Section 11

That was the dawn of a long day of tension for Sir Richmond and Miss

Grammont. Because each was now vividly aware of being in love with the

other and so neither was able to see how things were with the other.

They were afraid of each other. A restraint had come upon them both, a

restraint that was greatly enhanced by their sense of Belinda, acutely

observant, ostentatiously tactful and self-effacing, and prepared at the

slightest encouragement to be overwhelmingly romantic and sympathetic.

Their talk waned, and was revived to an artificial activity and waned

again. The historical interest had evaporated from the west of England

and left only an urgent and embarrassing present.

But the loveliness of the weather did not fail, and the whole day was

set in Severn landscapes. They first saw the great river like a sea

with the Welsh mountains hanging in the sky behind as they came over the

Mendip crest above Shipham. They saw it again as they crossed the hill

before Clifton Bridge, and so they continued, climbing to hill crests

for views at Alveston and near Dursley, and so to Gloucester and the

lowest bridge and thence back down stream again through fat meadow lands

at first and much apple-blossom and then over gentle hills through wide,

pale Nownham and Lidney and Alvington and Woolaston to old Chepstow and

its brown castle, always with the widening estuary to the left of them

and its foaming shoals and shining sand banks. From Chepstow they turned

back north along the steep Wye gorge to Tintern, and there at the snug

little Beaufort Arms with its prim lawn and flower garden they ended the

day’s journey.

Tintern Abbey they thought a poor graceless mass of ruin down beside

the river, and it was fenced about jealously and locked up from their

invasion. After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went for a walk in

the mingled twilight and moonlight up the hill towards Chepstow. Both of

them were absurdly and nervously pressing to Belinda to come with them,

but she was far too wise to take this sudden desire for her company

seriously. Her dinner shoes, she said, were too thin. Perhaps she

would change and come out a little later. “Yes, come later,” said Miss

Grammont and led the way to the door.

They passed through the garden. “I think we go up the hill? “ said Sir

Richmond.

“Yes,” she agreed, “up the hill.”

Followed a silence.

Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and disconnected

talk about Tintern Abbey, concerning, which she had no history ready,

and then, still lamer, about whether Monmouthshire is in England

or Wales, silence fell again. The silence lengthened, assumed a

significance, a dignity that no common words might break.

Then Sir Richmond spoke. “I love, you,” he said, “with all my heart.”

Her soft voice came back after a stillness. “I love you,” she said,

“with all myself.”

“I had long ceased to hope,” said Sir Richmond, “that I should ever find

a friend... a lover... perfect companionship....”

They went on walking side by side, without touching each other or

turning to each other.

“All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive in me,” she

said....

“Cool and sweet,” said Sir Richmond. “Such happiness as I could not have

imagined.”

The light of a silent bicycle appeared above them up the hill and swept

down upon them, lit their two still faces brightly and passed.

“My dear,” she whispered in the darkness between the high hedges.

They stopped short and stood quite still, trembling. He saw her face,

dim and tender, looking up to his.

Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had desired in

his dream....

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat explanations

of why she had not followed them, and enlarged upon the moonlight effect

of the Abbey ruins from the inn lawn. But the scared congratulations

in her eyes betrayed her recognition that momentous things had happened

between the two.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

FULL MOON

Section 1

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of having found

such happiness as he could not have imagined. But when he awoke in the

night that happiness had evaporated. He awoke suddenly out of this love

dream that had lasted now for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of

astonishment and dismay.

He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had parted also

from that process of self-exploration that they had started together,

but now he awakened to find it established and in full activity in his

mind. Something or someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an

abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he thought he was

doing with Miss Grammont and whither he thought he was taking her, how

he proposed to reconcile the close relationship with her that he was now

embarked upon with, in the first place, his work upon and engagements

with the Fuel Commission, and, in the second place, Martin Leeds.

Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn’t come into the case at all. He had

done his utmost to keep Martin Leeds out of his head throughout the

development of this affair. Now in an unruly and determined way that was

extremely characteristic of her she seemed resolute to break in.

She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client but

without any hostility, of the claims of Miss Grammont to be let alone.

The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had maintained to himself that

he had not made love to Miss Grammont, that their mutual attraction had

been irresistible and had achieved its end in spite of their resolute

and complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind. He

admitted to himself that driven by a kind of instinctive necessity he

had led their conversation step by step to a realization and declaration

of love, and that it did not exonerate him in the least that Miss

Grammont had been quite ready and willing to help him and meet him half

way. She wanted love as a woman does, more than a man does, and he

had steadily presented himself as a man free to love, able to love and

loving.

“She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship, and you have

made her that tremendous promise. That was implicit in your embrace. And

how can you keep that promise?”

It was as if Martin spoke; it was her voice; it was the very quality of

her thought.

“You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be interrupted or

abandoned if you take her. Whatever is not mortgaged to your work is

mortgaged to me. For the strange thing in all this is that you and I

love one another--and have no power to do otherwise. In spite of all

this.

“You have nothing to give her but stolen goods,” said the shadow of

Martin. “You have nothing to give anyone personally any more....

“Think of the love that she desires and think of this love that you can

give....

“Is there any new thing in you that you can give her that you haven’t

given me? You and I know each other very well; perhaps I know YOU too

well. Haven’t you loved me as much as you can love anyone? Think of all

that there has been between us that you are ready now, eager now to set

aside and forget as though it had never been. For four days you have

kept me out of your mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known

I was there--for all you would not know. No one else will ever be so

intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled together, wept together,

jested happily and jested bitterly. You have spared me not at all.

Pitiless and cruel you have been to me. You have reckoned up all my

faults against me as though they were sins. You have treated me at times

unlovingly--never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes

treated me. And yet I have your love--as no other woman can ever have

it. Even now when you are wildly in love with this girl’s freshness and

boldness and cleverness I come into your mind by right and necessity.”

“She is different,” argued Sir Richmond.

“But you are the same,” said the shadow of Martin with Martin’s

unsparing return. “Your love has never been a steadfast thing. It comes

and goes like the wind. You are an extravagantly imperfect lover. But

I have learnt to accept you, as people accept the English weather....

Never in all your life have you loved, wholly, fully, steadfastly--as

people deserve to be loved--not your mother nor your father, not your

wife nor your children, nor me, nor our child, nor any living thing.

Pleasant to all of us at times--at times bitterly disappointing. You

do not even love this work of yours steadfastly, this work to which you

sacrifice us all in turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have

these moods and changes, that is why you have these lassitudes. So it is

you are made....

“And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so much

simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it--as you can do--and then

fail it, as you will do....”

Sir Richmond’s mind and body lay very still for a time.

“Should I fail her?...”

For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his mind.

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and unforeseeing

his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had been just a blind drive

to get hold of her and possess her....

Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence again.

“But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a perfect love,

my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy, its ruthless criticism?

Has the world ever seen a perfect lover yet? Isn’t it our imperfection

that brings us together in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all,

likely to get a more perfect love in all her life than this poor love of

mine? And isn’t it good for her that she should love?”

“Perfect love cherishes. Perfect love foregoes.”

Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the immediate

question. “Perfect love,” the phrase was his point of departure. Was

it true that he could not love passionately and completely? Was that

fundamentally what was the matter with him? Was that perhaps what was

the matter with the whole world of mankind? It had not yet come to

that power of loving which makes action full and simple and direct and

unhesitating. Man upon his planet has not grown up to love, is still an

eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent. He lacks the courage to

love and the wisdom to love. Love is here. But it comes and goes, it

is mixed with greeds and jealousies and cowardice and cowardly

reservations. One hears it only in snatches and single notes. It is like

something tuning up before the Music begins.... The metaphor altogether

ran away with Sir Richmond’s half dreaming mind. Some day perhaps all

life would go to music.

Love was music and power. If he had loved enough he need never have

drifted away from his wife. Love would have created love, would have

tolerated and taught and inspired. Where there is perfect love there

is neither greed nor impatience. He would have done his work calmly.

He would have won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and

quarrelling with it perpetually....

“Flimsy creatures,” he whispered. “Uncertain health. Uncertain

strength. A will that comes and goes. Moods of baseness. Moods of utter

beastliness.... Love like April sunshine. April?...”

