of the flow of
+thought within. He lay on his back and his bent knees lifted
+the bed-clothes into a sharp mountain. He was not even trying
+to sleep.
+
+Why, he meditated, had V.V. stayed on in Europe so much
+longer than she need have done? And why had Gunter Lake
+suddenly got into a state of mind about her? Why didn't the
+girl confide in her father at least about these things? What
+was afoot? She had thrown over Lake once and it seemed she
+was going to turn him down again. Well, if she was an
+ordinary female person that was a silly sort of thing to do.
+With her fortune and his--you could buy the world. But
+suppose she was not all ordinary female person. . . . Her
+mother hadn't been ordinary anyhow, whatever else you called
+her, and no one could call Grammont blood all ordinary fluid.
+. . . Old Grammont had never had any delusions about Lake. If
+Lake's father hadn't been a big man Lake would never have
+counted for anything at all. Suppose she did turn him down.
+In itself that wasn't a thing to break her father's heart.
+
+What did matter was not whether she threw Lake over but what
+she threw him over for. If it was because he wasn't man
+enough, well and good. But if it was for some other lover,
+some good-looking, worthless impostor, some European title or
+suchlike folly--!
+
+At the thought of a lover for V.V. a sudden flood of anger
+poured across the old man's mind, behind the still mask of
+his face. It infuriated him even to think of V.V., his little
+V.V., his own girl, entertaining a lover, being possibly--
+most shameful thought--IN LOVE! Like some ordinary silly
+female, sinking to kisses, to the deeds one could buy and pay
+for. His V.V.! The idea infuriated and disgusted him. He
+fought against it as a possibility. Once some woman in New
+York had ventured to hint something to him of some fellow,
+some affair with an artist, Caston; she had linked this
+Caston with V.V.'s red cross nursing in Europe. . . . Old
+Grammont had made that woman sorry she spoke. Afterwards he
+had caused enquiries to be made about this Caston, careful
+enquiries. It seems that he and V.V. had known each other,
+there had been something. But nothing that V.V. need be
+ashamed of. When old Grammont's enquiry man had come back
+with his report, old Grammont had been very particular about
+that. At first the fellow had not been very clear, rather
+muddled indeed as to how things were--no doubt he had wanted
+to make out there was something just to seem to earn his
+money. Old Grammont had struck the table sharply and the eyes
+that looked out of his mask had blazed. "What have you found
+out against her?" he had asked in a low even voice.
+"Absolutely nothing, Sir," said the agent, suddenly white to
+the lips. . . .
+
+Old Grammont stared at his memory of that moment for a while.
+That affair was all right, quite all right. Of course it was
+all right. And also, happily, Caston was among the dead. But
+it was well her broken engagement with Lake had been resumed
+as though it had never been broken off. If there had been any
+talk that fact answered it. And now that Lake had served his
+purpose old Grammont did not care in the least if he was
+shelved. V.V. could stand alone.
+
+Old Grammont had got a phrase in his mind that looked like
+dominating the situation. He dreamt of saying to V.V.: "V.V.,
+I'm going to make a man of you--if you're man enough." That
+was a large proposition; it implied--oh! it implied all sorts
+of things. It meant that she would care as little for
+philandering as an able young business man. Perhaps some day,
+a long time ahead, she might marry. There wasn't much reason
+for it, but it might be she would not wish to be called a
+spinster. "Take a husband," thought old Grammont, "when I am
+gone, as one takes a butler, to make the household complete."
+In previous meditations on his daughter's outlook old
+Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the
+precedent of Queen Victoria. She had had no husband of the
+lord and master type, so to speak, but only a Prince Consort,
+well in hand. Why shouldn't the Grammont heiress dominate her
+male belonging, if it came to that, in the same fashion? Why
+shouldn't one tie her up and tie the whole thing up, so far
+as any male belonging was concerned, leaving V.V. in all
+other respects free? How could one do it?
+
+The speculative calm of the sunken brown eyes deepened.
+
+His thoughts went back to the white face of the private
+enquiry agent. "Absolutely nothing, Sir." What had the fellow
+thought of hinting? Nothing of that kind in V.V.'s
+composition, never fear. Yet it was a curious anomaly that
+while one had a thousand ways of defending one's daughter and
+one's property against that daughter's husband, there was no
+power on earth by which a father could stretch his dead hand
+between that daughter and the undue influence of a lover.
+Unless you tied her up for good and all, lover or none. . . .
+
+One was left at the mercy of V.V.'s character. . . .
+
+"I ought to see more of her," he thought. "She gets away from
+me. Just as her mother did." A man need not suspect his
+womenkind but he should know what they are doing. It is duty,
+his protective duty to them. These companions, these Seyffert
+women and so forth, were all very well in their way; there
+wasn't much they kept from you if you got them cornered and
+asked them intently. But a father's eye is better. He must go
+about with the girl for a time, watch her with other men,
+give her chances to talk business with him and see if she
+took them. "V.V., I'm going to make a man of you," the phrase
+ran through his brain. The deep instinctive jealousy of the
+primordial father was still strong in old Grammont's blood.
+It would be pleasant to go about with her on his right hand
+in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and
+unapproachable,--above that sort of nonsense, above all other
+masculine subjugation.
+
+"V.V., I'm going to make a man of you. . . ."
+
+His mind grew calmer. Whatever she wanted in Paris should be
+hers. He'd just let her rip. They'd be like sweethearts
+together, he and his girl.
+
+Old Grammont dozed off into dreamland.
+
+Section 5
+
+The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr.
+Grammont upon the Atlantic, were of a gentler, more romantic
+character. In them V.V. was no longer a daughter in the
+fierce focus of a father's jealousy, but the goddess
+enshrined in a good man's heart. Indeed the figure that the
+limelight of the reverie fell upon was not V.V. at all but
+Mr. Gunter Lake himself, in his favourite role of the perfect
+lover.
+
+An interminable speech unfolded itself. "I ask for nothing in
+return. I've never worried you about that Caston business and
+I never will. Married to me you shall be as free as if you
+were unmarried. Don't I know, my dear girl, that you don't
+love me yet. Let that be as you wish. I want nothing you are
+not willing to give me, nothing at all. All I ask is the
+privilege of making life happy--and it shall be happy--for
+you. . . . All I ask. All I ask. Protect, guard,
+cherish. . . ."
+
+For to Mr. Gunter Lake it seemed there could be no lovelier
+thing in life than a wife "in name only" slowly warmed into a
+glow of passion by the steadfast devotion and the strength
+and wisdom of a mate at first despised. Until at last a day
+would come. . . .
+
+"My darling!" Mr. Gunter Lake whispered to the darkness. "My
+little guurl. IT HAS BEEN WORTH THE WAITING. . . ."
+
+Section 6
+
+Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old
+George with a telegram in her hand. "My father reported his
+latitude and longitude by wireless last night. The London
+people think he will be off Falmouth in four days' time. He
+wants me to join his liner there and go on to Cherbourg and
+Paris. He's arranged that. He is the sort of man who can
+arrange things like that. There'll be someone at Falmouth to
+look after us and put us aboard the liner. I must wire them
+where I can pick up a telegram to-morrow."
+
+"Wells in Somerset," said Sir :Richmond.
+
+His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he
+wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town
+that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury,
+perched on a hill, a Saxon town, where Alfred had gathered
+his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled
+over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come
+near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a little
+sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views.
+They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they
+would go in the afternoon through the pleasant west country
+where the Celts had prevailed against the old folk of the
+Stonehenge temple and the Romans against the Celts and the
+Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the Danes against
+the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes and
+entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace,
+to Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh
+village the Celts had made for themselves three or four
+hundred years before the Romans came. And at Glastonbury also
+there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey
+that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to
+Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and
+sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the
+story of Europe right up to Reformation times.
+
+"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will
+be like turning over the pages of the history of our family,
+to and fro. There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in
+it, but there will be something from almost every chapter
+that comes after Stonehenge. Rome will be poorly represented,
+but that may come the day after at Bath. And the next day too
+I want to show you something of our old River Severn. We will
+come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There
+we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which
+the tobacco comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set
+sail thither--was it yesterday or the day before? You will
+understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out
+of this dreaming land--to Africa and America and the whole
+wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with
+their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour
+problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester,
+mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath
+we'll get in somehow. And then as an Anglo-American showman I
+shall be tempted to run you northward a little way past
+Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here and there and show
+you monuments bearing little shields with the stars and
+stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the
+Washington family monuments."
+
+"It was not only from England that America came," said Miss
+Grammont.
+
+"But England takes an American memory back most easily and
+most fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the
+emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin
+Europe. . . . For you and me anyhow this is our past, this
+was our childhood, and this is our land." He interrupted
+laughing as she was about to reply. "Well, anyhow," he said,
+"it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with
+the ripest history in every grain of its soil. So we'll send
+a wire to your London people and tell them to send their
+instructions to Wells."
+
+"I'll tell Belinda," she said, "to be quick with her
+packing."
+
+Section 7
+
+As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details
+of his excellent programme and revised their impressions of
+the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime
+sunlight of Wiltshire and Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting
+the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was
+inevitable that their conversation should become, by
+imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They
+kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr.
+Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their
+Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed
+the idiosyncrasies of their position. They might profess to
+be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts
+that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old Grammont
+and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon
+the Fuel Commission became more and more important. "What
+shall we do with this planet of ours? " gave way by the
+easiest transitions to "What are you and I doing and what
+have we got to do? How do you feel about it all? What do you
+desire and what do you dare?"
+
+It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel
+Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even
+greater than his own. He found that she was very much better
+read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and
+that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp
+of economic ideas. He thought her attitude towards socialism
+a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as
+socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of
+natural resources as a common property administered in the
+common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by
+it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the
+merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few,
+under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class
+jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she
+had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a
+class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public
+impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since
+departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every
+class; there was no stratification of either rightness or
+righteousness.
+
+He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the
+Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he
+found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau
+and with a surer confidence of understanding. Perhaps his
+talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made
+them more readily expressible than they would have been
+otherwise. He argued against the belief that any class could
+be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the
+conflict of motives he found in all the members of his
+Committee and most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion
+he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that there was not
+a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable
+drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one
+who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive towards the right
+thing. "That," said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life so
+interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic
+disappointments, so hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every
+man is a feeble man and every man is a good man. My motives
+come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in response to the
+circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most men
+will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given
+perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and
+vile. People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps
+that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly. The
+other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with
+Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
+Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a
+great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken
+brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly
+the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back
+their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became one
+solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until
+one understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had
+changed but the sunshine. And given a change in laws and
+prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy
+traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will
+all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working
+together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end. They
+aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any
+inner necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in
+the present drama. Which is nearly at the end of its run."
+
+"That's a hopeful view," said Miss Grammont. "I don't see the
+flaw in it--if there is a flaw."
+
+"There isn't one, " said Sir Richmond. "It is my chief
+discovery about life. I began with the question of fuel and
+the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my
+generalization applies to all human affairs. Human beings are
+fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate idiots,--I grant you.
+That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak. But they
+are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty
+well materially if once we hammer out a sane collective
+method of getting and using fuel. Which people generally will
+understand--in the place of our present methods of snatch and
+wrangle. Of that I am absolutely convinced. Some work, some
+help, some willingness you can get out of everybody. That's
+the red. And the same principle applies to most labour and
+property problems, to health, to education, to population,
+social relationships and war and peace. We haven't got the
+right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no
+system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all
+these respects. But there is a right system possible none the
+less. Let us only hammer our way through to the sane and
+reasonable organization in this and that and the other human
+affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for
+good. We may not live to see even the beginnings of success,
+but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced
+organized science, if only there are a few faithful,
+persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run
+certainly save mankind and make human life clean and
+splendid, happy work in a clear mind. If I could live to see
+it!"
+
+"And as for us--in our time?"
+
+"Measured by the end we serve, we don't matter. You know we
+don't matter."
+
+"We have to find our fun in the building and in our
+confidence that we do really build."
+
+"So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship,"
+said Sir Richmond.
+
+"So long as our confidence lasts," she repeated after him.
+
+"Ah!" cried Sir Richmond. "There it is! So long as our
+confidence lasts! So long as one keeps one's mind steady.
+That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss. I
+went to him for advice. I haven't known him for more than a
+month. It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to you. It
+was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of
+work. My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing
+evaporated. My will failed me. I don't know if you will
+understand what that means. It wasn't that my reason didn't
+assure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to
+do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow that seemed
+a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had
+gone out of it. . . . "
+
+He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.
