Secret Places of the Heart, The - Herbert George Wells
Secret Places of the Heart, The
Author: Herbert George Wells
Chapter 1: The Consultation
Section 1
The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was accustomed to let in visitors who had this air of being annoyed and finding one umbrella too numerous for them. It mattered nothing to her that the gentleman was asking for Dr. Martineau as if he was asking for something with an unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of his umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive mahogany stand. "What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the door of the consulting room.
"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly with its distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond Hardy."
The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost of the three windows and stared out despondently at Harley Street.
For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty jacket on its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.
"Damned fool I was to come here," he said... "damned fool!
"Rush out of the place?...
"I've given my name."...
He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended not to hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can do for me," he said.
"I'm sure I don't," said the doctor. "People come here and talk."
There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the figure that confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height wanted at least three inches of Sir Richmond's five feet eleven; he was humanly plump, his face was round and pink and cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of the full moon, of what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air and exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short or he had braced them too high so that he seemed to have grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric personality; this amiable presence dispelled his preconceived resistances.
Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been running upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets, seemed intent only on disavowals. "People come here and talk. It does them good, and sometimes I am able to offer a suggestion.
"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded the idea.
"I'm jangling damnably...overwork....."
"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork. Overwork never hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can work--good straightforward work, without internal resistance, until he drops,--and never hurt himself. You must be working against friction."
"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to death.... And it's so damned important I shouldn't break down. It's vitally important."
He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering gesture of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags. I explode at any little thing. I'm raw. I can't work steadily for ten minutes and I can't leave off working."
"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond Hardy? In the papers. What is it?"
"Fuel."
"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly can't afford to have you ill."
"I am ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that Commission."
"Your technical knowledge--"
"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the national fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's what I'm up against. You don't know the job I have to do. You don't know what a Commission of that sort is. The moral tangle of it. You don't know how its possibilities and limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long before a single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole thing with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as daylight. I might have seen it at first.... Three experts who'd been got at; they thought I'd been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted them to do provided you called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the socialist art critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers, oil profiteers, financial adventurers.... "
He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the days before the war it was different. Then there was abundance. A little grabbing or cornering was all to the good. All to the good. It prevented things being used up too fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia was tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all this is altered. We're living in a different world. The public won't stand things it used to stand. It's a new public. It's--wild. It'll smash up the show if they go too far. Everything short and running shorter--food, fuel, material. But these people go on. They go on as though nothing had changed.... Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn them. There are men on that Commission who would steal the brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in it.... It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles. It's--! But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."
"You think there may be a smash-up?"
"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."
"A social smash-up."
"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"
"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All sorts of people I find think that," said the doctor. "All sorts of people lie awake thinking of it."
"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"
The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too," he said and seemed to reflect. But he was observing his patient acutely--with his ears.
"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and left his sentence unfinished.
"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered swiftly what line of talk he had best follow.
Section 2
"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor. "It's at the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new state of mind. Before the war it was abnormal--a phase of neurasthenia. Now it is almost the normal state with whole classes of intelligent people. Intelligent, I say. The others always have been casual and adventurous and always will be. A loss of confidence in the general background of life. So that we seem to float over abysses."
"We do," said Sir Richmond.
"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in the days of our assurance. There is a discord, a jarring."
The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and dreadful sense of responsibility for the universe. Accompanied by a realization that the job is overwhelmingly too big for us."
"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond. "Anyhow, what else is there to do? We may keep things together.... "I've got to do my bit. And if only I could hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows. But that's where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous to work well in my life. And never have I been so slack and weak-willed and inaccurate.... Sloppy.... Indolent.... Viscious!... "
The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted him. "What's got hold of me? What's got hold of me? I used to work well enough. It's as if my will had come untwisted and was ravelling out into separate strands. I've lost my unity. I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to recover my vigour. At any cost."
Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out of his mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr. Martineau, is this: it's fatigue. It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much effort. On too high a level. And too austere. One strains and fags. Flags! 'Flags' I meant to say. One strains and flags and then the lower stuff in one, the subconscious stuff, takes control."
There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this, and the doctor drew in the corners of his mouth and gave his head a critical slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond raise his voice and quicken his speech. "I want," he said, "a good tonic. A pick-me-up, a stimulating harmless drug of some sort. That's indicated anyhow. To begin with. Something to pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to the scratch again."
"I don't like the use of drugs," said the doctor.
The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to disappointment. "But that's not reasonable," he cried. "That's not reasonable. That's superstition. Call a thing a drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug. Everything that affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I want food. When I'm overactive and sleepless I want tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I want pulling together."
"But we don't know how to use drugs," the doctor objected.
"But you ought to know."
Dr. Martineau fixed his eye on a first floor window sill on the opposite side of Harley Street. His manner suggested a lecturer holding on to his theme.
"A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs-- all sorts of drugs--and work them in to our general way of living. I have no prejudice against them at all. A time will come when we shall correct our moods, get down to our reserves of energy by their help, suspend fatigue, put off sleep during long spells of exertion. At some sudden crisis for example. When we shall know enough to know just how far to go with this, that or the other stuff. And how to wash out its after effects.... I quite agree with you,--in principle.... But that time hasn't come yet.... Decades of research yet.... If we tried that sort of thing now, we should be like children playing with poisons and explosives.... It's out of the question."
"I've been taking a few little things already. Easton Syrup for example."
"Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the way. Has it done you any good--any nett good? It has--I can see--broken your sleep."
The doctor turned round again to his patient and looked up into his troubled face.
"Given physiological trouble I don't mind resorting to a drug. Given structural injury I don't mind surgery. But except for any little mischief your amateur drugging may have done you do not seem to me to be either sick or injured. You've no trouble either of structure or material. You are-- worried--ill in your mind, and otherwise perfectly sound. It's the current of your thoughts, fermenting. If the trouble is in the mental sphere, why go out of the mental sphere for a treatment? Talk and thought; these are your remedies. Cool deliberate thought. You're unravelled. You say it yourself. Drugs will only make this or that unravelled strand behave disproportionately. You don't want that. You want to take stock of yourself as a whole--find out where you stand.
"But the Fuel Commission?"
"Is it sitting now?"
"Adjourned till after Whitsuntide. But there's heaps of work to be done.
"Still," he added, "this is my one chance of any treatment."
The doctor made a little calculation. "Three weeks.... It's scarcely time enough to begin."
"You're certain that no regimen of carefully planned and chosen tonics--"
"Dismiss the idea. Dismiss it." He decided to take a plunge. "I've just been thinking of a little holiday for myself. But I'd like to see you through this. And if I am to see you through, there ought to be some sort of beginning now. In this three weeks. Suppose.... "
Sir Richmond leapt to his thought. "I'm free to go anywhere."
"Golf would drive a man of your composition mad?"
"It would."