He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high summer

sunshine, into a continuing music, of love. He thought of a world like

some great playhouse in which players and orchestra and audience all

co-operate in a noble production without dissent or conflict. He thought

he was the savage of thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great

world that is still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead. His effort to

see more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy pinnacles and

to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his dream and left him awake

again and wrestling with the problem of Miss Grammont.

Section 2

The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable. He had to release Miss

Grammont from the adventure into which he had drawn her. This decision

stood out stern-and inevitable in his mind with no conceivable

alternative.

As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its difficulty.

He was profoundly in love with her, he was still only learning how

deeply, and she was not going to play a merely passive part in this

affair. She was perhaps as deeply in love with him....

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He

could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it

to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion.

“To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me....

It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like

taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her.... It

would scar her with a second humiliation....”

Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow and contrive by some

sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to go from her suddenly? But a

mere sudden parting would not end things between them now unless he

went off abruptly without explanations or any arrangements for further

communications. At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit

but evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her father at

Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that Sir Richmond realized

that now it could not end in that fashion, that with the whisper of love

and the touching of lips, something had been started that would go on,

that would develop. To break off now and go away without a word would

leave a raw and torn end, would leave her perplexed and perhaps even

more humiliated with an aching mystery to distress her. “Why did he go?

Was it something I said?--something he found out or imagined?”

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this problem. She and

he had got into each other’s lives to stay: the real problem was

the terms upon which they were to stay in each other’s lives. Close

association had brought them to the point of being, in the completest

sense, lovers; that could not be; and the real problem was the

transmutation of their relationship to some form compatible with his

honour and her happiness. A word, an idea, from some recent reading

floated into Sir Richmond’s head. “Sublimate,” he whispered. “We have

to sublimate this affair. We have to put this relationship upon a Higher

Plane.”

His mind stopped short at that.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart. “God! How I

loathe the Higher Plane!....

“God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some poor little

kid who has to wear irons on its legs.”

“I WANT her.... Do you hear, Martin? I want her.”

As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and Miss

Grammont--Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out--traversing Europe and

Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit beach in the South Seas....

His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and fantastic

interruptions had not occurred.

“We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane--and keep it

there. We two love one another--that has to be admitted now. (I ought

never to have touched her. I ought never to have thought of touching

her.) But we two are too high, our aims and work and obligations are too

high for any ordinary love making. That sort of thing would embarrass

us, would spoil everything.

“Spoil everything,” he repeated, rather like a small boy who learns an

unpalatable lesson.

For a time Sir Richmond, exhausted by moral effort, lay staring at the

darkness.

“It has to be done. I believe I can carry her through with it if I can

carry myself. She’s a finer thing than I am.... On the whole I am glad

it’s only one more day. Belinda will be about.... Afterwards we can

write to each other.... If we can get over the next day it will be all

right. Then we can write about fuel and politics--and there won’t be

her voice and her presence. We shall really SUBLIMATE.... First class

idea--sublimate!.... And I will go back to dear old Martin who’s all

alone there and miserable; I’ll be kind to her and play my part and tell

her her Carbuncle scar rather becomes her.... And in a little while I

shall be altogether in love with her again.

“Queer what a brute I’ve always been to Martin.”

“Queer that Martin can come in a dream to me and take the upper hand

with me.

“Queer that NOW--I love Martin.”

He thought still more profoundly. “By the time the Committee meets again

I shall have been tremendously refreshed.”

He repeated:--“Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them there. Then

go back to Martin. And so to the work. That’s it....”

Nothing so pacifies the mind as a clear-cut purpose. Sir Richmond fell

asleep during the fourth recapitulation of this programme.

Section 3

When Miss Grammont appeared at breakfast Sir Richmond saw at once that

she too had had a restless night. When she came into the little long

breakfast room of the inn with its brown screens and its neat white

tables it seemed to him that the Miss Grammont of his nocturnal

speculations, the beautiful young lady who had to be protected and

managed and loved unselfishly, vanished like some exorcised intruder.

Instead was this real dear young woman, who had been completely

forgotten during the reign of her simulacrum and who now returned

completely remembered, familiar, friendly, intimate. She touched his

hand for a moment, she met his eyes with the shadow of a smile in her

own.

“Oranges!” said Belinda from the table by the window. “Beautiful

oranges.”

She had been preparing them, poor Trans-atlantic exile, after the

fashion in which grape fruits are prepared upon liners and in the

civilized world of the west. “He’s getting us tea spoons,” said Belinda,

as they sat down.

“This is realler England than ever,” she said. “I’ve been up an hour.

I found a little path down to the river bank. It’s the greenest morning

world and full of wild flowers. Look at these.”

“That’s lady’s smock,” said Sir Richmond. “It’s not really a flower;

it’s a quotation from Shakespeare.”

“And there are cowslips!”

“CUCKOO BUDS OF YELLOW HUE. DO PAINT THE MEADOWS WITH DELIGHT. All the

English flowers come out of Shakespeare. I don’t know what we did before

his time.”

The waiter arrived with the tea spoons for the oranges.

Belinda, having distributed these, resumed her discourse of enthusiasm

for England. She asked a score of questions about Gloucester and

Chepstow, the Severn and the Romans and the Welsh, and did not wait for

the answers. She did not want answers; she talked to keep things going.

Her talk masked a certain constraint that came upon her companions after

the first morning’s greetings were over.

Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin maps.

“To-day,” he said, “we will run back to Bath--from which it will be easy

for you to train to Falmouth. We will go by Monmouth and then turn back

through the Forest of Dean, where you will get glimpses of primitive

coal mines still worked by two men and a boy with a windlass and a pail.

Perhaps we will go through Cirencester. I don’t know. Perhaps it is

better to go straight to Bath. In the very heart of Bath you will

find yourselves in just the same world you visited at Pompeii. Bath is

Pompeii overlaid by Jane Austen’s England.”

He paused for a moment. “We can wire to your agents from here before we

start and we can pick up their reply at Gloucester or Nailsworth or even

Bath itself. So that if your father is nearer than we suppose--But I

think to-morrow afternoon will be soon enough for Falmouth, anyhow.”

He stopped interrogatively.

Miss Grammont’s face was white. “That will do very well,” she said.

Section 4.

They started, but presently they came to high banks that showed such

masses of bluebells, ragged Robin, great stitchwort and the like that

Belinda was not to be restrained. She clamoured to stop the car and go

up the bank and pick her hands full, and so they drew up by the roadside

and Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont sat down near the car while Belinda

carried her enthusiastic onslaught on the flowers up the steep bank and

presently out of earshot.

The two lovers said unheeded things about the flowers to each other

and then fell silent. Then Miss Grammont turned her head and seemed

deliberately to measure her companion’s distance. Evidently she judged

her out of earshot.

“Well,” said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. “We love one another.

Is that so still?”

“I could not love you more.”

“It wasn’t a dream?”

“No.”

“And to-morrow we part?”

He looked her in the eyes. “I have been thinking of that all night,” he

said at last.

“I too.”

“And you think--?”

“That we must part. Just as we arranged it when was it? Three days or

three ages ago? There is nothing else in the world to do except for us

to go our ways.... I love you. That means for a woman--It means that I

want to be with you. But that is impossible.... Don’t doubt whether I

love you because I say--impossible....”

Sir Richmond, faced with his own nocturnal decision, was now moved to

oppose it flatly. “Nothing that one can do is impossible.”

She glanced again at Belinda and bent down towards him. “Suppose,” she

said, “you got back into that car with me; suppose that instead of going

on as we have planned, you took me away. How much of us would go?”

“You would go,” said Sir Richmond, “and my heart.”

“And this work of yours? And your honour? For the honour of a man in

this New Age of yours will be first of all in the work he does for the

world. And you will leave your work to be just a lover. And the work

that I might do because of my father’s wealth; all that would vanish

too. We should leave all of that, all of our usefulness, all that

much of ourselves. But what has made me love you? Just your breadth of

vision, just the sense that you mattered. What has made you love me?

Just that I have understood the dream of your work. All that we should

have to leave behind. We should specialize, in our own scandal. We

should run away just for one thing. To think, by sharing the oldest,

simplest, dearest indulgences in the world, that we had got each other.

When really we had lost each other, lost all that mattered....”