+
+"I don't know why I tell you these things," he said.
+
+"You tell them me," she said.
+
+"It's a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his
+ailments."
+
+"No. No. Go on."
+
+"I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my
+work went on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I
+was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the
+Committee, day afterday. It was being up against men who
+didn't reason against me but who just showed by everything
+they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn't matter to
+them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs,
+reading papers, going about a world in which all the
+organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream
+of is tacitly denied. I don't know if it seems an
+extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady
+refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-
+operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very
+near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men.
+You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense. They, and
+everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more
+immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this
+remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for
+myself. . . ."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Go on," said Miss Grammont. "I think I understand this. "
+
+"And yet I know I am right."
+
+"I know you are right. I'm certain. Go on.
+
+"If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society
+had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the
+others still kept them selves cloaked--if he was a normal
+sensitive man--he might have felt something of a fool. He
+might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red he was and
+the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is
+the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some
+sense of history and some sense of a larger life within us
+than our merely personal life. We don't want to go on with
+the old story merely. We want to live somehow in that larger
+life and to live for its greater ends and lose something
+unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are
+only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to
+do and will presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau
+talks about begins to come it may come very quickly--as the
+red came at Prague. But for the present everyone hesitates
+about throwing back the cloak."
+
+"Until the cloak becomes unbearable," she said, repeating his
+word.
+
+"I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I
+was ill. I thought I was overworked. But the real trouble was
+a loneliness that robbed me of all driving force. Nobody
+seemed thinking and feeling with me. . . . I have never
+realized until now what a gregarious beast man is. It needed
+only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas
+and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I
+talk to you--That is why I have clutched at your company.
+Because here you are, coming from thousands of miles away,
+and you talk my ideas, you fall into my ways of thought as
+though we had gone to the same school."
+
+"Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school," she said.
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something
+better in life than the first things it promised us."
+
+"But you--? Disappointed? I thought that in America people
+might be educating already on different lines--"
+
+"Even in America," Miss Grammont said, "crops only grow on
+the ploughed land."
+
+Section 8
+
+Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of
+Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of King Arthur
+and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells
+and a pleasant inn, with a quaint little garden before its
+front door that gave directly upon the cathedral. The three
+tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner to the
+sculptures on the western face. The great screen of wrought
+stone rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a
+clear blue sky in which the moon hung, round and already
+bright. That western facade with its hundreds of little
+figures tells the whole story of God and Man from Adam to the
+Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it. It is an
+even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that
+goes round the chapter house at Salisbury. It presented the
+universe, said Sir Richmond, as a complete crystal globe. It
+explained everything in life in a simple and natural manner,
+hope, heaven, devil and despair. Generations had lived and
+died mentally within that crystal globe, convinced that it
+was all and complete.
+
+"And now," said Miss Grammont, "we are in limitless space and
+time. The crystal globe is broken."
+
+"And?" said Belinda amazingly--for she had been silent for
+some time, "the goldfish are on the floor, V.V. Free to flop
+about. Are they any happier?"
+
+It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best
+left alone. "I trow not," said Belinda, giving the last touch
+to it.
+
+After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the
+cathedral and along by the moat of the bishop's palace, and
+Miss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to
+her friends, a duty she had neglected for some days. The
+evening was warm and still and the moon was approaching its
+full and very bright. Insensibly the soft afterglow passed
+into moonlight.
+
+At first the two companions talked very little. Sir Richmond
+was well content with this tacit friendliness and Miss
+Grammont was preoccupied because she was very strongly moved
+to tell him things about herself that hitherto she had told
+to no one. It was not merely that she wanted to tell him
+these things but also that for reasons she did not put as yet
+very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought
+to know. She talked of herself at first in general terms.
+"Life comes on anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting
+for ever and then suddenly one tears into life," she said. It
+was even more so for women than it was for men. You are shown
+life, a crowded vast spectacle full of what seems to be
+intensely interesting activities and endless delightful and
+frightful and tragic possibilities, and you have hardly had
+time to look at it before you are called upon to make
+decisions. And there is something in your blood that urges
+you to decisive acts. Your mind, your reason resists. "Give
+me time," it says. "They clamour at you with treats, crowds,
+shows, theatres, all sorts of things; lovers buzz at you,
+each trying to fix you part of his life when you are trying
+to get clear to live a little of your own." Her father had
+had one merit at any rate. He had been jealous of her lovers
+and very ready to interfere.
+
+"I wanted a lover to love," she said. "Every girl of course
+wants that. I wanted to be tremendously excited. . . . And at
+the same time I dreaded the enormous interference. . . .
+
+"I wasn't temperamentally a cold girl. Men interested and
+excited me, but there were a lot of men about and they
+clashed with each other. Perhaps way down in some out of the
+way place I should have fallen in love quite easily with the
+one man who came along. But no man fixed his image. After a
+year or so I think I began to lose the power which is natural
+to a young girl of falling very easily into love. I became
+critical of the youths and men who were attracted to me and I
+became analytical about myself. . . .
+
+"I suppose it is because you and I are going to part so soon
+that I can speak so freely to you. . . . But there are things
+about myself that I have never had out even with myself. I
+can talk to myself in you--"
+
+She paused baffled. "I know exactly," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"In my composition I perceive there have always been two
+ruling strains. I was a spoilt child at home, a rather
+reserved girl at school, keen on my dignity. I liked respect.
+I didn't give myself away. I suppose one would call that
+personal pride. Anyhow it was that streak made me value the
+position of being a rich married woman in New York. That was
+why I became engaged to Lake. He seemed to be as good a man
+as there was about. He said he adored me and wanted me to
+crown his life. He wasn't ill-looking or ill-mannered. The
+second main streak in my nature wouldn't however fit in with
+that."
+
+She stopped short.
+
+"The second streak, " said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Oh!--Love of beauty, love of romance. I want to give things
+their proper names; I don't want to pretend to you. . . . It
+was more or less than that. . . . It was--imaginative
+sensuousness. Why should I pretend it wasn't in me? I believe
+that streak is in all women."
+
+"I believe so too. In all properly constituted women."
+
+"I tried to devote that streak to Lake," she said. "I did my
+best for him. But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an
+idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business
+as a lover. And that side of me fell in love, the rest of me
+protesting, with a man named Caston. It was a notorious
+affair. Everybody in New York couples my name with Caston.
+Except when my father is about. His jealousy has blasted an
+area of silence--in that matter--all round him. He will not
+know of that story. And they dare not tell him. I should pity
+anyone who tried to tell it him."
+
+"What sort of man was this Caston?"
+
+Miss Grammont seemed to consider. She did not look at Sir
+Richmond; she kept her profile to him.
+
+"He was," she said deliberately, "a very rotten sort of man."
+
+She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial. "I
+believe I always knew he wasn't right. But he was very
+handsome. And ten years younger than Lake. And nobody else
+seemed to be all right, so I swallowed that. He was an
+artist, a painter. Perhaps you know his work." Sir Richmond
+shook his head. "He could make American business men look
+like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and
+he was beginning to be popular. He made love to me. In
+exactly the way Lake didn't. If I shut my eyes to one or two
+things, it was delightful. I liked it. But my father would
+have stood a painter as my husband almost as cheerfully as he
+would a man of colour. I made a fool of myself, as people
+say, about Caston. Well--when the war came, he talked in a
+way that irritated me. He talked like an East Side Annunzio,
+about art and war. It made me furious to know it was all talk
+and that he didn't mean business. . . . I made him go."
+
+She paused for a moment. "He hated to go."
+
+"Then I relented. Or I missed him and I wanted to be made
+love to. Or I really wanted to go on my own account. I
+forget. I forget my motives altogether now. That early war
+time was a queer time for everyone. A kind of wildness got
+into the blood. . . . I threw over Lake. All the time things
+had been going on in New York I had still been engaged to
+Lake. I went to France. I did good work. I did do good work.
+And also things were possible that would have seemed
+fantastic in America. You know something of the war-time
+atmosphere. There was death everywhere and people snatched at
+gratifications. Caston made 'To-morrow we die' his text. We
+contrived three days in Paris together--not very cleverly.
+All sorts of people know about it. . . . We went very far."
+
+She stopped short. "Well?" said Sir Richmond.
+
+"He did die. . . ."
+
+Another long pause. "They told me Caston had been killed. But
+someone hinted--or I guessed--that there was more in it than
+an ordinary casualty.
+
+"Nobody, I think, realizes that I know. This is the first
+time I have ever confessed that I do know. He was--shot. He
+was shot for cowardice."
+
+"That might happen to any man," said Sir Richmond presently.
+"No man is a hero all round the twenty-four hours. Perhaps he
+was caught by circumstances, unprepared. He may have been
+taken by surprise."
+
+"It was the most calculated, cold-blooded cowardice
+imaginable. He let three other men go on and get killed. . ."
+
+
+"No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know
+nothing about. It was vile, contemptible cowardice and
+meanness. It fitted in with a score of ugly little things I
+remembered. It explained them all. I know the evidence and
+the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because
+they were exactly in character. . . . And that, you see, was
+my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to
+whom I had given myself with both hands."
+
+Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed
+in the same even tones of careful statement. "I wasn't
+disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly
+sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a
+life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself,
+I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest realization
+that what you and I have been calling the bright little
+personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over
+and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot.
+And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and
+nothing particular to do with them."
+
+"That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.
+
+"It didn't seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of
+something or go to pieces. I couldn't turn to religion. I had
+no religion. And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that. I
+had a kind of revelation one night. 'Either I find out what
+all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost
+myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of something
+bigger than myself. And becoming that. That's why I have been
+making a sort of historical pilgrimage. . . . That's my
+story, Sir Richmond. That's my education. . . . Somehow
+though your troubles are different, it seems to me that my
+little muddle makes me understand how it is with you. What
+you've got, this idea of a scientific ordering of the world,
+is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been
+feeling my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold
+of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a
+still greater economic and educational control of which it is
+a part. I want to make that idea a part of myself. Rather I
+want to make myself a part of it. When you talk of it I
+believe in it altogether."
+
+"And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you."
+
+Section 9
+
+Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's
+confidences. His dispute with Dr. Martineau was present in
+his mind, so that he did not want to make love to her. But he
+was extremely anxious to express his vivid sense of the value
+of her friendship. And while he hesitated over this difficult
+and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself, and
+in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's
+thoughts.
+
+"Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself," she
+said; "now that I have told you so much. I did a thing that
+still puzzles me. I was filled with a sense of hopeless
+disaster in France and I suppose I had some sort of desperate
+idea of saving something out of the situation. . . . I
+renewed my correspondence with Gunter Lake. He made the
+suggestion I knew he would make, and I renewed our
+engagement."
+
+"To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But you don't love him?"
+
+"That's always been plain to me. But what I didn't realize,
+until I had given my promise over again, was that I dislike
+him acutely."
+
+"You hadn't realized that before?"
+
+"I hadn't thought about him sufficiently. But now I had to
+think about him a lot. The other affair had given me an idea
+perhaps of what it means to be married to a man. And here I
+am drifting back to him. The horrible thing about him is the
+steady ENVELOPING way in which he has always come at me.
+Without fellowship. Without any community of ideas. Ready to
+make the most extraordinary bargains. So long as he can in
+any way fix me and get me. What does it mean? What is there
+behind those watching, soliciting eyes of his? I don't in the
+least love him, and this desire and service and all the rest
+of it he offers me--it's not love. It's not even such love as
+Caston gave me. It's a game he plays with his imagination."
+
+She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond's mind.
+"This is illuminating," he said. "You dislike Lake acutely.
+You always have disliked him."
+
+"I suppose I have. But it's only now I admit it to myself."
+
+"Yes. And you might, for example, have married him in New
+York before the war."
+
+"It came very near to that."
+
+"And then probably you wouldn't have discovered you disliked
+him. You wouldn't have admitted it to yourself."
+
+"I suppose I shouldn't. I suppose I should have tried to
+believe I loved him."
+
+"Women do this sort of thing. Odd! I never realized it
+before. And there are endless wives suppressing an acute
+dislike. My wife does. I see now quite clearly that she
+detests me. Reasonably enough. From her angle I'm entirely
+detestable. But she won't admit it, won't know of it. She
+never will. To the end of my life, always, she will keep that
+detestation unconfessed. She puts a face on the matter. We
+both do. And this affair of yours. . . . Have you thought how
+unjust it is to Lake?"
