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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Secret Places of the Heart
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: February 21, 2006 [EBook #1734]
+Last Updated: September 17, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dianne Bean and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+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.... VICIOUS!...”
+
+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 clean-limbed, 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 travel-stained 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. ‘Oh, 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 Anglo-Saxondom, 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 Project Gutenberg’s The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells
+
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