"That's that. Still--. The country must be getting beautiful again now,--after all the rain we have had. I have a little two-seater. I don't know.... The repair people promise to release it before Friday."
"But I have a choice of two very comfortable little cars. Why not be my guest?"
"That might be more convenient."
"I'd prefer my own car."
"Then what do you say?"
"I agree. Peripatetic treatment."
"South and west. We could talk on the road. In the evenings. By the wayside. We might make the beginnings of a treatment.... A simple tour. Nothing elaborate. You wouldn't bring a man?"
"I always drive myself."
Section 3
"There's something very pleasant, said the doctor, envisaging his own rash proposal, "in travelling along roads you don't know and seeing houses and parks and villages and towns for which you do not feel in the slightest degree responsible. They hide all their troubles from the road. Their backyards are tucked away out of sight, they show a brave face; there's none of the nasty self-betrayals of the railway approach. And everything will be fresh still. There will still be a lot of apple-blossom--and bluebells.... And all the while we can be getting on with your affair."
He was back at the window now. "I want the holiday myself," he said.
He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder. "Have you noted how fagged and unstable everybody is getting? Everybody intelligent, I mean."
"It's an infernally worrying time."
"Exactly. Everybody suffers."
"It's no good going on in the old ways--"
"It isn't. And it's a frightful strain to get into any new ways. So here we are.
"A man," the doctor expanded, "isn't a creature in vacuo. He's himself and his world. He's a surface of contact, a system of adaptations, between his essential self and his surroundings. Well, our surroundings have become--how shall I put it?--a landslide. The war which seemed such a definable catastrophe in 1914 was, after all, only the first loud crack and smash of the collapse. The war is over and--nothing is over. This peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded phrase. The slide goes on,--it goes, if anything, faster, without a sign of stopping. And all our poor little adaptations! Which we have been elaborating and trusting all our lives!... One after another they fail us. We are stripped.... We have to begin all over again.... I'm fifty-seven and I feel at times nowadays like a chicken new hatched in a thunderstorm."
The doctor walked towards the bookcase and turned.
"Everybody is like that...it isn't--what are you going to do? It isn't--what am I going to do? It's--what are we all going to do!.. Lord! How safe and established everything was in 1910, say. We talked of this great war that was coming, but nobody thought it would come. We had been born in peace, comparatively speaking; we had been brought up in peace. There was talk of wars. There were wars--little wars--that altered nothing material.... Consols used to be at 112 and you fed your household on ten shillings a head a week. You could run over all Europe, barring Turkey and Russia, without even a passport. You could get to Italy in a day. Never were life and comfort so safe--for respectable people. And we were respectable people.... That was the world that made us what we are. That was the sheltering and friendly greenhouse in which we grew. We fitted our minds to that.... And here we are with the greenhouse falling in upon us lump by lump, smash and clatter, the wild winds of heaven tearing in through the gaps."
Upstairs on Dr. Martineau's desk lay the typescript of the opening chapters of a book that was intended to make a great splash in the world, his Psychology of a New Age. He had his metaphors ready.
"We said: 'This system will always go on. We needn't bother about it.' We just planned our lives accordingly. It was like a bird building its nest of frozen snakes. My father left me a decent independence. I developed my position; I have lived between here and the hospital, doing good work, enormously interested, prosperous, mildly distinguished. I had been born and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed that someone else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I never enquired."
"Nor did I" said Sir Richmond, "but--"
"And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on. "Nobody had ever steered the ship. It was adrift."
"I realized that. I--"
"It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by faith--as children do, as the animals do. At the back of the healthy mind, human or animal, has been this persuasion: 'This is all right. This will go on. If I keep the rule, if I do so and so, all will be well. I need not trouble further; things are cared for.'"
"If we could go on like that!" said Sir Richmond.
"We can't. That faith is dead. The war--and the peace--have killed it."
The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance to the full moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote things. "It may very well be that man is no more capable of living out of that atmosphere of assurance than a tadpole is of living out of water. His mental existence may be conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically self- seeking--incoherent... a stampede.... Human sanity may--disperse.
"That's our trouble," the doctor completed. "Our fundamental trouble. All our confidences and our accustomed adaptations are destroyed. We fit together no longer. We are--loose. We don't know where we are nor what to do. The psychology of the former time fails to give safe responses, and the psychology of the New Age has still to develop."
Section 4
"That is all very well," said Sir Richmond in the resolute voice of one who will be pent no longer. "That is all very well as far as it goes. But it does not cover my case. I am not suffering from inadaptation. I have adapted. I have thought things out. I think--much as you do. Much as you do. So it's not that. But--... Mind you, I am perfectly clear where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the breakup of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly. Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted. We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of world, planned and scientific, has to be got going. Civilization renewed. Rebuilding civilization--while the premises are still occupied and busy. It's an immense enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some ways it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips my imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work. Working as I do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall presently join up... The attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand it may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all that I have been saying, but-- The rest of me won't follow. The rest of me refuses to attend, forgets, straggles, misbehaves."
"Exactly."
The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all. 'Amazingly,' if you like.... I have this unlimited faith in our present tremendous necessity--for work--for devotion; I believe my share, the work I am doing, is essential to the whole thing--and I work sluggishly. I work reluctantly. I work damnably."
"Exact--" The doctor checked himself. "All that is explicable. Indeed it is. Listen for a moment to me! Consider what you are. Consider what we are. Consider what a man is before you marvel at his ineptitudes of will. Face the accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And that ape again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his forebear. A man's body, his bodily powers, are just the body and powers of an ape, a little improved, a little adapted to novel needs. That brings me to my point. Can his mind and will be anything better? For a few generations, a few hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out on the darknesses of life.... But the substance of man is ape still. He may carry a light in his brain, but his instincts move in the darkness. Out of that darkness he draws his motives."
"Or fails to draw them," said Sir Richmond.
"Or fails.... And that is where these new methods of treatment come in. We explore that failure. Together. What the psychoanalyst does-and I will confess that I owe much to the psychoanalyst--what he does is to direct thwarted, disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of their own nature. Which they have been accustomed to ignore and forget. They come to us with high ambitions or lovely illusions about themselves, torn, shredded, spoilt. They are morally denuded. Dreams they hate pursue them; abhorrent desires draw them; they are the prey of irresistible yet uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs. The first thing we ask them is this: 'What else could you expect?'"
"What else could I expect?" Sir Richmond repeated, looking down on him. "H'm!"
"The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly unselfish, inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you are ever anything else.... Do you realize that a few million generations ago, everything that stirs in us, everything that exalts human life, self-devotions, heroisms, the utmost triumphs of art, the love--for love it is--that makes you and me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round world, was latent in the body of some little lurking beast that crawled and hid among the branches of vanished and forgotten Mesozoic trees? A petty egg-laying, bristle-covered beast it was, with no more of the rudiments of a soul than bare hunger, weak lust and fear.... People always seem to regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance. It isn't: it's a vital fact of the utmost practical importance. That is what you are made of. Why should you expect--because a war and a revolution have shocked you--that you should suddenly be able to reach up and touch the sky?"