+
+"Not nearly so much as I might have done."
+
+"It is unfair to him. Atrociously unfair. He's not my sort of
+man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the
+peculiar laws of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of
+lover with an immense self-conceit at the back of his
+crawlingness."
+
+"He has," she endorsed.
+
+"He backs himself to crawl--until he crawls triumphantly
+right over you . . . . I don't like to think of the dream he
+has . . . . I take it he will lose. Is it fair to go into
+this game with him?"
+
+"In the interests of Lake," she said, smiling softly at Sir
+Richmond in the moonlight. "But you are perfectly right."
+
+"And suppose he doesn't lose!"
+
+Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.
+
+"There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a
+civilized woman may approach one another. Passionate desire
+is not enough. What is called love is not enough. Pledges,
+rational considerations, all these things are worthless. All
+these things are compatible with hate. The primary essential
+is friendship, clear understanding, absolute confidence. Then
+within that condition, in that elect relationship, love is
+permissible, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will--
+all things are permissible. . . ."
+
+Came a long pause between them.
+
+"Dear old cathedral," said Miss Grammont, a little
+irrelevantly. She had an air of having concluded something
+that to Sir Richmond seemed scarcely to have begun. She stood
+looking at the great dark facade edged with moonlight for
+some moments, and then turned towards the hotel, which showed
+a pink-lit window.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if Belinda is still up, And what she
+will think when I tell her of the final extinction of Mr.
+Lake. I think she rather looked forward to being the intimate
+friend, secrets and everything, of Mrs. Gunter Lake."
+
+Section 10
+
+Sir Richmond woke up at dawn and he woke out of an
+extraordinary dream. He was saying to Miss Grammont:
+"There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds.
+There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds."
+He saw her as he had seen her the evening before, light and
+cool, coming towards him in the moonlight from the hotel. But
+also in the inconsistent way of dreams he was very close to
+her kind, faintly smiling face, and his eyes were wet with
+tears and he was kissing her hand. "My dear wife and mate,"
+he was saying, and suddenly he was kissing her cool lips.
+
+He woke up and stared at his dream, which faded out only very
+slowly before the fresh sun rise upon the red tiles and tree
+boughs outside the open window, and before the first stir and
+clamour of the birds.
+
+He felt like a court in which some overwhelmingly
+revolutionary piece of evidence had been tendered. All the
+elaborate defence had broken down at one blow. He sat up on
+the edge of his bed, facing the new fact.
+
+"This is monstrous and ridiculous," he said, "and Martineau
+judged me exactly. I am in love with her. . . . I am head
+over heels in love with her. I have never been so much in
+love or so truly in love with anyone before."
+
+Section 11
+
+That was the dawn of a long day of tension for Sir Richmond
+and Miss Grammont. Because each was now vividly aware of
+being in love with the other and so neither was able to see
+how things were with the other. They were afraid of each
+other. A restraint had come upon them both, a restraint that
+was greatly enhanced by their sense of Belinda, acutely
+observant, ostentatiously tactful and self-effacing, and
+prepared at the slightest encouragement to be overwhelmingly
+romantic and sympathetic. Their talk waned, and was revived
+to an artificial activity and waned again. The historical
+interest had evaporated from the west of England and left
+only an urgent and embarrassing present.
+
+But the loveliness of the weather did not fail, and the whole
+day was set in Severn landscapes. They first saw the great
+river like a sea with the Welsh mountains hanging in the sky
+behind as they came over the Mendip crest above Shipham. They
+saw it again as they crossed the hill before Clifton Bridge,
+and so they continued, climbing to hill crests for views at
+Alveston and near Dursley, and so to Gloucester and the
+lowest bridge and thence back down stream again through fat
+meadow lands at first and much apple-blossom and then over
+gentle hills through wide, pale Nownham and Lidney and
+Alvington and Woolaston to old Chepstow and its brown castle,
+always with the widening estuary to the left of them and its
+foaming shoals and shining sand banks. From Chepstow they
+turned back north along the steep Wye gorge to Tintern, and
+there at the snug little Beaufort Arms with its prim lawn and
+flower garden they ended the day's journey.
+
+Tintern Abbey they thought a poor graceless mass of ruin down
+beside the river, and it was fenced about jealously and
+locked up from their invasion. After dinner Sir Richmond and
+Miss Grammont went for a walk in the mingled twilight and
+moonlight up the hill towards Chepstow. Both of them were
+absurdly and nervously pressing to Belinda to come with them,
+but she was far too wise to take this sudden desire for her
+company seriously. Her dinner shoes, she said, were too thin.
+Perhaps she would change and come out a little later. "Yes,
+come later," said Miss Grammont and led the way to the door.
+
+They passed through the garden. "I think we go up the hill? "
+said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Yes," she agreed, "up the hill."
+
+Followed a silence.
+
+Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and
+disconnected talk about Tintern Abbey, concerning, which she
+had no history ready, and then, still lamer, about whether
+Monmouthshire is in England or Wales, silence fell again. The
+silence lengthened, assumed a significance, a dignity that no
+common words might break.
+
+Then Sir Richmond spoke. "I love, you, he said, "with all my
+heart."
+
+Her soft voice came back after a stillness. "I love you," she
+said, "with all myself."
+
+"I had long ceased to hope, " said Sir -Richmond, that I
+should ever find a friend . . . a lover . . . perfect
+companionship . . . . "
+
+They went on walking side by side, without touching each
+other or turning to each other.
+
+"All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive
+in me," she said. . . .
+
+"Cool and sweet," said Sir Richmond. "Such happiness as I
+could not have imagined."
+
+The light of a silent bicycle appeared above them up the hill
+and swept down upon them, lit their two still faces brightly
+and passed.
+
+"My dear," she whispered in the darkness between the high
+hedges.
+
+They stopped short and stood quite still, trembling. He saw
+her face, dim and tender, looking up to his.
+
+Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had
+desired in his dream. . . .
+
+When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat
+explanations of why she had not followed them, and enlarged
+upon the moonlight effect of the Abbey ruins from the inn
+lawn. But the scared congratulations in her eyes betrayed her
+recognition that momentous things had happened between the
+two.
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
+
+FULL MOON
+
+Section 1
+
+Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of
+having found such happiness as he could not have imagined.
+But when he awoke in the night that happiness had evaporated.
+He awoke suddenly out of this love dream that had lasted now
+for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of astonishment
+and dismay.
+
+He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had
+parted also from that process of self-exploration that they
+had started together, but now he awakened to find it
+established and in full activity in his mind. Something or
+someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an
+abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he
+thought he was doing with Miss Grammont and whither he
+thought he was taking her, how he proposed to reconcile the
+close relationship with her that he was now embarked upon
+with, in the first place, his work upon and engagements with
+the Fuel Commission, and, in the second place, Martin Leeds.
+Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn't come into the case at all.
+He had done his utmost to keep Martin Leeds out of his head
+throughout the development of this affair. Now in an unruly
+and determined way that was extremely characteristic of her
+she seemed resolute to break in.
+
+She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client
+but without any hostility, of the claims of Miss Grammont to
+be let alone. The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had
+maintained to himself that he had not made love to Miss
+Grammont, that their mutual attraction had been irresistible
+and had achieved its end in spite of their resolute and
+complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind. He
+admitted to himself that driven by a kind of instinctive
+necessity he had led their conversation step by step to a
+realization and declaration of love, and that it did not
+exonerate him in the least that Miss Grammont had been quite
+ready and willing to help him and meet him half way. She
+wanted love as a woman does, more than a man does, and he had
+steadily presented himself as a man free to love, able to
+love and loving.
+
+"She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship,
+and you have made her that tremendous promise. That was
+implicit in your embrace. And how can you keep that promise?"
+
+It was as if Martin spoke; it was her voice; it was the very
+quality of her thought.
+
+"You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be
+interrupted or abandoned if you take her. Whatever is not
+mortgaged to your work is mortgaged to me. For the strange
+thing in all this is that you and I love one another--and
+have no power to do otherwise. In spite of all this.
+
+"You have nothing to give her but stolen goods," said the
+shadow of Martin. "You have nothing to give anyone personally
+any more. . . .
+
+"Think of the love that she desires and think of this love
+that you can give. . . .
+
+"Is there any new thing in you that you can give her that you
+haven't given me? You and I know each other very well;
+perhaps I know YOU too well. Haven't you loved me as much as
+you can love anyone? Think of all that there has been between
+us that you are ready now, eager now to set aside and forget
+as though it had never been. For four days you have kept me
+out of your mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known
+I was there--for all you would not know. No one else will
+ever be so intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled
+together, wept together, jested happily and jested bitterly.
+You have spared me not at all. Pitiless and cruel you have
+been to me. You have reckoned up all my faults against me as
+though they were sins. You have treated me at times
+unlovingly--never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have
+sometimes treated me. And yet I have your love--as no other
+woman can ever have it. Even now when you are wildly in love
+with this girl's freshness and boldness and cleverness I come
+into your mind by right and necessity."
+
+"She is different," argued Sir Richmond.
+
+"But you are the same," said the shadow of Martin with
+Martin's unsparing return. "Your love has never been a
+steadfast thing. It comes and goes like the wind. You are an
+extravagantly imperfect lover. But I have learnt to accept
+you, as people accept the English weather. . . . Never in all
+your life have you loved, wholly, fully, steadfastly--as
+people deserve to be loved--,not your mother nor your father,
+not your wife nor your children, nor me, nor our child, nor
+any living thing. Pleasant to all of us at times--at times
+bitterly disappointing. You do not even love this work of
+yours steadfastly, this work to which you sacrifice us all in
+turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have these
+moods and changes, that is why you have these lassitudes. So
+it is you are made. . . .
+
+"And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so
+much simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it--as you
+can do--and then fail it, as you will do. . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond's mind and body lay very still for a time.
+
+"Should I fail her? . . ."
+
+For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his
+mind.
+
+He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and
+unforeseeing his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had
+been just a blind drive to get hold of her and possess
+her. . . .
+
+Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence
+again.
+
+"But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a
+perfect love, my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy,
+its ruthless criticism? Has the world ever seen a perfect
+lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection that brings us together
+in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all, likely to get
+a more perfect love in all her life than this poor love of
+mine? And isn't it good for her that she should love?"
+
+"Perfect love cherishes. Perfect love foregoes."
+
+Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the
+immediate question. "Perfect love," the phrase was his point
+of departure. Was it true that he could not love passionately
+and completely? Was that fundamentally what was the matter
+with him? Was that perhaps what was the matter with the whole
+world of mankind? It had not yet come to that power of loving
+which makes action full and simple and direct and
+unhesitating. Man upon his planet has not grown up to love,
+is still an eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent. He
+lacks the courage to love and the wisdom to love. Love is
+here. But it comes and goes, it is mixed with greeds and
+jealousies and cowardice and cowardly reservations. One hears
+it only in snatches and single notes. It is like something
+tuning up before the Music begins. . . . The metaphor
+altogether ran away with Sir Richmond's half dreaming mind.
+Some day perhaps all life would go to music.
+
+Love was music and power. If he had loved. enough he need
+never have drifted away from his wife. Love would have
+created love, would have tolerated and taught and inspired.
+Where there is perfect love there is neither greed nor
+impatience. He would have done his work calmly. He would have
+won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and
+quarrelling with it perpetually. . . .
+
+"Flimsy creatures," he whispered. "Uncertain health.
+Uncertain strength. A will that comes and goes. Moods of
+baseness. Moods of utter beastliness. . . . Love like April
+sunshine. April? . .."
+
+He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high
+summer sunshine, into a continuing music, of love. He thought
+of a world like some great playhouse in which players and
+orchestra and audience all co-operate in a noble production
+without dissent or conflict. He thought he was the savage of
+thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great world that is
+still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead. His effort to see
+more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy
+pinnacles and to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his
+dream and left him awake again and wrestling with the problem
+of Miss Grammont.
+
+Section 2
+
+The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable. He had to
+release Miss Grammont from the adventure into which he had
+drawn her. This decision stood out stern-and inevitable in
+his mind with no conceivable alternative.
+
+As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its
+difficulty. He was profoundly in love with her, he was still
+only learning how deeply, and she was not going to play a
+merely passive part in this affair. She was perhaps as deeply
+in love with him. . . .
+
+He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and
+disavowals. He could not bear to think of her
+disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to
+disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To
+turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in
+me. . . . It would be like playing a practical joke upon her.