Her face was flushed with the earnestness of her conviction. Her eyes

were bright with tears. “Don’t think I don’t love you. It’s so hard to

say all this. Somehow it seems like going back on something--something

supreme. Our instincts have got us.... Don’t think I’d hold myself from

you, dear. I’d give myself to you with both hands. I love you--When a

woman loves--I at any rate--she loves altogether. But this thing--I am

convinced--cannot be. I must go my own way, the way I have to go. My

father is the man, obstinate, more than half a savage. For me--I know

it--he has the jealousy of ten husbands. If you take me--If our secret

becomes manifest--If you are to take me and keep me, then his life and

your life will become wholly this Feud, nothing but this Feud. You have

to fight him anyhow--that is why I of all people must keep out of

the quarrel. For him, it would be an immense excitement, full of the

possibility of fierce satisfactions; for you, whether you won me or lost

me, it would be utter waste and ruin.”

She paused and then went on:--“And for me too, waste and ruin. I shall

be a woman fought over. I shall be fought over as dogs fight over a

bone. I shall sink back to the level of Helen of Troy. I shall cease to

be a free citizen, a responsible free person. Whether you win me or lose

me it will be waste and ruin for us both. Your Fuel Commission will go

to pieces, all the wide, enduring work you have set me dreaming about

will go the same way. We shall just be another romantic story.... No!”

Sir Richmond sat still, a little like a sullen child, she thought. “I

hate all this,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think of your father before,

and now I think of him it sets me bristling for a fight. It makes

all this harder to give up. And yet, do you know, in the night I was

thinking, I was coming to conclusions, very like yours. For quite other

reasons. I thought we ought not to--We have to keep friends anyhow and

hear of each other?”

“That goes without saying.”

“I thought we ought not to go on to be lovers in any way that Would

affect you, touch you too closely.... I was sorry--I had kissed you.”

“Not I. No. Don’t be sorry for that. I am glad we have fallen in love,

more glad than I have been of anything else in my life, and glad we have

spoken plainly.... Though we have to part. And--”

Her whisper came close to him. “For a whole day yet, all round the clock

twice, you and I have one another.”

Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within earshot.

“I don’t know the name of a single one of these flowers,” she cried,

“except the bluebells. Look at this great handful I’ve gotten!

Springtime in Italy doesn’t compare with it, not for a moment.”

Section 5

Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with her alert

interest in their emotions all too thinly and obviously veiled, it

seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont to talk not

of themselves but of Man and Woman and of that New Age according to the

prophet Martineau, which Sir Richmond had partly described and

mainly invented and ascribed to his departed friend. They talked

anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an absurd

pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the little car,

scarcely glancing at one another, but side by side and touching each

other, and all the while they were filled with tenderness and love and

hunger for one another.

In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in

the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has

left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and

cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those

nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than

an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile imaginations. That

brief journey in the west country had lit up phase after phase in the

long teaching and discipline of man as he had developed depth of memory

and fixity of purpose out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming

childhood of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient

wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now, and how, as

they had followed one another, man’s idea of woman and woman’s idea of

man had changed with them, until nowadays in the minds of civilized men

brute desire and possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost

completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free mutual

loyalty. “Overlaid,” he said. “The older passions are still there like

the fires in an engine.” He invented a saying for Dr. Martineau that the

Man in us to-day was still the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his

will, his wrath against the universe increased rather than diminished.

If to-day he ceases to crack his brother’s bones and rape and bully his

womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater game and means to

crack this world and feed upon its marrow and wrench their secrets from

the stars.

And furthermore it would seem that the prophet Martineau had declared

that in this New Age that was presently to dawn for mankind, jealousy

was to be disciplined even as we had disciplined lust and anger; instead

of ruling our law it was to be ruled by law and custom. No longer were

the jealousy of strange peoples, the jealousy of ownership and the

jealousy of sex to determine the framework of human life. There was to

be one peace and law throughout the world, one economic scheme and a

universal freedom for men and women to possess and give themselves.

“And how many generations yet must there be before we reach that

Utopia?” Miss Grammont asked.

“I wouldn’t put it at a very great distance.”

“But think of all the confusions of the world!”

“Confusions merely. The world is just a muddle of states and religions

and theories and stupidities. There are great lumps of disorderly

strength in it, but as a whole it is a weak world. It goes on by habit.

There’s no great idea in possession and the only possible great idea is

this one. The New Age may be nearer than we dare to suppose.”

“If I could believe that!”

“There are many more people think as we do than you suppose. Are you and

I such very strange and wonderful and exceptional people?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“And yet the New World is already completely established in our hearts.

What has been done in our minds can be done in most minds. In a little

while the muddled angry mind of Man upon his Planet will grow clear and

it will be this idea that will have made it clear. And then life will

be very different for everyone. That tyranny of disorder which oppresses

every life on earth now will be lifted. There will be less and less

insecurity, less and less irrational injustice. It will be a better

instructed and a better behaved world. We shall live at our ease, not

perpetually anxious, not resentful and angry. And that will alter all

the rules of love. Then we shall think more of the loveliness of other

people because it will no longer be necessary to think so much of the

dangers and weaknesses and pitifulliesses of other people. We shall not

have to think of those who depend upon us for happiness and selfrespect.

We shall not have to choose between a wasteful fight for a personal end

or the surrender of our heart’s desire.”

“Heart’s desire,” she whispered. “Am I indeed your heart’s desire?”

Sir Richmond sank his head and voice in response.

“You are the best of all things. And I have to let you go.”

Sir Richmond suddenly remembered Miss Seyffert and half turned his face

towards her. Her forehead was just visible over the hood of the open

coupe. She appeared to be intelligently intent upon the scenery. Then he

broke out suddenly into a tirade against the world. “But I am bored

by this jostling unreasonable world. At the bottom of my heart I am

bitterly resentful to-day. This is a world of fools and brutes in which

we live, a world of idiotic traditions, imbecile limitations, cowardice,

habit, greed and mean cruelty. It is a slum of a world, a congested

district, an insanitary jumble of souls and bodies. Every good thing,

every sweet desire is thwarted--every one. I have to lead the life of a

slum missionary, a sanitary inspector, an underpaid teacher. I am bored.

Oh God! how I am bored! I am bored by our laws and customs. I am bored

by our rotten empire and its empty monarchy. I am bored by its parades

and its flags and its sham enthusiasms. I am bored by London and its

life, by its smart life and by its servile life alike. I am bored

by theatres and by books and by every sort of thing that people call

pleasure. I am bored by the brag of people and the claims of people and

the feelings of people. Damn people! I am bored by profiteers and by the

snatching they call business enterprise. Damn every business man! I am

bored by politics and the universal mismanagement of everything. I am

bored by France, by Anglo-Saxondom, by German self-pity, by Bolshevik

fanaticism. I am bored by these fools’ squabbles that devastate the

world. I am bored by Ireland, Orange and Green. Curse the Irish--north

and south together! Lord! how I HATE the Irish from Carson to the last

Sinn Feiner! And I am bored by India and by Egypt. I am bored by Poland

and by Islam. I am bored by anyone who professes to have rights. Damn

their rights! Curse their rights! I am bored to death by this year and

by last year and by the prospect of next year. I am bored--I am horribly

bored--by my work. I am bored by every sort of renunciation. I want to

live with the woman I love and I want to work within the limits of my

capacity. Curse all Hullo! Damn his eyes!--Steady, ah! The spark!...

Good! No skid.”

He had come round a corner at five and twenty miles an hour and had

stopped his spark and pulled up neatly within a yard of the fore-wheel

of a waggon that was turning in the road so as to block the way

completely.

“That almost had me....

“And now you feel better?” said Miss Grammont.

“Ever so much,” said Sir Richmond and chuckled.

The waggoner cleared the road and the car started up again.

For a minute or so neither spoke.

“You ought to be smacked hard for that outbreak,--my dear,” said Miss

Grammont.

“I ought--MY dear. I have no right to be ill-tempered. We two are

among the supremely fortunate ones of our time. We have no excuse for

misbehaviour. Got nothing to grumble at. Always I am lucky. THAT--with

the waggon--was a very near thing. God spoils us.

“We two,” he went on, after a pause, “are among the most fortunate

people alive. We are both rich and easily rich. That gives us freedoms

few people have. We have a vision of the whole world in which we live.