"H'm!" said Sir Richmond. "Have I been touching the sky!"
"You are trying to play the part of an honest rich man."
"I don't care to see the whole system go smash."
"Exactly," said the doctor, before he could prevent himself.
"But is it any good to tell a man that the job he is attempting is above him--that he is just a hairy reptile twice removed--and all that sort of thing?"
"Well, it saves him from hoping too much and being too greatly disappointed. It recalls him to the proportions of the job. He gets something done by not attempting everything.... And it clears him up. We get him to look into himself, to see directly and in measurable terms what it is that puts him wrong and holds him back. He's no longer vaguely incapacitated. He knows."
"That's diagnosis. That's not treatment."
"Treatment by diagnosis. To analyze a mental knot is to untie it."
"You propose that I shall spend my time, until the Commission meets, in thinking about myself. I wanted to forget myself."
"Like a man who tries to forget that his petrol is running short and a cylinder missing fire.... No. Come back to the question of what you are," said the doctor. "A creature of the darkness with new lights. Lit and half-blinded by science and the possibilities of controlling the world that it opens out. In that light your will is all for service; you care more for mankind than for yourself. You begin to understand something of the self beyond your self. But it is a partial and a shaded light as yet; a little area about you it makes clear, the rest is still the old darkness--of millions of intense and narrow animal generations.... You are like someone who awakens out of an immemorial sleep to find himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless mountains--in a sunless universe. You are not alone in it. You are not lord of all you survey. Your leadership is disputed. The darkness even of the room you are in is full of ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers and purposes.... They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws suddenly out of the darkness into the light of your attention. They snatch things out of your hand, they trip your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and cluster behind you. Wherever your shadow falls, they creep right up to you, creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The souls of apes, monkeys, reptiles and creeping things haunt the passages and attics and cellars of this living house in which your consciousness has awakened.... "
The doctor gave this quotation from his unpublished book the advantages of an abrupt break and a pause.
Sir Richmond shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "And you propose a vermin hunt in the old tenement?"
"The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to take stock and know what is there."
"Three weeks of self vivisection."
"To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself. As an opening.... It will take longer than that if we are to go through with the job."
It is a considerable--process."
"It is."
"Yet you shrink from simple things like drugs!"
"Self-knowledge--without anaesthetics."
"Has this sort of thing ever done anyone any good at all?"
"It has turned hundreds back to sanity and steady work."
"How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be? Anyhow--we can break off at any time.... We'll try it. We'll try it.... And so for this journey into the west of England.... And--if we can get there--I'm not sure that we can get there--into the secret places of my heart.
Chapter 5: In the Land of the Forgotten Peoples
Chapter 5: 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 6: The Encounter at Stonehenge
Chapter 6: The Encounter at Stonehenge
Section 1
Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over the downs round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and Netheravon and Amesbury to Stonehenge.
Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now, with Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a poorer thing than he had remembered it to be. Sir Richmond was frankly disappointed. After the real greatness and mystery of the older place, it seemed a poor little heap of stones; it did not even dominate the landscape; it was some way from the crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was further dwarfed by the colossal air-ship hangars and clustering offices of the air station that the great war had called into existence upon the slopes to the south-west. "It looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old giantess had left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that capped the neighbouring crests.
The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side of the road stood a travelstained middle-class automobile, with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things therein--a family automobile with father no doubt at the wheel. Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at its tail.
They were impeded at the entrance by a difference of opinion between the keeper of the turnstile and a small but resolute boy of perhaps five or six who proposed to leave the enclosure. The custodian thought that it would be better if his nurse or his mother came out with him.
"She keeps on looking at it, " said the small boy. "It isunt anything. I want to go and clean the car."
"You won't see Stonehenge every day, young man," said the custodian, a little piqued.
"It's only an old beach," said the small boy, with extreme conviction. "It's rocks like the seaside. And there isunt no sea."
The man at the turnstile mutely consulted the doctor.
"I don't see that he can get into any harm here," the doctor advised, and the small boy was released from archaeology.
He strolled to the family automobile, produced an en-tout-cas pocket-handkerchief and set himself to polish the lamps with great assiduity. The two gentlemen lingered at the turnstile for a moment or so to watch his proceedings. "Modern child," said Sir Richmond. "Old stones are just old stones to him. But motor cars are gods."
"You can hardly expect him to understand--at his age," said the custodian, jealous for the honor of Stonehenge....
"Reminds me of Martin's little girl," said Sir Richmond, as he and Dr. Martineau went on towards the circle. "When she encountered her first dragon-fly she was greatly delighted. '0h, dee' lill' a'eplane,' she said."
As they approached the grey old stones they became aware of a certain agitation among them. A voice, an authoritative bass voice, was audible, crying, "Anthony!" A nurse appeared remotely going in the direction of the aeroplane sheds, and her cry of "Master Anthony" came faintly on the breeze. An extremely pretty young woman of five or six and twenty became visible standing on one of the great prostrate stones in the centre of the place. She was a black-haired, sun-burnt individual and she stood with her arms akimbo, quite frankly amused at the disappearance of Master Anthony, and offering no sort of help for his recovery. On the greensward before her stood the paterfamilias of the family automobile, and he was making a trumpet with his hands in order to repeat the name of Anthony with greater effect. A short lady in grey emerged from among the encircling megaliths, and one or two other feminine personalities produced effects of movement rather than of individuality as they flitted among the stones. "Well," said the lady in grey, with that rising intonation of humorous conclusion which is so distinctively American, "those Druids have got him."
"He's hiding," said the automobilist, in a voice that promised chastisement to a hidden hearer. "That's what he is doing. He ought not to play tricks like this. A great boy who is almost six."
"If you are looking for a small, resolute boy of six," said Sir Richmond, addressing himself to the lady on the rock rather than to the angry parent below, "he's perfectly safe and happy. The Druids haven't got him. Indeed, they've failed altogether to get him. 'Stonehenge,' he says, 'is no good.' So he's gone back to clean the lamps of your car."
"Aa-oo. So that's it! " said Papa. "Winnie, go and tell Price he's gone back to the car.... They oughtn't to have let him out of the enclosure...."
The excitement about Master Anthony collapsed. The rest of the people in the circles crystallized out into the central space as two apparent sisters and an apparent aunt and the nurse, who was packed off at once to supervise the lamp cleaning. The head of the family found some difficulty, it would seem, in readjusting his mind to the comparative innocence of Anthony, and Sir Richmond and the young lady on the rock sought as if by common impulse to establish a general conversation. There were faint traces of excitement in her manner, as though there had been some controversial passage between herself and the family gentleman.
"We were discussing the age of this old place," she said, smiling in the frankest and friendliest way. "How old do you think it is?"