+It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making
+a grimace at her. . . . It would scar her with a second
+humiliation. . . ."
+
+Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow and
+contrive by some sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to
+go from her suddenly? But a mere sudden parting would not end
+things between them now unless he went off abruptly without
+explanations or any arrangements for further communications.
+At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit but
+evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her
+father at Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that
+Sir Richmond realized that now it could not end in that
+fashion, that with the whisper of love and the touching of
+lips, something had been started that would go on, that would
+develop. To break off now and go away without a word would
+leave a raw and torn end, would leave her perplexed and
+perhaps even more humiliated with an aching mystery to
+distress her. "Why did he go? Was it something I said?--
+something he found out or imagined? "
+
+Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this
+problem. She and he had got into each other's lives to stay:
+the real problem was the terms upon which they were to stay
+in each other's lives. Close association had brought them to
+the point of being, in the completest sense, lovers; that
+could not be; and the real problem was the transmutation of
+their relationship to some form compatible with his honour
+and her happiness. A word, an idea, from some recent reading
+floated into Sir Richmond's head. "Sublimate," he whispered.
+"We have to sublimate this affair. We have to put this
+relationship upon a Higher Plane.
+
+His mind stopped short at that.
+
+Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart.
+"God! How I loathe the Higher Plane! . . . .
+
+"God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some
+poor little kid who has to wear irons on its legs.
+
+"I WANT her. . . . Do you hear, Martin? I want her. "
+
+As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and
+Miss Grammont--Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out--
+traversing Europe and Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit
+beach in the South Seas. . . .
+
+His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and
+fantastic interruptions had not occurred.
+
+"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane--and
+keep it there. We two love one another--that has to be
+admitted now. (I ought never to have touched her. I ought
+never to have thought of touching her.) But we two are too
+high, our aims and work and obligations are too high for any
+ordinary love making. That sort of thing would embarrass us,
+would spoil everything.
+
+"Spoil everything," he repeated, rather like a small boy who
+learns an unpalatable lesson.
+
+For a time Sir Richmond, exhausted by moral effort, lay
+staring at the darkness.
+
+"It has to be done. I believe I can carry her through with it
+if I can carry myself. She's a finer thing than I am. . . .
+On the whole I am glad it's only one more day. Belinda will
+be about. . . . Afterwards we can write to each other. . . .
+If we can get over the next day it will be all right. Then we
+can write about fuel and politics--and there won't be her
+voice and her presence. We shall really SUBLIMATE. . . .
+First class idea-- sublimate! . . . . And I will go back to
+dear old Martin who's all alone there and miserable; I'll be
+kind to her and play my part and tell her her Carbuncle scar
+rather becomes her. . . . And in a little while I shall be
+altogether in love with her again.
+
+"Queer what a brute I've always been to Martin."
+
+"Queer that Martin can come in a dream to me and take the
+upper hand with me.
+
+"Queer that NOW--I love Martin."
+
+He thought still more profoundly. "By the time the Committee
+meets again I shall have been tremendously refreshed."
+
+He repeated:--"Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them
+there. Then go back to Martin. And so to the work. That's
+it. . . ."
+
+Nothing so pacifies the mind as a clear-cut purpose. Sir
+Richmond fell asleep during the fourth recapitulation of this
+programme.
+
+Section 3
+
+When Miss Grammont appeared at breakfast Sir Richmond saw at
+once that she too had had a restless night. When she came
+into the little long breakfast room of the inn with its brown
+screens and its neat white tables it seemed to him that the
+Miss Grammont of his nocturnal speculations, the beautiful
+young lady who had to be protected and managed and loved
+unselfishly, vanished like some exorcised intruder. Instead
+was this real dear young woman, who had been completely
+forgotten during the reign of her simulacrum and who now
+returned completely remembered, familiar, friendly, intimate.
+She touched his hand for a moment, she met his eyes with the
+shadow of a smile in her own.
+
+"Oranges!" said Belinda from the table by the window.
+"Beautiful oranges."
+
+She had been preparing them, poor Trans-atlantic exile, after
+the fashion in which grape fruits are prepared upon liners
+and in the civilized world of the west. "He's getting us tea
+spoons," said Belinda, as they sat down.
+
+"This is realler England than ever," she said. "I've been up
+an hour. I found a little path down to the river bank. It's
+the greenest morning world and full of wild flowers. Look at
+these."
+
+"That's lady's smock," said Sir Richmond. "It's not really a
+flower; it's a quotation from Shakespeare."
+
+"And there are cowslips!"
+
+"CUCKOO BUDS OF YELLOW HUE. DO PAINT THE MEADOWS WITH
+DELIGHT. All the English flowers come out of Shakespeare. I
+don't know what we did before his time."
+
+The waiter arrived with the tea spoons for the oranges.
+
+Belinda, having distributed these, resumed her discourse of
+enthusiasm for England. She asked a score of questions about
+Gloucester and Chepstow, the Severn and the Romans and the
+Welsh, and did not wait for the answers. She did not want
+answers; she talked to keep things going. Her talk masked a
+certain constraint that came upon her companions after the
+first morning's greetings were over.
+
+Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin
+maps. "To-day," he said," we will run back to Bath--from
+which it will be easy for you to train to Falmouth. We will
+go by Monmouth and then turn back through the Forest of Dean,
+where you will get glimpses of primitive coal mines still
+worked by two men and a boy with a windlass and a pail.
+Perhaps we will go through Cirencester. I don't know. Perhaps
+it is better to go straight to Bath. In the very heart of
+Bath you will find yourselves in just the same world you
+visited at Pompeii. Bath is Pompeii overlaid by Jane Austen's
+England."
+
+He paused for a moment. "We can wire to your agents from here
+before we start and we can pick up their reply at Gloucester
+or Nailsworth or even Bath itself. So that if your father is
+nearer than we suppose--But I think to-morrow afternoon will
+be soon enough for Falmouth, anyhow."
+
+He stopped interrogatively.
+
+Miss Grammont's face was white. "That will do very well," she
+said.
+
+Section 4,
+
+They started, but presently they came to high banks that
+showed such masses of bluebells, ragged Robin, great
+stitchwort and the like that Belinda was not to be
+restrained. She clamoured to stop the car and go up the bank
+and pick her hands full, and so they drew up by the roadside
+and Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont sat down near the car
+while Belinda carried her enthusiastic onslaught on the
+flowers up the steep bank and presently out of earshot.
+
+The two lovers said unheeded things about the flowers to each
+other and then fell silent. Then Miss Grammont turned her
+head and seemed deliberately to measure her companion's
+distance. Evidently she judged her out of earshot.
+
+"Well, said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. "We love
+one another. Is that so still?"
+
+"I could not love you more."
+
+"It wasn't a dream?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And to-morrow we part?"
+
+He looked her in the eyes. "I have been thinking of that all
+night," he said at last.
+
+"I too."
+
+"And you think--?"
+
+"That we must part. Just as we arranged it when was it? Three
+days or three ages ago? There is nothing else in the world to
+do except for us to go our ways. . . . I love you. That means
+for a woman--It means that I want to be with you. But that is
+impossible. . . . Don't doubt whether I love you because I
+say--impossible. . . . "
+
+Sir Richmond, faced with his own nocturnal decision, was now
+moved to oppose it flatly. "Nothing that one can do is
+impossible."
+
+She glanced again at Belinda and bent down towards him."
+Suppose," she said, "you got back into that car with me;
+suppose that instead of going on as we have planned, you took
+me away. How much of us would go?"
+
+"You would go," said Sir Richmond, "and my heart."
+
+"And this work of yours? And your honour? For the honour of a
+man in this New Age of yours will be first of all in the work
+he does for the world. And you will leave your work to be
+just a lover. And the work that I might do because of my
+father's wealth; all that would vanish too. We should leave
+all of that, all of our usefulness, all that much of
+ourselves. But what has made me love you? Just your breadth
+of vision, just the sense that you mattered. What has made
+you love me? Just that I have understood the dream of your
+work. All that we should have to leave behind. We should
+specialize, in our own scandal. We should run away just for
+one thing. To think, by sharing the oldest, simplest, dearest
+indulgences in the world, that we had got each other. When
+really we had lost each other, lost all that mattered. . . ."
+
+Her face was flushed with the earnestness of her conviction.
+Her eyes were bright with tears. "Don't think I don't love
+you. It's so hard to say all this. Somehow it seems like
+going back on something--something supreme. Our instincts
+have got us. . . . Don't think I'd hold myself from you,
+dear. I'd give myself to you with both hands. I love you--
+When a woman loves--I at any rate--she loves altogether. But
+this thing--I am convinced--cannot be. I must go my own way,
+the way I have to go. My father is the man, obstinate, more
+than half a savage. For me--I know it--he has the jealousy of
+ten husbands. If you take me--If our secret becomes
+manifest--If you are to take me and keep me, then his life
+and your life will become wholly this Feud, nothing but this
+Feud. You have to fight him anyhow--that is why I of all
+people must keep out of the quarrel. For him, it would be an
+immense excitement, full of the possibility of fierce
+satisfactions; for you, whether you won me or lost me, it
+would be utter waste and ruin."
+
+She paused and then went on:--"And for me too, waste and
+ruin. I shall be a woman fought over. I shall be fought over
+as dogs fight over a bone. I shall sink back to the level of
+Helen of Troy. I shall cease to be a free citizen, a
+responsible free person. Whether you win me or lose me it
+will be waste and ruin for us both. Your Fuel Commission will
+go to pieces, all the wide, enduring work you have set me
+dreaming about will go the same way. We shall just be another
+romantic story. . . . No!"
+
+Sir Richmond sat still, a little like a sullen child, she
+thought. "I hate all this," he said slowly. "I didn't think
+of your father before, and now I think of him it sets me
+bristling for a fight. It makes all this harder to give up.
+And yet, do you know, in the night I was thinking, I was
+coming to conclusions, very like yours. For quite other
+reasons. I thought we ought not to--We have to keep friends
+anyhow and hear of each other?"
+
+"That goes without saying."
+
+"I thought we ought not to go on to be lovers in any way that
+Would affect you, touch you too closely. . . . I was sorry--I
+had kissed you."
+
+"Not I. No. Don't be sorry for that. I am glad we have fallen
+in love, more glad than I have been of anything else in my
+life, and glad we have spoken plainly. . . . Though we have
+to part. And--"
+
+Her whisper came close to him. "For a whole day yet, all
+round the clock twice, you and I have one another."
+
+Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within
+earshot.
+
+"I don't know the name of a single one of these flowers" she
+cried, "except the bluebells. Look at this great handful I've
+gotten! Springtime in Italy doesn't compare with it, not for
+a moment."
+
+Section 5
+
+Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with
+her alert interest in their emotions all too thinly and
+obviously veiled, it seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond
+and Miss Grammont to talk not of themselves but of Man and
+Woman and of that New Age according to the prophet Martineau,
+which Sir Richmond had partly described and mainly invented
+and ascribed to his departed friend. They talked
+anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an
+absurd pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the
+little car, scarcely glancing at one another, but side by
+side and touching each other, and all the while they were
+filled with tenderness and love and hunger for one another.
+
+In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every
+phase in the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and
+brutish past which has left its traces in human bones mingled
+with the bones of hyaenas and cave bears beneath the
+stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those nearly
+forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more
+than an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile
+imaginations. That brief journey in the west country had lit
+up phase after phase in the long teaching and discipline of
+man as he had developed depth of memory and fixity of purpose
+out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming childhood
+of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient
+wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now,
+and how, as they had followed one another, man's idea of
+woman and woman's idea of man had changed with them, until
+nowadays in the minds of civilized men brute desire and
+possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost
+completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free
+mutual loyalty. "Overlaid," he said. "The older passions are
+still there like the fires in an engine." He invented a
+saying for Dr. Martineau that the Man in us to-day was still
+the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his will, his wrath
+against the universe increased rather than diminished. If to-
+day he ceases to crack his brother's bones and rape and bully
+his womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater
+game and means to crack this world and feed upon its marrow
+and wrench their secrets from the stars.
+
+And furthermore it would seem that the prophet Martineau had
+declared that in this New Age that was presently to dawn for
+mankind, jealousy was to be disciplined even as we had
+disciplined lust and anger; instead of ruling our law it was
+to be ruled by law and custom. No longer were the jealousy of
+strange peoples, the jealousy of ownership and the jealousy
+of sex to determine the framework of human life. There was to
+be one peace and law throughout the world, one economic
+scheme and a universal freedom for men and women to possess
+and give themselves.