It’s in a mess--but that is by the way. The mass of mankind never gets

enough education to have even a glimpse of the world as a whole. They

never get a chance to get the hang of it. It is really possible for us

to do things that will matter in the world. All our time is our own;

all our abilities we are free to use. Most people, most intelligent and

educated people, are caught in cages of pecuniary necessity; they

are tied to tasks they can’t leave, they are driven and compelled and

limited by circumstances they can never master. But we, if we have

tasks, have tasks of our own choosing. We may not like the world, but

anyhow we are free to do our best to alter it. If I were a clerk in

Hoxton and you were a city typist, then we MIGHT swear.”

“It was you who swore,” smiled Miss Grammont.

“It’s the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city typist who

really keep me at my work. Any smacking ought to come from them.

I couldn’t do less than I do in the face of their helplessness.

Nevertheless a day will come--through what we do and what we refrain

from doing when there will be no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and

no captive typists in the city. And nobody at all to consider.”

“According to the prophet Martineau,” said Miss Grammont.

“And then you and I must contrive to be born again.”

“Heighho!” cried Miss Grammont. “A thousand years ahead! When fathers

are civilized. When all these phanton people who intervene on your

side--no! I don’t want to know anything about them, but I know of them

by instinct--when they also don’t matter.”

“Then you and I can have things out with each other--THOROUGHLY,” said

Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in his voice, charging the

little hill before him as though he charged at Time.

Section 6

They had to wait at Nailsworth for a telegram from Mr. Grammont’s

agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in the afternoon. They

came into the town through unattractive and unworthy outskirts, and only

realized the charm of the place after they had garaged their car at the

Pulteney Hotel and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon

with the Pump Room and the Roman Baths. The Pulteney they found hung

with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an astonishing extent; some

former proprietor must have had a mania for replicas and the place is

eventful with white marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and

Queen Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of Rome,

Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy,

amidst which splendours a competent staff administers modern comforts

with an old-fashioned civility. But round and about the Pulteney one

has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical

terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and

Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of

“presents from Bath”; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine

array of the original Bath chairs.

Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of

the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the

Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek. And they

considered a little doubtfully the seventeenth century statue of Bladud,

who is said to have been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded

the city in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred

years before the Romans came.

In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont

and was very enthusiastic about everything, but in the evening after

dinner it was clear that her role was to remain in the hotel. Sir

Richmond and Miss Grammont went out into the moonlit gloaming; they

crossed the bridge again and followed the road beside the river towards

the old Abbey Church, that Lantern of the West. Away in some sunken

gardens ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little lights

about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down below dancing on the

grass. These little lights, these bobbing black heads and the lilting

music, this little inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy

illumination, made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast

and cool and silent. Our visitors began to realize that Bath could

be very beautiful. They went to the parapet above the river and stood

there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and smoking cigarettes. Miss

Grammont was moved to declare the Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch,

its effect of height over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses

above, more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. Down below was

a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along the foaming

weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against the rush of the water

lower down the stream.

“Dear England!” said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious spectacle.

“How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly things!”

“It is the home we come from.”

“You belong to it still.”

“No more than you do. I belong to a big overworking modern place called

London which stretches its tentacles all over the world. I am as much a

home-coming tourist as you are. Most of this western country I am seeing

for the first time.”

She said nothing for a space. “I’ve not a word to say to-night,” she

said. “I’m just full of a sort of animal satisfaction in being close to

you.... And in being with you among lovely things.... Somewhere--Before

we part to-night--....”

“Yes?” he said to her pause, and his face came very near to hers.

“I want you to kiss me.”

“Yes,” he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely aware of

the promenaders passing close to them.

“It’s a promise?”

“Yes.”

Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and gripped it

and pressed it. “My dear!” he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable

of expressions. It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their

Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and

work girls who made the darkling populous about them with their silent

interchanges.

“There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,” she said.

“After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to think of them. But

now--every rational thing seems dissolved in this moonlight....”

Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual dignity of

their relationship.

“I suppose I ought to be more concerned tonight about the work I have to

do in the world and anxious for you to tell me this and that, but indeed

I am not concerned at all about it. I seem to have it in outline all

perfectly clear. I mean to play a man’s part in the world just as

my father wants me to do. I mean to win his confidence and work with

him--like a partner. Then some day I shall be a power in the world of

fuel. And at the same time I must watch and read and think and learn

how to be the servant of the world.... We two have to live like trusted

servants who have been made guardians of a helpless minor. We have

to put things in order and keep them in order against the time when

Man--Man whom we call in America the Common Man--can take hold of his

world--”

“And release his servants,” said Sir Richmond.

“All that is perfectly clear in my mind. That is what I am going to live

for; that is what I have to do.”

She stopped abruptly. “All that is about as interesting to-night--in

comparison with the touch of your dear fingers--as next month’s railway

time-table.”

But later she found a topic that could hold their attention for a time.

“We have never said a word about religion,” she said.

Sir Richmond paused for a moment. “I am a godless man,” he said. “The

stars and space and time overwhelm my imagination. I cannot imagine

anything above or beyond them.”

She thought that over. “But there are divine things,” she said.

“YOU are divine.... I’m not talking lovers’ nonsense,” he hastened to

add. “I mean that there is something about human beings--not just the

everyday stuff of them, but something that appears intermittently--as

though a light shone through something translucent. If I believe in any

divinity at all it is a divinity revealed to me by other people--And

even by myself in my own heart.

“I’m never surprised at the badness of human beings,” said Sir Richmond;

“seeing how they have come about and what they are; but I have been

surprised time after time by fine things.... Often in people I disliked

or thought little of.... I can understand that I find you full of divine

quality, because I am in love with you and all alive to you. Necessarily

I keep on discovering loveliness in you. But I have seen divine things

in dear old Martineau, for example. A vain man, fussy, timid--and yet

filled with a passion for truth, ready to make great sacrifices and to

toil tremendously for that. And in those men I am always cursing,

my Committee, it is astonishing at times to discover what streaks of

goodness even the really bad men can show.... But one can’t make use

of just anyone’s divinity. I can see the divinity in Martineau but it

leaves me cold. He tired me and bored me.... But I live on you. It’s

only through love that the God can reach over from one human being to

another. All real love is a divine thing, a reassurance, a release of

courage. It is wonderful enough that we should take food and drink and

turn them into imagination, invention and creative energy; it is still

more wonderful that we should take an animal urging and turn it into a

light to discover beauty and an impulse towards the utmost achievements

of which we are capable. All love is a sacrament and all lovers are

priests to each other. You and I--”

Sir Richmond broke off abruptly. “I spent three days trying to tell this

to Dr. Martineau. But he wasn’t the priest I had to confess to and the

words wouldn’t come. I can confess it to you readily enough....”

“I cannot tell,” said Miss Grammont, “whether this is the last wisdom in

life or moonshine. I cannot tell whether I am thinking or feeling; but

the noise of the water going over the weir below is like the stir in

my heart. And I am swimming in love and happiness. Am I awake or am I

dreaming you, and are we dreaming one another? Hold my hand--hold it

hard and tight. I’m trembling with love for you and all the world.... If

I say more I shall be weeping.”

For a long time they stood side by side saying not a word to one

another.

Presently the band down below and the dancing ceased and the little

lights were extinguished. The silent moon seemed to grow brighter and

larger and the whisper of the waters louder. A crowd of young people

flowed out of the gardens and passed by on their way home. Sir Richmond

and Miss Grammont strolled through the dispersing crowd and over the

Toll Bridge and went exploring down a little staircase that went down

from the end of the bridge to the dark river, and then came back to

their old position at the parapet looking upon the weir and the Pulteney

Bridge. The gardens that had been so gay were already dark and silent as

they returned, and the streets echoed emptily to the few people who were

still abroad.

“It’s the most beautiful bridge in the world,” said Miss Grammont, and

gave him her hand again.

Some deep-toned clock close by proclaimed the hour eleven.

The silence healed again.

“Well?” said Sir Richmond.

“Well?” said Miss Grammont smiling very faintly.

“I suppose we must go out of all this beauty now, back to the lights of

the hotel and the watchful eyes of your dragon.”

“She has not been a very exacting dragon so far, has she?”

“She is a miracle of tact.”

“She does not really watch. But she is curious--and very sympathetic.”

“She is wonderful.”....

“That man is still fishing,” said Miss Grammont.