The father of Anthony intervened, also with a shadow of controversy in his manner. "I was explaining to the young lady that it dates from the early bronze age. Before chronology existed.... But she insists on dates."
"Nothing of bronze has ever been found here," said Sir Richmond.
"Well, when was this early bronze age, anyhow?" said the young lady.
Sir Richmond sought a recognizable datum. "Bronze got to Britain somewhere between the times of Moses and Solomon."
"Ah! " said the young lady, as who should say, 'This man at least talks sense.'
"But these stones are all shaped," said the father of the family. "It is difficult to see how that could have been done without something harder than stone."
"I don't see the place," said the young lady on the stone. "I can't imagine how they did it up--not one bit."
"Did it up!" exclaimed the father of the family in the tone of one accustomed to find a gentle sport in the intellectual frailties of his womenkind.
"It's just the bones of a place. They hung things round it. They draped it."
"But what things?" asked Sir Richmond.
"Oh! they had things all right. Skins perhaps. Mats of rushes. Bast cloth. Fibre of all sorts. Wadded stuff."
"Stonehenge draped! It's really a delightful idea;" said the father of the family, enjoying it.
"It's quite a possible one," said Sir Richmond.
"Or they may have used wicker," the young lady went on, undismayed. She seemed to concede a point. "Wicker is likelier."
"But surely," said the father of the family with the expostulatory voice and gesture of one who would recall erring wits to sanity, "it is far more impressive standing out bare and noble as it does. In lonely splendour."
"But all this country may have been wooded then," said Sir Richmond. "In which case it wouldn't have stood out. It doesn't stand out so very much even now."
"You came to it through a grove," said the young lady, eagerly picking up the idea.
"Probably beech," said Sir Richmond.
"Which may have pointed to the midsummer sunrise," said Dr. Martineau, unheeded.
"These are novel ideas," said the father of the family in the reproving tone of one who never allows a novel idea inside his doors if he can prevent it.
"Well," said the young lady, "I guess there was some sort of show here anyhow. And no human being ever had a show yet without trying to shut people out of it in order to make them come in. I guess this was covered in all right. A dark hunched old place in a wood. Beech stems, smooth, like pillars. And they came to it at night, in procession, beating drums, and scared half out of their wits. They came in there and went round the inner circle with their torches. And so they were shown. The torches were put out and the priests did their mysteries. Until dawn broke. That is how they worked it."
"But even you can't tell what the show was, V.V." said the lady in grey, who was standing now at Dr. Martineau's elbow.
"Something horrid," said Anthony's younger sister to her elder in a stage whisper.
"Bluggy," agreed Anthony's elder sister to the younger, in a noiseless voice that certainly did not reach father. "Squeals!...."
This young lady who was addressed as "V.V." was perhaps one or two and twenty, Dr. Martineau thought,--he was not very good at feminine ages. She had a clear sun-browned complexion, with dark hair and smiling lips. Her features were finely modelled, with just that added touch of breadth in the brow and softness in the cheek bones, that faint flavour of the Amerindian, one sees at times in American women. Her voice was a very soft and pleasing voice, and she spoke persuasively and not assertively as so many American women do. Her determination to make the dry bones of Stonehenge live shamed the doctor's disappointment with the place. And when she had spoken, Dr. Martineau noted that she looked at Sir Richmond as if she expected him at least to confirm her vision. Sir Richmond was evidently prepared to confirm it.
With a queer little twinge of infringed proprietorship, the doctor saw Sir Richmond step up on the prostrate megalith and stand beside her, the better to appreciate her point of view. He smiled down at her. "Now why do you think they came in there?" he asked.
The young lady was not very clear about her directions. She did not know of the roadway running to the Avon river, nor of the alleged race course to the north, nor had she ever heard that the stones were supposed to be of two different periods and that some of them might possibly have been brought from a very great distance.
Section 2
Neither Dr. Martineau nor the father of the family found the imaginative reconstruction of the Stonehenge rituals quite so exciting as the two principals. The father of the family endured some further particulars with manifest impatience, no longer able, now that Sir Richmond was encouraging the girl, to keep her in check with the slightly derisive smile proper to her sex. Then he proclaimed in a fine loud tenor, "All this is very imaginative, I'm afraid." And to his family, "Time we were pressing on. Turps, we must go-o. Come, Phoebe!"
As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came floating back. "Talking wanton nonsense.... Any professional archaeologist would laugh, simply laugh...."
He passed out of the world.
With a faint intimation of dismay Dr. Martineau realized that the two talkative ladies were not to be removed in the family automobile with the rest of the party. Sir Richmond and the younger lady went on very cheerfully to the population, agriculture, housing and general scenery of the surrounding Downland during the later Stone Age. The shorter, less attractive lady, whose accent was distinctly American, came now and stood at the doctor's elbow. She seemed moved to play the part of chorus to the two upon the stone.
"When V.V. gets going," she remarked, "she makes things come alive."
Dr. Martineau hated to be addressed suddenly by strange ladies. He started, and his face assumed the distressed politeness of the moon at its full. "Your friend," he said, "interested in archaeology? "
"Interested!" said the stouter lady. "Why! She's a fiend at it. Ever since we came on Carnac. "
"You've visited Carnac?"
"That's where the bug bit her." said the stout lady with a note of querulous humour. "Directly V.V. set eyes on Carnac, she just turned against all her up-bringing. 'Why wasn't I told of this before?' she said. 'What's Notre Dame to this? This is where we came from. This is the real starting point of the Mayflower. Belinda,' she said, 'we've got to see all we can of this sort of thing before we go back to America. They've been keeping this from us.' And that's why we're here right now instead of being shopping in Paris or London like decent American women."
The younger lady looked down on her companion with something of the calm expert attention that a plumber gives to a tap that is misbehaving, and like a plumber refrained from precipitate action. She stood with the backs of her hands resting on her hips.
"Well," she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir Richmond and the rest to the doctor. "it is nearer the beginnings of things than London or Paris."
"And nearer to us, " said Sir Richmond.
"I call that just--paradoxical," said the shorter lady, who appeared to be called Belinda.
"Not paradoxical," Dr. Martineau contradicted gently. "Life is always beginning again. And this is a time of fresh beginnings."
"Now that's after V.V.'s own heart," cried the stout lady in grey. "She'll agree to all that. She's been saying it right across Europe. Rome, Paris, London; they're simply just done. They don't signify any more. They've got to be cleared away."
"You let me tell my own opinions, Belinda," said the young lady who was called V.V. "I said that if people went on building with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals for two thousand years, it was time they were cleared up and taken away."
"Corinthian capitals?" Sir Richmond considered it and laughed cheerfully. "I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of thing."
"The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument! " said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. "It gave me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might understand English. "
The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. "When one is travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me for everything in Europe that I don't want and have no sort of use for. It isn't a bad sort of capital in its way, florid and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;--and that a whole continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get past it!..."