+
+"And how many generations yet must there be before we reach
+that Utopia?" Miss Grammont asked.
+
+"I wouldn't put it at a very great distance."
+
+"But think of all the confusions of the world!"
+
+"Confusions merely. The world is just a muddle of states and
+religions and theories and stupidities. There are great lumps
+of disorderly strength in it, but as a whole it is a weak
+world. It goes on by habit. There's no great idea in
+possession and the only possible great idea is this one. The
+New Age may be nearer than we dare to suppose."
+
+"If I could believe that!"
+
+"There are many more people think as we do than you suppose.
+Are you and I such very strange and wonderful and exceptional
+people?"
+
+"No. I don't think so."
+
+"And yet the New World is already completely established in
+our hearts. What has been done in our minds can be done in
+most minds. In a little while the muddled angry mind of Man
+upon his Planet will grow clear and it will be this idea that
+will have made it clear. And then life will be very different
+for everyone. That tyranny of disorder which oppresses every
+life on earth now will be lifted. There will be less and less
+insecurity, less and less irrational injustice. It will be a
+better instructed and a better behaved world. We shall live
+at our ease, not perpetually anxious, not resentful and
+angry. And that will alter all the rules of love. Then we
+shall think more of the loveliness of other people because it
+will no longer be necessary to think so much of the dangers
+and weaknesses and pitifulliesses of other people. We shall
+not have to think of those who depend upon us for happiness
+and selfrespect. We shall not have to choose between a
+wasteful fight for a personal end or the surrender of our
+heart's desire."
+
+"Heart's desire," she whispered. "Am I indeed your heart's
+desire?"
+
+Sir Richmond sank his head and voice in response.
+
+"You are the best of all things. And I have to let you go."
+
+Sir Richmond suddenly remembered Miss Seyffert and half
+turned his face towards her. Her forehead was just visible
+over the hood of the open coupe. She appeared to be
+intelligently intent upon the scenery. Then he broke out
+suddenly into a tirade against the world. "But I am bored by
+this jostling unreasonable world. At the bottom of my heart I
+am bitterly resentful to-day. This is a world of fools and
+brutes in which we live, a world of idiotic traditions,
+imbecile limitations, cowardice, habit, greed and mean
+cruelty. It is a slum of a world, a congested district, an
+insanitary jumble of souls and bodies. Every good thing,
+every sweet desire is thwarted--every one. I have to lead the
+life of a slum missionary, a sanitary inspector, an underpaid
+teacher. I am bored. Oh God! how I am bored! I am bored by
+our laws and customs. I am bored by our rotten empire and its
+empty monarchy. I am bored by its parades and its flags and
+its sham enthusiasms. I am bored by London and its life, by
+its smart life and by its servile life alike. I am bored by
+theatres and by books and by every sort of thing that people
+call pleasure. I am bored by the brag of people and the
+claims of people and the feelings of people. Damn people! I
+am bored by profiteers and by the snatching they call
+business enterprise. Damn every business man! I am bored by
+politics and the universal mismanagement of everything. I am
+bored by France, by AngloSaxondom, by German self-pity, by
+Bolshevik fanaticism. I am bored by these fools' squabbles
+that devastate the world. I am bored by Ireland, Orange and
+Green. Curse the Irish--north and south together! Lord! how I
+HATE the Irish from Carson to the last Sinn Feiner! And I am
+bored by India and by Egypt. I am bored by Poland and by
+Islam. I am bored by anyone who professes to have rights.
+Damn their rights! Curse their rights! I am bored to death by
+this year and by last year and by the prospect of next year.
+I am bored--I am horribly bored--by my work. I am bored by
+every sort of renunciation. I want to live with the woman I
+love and I want to work within the limits of my capacity.
+Curse all Hullo! Damn his eyes!--Steady, ah! The spark! . . .
+Good! No skid."
+
+He had come round a corner at five and twenty miles an hour
+and had stopped his spark and pulled up neatly within a yard
+of the fore-wheel of a waggon that was turning in the road so
+as to block the way completely.
+
+"That almost had me. . . .
+
+"And now you feel better?" said Miss Grammont.
+
+"Ever so much," said Sir Richmond and chuckled.
+
+The waggoner cleared the road and the car started up again.
+
+For a minute or so neither spoke.
+
+"You ought to be smacked hard for that outbreak,--my dear,"
+said Miss Grammont.
+
+"I ought--MY dear. I have no right to be ill-tempered. We two
+are among the supremely fortunate ones of our time. We have
+no excuse for misbehaviour. Got nothing to grumble at. Always
+I am lucky. THAT--with the waggon--was a very near thing. God
+spoils us.
+
+"We two," he went on, after a pause, "are among the most
+fortunate people alive. We are both rich and easily rich.
+That gives us freedoms few people have. We have a vision of
+the whole world in which we live. It's in a mess--but that is
+by the way. The mass of mankind never gets enough education
+to have even a glimpse of the world as a whole. They never
+get a chance to get the hang of it. It is really possible for
+us to do things that will matter in the world. All our time
+is our own; all our abilities we are free to use. Most
+people, most intelligent and educated people, are caught in
+cages of pecuniary necessity; they are tied to tasks they
+can't leave, they are driven and compelled and limited by
+circumstances they can never master. But we, if we have
+tasks, have tasks of our own choosing. We may not like the
+world, but anyhow we are free to do our best to alter it. If
+I were a clerk in Hoxton and you were a city typist, then we
+MIGHT swear. "
+
+"It was you who swore," smiled Miss Grammont.
+
+"It's the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city
+typist who really keep me at my work. Any smacking ought to
+come from them. I couldn't do less than I do in the face of
+their helplessness. Nevertheless a day will come--through
+what we do and what we refrain from doing when there will be
+no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and no captive typists
+in the city. And nobody at all to consider."
+
+"According to the prophet Martineau," said Miss Grammont.
+
+"And then you and I must contrive to be born again. "
+
+"Heighho!" cried Miss Grammont. "A thousand years ahead! When
+fathers are civilized. When all these phanton people who
+intervene on your side--no! I don't want to know anything
+about them, but I know of them by instinct--when they also
+don't matter."
+
+"Then you and I can have things out with each other--
+THOROUGHLY," said Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in
+his voice, charging the little hill before him as though he
+charged at Time.
+
+Section 6
+
+They had to wait at Nailsworth for a telegram from Mr.
+Grammont's agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in
+the afternoon. They came into the town through unattractive
+and unworthy outskirts, and only realized the charm of the
+place after they had garaged their car at the Pulteney Hotel
+and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon with
+the Pump Room and the Roman Baths. The Pulteney they found
+hung with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an
+astonishing extent; some former proprietor must have had a
+mania for replicas and the place is eventful with white
+marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and Queen
+Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of
+Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the
+Royal Academy, amidst which splendours a competent staff
+administers modern comforts with an old-fashioned civility.
+But round and about the Pulteney one has still the scenery of
+Georgian England, the white, faintly classical terraces and
+houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and
+Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops
+full of "presents from Bath"; the Pump Room with its water
+drinkers and a fine array of the original Bath chairs.
+
+Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories
+of the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris,
+and the Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath
+to Baalbek. And they considered a little doubtfully the
+seventeenth century statue of Bladud, who is said to have
+been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded the city
+in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred
+years before the Romans came.
+
+In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and
+Miss Grammont and was very enthusiastic about everything, but
+in the evening after dinner it was clear that her role was to
+remain in the hotel. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out
+into the moonlit gloaming; they crossed the bridge again and
+followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey
+Church, that Lantern of the West. Away in some sunken gardens
+ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little
+lights about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down
+below dancing on the grass. These little lights, these
+bobbing black heads and the lilting music, this little
+inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy illumination,
+made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast
+and cool and silent. Our visitors began to realize that Bath
+could be very beautiful. They went to the parapet above the
+river and stood there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and
+smoking cigarettes. Miss Grammont was moved to declare the
+Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch, its effect of height
+over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses above,
+more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. Down below
+was a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along
+the foaming weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against
+the rush of the water lower down the stream.
+
+"Dear England!" said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious
+spectacle. "How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly
+things!"
+
+"It is the home we come from."
+
+"You belong to it still."
+
+"No more than you do. I belong to a big overworking modern
+place called London which stretches its tentacles all over
+the world. I am as much a home-coming tourist as you are.
+Most of this western country I am seeing for the first time."
+
+She said nothing for a space. "I've not a word to say to-
+night," she said. "I'm just full of a sort of animal
+satisfaction in being close to you. . . . And in being with
+you among lovely things. . . . Somewhere--Before we part to-
+night--. . . . "
+
+"Yes?" he said to her pause, and his face came very near to
+hers.
+
+I want you to kiss me. "
+
+"Yes," he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely
+aware of the promenaders passing close to them.
+
+"It's a promise?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and
+gripped it and pressed it. "My dear!" he whispered, tritest
+and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man
+and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the
+shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the
+darkling populous about them with their silent interchanges.
+
+"There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,"
+she said. "After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to
+think of them. But now--every rational thing seems dissolved
+in this moonlight. . . ."
+
+Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual
+dignity of their relationship.
+
+"I suppose I ought to be more concerned tonight about the
+work I have to do in the world and anxious for you to tell me
+this and that, but indeed I am not concerned at all about it.
+I seem to have it in outline all perfectly clear. I mean to
+play a man's part in the world just as my father wants me to
+do. I mean to win his confidence and work with him--like a
+partner. Then some day I shall be a power in the world of
+fuel. And at the same time I must watch and read and think
+and learn how to be the servant of the world. . . . We two
+have to live like trusted servants who have been made
+guardians of a helpless minor. We have to put things in order
+and keep them in order against the time when Man--Man whom we
+call in America the Common Man--can take hold of his world--"
+
+"And release his servants," said Sir Richmond.
+
+"All that is perfectly clear in my mind. That is what I am
+going to live for; that is what I have to do."
+
+She stopped abruptly. "All that is about as interesting to-
+night--in comparison with the touch of your dear fingers--as
+next month's railway time-table."
+
+But later she found a topic that could hold their attention
+for a time.
+
+"We have never said a word about religion," she said.
+
+Sir Richmond paused for a moment. "I am a godless man," he
+said. "The stars and space and time overwhelm my imagination.
+I cannot imagine anything above or beyond them."
+
+She thought that over. "But there are divine things," she
+said.
+
+"YOU are divine. . . . I'm not talking lovers' nonsense," he
+hastened to add. "I mean that there is something about human
+beings--not just the everyday stuff of them, but something
+that appears intermittently--as though a light shone through
+something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it
+is a divinity revealed to me by other people-- And even by
+myself in my own heart.
+
+"I'm never surprised at the badness of human beings," said
+Sir Richmond; "seeing how they have come about and what they
+are; but I have been surprised time after time by fine
+things . . . . Often in people I disliked or thought little
+of . . . . I can understand that I find you full of divine
+quality, because I am in love with you and all alive to you.
+Necessarily I keep on discovering loveliness in you. But I
+have seen divine things in dear old Martineau, for example. A
+vain man, fussy, timid--and yet filled with a passion for
+truth, ready to make great sacrifices and to toil
+tremendously for that. And in those men I am always cursing,
+my Committee, it is astonishing at times to discover what
+streaks of goodness even the really bad men can show. . . .
+But one can't make use of just anyone's divinity. I can see
+the divinity in Martineau but it leaves me cold. He tired me
+and bored me. . . . But I live on you. It's only through love
+that the God can reach over from one human being to another.
+All real love is a divine thing, a reassurance, a release of
+courage. It is wonderful enough that we should take food and
+drink and turn them into imagination, invention and creative
+energy; it is still more wonderful that we should take an
+animal urging and turn it into a light to discover beauty and
+an impulse towards the utmost achievements of which we are
+capable. All love is a sacrament and all lovers are priests
+to each other. You and I--"
+
+Sir Richmond broke off abruptly. "I spent three days trying
+to tell this to Dr. Martineau. But he wasn't the priest I had
+to confess to and the words wouldn't come. I can confess it
+to you readily enough . . . ."
+
+"I cannot tell," said Miss Grammont, "whether this is the
+last wisdom in life or moonshine. I cannot tell whether I am
+thinking or feeling; but the noise of the water going over
+the weir below is like the stir in my heart. And I am
+swimming in love and happiness. Am I awake or am I dreaming
+you, and are we dreaming one another? Hold my hand--hold it
+hard and tight. I'm trembling with love for you and all the
+world. . . . If I say more I shall be weeping."
