Section 1

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.