"It's the classical tradition."
"It puzzles me."
"It's the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed spread by the Romans all over western Europe."
"And it smothers the history of Europe. You can't see Europe because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble Arches and Arcs de Triomphe. You never get away from it. It is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can't sit down. 'The empire, gentlemen--the Empire. Empire.' Rome itself is perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round stupid arches as though it couldn't imagine that you could possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter's and that frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes on."
"Ave Roma immortalis," said Dr. Martineau.
"This Roman empire seems to be Europe's first and last idea. A fixed idea. And such a poor idea!... America never came out of that. It's no good-telling me that it did. It escaped from it.... So I said to Belinda here, 'Let's burrow, if we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus weeds got hold of us.'"
"I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly Corinthian, something called the Capitol," Sir Richmond reflected. "And other buildings. A Treasury."
"That is different," said the young lady, so conclusively that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on that score.
"A last twinge of Europeanism," she vouchsafed. "We were young in those days."
"You are well beneath the marble here."
She assented cheerfully.
"A thousand years before it."
"Happy place! Happy people!"
"But even this place isn't the beginning of things here. Carnac was older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have you heard in America of Avebury? It may have predated this place, they think, by another thousand years."
"Avebury?" said the lady who was called Belinda.
"But what is this Avebury?" asked V.V. "I've never heard of the place."
"I thought it was a lord," said Belinda.
Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau, embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder of Avebury. Possibly he exaggerated Avebury....
It was Dr. Martineau who presently brought this disquisition upon Avebury to a stop by a very remarkable gesture. He looked at his watch. He drew it out ostentatiously, a thick, respectable gold watch, for the doctor was not the sort of man to wear his watch upon his wrist. He clicked it open and looked at it. Thereby he would have proclaimed his belief this encounter was an entirely unnecessary interruption of his healing duologue with Sir Richmond, which must now be resumed.
But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr. Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was to be thrust into an extreme proximity with him and the balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.
Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine historical imagination before, and he was evidently very greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was to be got out of this encounter.
Section 3
Sir Richmond displayed a complete disregard of the sufferings of Dr. Martineau, shamefully compressed behind him. Of these he was to hear later. He ran his overcrowded little car, overcrowded so far as the dicky went, over the crest of the Down and down into Amesbury and on to Salisbury, stopping to alight and stretch the legs of the party when they came in sight of Old Sarum.
"Certainly they can do with a little stretching," said Dr. Martineau grimly.
This charming young woman had seized upon the imagination of Sir Richmond to the temporary exclusion of all other considerations. The long Downland gradients, quivering very slightly with the vibration of the road, came swiftly and easily to meet and pass the throbbing little car as he sat beside her and talked to her. He fell into that expository manner which comes so easily to the native entertaining the visitor from abroad.
"In England, it seems to me there are four main phases of history. Four. Avebury, which I would love to take you to see to-morrow. Stonehenge. Old Sarum, which we shall see in a moment as a great grassy mound on our right as we come over one of these crests. Each of them represents about a thousand years. Old Sarum was Keltic; it, saw the Romans and the Saxons through, and for a time it was a Norman city. Now it is pasture for sheep. Latest as yet is Salisbury,--English, real English. It may last a few centuries still. It is little more than seven hundred years old. But when I think of those great hangars back there by Stonehenge, I feel that the next phase is already beginning. Of a world one will fly to the ends of, in a week or so. Our world still. Our people, your people and mine, who are going to take wing so soon now, were made in all these places. We are visiting the old homes. I am glad I came back to it just when you were doing the same thing."
"I'm lucky to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller," she said; "with a car."
"You're the first American I've ever met whose interest in history didn't seem--" He sought for an inoffensive word.
"Silly? Oh! I admit it. It's true of a lot of us. Most of us. We come over to Europe as if it hadn't anything to do with us except to supply us with old pictures and curios generally. We come sight-seeing. It's romantic. It's picturesque. We stare at the natives--like visitors at a Zoo. We don't realize that we belong.... I know our style.... But we aren't all like that. Some of us are learning a bit better than that. We have one or two teachers over there to lighten our darkness. There's Professor Breasted for instance. He comes sometimes to my father's house. And there's James Harvey Robinson and Professor Hutton Webster. They've been trying to restore our memory."
"I've never heard of any of them," said Sir Richmond.
"You hear so little of America over here. It's quite a large country and all sorts of interesting things happen there nowadays. And we are waking up to history. Quite fast. We shan't always be the most ignorant people in the world. We are beginning to realize that quite a lot of things happened between Adam and the Mayflower that we ought to be told about. I allow it's a recent revival. The United States has been like one of those men you read about in the papers who go away from home and turn up in some distant place with their memories gone. They've forgotten what their names were or where they lived or what they did for a living; they've forgotten everything that matters. Often they have to begin again and settle down for a long time before their memories come back. That's how it has been with us. Our memory is just coming back to us."
"And what do you find you are?"
"Europeans. Who came away from kings and churches-@-and Corinthian capitals."
"You feel all this country belongs to you?"
"As much as it does to you." Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. "But if I say that America belongs to me as much as it does to you?"
"We are one people," she said.
"We"
"Europe. These parts of Europe anyhow. And ourselves."
"You are the most civilized person I've met for weeks and weeks." "Well, you are the first civilized person I've met in Europe for a long time. If I understand you."
"There are multitudes of reasonable, civilized people in Europe."
"I've heard or seen very little of them.
"They're scattered, I admit."
"And hard to find."
"So ours is a lucky meeting. I've wanted a serious talk to an American for some time. I want to know very badly what you think you are up to with the world,--our world. "
"I'm equally anxious to know what England thinks she is doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult to understand. On any hypothesis-that is honourable to her." "H'm," said Sir Richmond.
"I assure you we don't like it. This Irish business. We feel a sort of ownership in England. It's like finding your dearest aunt torturing the cat."
"We must talk of that," said Sir Richmond.
"I wish you would."
"It is a cat and a dog--and they have been very naughty animals. And poor Aunt Britannia almost deliberately lost her temper. But I admit she hits about in a very nasty fashion."
"And favours the dog."
"She does."
"I want to know all you admit."
"You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury. If you are free?"
"We're travelling together, just we two. We are wandering about the south of England on our way to Falmouth. Where I join a father in a few days' time, and I go on with him to Paris. And if you and your friend are coming to the Old George--"
"We are," said Sir Richmond.
"I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And seeing Avebury to-morrow. Why not? Perhaps if we did as the Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate something of the extreme informality of our behaviour."
"My name is Hardy. I've been a munition manufacturer. I was slightly wounded by a stray shell near Arras while I was inspecting some plant I had set up, and also I was hit by a stray knighthood. So my name is now Sir Richmond Hardy. My friend is a very distinguished Harley Street physician. Chiefly nervous and mental cases. His name is Dr. Martineau. He is quite as civilized as I am. He is also a philosophical writer. He is really a very wise and learned man indeed. He is full of ideas. He's stimulated me tremendously. You must talk to him."