+
+For a long time they stood side by side saying not a word to
+one another.
+
+Presently the band down below and the dancing ceased and the
+little lights were extinguished. The silent moon seemed to
+grow brighter and larger and the whisper of the waters
+louder. A crowd of young people flowed out of the gardens and
+passed by on their way home. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont
+strolled through the dispersing crowd and over the Toll
+Bridge and went exploring down a little staircase that went
+down from the end of the bridge to the dark river, and then
+came back to their old position at the parapet looking upon
+the weir and the Pulteney Bridge. The gardens that had been
+so gay were already dark and silent as they returned, and the
+streets echoed emptily to the few people who were still
+abroad.
+
+"It's the most beautiful bridge in the world," said Miss
+Grammont, and gave him her hand again.
+
+Some deep-toned clock close by proclaimed the hour eleven.
+
+The silence healed again.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Richmond.
+
+"Well?" said Miss Grammont smiling very faintly.
+
+"I suppose we must go out of all this beauty now, back to the
+lights of the hotel and the watchful eyes of your dragon. "
+
+"She has not been a very exacting dragon so far, has she?"
+
+"She is a miracle of tact."
+
+"She does not really watch. But she is curious--and very
+sympathetic. "
+
+"She is wonderful." . . . .
+
+"That man is still fishing," said Miss Grammont.
+
+For a time she peered down at the dark figure wading in the
+foam below as though it was the only thing of interest in the
+world. Then she turned to Sir Richmond.
+
+"I would trust Belinda with my life, she said. "And anyhow-
+now--we need not worry about Belinda."
+
+Section 7
+
+At the breakfast table it was Belinda who was the most
+nervous of the three, the most moved, the most disposed to
+throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her
+companions had passed beyond the idea of separation; it was
+as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the high
+dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they
+had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers;
+they seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their
+bearing. It would have pleased Belinda better, seeing how
+soon they were to be torn apart, if they had not made quite
+such excellent breakfasts. She even suspected them of having
+slept well. Yet yesterday they had been deeply stirred. They
+had stayed out late last night, so late that she had not
+heard them come in. Perhaps then they had passed the climax
+of their emotions. Sir Richmond, she learnt, was to take the
+party to Exeter, where there would be a train for Falmouth a
+little after two. If they started from Bath about nine that
+would give them an ample margin of time in which to deal with
+a puncture or any such misadventure.
+
+They crested the Mendips above Shepton Mallet, ran through
+Tilchester and Ilminster into the lovely hill country about
+Up-Ottery and so to Honiton and the broad level road to
+Exeter. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont were in a state of
+happy gravity; they sat contentedly side by side, talking
+very little. They had already made their arrangements for
+writing to one another. There was to be no stream of love-
+letters or protestations. That might prove a mutual torment.
+Their love was to be implicit. They were to write at
+intervals about political matters and their common interests,
+and to keep each other informed of their movements about the
+world.
+
+"We shall be working together," she said, speaking suddenly
+out of a train of thought she had been following, "we shall
+be closer together than many a couple who have never spent a
+day apart for twenty years."
+
+Then presently she said: "In the New Age all lovers will have
+to be accustomed to meeting and parting. We women will not be
+tied very much by domestic needs. Unless we see fit to have
+children. We shall be going about our business like men; we
+shall have world-wide businesses--many of us--just as men
+will. . . .
+
+"It will be a world full of lovers' meetings."
+
+Some day--somewhere--we two will certainly meet again."
+
+"Even you have to force circumstances a little," said Sir
+Richmond.
+
+"We shall meet, she said, "without doing that."
+
+"But where?" he asked unanswered. . . .
+
+"Meetings and partings," she said. "Women will be used to
+seeing their lovers go away. Even to seeing them go away to
+other women who have borne them children and who have a
+closer claim on them."
+
+"No one-" began Sir Richmond, startled.
+
+"But I don't mind very much. It's how things are. If I were a
+perfectly civilized woman I shouldn't mind at all. If men and
+women are not to be tied to each other there must needs be
+such things as this."
+
+"But you," said Sir Richmond. I at any rate am not like that.
+I cannot bear the thought that YOU--"
+
+"You need not bear it, my dear. I was just trying to imagine
+this world that is to be. Women I think are different from
+men in their jealousy. Men are jealous of the other man;
+women are jealous for their man--and careless about the other
+woman. What I love in you I am sure about. My mind was empty
+when it came to you and now it is full to overflowing. I
+shall feel you moving about in the same world with me. I'm
+not likely to think of anyone else for a very long
+time. . . . Later on, who knows? I may marry. I make no vows.
+But I think until I know certainly that you do not want me
+any more it will be impossible for me to marry or to have a
+lover. I don't know, but that is how I believe it will be
+with me. And my mind feels beautifully clear now and settled.
+I've got your idea and made it my own, your idea that we
+matter scarcely at all, but that the work we do matters
+supremely. I'll find my rope and tug it, never fear. Half way
+round the world perhaps some day you will feel me tugging."
+
+"I shall feel you're there," he said, "whether you tug or
+not. . . ."
+
+"Three miles left to Exeter," he reported presently.
+
+She glanced back at Belinda.
+
+"It is good that we have loved, my dear," she whispered. "Say
+it is good."
+
+"The best thing in all my life," he said, and lowered his
+head and voice to say: "My dearest dear."
+
+"Heart's desire--still--?"
+
+"Heart's delight. . . . Priestess of life. . . . Divinity."
+
+She smiled and nodded and suddenly Belinda, up above their
+lowered heads, accidentally and irrelevantly, no doubt,
+coughed.
+
+At Exeter Station there was not very much time to spare after
+all. Hardly had Sir Richmond secured a luncheon basket for
+the two travellers before the train came into the station. He
+parted from Miss Grammont with a hand clasp. Belinda was
+flushed and distressed at the last but her friend was quiet
+and still. "Au revoir," said Belinda without conviction when
+Sir Richmond shook her hand.
+
+Section 8.
+
+Sir Richmond stood quite still on the platform as the train
+ran out of the station. He did not move until it had
+disappeared round the bend. Then he turned, lost in a brown
+study, and walked very slowly towards the station exit.
+
+"The most wonderful thing in my life," he thought. "And
+already--it is unreal.
+
+"She will go on to her father whom she knows ten thousand
+times more thoroughly than she knows me; she will go on to
+Paris, she will pick up all the threads of her old story, be
+reminded of endless things in her life, but never except in
+the most casual way of these days: they will be cut off from
+everything else that will serve to keep them real; and as for
+me--this connects with nothing else in my life at all. . . .
+It is as disconnected as a dream. . . . Already it is hardly
+more substantial than a dream. . . .
+
+"We shall write letters. Do letters breathe faster or slower
+as you read them?
+
+"We may meet.
+
+"Where are we likely to meet again? ... I never realized
+before how improbable it is that we shall meet again. And if
+we meet? . . .
+
+"Never in all our lives shall we be really TOGETHER again.
+It's over--With a completeness. . . .
+
+"Like death."
+
+He came opposite the bookstalls and stopped short and stared
+with unseeing eyes at the display of popular literature. He
+was wondering now whether after all he ought to have let her
+go. He experienced something of the blank amazement of a
+child who has burst its toy balloon. His golden globe of
+satisfaction in an instant had gone. An irrational sense of
+loss was flooding every other feeling about V.V. If she had
+loved him truly and altogether could she have left him like
+this? Neither of them surely had intended so complete a
+separation. He wanted to go back and recall that train.
+
+A few seconds more, he realized, and he would give way to
+anger. Whatever happened that must not happen. He pulled
+himself together. What was it he had to do now? He had not to
+be angry, he had not even to be sorry. They had done the
+right thing. Outside the station his car was waiting.
+
+He went outside the station and stared at his car. He had to
+go somewhere. Of course! down into Cornwall to Martin's
+cottage. He had to go down to her and be kind and comforting
+about that carbuncle. To be kind? . . . If this thwarted
+feeling broke out into anger he might be tempted to take it
+out of Martin. That at any rate he must not do. He had always
+for some inexplicable cause treated Martin badly. Nagged her
+and blamed her and threatened her. That must stop now. No
+shadow of this affair must lie on Martin. . . . And Martin
+must never have a suspicion of any of this. . . .
+
+The image of Martin became very vivid in his mind. He thought
+of her as he had seen her many times, with the tears close,
+fighting with her back to the wall, with all her wit and
+vigour gone, because she loved him more steadfastly than he
+did her. Whatever happened he must not take it out of Martin.
+It was astonishing how real she had become now--as V.V.
+became a dream. Yes, Martin was astonishingly real. And if
+only he could go now and talk to Martin--and face all the
+facts of life with her, even as he had done with that phantom
+Martin in his dream. . . .
+
+But things were not like that.
+
+He looked to see if his car was short of water or petrol;
+both needed replenishing, and so he would have to go up the
+hill into Exeter town again. He got into his car and sat with
+his fingers on the electric starter.
+
+Martin! Old Friend! Eight days were still left before the
+Committee met again, eight days for golden kindness. He would
+distress Martin by no clumsy confession. He would just make
+her happy as she loved to be made happy. . . . Nevertheless.
+Nevertheless. . . .
+
+Was it Martin who failed him or he who failed Martin?
+
+Incessant and insoluble dispute. Well, the thing now was to
+go to Martin. . . . And then the work!
+
+He laughed suddenly.
+
+"I'll take it out of the damned Commission. I'll make old
+Rumford Brown sit up."
+
+He was astonished to find himself thinking of the affairs of
+the Commission with a lively interest and no trace of
+fatigue. He had had his change; he had taken his rest; he was
+equal to his task again already. He started his engine and
+steered his way past a van and a waiting cab.
+
+"Fuel," he said.
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH
+
+THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY
+
+Section 1
+
+The Majority and Minority Reports of the Fuel Commission were
+received on their first publication with much heat and
+disputation, but there is already a fairly general agreement
+that they are great and significant documents, broadly
+conceived and historically important. They do lift the
+questions of fuel supply and distribution high above the
+level of parochial jealousies and above the petty and
+destructive profiteering of private owners and traders, to a
+view of a general human welfare. They form an important link
+in a series of private and public documents that are slowly
+opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods
+conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may
+yet arrest the drift of our western civilization towards
+financial and commercial squalor and the social collapse that
+must ensue inevitably on that. In view of the composition of
+the Committee, the Majority Report is in itself an amazing
+triumph of Sir Richmond's views; it is astonishing that he
+was able to drive his opponents so far  and then leave them
+there securely advanced while he carried on the adherents he
+had altogether won, including, of course, the labour
+representatives, to the further altitudes of the Minority
+Report.
+
+After the Summer recess the Majority Report was discussed and
+adopted. Sir Richmond had shown signs of flagging energy in
+June, but he had come back in September in a state of
+exceptional vigour; for a time he completely dominated the
+Committee by the passionate force of his convictions and the
+illuminating scorn he brought to bear on the various
+subterfuges and weakening amendments by which the meaner
+interests sought to save themselves in whole or in part from
+the common duty of sacrifice. But toward the end he fell ill.
+He had worked to the pitch of exhaustion. He neglected a cold
+that settled on his chest. He began to cough persistently and
+betray an increasingly irritable temper. In the last fights
+in the Committee his face was bright with fever and he spoke
+in a voiceless whisper, often a vast angry whisper. His place
+at table was marked with scattered lozenges and scraps of
+paper torn to the minutest shreds. Such good manners as had
+hitherto mitigated his behaviour on the Committee departed
+from him, He carried his last points, gesticulating and
+coughing and wheezing rather than speaking. But he had so
+hammered his ideas into the Committee that they took the
+effect of what he was trying to say.
+
+He died of pneumonia at his own house three days after the
+passing of the Majority Report. The Minority Report, his own
+especial creation, he never signed. It was completed by Wast
+and Carmichael. . . .
+
+After their parting at Salisbury station Dr. Martineau heard
+very little of Sir Richmond for a time except through the
+newspapers, which contained frequent allusions to the
+Committee. Someone told him that Sir Richmond had been
+staying at Ruan in Cornwall where Martin Leeds had a cottage,
+and someone else had met him at Bath on his way, he said, in
+his car from Cornwall to a conference with Sir Peter Davies
+in Glamorganshire.