For a time she peered down at the dark figure wading in the foam below

as though it was the only thing of interest in the world. Then she

turned to Sir Richmond.

“I would trust Belinda with my life,” she said. “And anyhow--now--we need

not worry about Belinda.”

Section 7

At the breakfast table it was Belinda who was the most nervous of the

three, the most moved, the most disposed to throw a sacramental air over

their last meal together. Her companions had passed beyond the idea of

separation; it was as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the

high dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they had

become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers; they seemed

sure of one another and with a new pride in their bearing. It would have

pleased Belinda better, seeing how soon they were to be torn apart, if

they had not made quite such excellent breakfasts. She even suspected

them of having slept well. Yet yesterday they had been deeply stirred.

They had stayed out late last night, so late that she had not heard them

come in. Perhaps then they had passed the climax of their emotions. Sir

Richmond, she learnt, was to take the party to Exeter, where there would

be a train for Falmouth a little after two. If they started from Bath

about nine that would give them an ample margin of time in which to deal

with a puncture or any such misadventure.

They crested the Mendips above Shepton Mallet, ran through Tilchester

and Ilminster into the lovely hill country about Up-Ottery and so

to Honiton and the broad level road to Exeter. Sir Richmond and Miss

Grammont were in a state of happy gravity; they sat contentedly side by

side, talking very little. They had already made their arrangements for

writing to one another. There was to be no stream of love-letters or

protestations. That might prove a mutual torment. Their love was to be

implicit. They were to write at intervals about political matters

and their common interests, and to keep each other informed of their

movements about the world.

“We shall be working together,” she said, speaking suddenly out of a

train of thought she had been following, “we shall be closer together

than many a couple who have never spent a day apart for twenty years.”

Then presently she said: “In the New Age all lovers will have to be

accustomed to meeting and parting. We women will not be tied very much

by domestic needs. Unless we see fit to have children. We shall be going

about our business like men; we shall have world-wide businesses--many

of us--just as men will....

“It will be a world full of lovers’ meetings.”

“Some day--somewhere--we two will certainly meet again.”

“Even you have to force circumstances a little,” said Sir Richmond.

“We shall meet,” she said, “without doing that.”

“But where?” he asked unanswered....

“Meetings and partings,” she said. “Women will be used to seeing their

lovers go away. Even to seeing them go away to other women who have

borne them children and who have a closer claim on them.”

“No one--” began Sir Richmond, startled.

“But I don’t mind very much. It’s how things are. If I were a perfectly

civilized woman I shouldn’t mind at all. If men and women are not to be

tied to each other there must needs be such things as this.”

“But you,” said Sir Richmond. “I at any rate am not like that. I cannot

bear the thought that YOU--”

“You need not bear it, my dear. I was just trying to imagine this world

that is to be. Women I think are different from men in their jealousy.

Men are jealous of the other man; women are jealous for their man--and

careless about the other woman. What I love in you I am sure about. My

mind was empty when it came to you and now it is full to overflowing. I

shall feel you moving about in the same world with me. I’m not likely to

think of anyone else for a very long time.... Later on, who knows? I may

marry. I make no vows. But I think until I know certainly that you do

not want me any more it will be impossible for me to marry or to have a

lover. I don’t know, but that is how I believe it will be with me. And

my mind feels beautifully clear now and settled. I’ve got your idea and

made it my own, your idea that we matter scarcely at all, but that the

work we do matters supremely. I’ll find my rope and tug it, never fear.

Half way round the world perhaps some day you will feel me tugging.”

“I shall feel you’re there,” he said, “whether you tug or not....”

“Three miles left to Exeter,” he reported presently.

She glanced back at Belinda.

“It is good that we have loved, my dear,” she whispered. “Say it is

good.”

“The best thing in all my life,” he said, and lowered his head and voice

to say: “My dearest dear.”

“Heart’s desire--still--?”

“Heart’s delight.... Priestess of life.... Divinity.”

She smiled and nodded and suddenly Belinda, up above their lowered

heads, accidentally and irrelevantly, no doubt, coughed.

At Exeter Station there was not very much time to spare after all.

Hardly had Sir Richmond secured a luncheon basket for the two travellers

before the train came into the station. He parted from Miss Grammont

with a hand clasp. Belinda was flushed and distressed at the last

but her friend was quiet and still. “Au revoir,” said Belinda without

conviction when Sir Richmond shook her hand.

Section 8.

Sir Richmond stood quite still on the platform as the train ran out of

the station. He did not move until it had disappeared round the bend.

Then he turned, lost in a brown study, and walked very slowly towards

the station exit.

“The most wonderful thing in my life,” he thought. “And already--it is

unreal.

“She will go on to her father whom she knows ten thousand times more

thoroughly than she knows me; she will go on to Paris, she will pick up

all the threads of her old story, be reminded of endless things in her

life, but never except in the most casual way of these days: they will

be cut off from everything else that will serve to keep them real; and

as for me--this connects with nothing else in my life at all.... It is

as disconnected as a dream.... Already it is hardly more substantial

than a dream....

“We shall write letters. Do letters breathe faster or slower as you read

them?

“We may meet.

“Where are we likely to meet again?... I never realized before how

improbable it is that we shall meet again. And if we meet?...

“Never in all our lives shall we be really TOGETHER again. It’s

over--With a completeness....

“Like death.”

He came opposite the bookstalls and stopped short and stared with

unseeing eyes at the display of popular literature. He was wondering now

whether after all he ought to have let her go. He experienced something

of the blank amazement of a child who has burst its toy balloon. His

golden globe of satisfaction in an instant had gone. An irrational sense

of loss was flooding every other feeling about V.V. If she had loved him

truly and altogether could she have left him like this? Neither of them

surely had intended so complete a separation. He wanted to go back and

recall that train.

A few seconds more, he realized, and he would give way to anger.

Whatever happened that must not happen. He pulled himself together. What

was it he had to do now? He had not to be angry, he had not even to be

sorry. They had done the right thing. Outside the station his car was

waiting.

He went outside the station and stared at his car. He had to go

somewhere. Of course! down into Cornwall to Martin’s cottage. He had to

go down to her and be kind and comforting about that carbuncle. To

be kind?... If this thwarted feeling broke out into anger he might be

tempted to take it out of Martin. That at any rate he must not do. He

had always for some inexplicable cause treated Martin badly. Nagged her

and blamed her and threatened her. That must stop now. No shadow of this

affair must lie on Martin.... And Martin must never have a suspicion of

any of this....

The image of Martin became very vivid in his mind. He thought of her as

he had seen her many times, with the tears close, fighting with her back

to the wall, with all her wit and vigour gone, because she loved him

more steadfastly than he did her. Whatever happened he must not take it

out of Martin. It was astonishing how real she had become now--as V.V.

became a dream. Yes, Martin was astonishingly real. And if only he could

go now and talk to Martin--and face all the facts of life with her, even

as he had done with that phantom Martin in his dream....

But things were not like that.

He looked to see if his car was short of water or petrol; both needed

replenishing, and so he would have to go up the hill into Exeter town

again. He got into his car and sat with his fingers on the electric

starter.

Martin! Old Friend! Eight days were still left before the Committee met

again, eight days for golden kindness. He would distress Martin by no

clumsy confession. He would just make her happy as she loved to be made

happy.... Nevertheless. Nevertheless....

Was it Martin who failed him or he who failed Martin?

Incessant and insoluble dispute. Well, the thing now was to go to

Martin.... And then the work!

He laughed suddenly.

“I’ll take it out of the damned Commission. I’ll make old Rumford Brown

sit up.”

He was astonished to find himself thinking of the affairs of the

Commission with a lively interest and no trace of fatigue. He had

had his change; he had taken his rest; he was equal to his task again

already. He started his engine and steered his way past a van and a

waiting cab.

“Fuel,” he said.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY

Section 1

The Majority and Minority Reports of the Fuel Commission were received

on their first publication with much heat and disputation, but there is

already a fairly general agreement that they are great and significant

documents, broadly conceived and historically important. They do lift

the questions of fuel supply and distribution high above the level of

parochial jealousies and above the petty and destructive profiteering of

private owners and traders, to a view of a general human welfare. They

form an important link in a series of private and public documents

that are slowly opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods

conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may yet arrest

the drift of our western civilization towards financial and commercial

squalor and the social collapse that must ensue inevitably on that.