Sir Richmond glanced over his shoulder at the subject of these commendations. Through the oval window glared an expression of malignity that made no impression whatever on his preoccupied mind.
"My name," said the young lady, "is Grammont. The war whirled me over to Europe on Red Cross work and since the peace I've been settling up things and travelling about Europe. My father is rather a big business man in New York."
"The oil Grammont?"
"He is rather deep in oil, I believe. He is coming over to Europe because he does not like the way your people are behaving in Mesopotamia. He is on his way to Paris now. Paris it seems is where everything is to be settled against you. Belinda is a sort of companion I have acquired for the purposes of independent travel. She was Red Cross too. I must have somebody and I cannot bear a maid. Her name is Belinda Seyffert. From Philadelphia originally. You have that? Seyffert, Grammont?"
"And Hardy?" "Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau."
"And-Ah!--That great green bank there just coming into sight must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop here for a little while.... "
Then it was that Dr. Martineau was grim about the stretching of his legs.
Section 4
The sudden prospect which now opened out before Sir Richmond of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self- examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard of Dr. Martineau's possible objections to any such modification of their original programme. When they arrived in Salisbury, the doctor did make some slight effort to suggest a different hotel from that in which the two ladies had engaged their rooms, but on the spur of the moment and in their presence he could produce no sufficient reason for refusing the accommodation the Old George had ready for him. He was reduced to a vague: "We don't want to inflict ourselves--" He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert, before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the engagements to which Sir Richmond had committed himself.
"I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow," said Sir Richmond. "These ladies were nearly missing it."
The thing took the doctor's breath away. For the moment he could say nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An objection formulated itself very slowly. "But that dicky," he whispered.
His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the completeness of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had been a cathedral city; it was essentially and purely that. The church at its best, in the full tide of its mediaeval ascendancy, had called it into being. He was making some extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory qualifications. "Our age will leave the ruins of hotels," said Sir Richmond. "Railway arches and hotels."
"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the Empire comes nearest to it.... "
As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant to walk round and about Salisbury. He foresaw that walk with the utmost clearness. In front and keeping just a little beyond the range of his intervention, Sir Richmond would go with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring up the rear. "If I do," he muttered, "I'll be damned!" an unusually strong expression for him.
"You said--?" asked Miss Seyffert.
"That I have some writing to do--before the post goes," said the doctor brightly.
"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with ill-concealed dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.
"I'm afraid," said the doctor mulishly. "Impossible."
(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")
Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first to look for shops," she said. "There's those things you want to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can all go together as far as that. And while you are shopping, if you wouldn't mind getting one or two things for me...."
It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and eager to resume with him....
Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He could think over his notes....
But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in their common programme....
For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America. "Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl" with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word "boy." She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could talk with her as if he talked with a man like himself--but with a zest no man could give him.
It was evident that the good things she had said at first came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking for effect at all, she was talking because she was tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as she was.
Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought- iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some moments surveying it.
"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir Richmond. "But why, I wonder, did we build it? "
"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp against the blue. "I've been away for so long-over there-that I forget altogether. Why did we build it?"
She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. "My friend, the philosopher," he had said, "will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are. You must talk to him--he is a very curious and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he says, passing thoughts. We are--what does he call it? --Man on his Planet, taking control of life."
"Man and woman," she had amended.
But just as man on his planet taking control of life had failed altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond found very great difficulty in recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.
"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond. "But the impulse was losing its force. "
She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly quizzical expression.
But he had his reply ready.
"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were already very clever engineers. What interested us here wasn't the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display our power over stone. We made it into reeds and branches. We squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think people have ever feared and worshipped in this--this artist's lark--as they did in Stonehenge?"
"I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here," she said.
Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. "The spirit of the Gothic cathedrals," he said, "is the spirit of the sky- scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition. The Freemasons on the building could hardly refrain from jeering at the little priest they had left down below there, performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his altar. He was just their excuse for doing it all."
"Sky-scrapers?" she conceded. "An early display of the sky- scraper spirit.... You are doing your best to make me feel thoroughly at home."
"You are more at home here still than in that new country of ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other cathedrals we built in Europe.... It was the fun of building made us do it... "
"H'm," she said. "And my sky-scrapers?"
"Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most about America. It's still large enough, mentally and materially, to build all sorts of things.... Over here, the sites are frightfully crowded.... "
"And what do you think we are building now? And what do you think you are building over here?"
"What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up. I believe it is time we began to build in earnest. For good...."
"But are we building anything at all?"
"A new world."
"Show it me," she said.
"We're still only at the foundations," said Sir Richmond." Nothing shows as yet."
"I wish I could believe they were foundations."
"But can you doubt we are scrapping the old?..."
It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so they strolled to and fro round and about the west end and along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging their ideas very frankly and freely about the things that had recently happened to the world and what they thought they ought to be doing in it.
Section 5
After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a corner of the smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed from tweedy pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of Miss Grammont's hair and a necklace of the same colourings kept the peace between her jolly sun-burnt cheek and her soft untanned neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr. Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.
The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of the steady continuity of Sir Richmond's duologue with Miss Grammont. Miss Seyffert's methods were too discursive and exclamatory. She broke every thread that appeared. The Old George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss Seyffert laced the entire evening with her recognition of the fact. "Just look at that old beam!" she would cry suddenly. " To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot in America!"
Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she chose. After the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat deep in a basket chair and spoke now and then. Miss Seyffert gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.
Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her chair threw out the statement that Italy was frightfully overpopulated. "In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a cheese. Nobody seems to be living. Everyone is too busy keeping alive."
"Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules," said Miss Seyffert.
"Little children working like slaves," said Miss Grammont.
"And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the roadside. Who ought to be getting wages--sufficient...."
"Begging--from foreigners--is just a sport in Italy," said Sir Richmond. "It doesn't imply want. But I agree that a large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole world is. Don't you think so, Martineau?"
"Well--yes--for its present social organization. "
"For any social organization," said Sir Richmond.
"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added amazingly: "I'm out for Birth Control all the time."
A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty coffee cup.
"The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives," said Sir Richmond. "Which amount to nothing. Which do not even represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources, the fuel and surplus energy of the world."
"I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives," Miss Grammont reflected.
"Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are just vain repetitions--imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all that they do has been done better before. Because they are crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as for liking their lives, they need never have had the chance."
"How many people are there in the world?" she asked abruptly.
"I don't know. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions perhaps."
"And in your world?"
"I'd have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At most. It would be quite enough for this little planet, for a time, at any rate. Don't you think so, doctor?"
"I don't know," said Dr. Martineau. "Oddly enough, I have never thought about that question before. At least, not from this angle."