+
+But in the interim Dr. Martineau had the pleasure of meeting
+Lady Hardy at a luncheon party. He was seated next to her and
+he found her a very pleasing and sympathetic person indeed.
+She talked to him freely and simply of her husband and of the
+journey the two men had taken together. Either she knew
+nothing of the circumstances of their parting or if she did
+she did not betray her knowledge. "That holiday did him a
+world of good," she said. "He came back to his work like a
+giant. I feel very grateful to you."
+
+Dr. Martineau said it was a pleasure to have helped Sir
+Richmond's work in any way. He believed in him thoroughly.
+Sir Richmond was inspired by great modern creative ideas.
+
+"Forgive me if I keep you talking about him," said Lady
+Hardy. "I wish I could feel as sure that I had been of use to
+him."
+
+Dr. Martineau insisted. "I know very well that you are."
+
+"I do what I can to help him carry his enormous burthen of
+toil" she said. "I try to smooth his path. But he is a
+strange silent creature at times. "
+
+Her eyes scrutinized the doctor's face.
+
+It was not the doctor's business to supplement Sir Richmond's
+silences. Yet he wished to meet the requirements of this lady
+if he could. "He is one of those men," he said, "who are
+driven by forces they do not fully understand. A man of
+genius."
+
+"Yes," she said in an undertone of intimacy. Genius. . . . A
+great irresponsible genius. . . . Difficult to help. . . . I
+wish I could do more for him."
+
+A very sweet and charming lady. It was with great regret that
+the doctor found the time had come to turn to his left-hand
+neighbour.
+
+Section 2
+
+It was with some surprise that Dr. Martineau received a fresh
+appeal for aid from Sir Richmond. It was late in October and
+Sir Richmond was already seriously ill. But he was still
+going about his business as though he was perfectly well. He
+had not mistaken his man. Dr. Martineau received him as
+though there had never been a shadow of offence between them.
+
+He came straight to the point. "Martineau," he said, "I must
+have those drugs I asked you for when first I came to you
+now. I must be bolstered up. I can't last out unless I am.
+I'm at the end of my energy. I come to you because you will
+understand. The Commission can't go on now for more than
+another three weeks. Whatever happens afterwards I must keep
+going until then."
+
+The doctor did understand. He made no vain objections. He did
+what he could to patch up his friend for his last struggles
+with the opposition in the Committee. "Pro forma," he said,
+stethoscope in hand, "I must order you to bed. You won't go.
+But I order you. You must know that what you are doing is
+risking your life. Your lungs are congested, the bronchial
+tubes already. That may spread at any time. If this open
+weather lasts you may go about and still pull through. But at
+any time this may pass into pneumonia. And there's not much
+in you just now to stand up against pneumonia. . . ."
+
+"I'll take all reasonable care."
+
+"Is your wife at home!"
+
+"She is in Wales with her people. But the household is well
+trained. I can manage."
+
+"Go in a closed car from door to door. Wrap up like a mummy.
+I wish the Committee room wasn't down those abominable House
+of Commons corridors. . . ."
+
+They parted with an affectionate handshake.
+
+Section 3
+
+Death approved of Sir Richmond's determination to see the
+Committee through. Our universal creditor gave this
+particular debtor grace to the very last meeting. Then he
+brushed a gust of chilly rain across the face of Sir Richmond
+as he stood waiting for his car outside the strangers'
+entrance to the House. For a couple of days Sir Richmond felt
+almost intolerably tired, but scarcely noted the changed
+timbre of the wheezy notes in his throat. He rose later each
+day and with ebbing vigour, jotted down notes and corrections
+upon the proofs of the Minority Report. He found it
+increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would correct
+and alter back and then repeat the correction, perhaps half a
+dozen times. On the evening of the second day his lungs
+became painful and his breathing difficult. His head ached
+and a sense of some great impending evil came upon him. His
+skin was suddenly a detestable garment to wear. He took his
+temperature with a little clinical thermometer he kept by him
+and found it was a hundred and one. He telephoned hastily for
+Dr. Martineau and without waiting for his arrival took a hot
+bath and got into bed. He was already thoroughly ill when the
+doctor arrived.
+
+"Forgive my sending for you," he said. "Not your line. I
+know. . . . My wife's G.P.--an exasperating sort of ass.
+Can't stand him. No one else."
+
+He was lying on a narrow little bed with a hard pillow that
+the doctor replaced by one from Lady Hardy's room. He had
+twisted the bed-clothes into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was
+on the floor.
+
+Sir Richmond's bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep
+seemed to have been an admitted necessity rather than a
+principal purpose. On one hand it opened into a business-like
+dressing and bath room, on the other into the day study. It
+bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who had long
+lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated
+hours and habits. There was a desk and reading lamp for night
+work near the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at
+night, a silver biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely
+intent industry of the small hours. There was a bookcase of
+bluebooks, books of reference and suchlike material, and some
+files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged photograph of
+Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was littered
+with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir
+Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty
+retreat to bed. And lying among the proofs, as though it had
+been taken out and looked at quite recently was the
+photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr. Martineau's mind hung
+in doubt and then he knew it for the young American of
+Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And
+now it was not his business to know.
+
+These various observations printed themselves on Dr.
+Martineau's mind after his first cursory examination of his
+patient and while he cast about for anything that would give
+this large industrious apartment a little more of the
+restfulness and comfort of a sick room. "I must get in a
+night nurse at once," he said. "We must find a small table
+somewhere to put near the bed.
+
+"I am afraid you are very ill," he said, returning to the
+bedside. "This is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will you
+let me call in another man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to
+consult?"
+
+"I'm in your hands, said Sir Richmond. I want to pull
+through."
+
+"He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for
+the case--and everything."
+
+The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of
+nurse hard on his heels. Sir Richmond submitted almost
+silently to his expert handling and was sounded and looked to
+and listened at.
+
+"H'm," said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir
+Richmond: "We've got to take care of you.
+
+"There's a lot about this I don't like," said the second
+doctor and drew Dr. Martineau by the arm towards the study.
+For a moment or so Sir Richmond listened to the low murmur of
+their voices, but he did not feel very deeply interested in
+what they were saying. He began to think what a decent chap
+Dr. Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his
+professional training had made him, how completely he had
+ignored the smothered incivilities of their parting at
+Salisbury. All men ought to have some such training, Not a
+bad idea to put every boy and girl through a year or so of
+hospital service. . . . Sir Richmond must have dozed, for his
+next perception was of Dr. Martineau standing over him and
+saying "I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill
+indeed. Much more so than I thought you were at first."
+
+Sir Richmond's raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this
+fact.
+
+"I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for."
+
+Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.
+
+"Don't want her about," he said, and after a pause, "Don't
+want anybody about."
+
+"But if anything happens-?"
+
+"Send then."
+
+An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond's
+face. He seemed to regard the matter as settled. He closed
+his eyes.
+
+For a time Dr. Martineau desisted. He went to the window and
+turned to look again at the impassive figure on the bed. Did
+Sir Richmond fully understand? He made a step towards his
+patient and hesitated. Then he brought a chair and sat down
+at the bedside.
+
+Sir Richmond opened his eyes and regarded him with a slight
+frown.
+
+"A case of pneumonia," said the doctor, "after great exertion
+and fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected turns."
+
+Sir Richmond, cheek on pillow, seemed to assent.
+
+"I think if you want to be sure that Lady Hardy sees you
+again-- . . . If you don't want to take risks about
+that--. . . One never knows in these cases. Probably there is
+a night train."
+
+Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning. But he
+stuck to his point. His voice was faint but firm. "Couldn't
+make up anything to say to her. Anything she'd like."
+
+Dr. Martineau rested on that for a little while. Then he
+said: "If there is anyone else?"
+
+"Not possible," said Sir Richmond, with his eyes on the
+ceiling.
+
+"But to see?"
+
+Sir Richmond turned his head to Dr. Martineau. His face
+puckered like a peevish child's. "They'd want things said to
+them...Things to remember...I CAN'T. I'm tired out."
+
+"Don't trouble," whispered Dr. Martineau, suddenly
+remorseful.
+
+But Sir Richmond was also remorseful. "Give them my love," he
+said. "Best love...Old Martin. Love."
+
+Dr. Martineau was turning away when Sir Richmond spoke again
+in a whisper. "Best love...Poor at the best. . . ."
+He dozed for a time. Then he made a great effort. "I can't
+see them, Martineau, until I've something to say. It's like
+that. Perhaps I shall think of some kind things to say--after
+a sleep. But if they came now...I'd say something wrong. Be
+cross perhaps. Hurt someone. I've hurt so many. People
+exaggerate...People exaggerate--importance these occasions."
+
+"Yes, yes," whispered Dr. Martineau. "I quite understand."
+
+Section 4
+
+For a time Sir Richmond dozed. Then he stirred and muttered.
+"Second rate. . . Poor at the best. . . Love. . . Work.
+All. . ."
+
+"It had been splendid work," said Dr. Martineau, and was not
+sure that Sir Richmond heard.
+
+"Those last few days. . . lost my grip. . . Always lose my
+damned grip.
+
+"Ragged them. . . . Put their backs up . . . .Silly....
+
+"Never.... Never done anything--WELL ....
+
+"It's done. Done. Well or ill....
+
+"Done."
+
+His voice sank to the faintest whisper. "Done for ever and
+ever ... and ever . . . and ever."
+
+Again he seemed to doze.
+
+Dr. Martineau stood up softly. Something beyond reason told
+him that this was certainly a dying man. He was reluctant to
+go and he had an absurd desire that someone, someone for whom
+Sir Richmond cared, should come and say good-bye to him, and
+for Sir Richmond to say good-bye to someone. He hated this
+lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had
+sought intimacy so persistently and vainly. It was
+extraordinary--he saw it now for the first time--he loved
+this man. If it had been in his power, he would at that
+moment have anointed him with kindness.
+
+The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy
+writing desk, littered like a recent battlefield. The
+photograph of the American girl drew his eyes. What had
+happened? Was there not perhaps some word for her? He turned
+about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir
+Richmond's eyes open and regarding him. In them he saw an
+expression he had seen there once or twice before, a faint
+but excessively irritating gleam of amusement.
+
+"Oh!--WELL!" said Dr. Martineau and turned away. He went to
+the window and stared out as his habit was.
+
+Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor's back
+until his eyes closed again.
+
+It was their last exchange. Sir Richmond died that night in
+the small hours, so quietly that for some time the night
+nurse did not observe what had happened. She was indeed
+roused to that realization by the ringing of the telephone
+bell in the adjacent study.
+
+Section 5
+
+For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake
+unable to sleep. He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond
+lying on his uncomfortable little bed in his big bedroom and
+by the curious effect of loneliness produced by the nocturnal
+desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir Richmond of any
+death-bed partings. He realized how much this man, who had
+once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back
+upon himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely
+he had taken counsel with anyone in his later years. His mind
+now dwelt apart. Even if people came about him he would still
+be facing death alone.
+
+And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might
+slip out of a crowded assembly, unobserved. Even now he might
+be going. The doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had
+talked of the rage of life in a young baby, how we drove into
+life in a sort of fury, how that rage impelled us to do this
+and that, how we fought and struggled until the rage spent
+itself and was gone. That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond
+was now perhaps very near its end. Presently it would fade
+and cease, and the stream that had made it and borne it would
+know it no more.
+
+Dr. Martineau's thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture
+land of dreams. He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as
+it were away from him along a narrow path, a path that
+followed the crest of a ridge, between great darknesses,
+enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and below. He was going
+along this path without looking back, without a thought for
+those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him on
+his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him
+walking, without haste or avidity, walking as a man might
+along some great picture gallery with which he was perhaps
+even over familiar. His hands would be in his pockets, his
+indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him. And as he
+strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him.
+His figure became dim and dimmer.
+
+Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide
+the beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just
+dissolve that figure into itself?
+
+Was that indeed the end?
+
+Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can
+neither imagine nor disbelieve in immortality. Dimmer and
+dimmer grew the figure but still it remained visible. As one
+can continue to see a star at dawn until one turns away. Or
+one blinks or nods and it is gone.
+
+Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless
+generations. Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so
+clearly, faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic
+peoples believed from Avebury to Polynesia? Not always have
+we had to go alone and unprepared into uncharted darknesses.