In view of the composition of the Committee, the Majority Report is in

itself an amazing triumph of Sir Richmond’s views; it is astonishing

that he was able to drive his opponents so far and then leave them there

securely advanced while he carried on the adherents he had altogether

won, including, of course, the labour representatives, to the further

altitudes of the Minority Report.

After the Summer recess the Majority Report was discussed and adopted.

Sir Richmond had shown signs of flagging energy in June, but he had

come back in September in a state of exceptional vigour; for a time

he completely dominated the Committee by the passionate force of his

convictions and the illuminating scorn he brought to bear on the various

subterfuges and weakening amendments by which the meaner interests

sought to save themselves in whole or in part from the common duty of

sacrifice. But toward the end he fell ill. He had worked to the pitch of

exhaustion. He neglected a cold that settled on his chest. He began to

cough persistently and betray an increasingly irritable temper. In the

last fights in the Committee his face was bright with fever and he spoke

in a voiceless whisper, often a vast angry whisper. His place at table

was marked with scattered lozenges and scraps of paper torn to the

minutest shreds. Such good manners as had hitherto mitigated his

behaviour on the Committee departed from him, He carried his last

points, gesticulating and coughing and wheezing rather than speaking.

But he had so hammered his ideas into the Committee that they took the

effect of what he was trying to say.

He died of pneumonia at his own house three days after the passing of

the Majority Report. The Minority Report, his own especial creation, he

never signed. It was completed by Wast and Carmichael....

After their parting at Salisbury station Dr. Martineau heard very

little of Sir Richmond for a time except through the newspapers, which

contained frequent allusions to the Committee. Someone told him that Sir

Richmond had been staying at Ruan in Cornwall where Martin Leeds had a

cottage, and someone else had met him at Bath on his way, he said,

in his car from Cornwall to a conference with Sir Peter Davies in

Glamorganshire.

But in the interim Dr. Martineau had the pleasure of meeting Lady Hardy

at a luncheon party. He was seated next to her and he found her a very

pleasing and sympathetic person indeed. She talked to him freely and

simply of her husband and of the journey the two men had taken together.

Either she knew nothing of the circumstances of their parting or if she

did she did not betray her knowledge. “That holiday did him a world of

good,” she said. “He came back to his work like a giant. I feel very

grateful to you.”

Dr. Martineau said it was a pleasure to have helped Sir Richmond’s work

in any way. He believed in him thoroughly. Sir Richmond was inspired by

great modern creative ideas.

“Forgive me if I keep you talking about him,” said Lady Hardy. “I wish I

could feel as sure that I had been of use to him.”

Dr. Martineau insisted. “I know very well that you are.”

“I do what I can to help him carry his enormous burthen of toil,” she

said. “I try to smooth his path. But he is a strange silent creature at

times.”

Her eyes scrutinized the doctor’s face.

It was not the doctor’s business to supplement Sir Richmond’s silences.

Yet he wished to meet the requirements of this lady if he could. “He is

one of those men,” he said, “who are driven by forces they do not fully

understand. A man of genius.”

“Yes,” she said in an undertone of intimacy. “Genius.... A great

irresponsible genius.... Difficult to help.... I wish I could do more

for him.”

A very sweet and charming lady. It was with great regret that the doctor

found the time had come to turn to his left-hand neighbour.

Section 2

It was with some surprise that Dr. Martineau received a fresh appeal

for aid from Sir Richmond. It was late in October and Sir Richmond was

already seriously ill. But he was still going about his business as

though he was perfectly well. He had not mistaken his man. Dr. Martineau

received him as though there had never been a shadow of offence between

them.

He came straight to the point. “Martineau,” he said, “I must have those

drugs I asked you for when first I came to you now. I must be bolstered

up. I can’t last out unless I am. I’m at the end of my energy. I come to

you because you will understand. The Commission can’t go on now for more

than another three weeks. Whatever happens afterwards I must keep going

until then.”

The doctor did understand. He made no vain objections. He did what he

could to patch up his friend for his last struggles with the opposition

in the Committee. “Pro forma,” he said, stethoscope in hand, “I must

order you to bed. You won’t go. But I order you. You must know that

what you are doing is risking your life. Your lungs are congested,

the bronchial tubes already. That may spread at any time. If this open

weather lasts you may go about and still pull through. But at any time

this may pass into pneumonia. And there’s not much in you just now to

stand up against pneumonia....”

“I’ll take all reasonable care.”

“Is your wife at home!”

“She is in Wales with her people. But the household is well trained. I

can manage.”

“Go in a closed car from door to door. Wrap up like a mummy. I wish

the Committee room wasn’t down those abominable House of Commons

corridors....”

They parted with an affectionate handshake.

Section 3

Death approved of Sir Richmond’s determination to see the Committee

through. Our universal creditor gave this particular debtor grace to the

very last meeting. Then he brushed a gust of chilly rain across the face

of Sir Richmond as he stood waiting for his car outside the strangers’

entrance to the House. For a couple of days Sir Richmond felt almost

intolerably tired, but scarcely noted the changed timbre of the wheezy

notes in his throat. He rose later each day and with ebbing vigour,

jotted down notes and corrections upon the proofs of the Minority

Report. He found it increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would

correct and alter back and then repeat the correction, perhaps half a

dozen times. On the evening of the second day his lungs became painful

and his breathing difficult. His head ached and a sense of some great

impending evil came upon him. His skin was suddenly a detestable garment

to wear. He took his temperature with a little clinical thermometer he

kept by him and found it was a hundred and one. He telephoned hastily

for Dr. Martineau and without waiting for his arrival took a hot bath

and got into bed. He was already thoroughly ill when the doctor arrived.

“Forgive my sending for you,” he said. “Not your line. I know.... My

wife’s G.P.--an exasperating sort of ass. Can’t stand him. No one else.”

He was lying on a narrow little bed with a hard pillow that the doctor

replaced by one from Lady Hardy’s room. He had twisted the bed-clothes

into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was on the floor.

Sir Richmond’s bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep seemed to

have been an admitted necessity rather than a principal purpose. On one

hand it opened into a business-like dressing and bath room, on the other

into the day study. It bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who

had long lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated

hours and habits. There was a desk and reading lamp for night work near

the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at night, a silver

biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely intent industry of the

small hours. There was a bookcase of bluebooks, books of reference and

suchlike material, and some files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged

photograph of Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was

littered with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir

Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty retreat to bed.

And lying among the proofs, as though it had been taken out and looked

at quite recently was the photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr.

Martineau’s mind hung in doubt and then he knew it for the young

American of Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And

now it was not his business to know.

These various observations printed themselves on Dr. Martineau’s mind

after his first cursory examination of his patient and while he cast

about for anything that would give this large industrious apartment a

little more of the restfulness and comfort of a sick room. “I must

get in a night nurse at once,” he said. “We must find a small table

somewhere to put near the bed.

“I am afraid you are very ill,” he said, returning to the bedside. “This

is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will you let me call in another

man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to consult?”

“I’m in your hands, said Sir Richmond. I want to pull through.”

“He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for the

case--and everything.”

The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of nurse hard on

his heels. Sir Richmond submitted almost silently to his expert handling

and was sounded and looked to and listened at.

“H’m,” said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir Richmond:

“We’ve got to take care of you.

“There’s a lot about this I don’t like,” said the second doctor and

drew Dr. Martineau by the arm towards the study. For a moment or so Sir

Richmond listened to the low murmur of their voices, but he did not feel

very deeply interested in what they were saying. He began to think what

a decent chap Dr. Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his

professional training had made him, how completely he had ignored the

smothered incivilities of their parting at Salisbury. All men ought

to have some such training, Not a bad idea to put every boy and girl

through a year or so of hospital service.... Sir Richmond must have

dozed, for his next perception was of Dr. Martineau standing over him

and saying “I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill indeed.

Much more so than I thought you were at first.”

Sir Richmond’s raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this fact.

“I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for.”

Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.

“Don’t want her about,” he said, and after a pause, “Don’t want anybody

about.”

“But if anything happens-?”

“Send then.”

An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond’s face. He

seemed to regard the matter as settled. He closed his eyes.

For a time Dr. Martineau desisted. He went to the window and turned to

look again at the impassive figure on the bed. Did Sir Richmond fully

understand? He made a step towards his patient and hesitated. Then he

brought a chair and sat down at the bedside.