"But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million aristocrats?" began Miss Grammont. "My native instinctive democracy--"
"Need not be outraged," said Sir Richmond. "Any two hundred and fifty million would do, They'd be able to develop fully, all of them. As things are, only a minority can do that. The rest never get a chance."
"That's what I always say," said Miss Seyffert.
"A New Age," said Dr. Martineau; "a New World. We may be coming to such a stage, when population, as much as fuel, will be under a world control. If one thing, why not the other? I admit that the movement of thought is away from haphazard towards control--"
"I'm for control all the time," Miss Seyffert injected, following up her previous success.
"I admit", the doctor began his broken sentence again with marked patience, "that the movement of thought is away from haphazard towards control--in things generally. But is the movement of events?"
"The eternal problem of man," said Sir Richmond. "Can our wills prevail?"
There came a little pause.
Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert. "If you are," said Belinda.
"I wish I could imagine your world," said Miss Grammont, rising, "of two hundred and fifty millions of fully developed human beings with room to live and breathe in and no need for wars. Will they live in palaces? Will they all be healthy?... Machines will wait on them. No! I can't imagine it. Perhaps I shall dream of it. My dreaming self may be cleverer."
She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they stood hand in hand, appreciatively....
"Well!" said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two Americans, "This is a curious encounter."
"That young woman has brains," said Sir Richmond, standing before the fireplace. There was no doubt whatever which young woman he meant. But Dr. Martineau grunted.
"I don't like the American type," the doctor pronounced judicially.
"I do," Sir Richmond countered.
The doctor thought for a moment or so. "You are committed to the project of visiting Avebury?" he said.
"They ought to see Avebury, " said Sir Richmond.
"H'm," said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts and staring at the fire. "Birth Control! I never did."
Sir Richmond smiled down on the top of the doctor's head and said nothing.
"I think" said the doctor and paused. "I shall leave this Avebury expedition to you."
"We can be back in the early afternoon," said Sir Richmond. "To give them a chance of seeing the cathedral. The chapter house here is not one to miss.... "
"And then I suppose we shall go on?
"As you please," said Sir Richmond insincerely.
"I must confess that four people make the car at any rate seem tremendously overpopulated. And to tell the truth, I do not find this encounter so amusing as you seem to do.... I shall not be sorry when we have waved good-bye to those young ladies, and resume our interrupted conversation."
Sir Richmond considered something mulish in the doctor's averted face.
"I find Miss Grammont an extremely interesting--and stimulating human being.
"Evidently."
The doctor sighed, stood up and found himself delivering one of the sentences he had engendered during his solitary meditations in his room before dinner. He surprised himself by the plainness of his speech. "Let me be frank," he said, regarding Sir Richmond squarely. "Considering the general situation of things and your position, I do not care very greatly for the part of an accessory to what may easily develop, as you know very well, into a very serious flirtation. An absurd, mischievous, irrelevant flirtation. You may not like the word. You may pretend it is a conversation, an ordinary intellectual conversation. That is not the word. Simply that is not the word. You people eye one another.... Flirtation. I give the affair its proper name. That is all. Merely that. When I think--But we will not discuss it now.... Good night.... Forgive me if I put before you, rather bluntly, my particular point of view."
Sir Richmond found himself alone. With his eyebrows raised.
Section 6
After twenty-four eventful hours our two students of human motives found themselves together again by the fireplace in the Old George smoking-room. They had resumed their overnight conversation, in a state of considerable tension.
"If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place like this.
I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau. "I am not coming on if these young women are."
"But if you consider it scandalous--and really, Martineau, really! as one man to another, it does seem to me to be a bit pernickety of you, a broad and original thinker as you are--"
"Thought is one matter. Rash, inconsiderate action quite another. And above all, if I spend another day in or near the company of Miss Belinda Seyffert I shall--I shall be extremely rude to her."
"But," said Sir Richmond and bit his lower lip and considered.
"We might drop Belinda," he suggested turning to his friend and speaking in low, confidential tones. "She is quite a manageable person. Quite. She could--for example--be left behind with the luggage and sent on by train. I do not know if you realize how the land lies in that quarter. It needs only a word to Miss Grammont. "
There was no immediate reply. For a moment he had a wild hope that his companion would agree, and then he perceived that the doctor's silence meant only the preparation of an ultimatum.
"I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more than I do to Miss Seyffert."
Sir Richmond said nothing.
"It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different angle if I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert has asked me if you were a married man."
"And of course you told her I was."
"On the second occasion."
Sir Richmond smiled again.
"Frankly," said the doctor, "this adventure is altogether uncongenial to me. It is the sort of thing that has never happened in my life. This highway coupling--"
"Don't you think," said Sir Richmond, "that you are attaching rather too much--what shall I say--romantic?--flirtatious?-- meaning to this affair? I don't mind that after my rather lavish confessions you should consider me a rather oversexed person, but isn't your attitude rather unfair,--unjust, indeed, and almost insulting, to this Miss Grammont? After all, she's a young lady of very good social position indeed. She doesn't strike you--does she?--as an undignified or helpless human being. Her manners suggest a person of considerable self-control. And knowing less of me than you do, she probably regards me as almost as safe as--a maiden aunt say. I'm twice her age. We are a party of four. There are conventions, there are considerations.... Aren't you really, my dear Martineau, overdoing all this side of this very pleasant little enlargement of our interests."
"Am I?" said Dr. Martineau and brought a scrutinizing eye to bear on Sir Richmond's face.
"I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so," Sir Richmond admitted.
"Then I shall prefer to leave your party."
There were some moments of silence.
"I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma," said Sir Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his voice.
"It is not a dilemma," said Dr. Martineau, with a corresponding loss of asperity. "I grant you we discover we differ upon a question of taste and convenience. But before I suggested this trip, I had intended to spend a little time with my old friend Sir Kenelm Latter at Bournemouth. Nothing simpler than to go to him now...."
"I shall be sorry all the same."
"I could have wished," said the doctor, "that these ladies had happened a little later...."
The matter was settled. Nothing more of a practical nature remained to be said. But neither gentleman wished to break off with a harsh and bare decision.
"When the New Age is here," said Sir Richmond, "then, surely, a friendship between a man and a woman will not be subjected to the--the inconveniences your present code would set about it? They would travel about together as they chose?"
"The fundamental principle of the new age," said the doctor, will be Honi soit qui mal y pense. In these matters. With perhaps Fay ce que vouldras as its next injunction. So long as other lives are not affected. In matters of personal behaviour the world will probably be much more free and individuals much more open in their conscience and honour than they have ever been before. In matters of property, economics and public conduct it will probably be just the reverse. Then, there will be much more collective control and much more insistence, legal insistence, upon individual responsibility. But we are not living in a new age yet; we are living in the patched-up ruins of a very old one. And you-- if you will forgive me--are living in the patched up remains of a life that had already had its complications. This young lady, whose charm and cleverness I admit, behaves as if the new age were already here. Well, that may be a very dangerous mistake both for her and for you.... This affair, if it goes on for a few days more, may involve very serious consequences indeed, with which I, for one, do not wish to be involved."
Sir Richmond, upon the hearthrug, had a curious feeling that he was back in the head master's study at Caxton.
Dr. Martineau went on with a lucidity that Sir Richmond found rather trying, to give his impression of Miss Grammont and her position in life.
"She is," he said, "manifestly a very expensively educated girl. And in many ways interesting. I have been watching her. I have not been favoured with very much of her attention, but that fact has enabled me to see her in profile. Miss Seyffert is a fairly crude mixture of frankness, insincerity and self- explanatory egotism, and I have been able to disregard a considerable amount of the conversation she has addressed to me. Now I guess this Miss Grammont has had no mother since she was quite little."
"Your guesses, doctor, are apt to be pretty good," said Sir Richmond.
"You know that?"
"She has told me as much."
"H'm. Well--She impressed me as having the air of a girl who has had to solve many problems for which the normal mother provides ready made solutions. That is how I inferred that there was no mother. I don't think there has been any stepmother, either friendly or hostile? There hasn't been. I thought not. She has had various governesses and companions, ladies of birth and education, engaged to look after her and she has done exactly what she liked with them. Her manner with Miss Seyffert, an excellent manner for Miss Seyffert, by the bye, isn't the sort of manner anyone acquires in a day. Or for one person only. She is a very sure and commanding young woman."
Sir Richmond nodded.
"I suppose her father adores and neglects her, and whenever she has wanted a companion or governess butchered, the thing has been done.... These business Americans, I am told, neglect their womenkind, give them money and power, let them loose on the world.... It is a sort of moral laziness masquerading as affection.... Still I suppose custom and tradition kept this girl in her place and she was petted, honoured, amused, talked about but not in a harmful way, and rather bored right up to the time when America came into the war. Theoretically she had a tremendously good time."
"I think this must be near the truth of her biography," said Sir Richmond.
"I suppose she has lovers."
"You don't mean--?" "No, I don't. Though that is a matter that ought to have no special interest for you. I mean that she was surrounded by a retinue of men who wanted to marry her or who behaved as though they wanted to marry her or who made her happiness and her gratifications and her condescensions seem a matter of very great importance to them. She had the flattery of an extremely uncritical and unexacting admiration. That is the sort of thing that gratifies a silly woman extremely. Miss Grammont is not silly and all this homage and facile approval probably bored her more than she realized. To anyone too intelligent to be steadily excited by buying things and wearing things and dancing and playing games and going to places of entertainment, and being given flowers, sweets, jewellery, pet animals, and books bound in a special sort of leather, the prospect of being a rich man's only daughter until such time as it becomes advisable to change into a rich man's wealthy wife, is probably not nearly so amusing as envious people might suppose. I take it Miss Grammont had got all she could out of that sort of thing some time before the war, and that she had already read and thought rather more than most young women in her position. Before she was twenty I guess she was already looking for something more interesting in the way of men than a rich admirer with an automobile full of presents. Those who seek find."
"What do you think she found?"
"What would a rich girl find out there in America? I don't know. I haven't the material to guess with. In London a girl might find a considerable variety of active, interesting men, rising politicians, university men of distinction, artists and writers even, men of science, men--there are still such men--active in the creative work of the empire.
"In America I suppose there is at least an equal variety, made up of rather different types. She would find that life was worth while to such people in a way that made the ordinary entertainments and amusements of her life a monstrous silly waste of time. With the facility of her sex she would pick up from one of them the idea that made life worth while for him. I am inclined to think there was someone in her case who did seem to promise a sort of life that was worth while. And that somehow the war came to alter the look of that promise.
"How?"
"I don't know. Perhaps I am only romancing. But for this young woman I am convinced this expedition to Europe has meant experience, harsh educational experience and very profound mental disturbance. There have been love experiences; experiences that were something more than the treats and attentions and proposals that made up her life when she was sheltered over there. And something more than that. What it is I don't know. The war has turned an ugly face to her. She has seen death and suffering and ruin. Perhaps she has seen people she knew killed. Perhaps the man has been killed. Or she has met with cowardice or cruelty or treachery where she didn't expect it. She has been shocked out of the first confidence of youth. She has ceased to take the world for granted. It hasn't broken her but it has matured her. That I think is why history has become real to her. Which so attracts you in her. History, for her, has ceased to be a fabric of picturesque incidents; it is the study of a tragic struggle that still goes on. She sees history as you see it and I see it. She is a very grown-up young woman.
"It's just that," said Sir Richmond. "It's just that. If you see as much in Miss Grammont as all that, why don't you want to come on with us? You see the interest of her."
"I see a lot more than that. You don't know what an advantage it is to be as I am, rather cold and unresponsive to women and unattractive and negligible--negligible, that is the exact word--to them. You can't look at a woman for five minutes without losing sight of her in a mist of imaginative excitement. Because she looks back at you. I have the privilege of the negligible--which is a cool head. Miss Grammont has a startled and matured mind, an original mind. Yes. And there is something more to be said. Her intelligence is better than her character."
"I don't quite see what you are driving at."
"The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we understand it, seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character. And as I have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no discipline.... You also are a person of high intelligence and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You-- on account of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss Martin Leeds--" "Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?"
"This is the confessional. It closes to-morrow morning but it is the confessional still. Look at the thing frankly. You, I say, are also at loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir, don't we both know that ever since we left London you have been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha'porth of kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You're a stray man looking for a mistress. Miss Grammont being a woman is a little more selective than that. But if she's at a loose end as I suppose, she isn't protected by the sense of having made her selection. And she has no preconceptions of what she wants. You are a very interesting man in many ways. You carry marriage and entanglements lightly. With an air of being neither married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall in love with you."
"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an ill-concealed eagerness.
Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. "These miracles--grotesquely--happen," he said. "She knows nothing of Martin Leeds.... You must remember that....
"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the phrase goes, what is to follow?"
There was a pause.
Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he took counsel with them and then decided to take offence.
"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous. You talk of falling in love as though it was impossible for a man and woman to be deeply interested in each other without that. And the gulf in our ages--in our quality! From the Psychologist of a New Age I find this amazing. Are men and women to go on for ever-- separated by this possibility into two hardly communicating and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be friendship and companionship between men and women without passion?"
"You ought to know even better than I do that there is not. For such people as you two anyhow. And at present the world is not prepared to tolerate friendship and companionship with that accompaniment. That is the core of this situation."
A pause fell between the two gentlemen. They had smoothed over the extreme harshness of their separation and there was very little more to be said.
"Well," said Sir Richmond in conclusion, "I am very sorry indeed, Martineau, that we have to part like this."
Chapter 9: The Last Days of Sir Richmond Hardy
Chapter 9: 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