+For a time the dream artist used a palette of the doctor's
+vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a new roll of
+the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been
+looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked
+figure, crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific
+monsters, ferrying a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the
+scales of judgment before the very throne of Osiris and stood
+waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed his conscience and
+that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead, crouched ready
+if the judgment went against him. The doctor's attention
+concentrated upon the scales. A memory of Swedengorg's Heaven
+and Hell mingled with the Egyptian fantasy. Now at last it
+was possible to know something real about this man's soul,
+now at last one could look into the Secret Places of his
+Heart. Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis head, were
+reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it
+to the supreme judge.
+
+Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams. His
+anxiety to plead for his friend had brought him in. He too
+had become a little painted figure and he was bearing a book
+in his hand. He wanted to show that the laws of the new world
+could not be the same as those of the old, and the book he
+was bringing as evidence was his own Psychology of a New Age.
+
+The clear thought of that book broke up his dream by
+releasing a train of waking troubles. . . . You have been six
+months on Chapter Ten; will it ever be ready for
+Osiris? . . . will it ever be ready for print? . . .
+
+Dream and waking thoughts were mingled like sky and cloud
+upon a windy day in April. Suddenly he saw again that lonely
+figure on the narrow way with darknesses above and darknesses
+below and darknesses on every hand. But this time it was not
+Sir Richmond. . . . Who was it? Surely it was Everyman.
+Everyman had to travel at last along that selfsame road,
+leaving love, leaving every task and every desire. But was it
+Everyman? . . . A great fear and horror came upon the doctor.
+That little figure was himself! And the book which was his
+particular task in life was still undone. He himself stood in
+his turn upon that lonely path with the engulfing darknesses
+about him. . . .
+
+He seemed to wrench himself awake.
+
+He lay very still for some moments and then he sat up in bed.
+An overwhelming conviction had arisen--in his mind that Sir
+Richmond was dead. He felt he must know for certain. He
+switched on his electric light, mutely interrogated his round
+face reflected in the looking glass, got out of bed, shuffled
+on his slippers and went along the passage to the telephone.
+He hesitated for some seconds and then lifted the receiver.
+It was his call which aroused the nurse to the fact of Sir
+Richmond's death.
+
+Section 6
+
+Lady Hardy arrived home in response to Dr. Martineau's
+telegram late on the following evening. He was with her next
+morning, comforting and sympathetic. Her big blue eyes,
+bright with tears, met his very wistfully; her little body
+seemed very small and pathetic in its simple black dress. And
+yet there was a sort of bravery about her. When he came into
+the drawing-room she was in one of the window recesses
+talking to a serious-looking woman of the dressmaker type.
+She left her business at once to come to him. "Why did I not
+know in time?" she cried.
+
+"No one, dear lady, had any idea until late last night," he
+said, taking both her hands in his for a long friendly
+sympathetic pressure.
+
+"I might have known that if it had been possible you would
+have told me," she said.
+
+"You know," she added, "I don't believe it yet. I don't
+realize it. I go about these formalities--"
+
+"I think I can understand that."
+
+"He was always, you know, not quite here . . . . It is as if
+he were a little more not quite here . . . . I can't believe
+it is over. . . . "
+
+She asked a number of questions and took the doctor's advice
+upon various details of the arrangements. "My daughter Helen
+comes home to-morrow afternoon," she explained. "She is in
+Paris. But our son is far, far away in the Punjab. I have
+sent him a telegram. . . . It is so kind of you to come in to
+me."
+
+Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy's
+disposition to treat him as a friend of the family. He had
+conceived a curious, half maternal affection for Sir Richmond
+that had survived even the trying incident of the Salisbury
+parting and revived very rapidly during the last few weeks.
+This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy. Hers was a
+type that had always appealed to him. He could understand so
+well the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting
+herself to gather together some preservative and reassuring
+evidences of this man who had always been; as she put it,
+"never quite here." It was as if she felt that now it was at
+last possible to make a definite reality of him. He could be
+fixed. And as he was fixed he would stay. Never more would he
+be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance
+wither the interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was
+finding much comfort in this task of reconstruction. She had
+gathered together in the drawingroom every presentable
+portrait she had been able to find of him. He had never, she
+said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil sketch
+done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a
+number of photographs, several of which--she wanted the
+doctor's advice upon this point--she thought might be
+enlarged; there was a statuette done by some woman artist who
+had once beguiled him into a sitting. There was also a
+painting she had had worked up from a photograph and some
+notes. She flitted among these memorials, going from one to
+the other, undecided which to make the standard portrait. "
+That painting, I think, is most like," she said: "as he was
+before the war. But the war and the Commission changed him,--
+worried him and aged him. . . . I grudged him to that
+Commission. He let it worry him frightfully."
+
+"It meant very much to him," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"It meant too much to him. But of course his ideas were
+splendid. You know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of
+book done, explaining his ideas. He would never write. He
+despised it--unreasonably. A real thing done, he said, was
+better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he said, but
+women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And
+I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary
+official biography. . . . I have thought of young Leighton,
+the secretary of the Commission. He seems thoroughly
+intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile
+Richmond's views with those of the big business men on the
+Committee. He might do. . . . Or perhaps I might be able to
+persuade two or three people to write down their impressions
+of him. A sort of memorial volume. . . . But he was shy of
+friends. There was no man he talked to very intimately about
+his ideas unless it was to you . . . I wish I had the
+writer's gift, doctor."
+
+Section 7
+
+It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr.
+Martineau by telephone. "Something rather disagreeable," she
+said. "If you could spare the time. If you could come round.
+
+"It is frightfully distressing," she said when he got round
+to her, and for a time she could tell him nothing more. She
+was having tea and she gave him some. She fussed about with
+cream and cakes and biscuits. He noted a crumpled letter
+thrust under the edge of the silver tray.
+
+"He talked, I know, very intimately with you," she said,
+coming to it at last. "He probably went into things with you
+that he never talked about with anyone else. Usually he was
+very reserved, Even with me there were things about which he
+said nothing."
+
+"We did," said Dr. Martineau with discretion, "deal a little
+with his private life.
+
+"There was someone--"
+
+Dr. Martineau nodded and then, not to be too portentous, took
+and bit a biscuit.
+
+"Did he by any chance ever mention someone called Martin
+Leeds?"
+
+Dr. Martineau seemed to reflect. Then realizing that this was
+a mistake, he said: "He told me the essential facts."
+
+The poor lady breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm glad," she said
+simply. She repeated, "Yes, I'm glad. It makes things easier
+now."
+
+Dr. Martineau looked his enquiry.
+
+"She wants to come and see him."
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Here! And Helen here! And the servants noticing everything!
+I've never met her. Never set eyes on her. For all I know she
+may want to make a scene." There was infinite dismay in her
+voice.
+
+Dr. Martineau was grave. "You would rather not receive her?"
+
+"I don't want to refuse her. I don't want even to seem
+heartless. I understand, of course, she has a sort of claim.
+" She sobbed her reluctant admission. "I know it. I
+know. . . . There was much between them."
+
+Dr. Martineau pressed the limp hand upon the little tea
+table. "I understand, dear lady," he said. "I understand. Now
+. . . suppose _I_ were to write to her and arrange--I do not
+see that you need be put to the pain of meeting her. Suppose
+I were to meet her here myself?
+
+"If you COULD!"
+
+The doctor was quite prepared to save the lady any further
+distresses, no matter at what trouble to himself. "You are so
+good to me," she said, letting the tears have their way with
+her.
+
+"I am silly to cry," she said, dabbing her eyes.
+
+"We will get it over to-morrow," he reassured her. "You need
+not think of it again."
+
+He took over Martin's brief note to Lady Hardy and set to
+work by telegram to arrange for her visit. She was in London
+at her Chelsea flat and easily accessible. She was to come to
+the house at mid-day on the morrow, and to ask not for Lady
+Hardy but for him. He would stay by her while she was in the
+house, and it would be quite easy for Lady Hardy to keep
+herself and her daughter out of the way. They could, for
+example, go out quietly to the dressmakers in the closed car,
+for many little things about the mourning still remained to
+be seen to.
+
+Section 8
+
+Miss Martin Leeds arrived punctually, but the doctor was well
+ahead of his time and ready to receive her. She was ushered
+into the drawing room where he awaited her. As she came
+forward the doctor first perceived that she had a very sad
+and handsome face, the face of a sensitive youth rather than
+the face of a woman. She had fine grey eyes under very fine
+brows; they were eyes that at other times might have laughed
+very agreeably, but which were now full of an unrestrained
+sadness. Her brown hair was very untidy and parted at the
+side like a man's. Then he noted that she seemed to be very
+untidily dressed as if she was that rare and, to him, very
+offensive thing, a woman careless of her beauty. She was
+short in proportion to her broad figure and her broad
+forehead.
+
+"You are Dr. Martineau?" she said. "He talked of you." As she
+spoke her glance went from him to the pictures that stood
+about the room. She walked up to the painting and stood in
+front of it with her distressed gaze wandering about her.
+"Horrible!" she said. "Absolutely horrible! . . . Did SHE do
+this?"
+
+Her question disconcerted the doctor very much. "You mean
+Lady Hardy?" he asked. "She doesn't paint."
+
+"No, no. I mean, did she get all these things together? "
+
+"Naturally," said Dr. Martineau.
+
+"None of them are a bit like him. They are like blows aimed
+at his memory. Not one has his life in it. How could she do
+it? Look at that idiot statuette! . . . He was
+extraordinarily difficult to get. I have burnt every
+photograph I had of him. For fear that this would happen;
+that he would go stiff and formal--just as you have got him
+here. I have been trying to sketch him almost all the time
+since he died. But I can't get him back. He's gone."
+
+She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if
+she expected him to understand her, but because she had to
+say these things which burthened her mind to someone. "I have
+done hundreds of sketches. My room is littered with them.
+When you turn them over he seems to be lurking among them.
+But not one of them is like him."
+
+She was trying to express something beyond her power. "It is
+as if someone had suddenly turned out the light."
+
+She followed the doctor upstairs. "This was his study," the
+doctor explained.
+
+"I know it. I came here once," she said.
+
+They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay.
+Dr. Martineau, struck by a sudden memory, glanced nervously
+at the desk, but someone had made it quite tidy and the
+portrait of Aliss Grammont had disappeared. Miss Leeds walked
+straight across to the coffin and stood looking down on the
+waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir Richmond's brows
+and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than they had
+ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane
+smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she
+sighed deeply.
+
+She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as
+though she talked at that silent presence in the coffin. "I
+think he loved," she said. "Sometimes I think he loved me.
+But it is hard to tell. He was kind. He could be intensely
+kind and yet he didn't seem to care for you. He could be
+intensely selfish and yet he certainly did not care for
+himself. . . . Anyhow, I loved HIM. . . . There is nothing
+left in me now to love anyone else--for ever. . . ."
+
+She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man
+with her head a little on one side. "Too kind," she said very
+softly.
+
+"There was a sort of dishonesty in his kindness. He would not
+let you have the bitter truth. He would not say he did not
+love you. . . .
+
+"He was too kind to life ever to call it the foolish thing it
+is. He took it seriously because it takes itself seriously.
+He worked for it and killed himself with work for
+it . . . . "
+
+She turned to Dr. Martineau and her face was streaming with
+tears. "And life, you know, isn't to be taken seriously. It
+is a joke--a bad joke--made by some cruel little god who has
+caught a neglected planet. . . . Like torturing a stray
+cat. . . . But he took it seriously and he gave up his life
+for it.
+
+"There was much happiness he might have had. He was very
+capable of happiness. But he never seemed happy. This work of
+his came before it. He overworked and fretted our happiness
+away. He sacrificed his happiness and mine."
+
+She held out her hands towards the doctor. "What am I to do
+now with the rest of my life? Who is there to laugh with me
+now and jest?
+
+"I don't complain of him. I don't blame him. He did his
+best--to be kind.
+
+"But all my days now I shall mourn for him and long for
+him. . . . "
+
+She turned back to the coffin. Suddenly she lost every
+vestige of self-control. She sank down on her knees beside
+the trestle. "Why have you left me!" she cried.
+
+"Oh! Speak to me, my darling! Speak to me, I TELL YOU! Speak
+to me!"
+
+It was a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful.
+She beat her hands upon the coffin. She wept loudly and
+fiercely as a child does....
+
+Dr. Martineau drifted feebly to the window.
+
+He wished he had locked the door. The servants might hear and
+wonder what it was all about. Always he had feared love for
+the cruel thing it was, but now it seemed to him for the
+first time that he realized its monstrous cruelty.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of The Secret Places of the Heart by H.
+G. Wells
+