Sir Richmond opened his eyes and regarded him with a slight frown.

“A case of pneumonia,” said the doctor, “after great exertion and

fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected turns.”

Sir Richmond, cheek on pillow, seemed to assent.

“I think if you want to be sure that Lady Hardy sees you again--... If

you don’t want to take risks about that--... One never knows in these

cases. Probably there is a night train.”

Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning. But he stuck to his

point. His voice was faint but firm. “Couldn’t make up anything to say

to her. Anything she’d like.”

Dr. Martineau rested on that for a little while. Then he said: “If there

is anyone else?”

“Not possible,” said Sir Richmond, with his eyes on the ceiling.

“But to see?”

Sir Richmond turned his head to Dr. Martineau. His face puckered like

a peevish child’s. “They’d want things said to them...Things to

remember...I CAN’T. I’m tired out.”

“Don’t trouble,” whispered Dr. Martineau, suddenly remorseful.

But Sir Richmond was also remorseful. “Give them my love,” he said.

“Best love...Old Martin. Love.”

Dr. Martineau was turning away when Sir Richmond spoke again in a

whisper. “Best love...Poor at the best....” He dozed for a time. Then he

made a great effort. “I can’t see them, Martineau, until I’ve something

to say. It’s like that. Perhaps I shall think of some kind things to

say--after a sleep. But if they came now...I’d say something wrong.

Be cross perhaps. Hurt someone. I’ve hurt so many. People

exaggerate...People exaggerate--importance these occasions.”

“Yes, yes,” whispered Dr. Martineau. “I quite understand.”

Section 4

For a time Sir Richmond dozed. Then he stirred and muttered. “Second

rate... Poor at the best... Love... Work. All...”

“It had been splendid work,” said Dr. Martineau, and was not sure that

Sir Richmond heard.

“Those last few days... lost my grip... Always lose my damned grip.

“Ragged them.... Put their backs up....Silly....

“Never.... Never done anything--WELL....

“It’s done. Done. Well or ill....

“Done.”

His voice sank to the faintest whisper. “Done for ever and ever... and

ever... and ever.”

Again he seemed to doze.

Dr. Martineau stood up softly. Something beyond reason told him that

this was certainly a dying man. He was reluctant to go and he had an

absurd desire that someone, someone for whom Sir Richmond cared, should

come and say good-bye to him, and for Sir Richmond to say good-bye to

someone. He hated this lonely launching from the shores of life of

one who had sought intimacy so persistently and vainly. It was

extraordinary--he saw it now for the first time--he loved this man. If

it had been in his power, he would at that moment have anointed him with

kindness.

The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy writing desk,

littered like a recent battlefield. The photograph of the American girl

drew his eyes. What had happened? Was there not perhaps some word for

her? He turned about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir

Richmond’s eyes open and regarding him. In them he saw an expression he

had seen there once or twice before, a faint but excessively irritating

gleam of amusement.

“Oh!--WELL!” said Dr. Martineau and turned away. He went to the window

and stared out as his habit was.

Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor’s back until his

eyes closed again.

It was their last exchange. Sir Richmond died that night in the small

hours, so quietly that for some time the night nurse did not observe

what had happened. She was indeed roused to that realization by the

ringing of the telephone bell in the adjacent study.

Section 5

For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake unable to sleep.

He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond lying on his uncomfortable

little bed in his big bedroom and by the curious effect of loneliness

produced by the nocturnal desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir

Richmond of any death-bed partings. He realized how much this man, who

had once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back upon

himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely he had taken

counsel with anyone in his later years. His mind now dwelt apart. Even

if people came about him he would still be facing death alone.

And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might slip

out of a crowded assembly, unobserved. Even now he might be going. The

doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had talked of the rage of life

in a young baby, how we drove into life in a sort of fury, how that rage

impelled us to do this and that, how we fought and struggled until the

rage spent itself and was gone. That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond

was now perhaps very near its end. Presently it would fade and cease,

and the stream that had made it and borne it would know it no more.

Dr. Martineau’s thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture land of

dreams. He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as it were away from

him along a narrow path, a path that followed the crest of a ridge,

between great darknesses, enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and

below. He was going along this path without looking back, without a

thought for those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him

on his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him walking,

without haste or avidity, walking as a man might along some great

picture gallery with which he was perhaps even over familiar. His hands

would be in his pockets, his indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him.

And as he strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him. His

figure became dim and dimmer.

Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide the

beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just dissolve that

figure into itself?

Was that indeed the end?

Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can neither

imagine nor disbelieve in immortality. Dimmer and dimmer grew the figure

but still it remained visible. As one can continue to see a star at dawn

until one turns away. Or one blinks or nods and it is gone.

Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless

generations. Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so clearly,

faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic peoples believed

from Avebury to Polynesia? Not always have we had to go alone and

unprepared into uncharted darknesses. For a time the dream artist used a

palette of the doctor’s vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a

new roll of the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been

looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked figure,

crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific monsters, ferrying

a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the scales of judgment before the

very throne of Osiris and stood waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed

his conscience and that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead,

crouched ready if the judgment went against him. The doctor’s attention

concentrated upon the scales. A memory of Swedengorg’s Heaven and Hell

mingled with the Egyptian fantasy. Now at last it was possible to know

something real about this man’s soul, now at last one could look into

the Secret Places of his Heart. Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis

head, were reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it

to the supreme judge.

Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams. His anxiety to

plead for his friend had brought him in. He too had become a little

painted figure and he was bearing a book in his hand. He wanted to show

that the laws of the new world could not be the same as those of the

old, and the book he was bringing as evidence was his own Psychology of

a New Age.

The clear thought of that book broke up his dream by releasing a train

of waking troubles.... You have been six months on Chapter Ten; will it

ever be ready for Osiris?... will it ever be ready for print?...

Dream and waking thoughts were mingled like sky and cloud upon a windy

day in April. Suddenly he saw again that lonely figure on the narrow way

with darknesses above and darknesses below and darknesses on every hand.

But this time it was not Sir Richmond.... Who was it? Surely it was

Everyman. Everyman had to travel at last along that selfsame road,

leaving love, leaving every task and every desire. But was it

Everyman?... A great fear and horror came upon the doctor. That little

figure was himself! And the book which was his particular task in life

was still undone. He himself stood in his turn upon that lonely path

with the engulfing darknesses about him....

He seemed to wrench himself awake.

He lay very still for some moments and then he sat up in bed. An

overwhelming conviction had arisen--in his mind that Sir Richmond was

dead. He felt he must know for certain. He switched on his electric

light, mutely interrogated his round face reflected in the looking

glass, got out of bed, shuffled on his slippers and went along the

passage to the telephone. He hesitated for some seconds and then lifted

the receiver. It was his call which aroused the nurse to the fact of Sir

Richmond’s death.

Section 6

Lady Hardy arrived home in response to Dr. Martineau’s telegram late

on the following evening. He was with her next morning, comforting

and sympathetic. Her big blue eyes, bright with tears, met his very

wistfully; her little body seemed very small and pathetic in its simple

black dress. And yet there was a sort of bravery about her. When he came

into the drawing-room she was in one of the window recesses talking to

a serious-looking woman of the dressmaker type. She left her business at

once to come to him. “Why did I not know in time?” she cried.

“No one, dear lady, had any idea until late last night,” he said, taking

both her hands in his for a long friendly sympathetic pressure.

“I might have known that if it had been possible you would have told

me,” she said.

“You know,” she added, “I don’t believe it yet. I don’t realize it. I go

about these formalities--”

“I think I can understand that.”

“He was always, you know, not quite here.... It is as if he were a

little more not quite here.... I can’t believe it is over....”

She asked a number of questions and took the doctor’s advice upon

various details of the arrangements. “My daughter Helen comes home

to-morrow afternoon,” she explained. “She is in Paris. But our son is

far, far away in the Punjab. I have sent him a telegram.... It is so

kind of you to come in to me.”

Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy’s disposition

to treat him as a friend of the family. He had conceived a curious, half

maternal affection for Sir Richmond that had survived even the trying

incident of the Salisbury parting and revived very rapidly during the

last few weeks. This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy. Hers

was a type that had always appealed to him. He could understand so well

the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting herself to gather

together some preservative and reassuring evidences of this man who had

always been; as she put it, “never quite here.” It was as if she felt

that now it was at last possible to make a definite reality of him. He

could be fixed. And as he was fixed he would stay. Never more would he

be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance wither the

interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was finding much comfort

in this task of reconstruction. She had gathered together in the

drawingroom every presentable portrait she had been able to find of him.

He had never, she said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil

sketch done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a

number of photographs, several of which--she wanted the doctor’s advice

upon this point--she thought might be enlarged; there was a statuette

done by some woman artist who had once beguiled him into a sitting.

There was also a painting she had had worked up from a photograph and

some notes. She flitted among these memorials, going from one to the

other, undecided which to make the standard portrait. “That painting,

I think, is most like,” she said: “as he was before the war. But the war

and the Commission changed him,--worried him and aged him.... I grudged

him to that Commission. He let it worry him frightfully.”

“It meant very much to him,” said Dr. Martineau.

“It meant too much to him. But of course his ideas were splendid. You

know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of book done, explaining his

ideas. He would never write. He despised it--unreasonably. A real thing

done, he said, was better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he

said, but women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And

I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary official

biography.... I have thought of young Leighton, the secretary of the

Commission. He seems thoroughly intelligent and sympathetic and really

anxious to reconcile Richmond’s views with those of the big business men

on the Committee. He might do.... Or perhaps I might be able to persuade

two or three people to write down their impressions of him. A sort

of memorial volume.... But he was shy of friends. There was no man he

talked to very intimately about his ideas unless it was to you... I wish

I had the writer’s gift, doctor.”

Section 7

It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr. Martineau

by telephone. “Something rather disagreeable,” she said. “If you could

spare the time. If you could come round.

“It is frightfully distressing,” she said when he got round to her, and

for a time she could tell him nothing more. She was having tea and she

gave him some. She fussed about with cream and cakes and biscuits. He

noted a crumpled letter thrust under the edge of the silver tray.

“He talked, I know, very intimately with you,” she said, coming to it at

last. “He probably went into things with you that he never talked about

with anyone else. Usually he was very reserved, Even with me there were

things about which he said nothing.”

“We did,” said Dr. Martineau with discretion, “deal a little with his

private life.

“There was someone--”

Dr. Martineau nodded and then, not to be too portentous, took and bit a

biscuit.

“Did he by any chance ever mention someone called Martin Leeds?”

Dr. Martineau seemed to reflect. Then realizing that this was a mistake,

he said: “He told me the essential facts.”

The poor lady breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m glad,” she said simply.

She repeated, “Yes, I’m glad. It makes things easier now.”

Dr. Martineau looked his enquiry.

“She wants to come and see him.”

“Here?”

“Here! And Helen here! And the servants noticing everything! I’ve never

met her. Never set eyes on her. For all I know she may want to make a

scene.” There was infinite dismay in her voice.

Dr. Martineau was grave. “You would rather not receive her?”

“I don’t want to refuse her. I don’t want even to seem heartless.

I understand, of course, she has a sort of claim.” She sobbed her

reluctant admission. “I know it. I know.... There was much between

them.”

Dr. Martineau pressed the limp hand upon the little tea table. “I

understand, dear lady,” he said. “I understand. Now ... suppose _I_ were

to write to her and arrange--I do not see that you need be put to the

pain of meeting her. Suppose I were to meet her here myself?

“If you COULD!”

The doctor was quite prepared to save the lady any further distresses,

no matter at what trouble to himself. “You are so good to me,” she said,

letting the tears have their way with her.

“I am silly to cry,” she said, dabbing her eyes.

“We will get it over to-morrow,” he reassured her. “You need not think

of it again.”

He took over Martin’s brief note to Lady Hardy and set to work by

telegram to arrange for her visit. She was in London at her Chelsea flat

and easily accessible. She was to come to the house at mid-day on the

morrow, and to ask not for Lady Hardy but for him. He would stay by her

while she was in the house, and it would be quite easy for Lady Hardy to

keep herself and her daughter out of the way. They could, for example,

go out quietly to the dressmakers in the closed car, for many little

things about the mourning still remained to be seen to.

Section 8

Miss Martin Leeds arrived punctually, but the doctor was well ahead of

his time and ready to receive her. She was ushered into the drawing room

where he awaited her. As she came forward the doctor first perceived

that she had a very sad and handsome face, the face of a sensitive youth

rather than the face of a woman. She had fine grey eyes under very

fine brows; they were eyes that at other times might have laughed very

agreeably, but which were now full of an unrestrained sadness. Her brown

hair was very untidy and parted at the side like a man’s. Then he noted

that she seemed to be very untidily dressed as if she was that rare and,

to him, very offensive thing, a woman careless of her beauty. She was

short in proportion to her broad figure and her broad forehead.

“You are Dr. Martineau?” she said. “He talked of you.” As she spoke

her glance went from him to the pictures that stood about the room. She

walked up to the painting and stood in front of it with her distressed

gaze wandering about her. “Horrible!” she said. “Absolutely horrible!...

Did SHE do this?”

Her question disconcerted the doctor very much. “You mean Lady Hardy?”

he asked. “She doesn’t paint.”

“No, no. I mean, did she get all these things together?”

“Naturally,” said Dr. Martineau.

“None of them are a bit like him. They are like blows aimed at his

memory. Not one has his life in it. How could she do it? Look at that

idiot statuette!... He was extraordinarily difficult to get. I have

burnt every photograph I had of him. For fear that this would happen;

that he would go stiff and formal--just as you have got him here. I have

been trying to sketch him almost all the time since he died. But I can’t

get him back. He’s gone.”

She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if she expected

him to understand her, but because she had to say these things which

burthened her mind to someone. “I have done hundreds of sketches. My

room is littered with them. When you turn them over he seems to be

lurking among them. But not one of them is like him.”

She was trying to express something beyond her power. “It is as if

someone had suddenly turned out the light.”

She followed the doctor upstairs. “This was his study,” the doctor

explained.

“I know it. I came here once,” she said.

They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay. Dr.

Martineau, struck by a sudden memory, glanced nervously at the desk, but

someone had made it quite tidy and the portrait of Aliss Grammont had

disappeared. Miss Leeds walked straight across to the coffin and

stood looking down on the waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir

Richmond’s brows and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than

they had ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane

smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she sighed

deeply.

She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as though she

talked at that silent presence in the coffin. “I think he loved,” she

said. “Sometimes I think he loved me. But it is hard to tell. He was

kind. He could be intensely kind and yet he didn’t seem to care for

you. He could be intensely selfish and yet he certainly did not care for

himself.... Anyhow, I loved HIM.... There is nothing left in me now to

love anyone else--for ever....”

She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man with her

head a little on one side. “Too kind,” she said very softly.

“There was a sort of dishonesty in his kindness. He would not let you

have the bitter truth. He would not say he did not love you....

“He was too kind to life ever to call it the foolish thing it is. He

took it seriously because it takes itself seriously. He worked for it

and killed himself with work for it....”

She turned to Dr. Martineau and her face was streaming with tears.

“And life, you know, isn’t to be taken seriously. It is a joke--a

bad joke--made by some cruel little god who has caught a neglected

planet.... Like torturing a stray cat.... But he took it seriously and

he gave up his life for it.

“There was much happiness he might have had. He was very capable of

happiness. But he never seemed happy. This work of his came before

it. He overworked and fretted our happiness away. He sacrificed his

happiness and mine.”

She held out her hands towards the doctor. “What am I to do now with the

rest of my life? Who is there to laugh with me now and jest?

“I don’t complain of him. I don’t blame him. He did his best--to be

kind.

“But all my days now I shall mourn for him and long for him....”

She turned back to the coffin. Suddenly she lost every vestige of

self-control. She sank down on her knees beside the trestle. “Why have

you left me!” she cried.

“Oh! Speak to me, my darling! Speak to me, I TELL YOU! Speak to me!”

It was a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful. She beat

her hands upon the coffin. She wept loudly and fiercely as a child

does....

Dr. Martineau drifted feebly to the window.

He wished he had locked the door. The servants might hear and wonder

what it was all about. Always he had feared love for the cruel thing it

was, but now it seemed to him for the first time that he realized its

monstrous cruelty.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells