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The Secret Places of the Heart

by H. G. Wells

May, 1999 [Etext #1734]

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THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

BY H. G. WELLS

1922

CONTENTS

Chapter

1. THE CONSULTATION
2. LADY HARDY
3. THE DEPARTURE
4. AT MAIDENHEAD
5. IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES
6. THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE
7. COMPANIONSHIP
8. FULL MOON
9. THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY

THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE CONSULTATION

Section 1

The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was

accustomed to let in visitors who had this air of being

annoyed and finding one umbrella too numerous for them. It

mattered nothing to her that the gentleman was asking for Dr.

Martineau as if he was asking for something with an

unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of

his umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive

mahogany stand. "What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the

door of the consulting room.

"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly

with its distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond

Hardy."

The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in

undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in

which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world

eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished

specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase

containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical

works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs,

a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any

collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the

promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost

of the three windows and stared out despondently at Harley

Street.

For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty

jacket on its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.

"Damned fool I was to come here," he said..."DAMNED fool!

"Rush out of the place? . . .

"I've given my name." . . .

He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended

not to hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can

do for me," he said.

"I'm sure _I_ don't," said the doctor. "People come here and

talk."

There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the

figure that confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height

wanted at least three inches of Sir Richmond's five feet

eleven; he was humanly plump, his face was round and pink and

cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of the full moon, of

what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air and

exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short

or he had braced them too high so that he seemed to have

grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been

dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric

personality; this amiable presence dispelled his preconceived

resistances.

Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been

running upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets,

seemed intent only on disavowals. "People come here and talk.

It does them good, and sometimes I am able to offer a

suggestion.

"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded

the idea.

"I'm jangling damnably...overwork.. . . ."

"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork.

Overwork never hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can

work--good straightforward work, without internal resistance,

until he drops,--and never hurt himself. You must be working

against friction."

"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to

death. . . . And it's so DAMNED important I SHOULDN'T break

down. It's VITALLY important."

He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering

gesture of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags.

I explode at any little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily

for ten minutes and I can't leave off working."

"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond

Hardy? In the papers. What is it?"

"Fuel."

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly

can't afford to have you ill."

"I AM ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that

Commission."

"Your technical knowledge--"

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the

national fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's

what I'm up against. You don't know the job I have to do. You

don't know what a Commission of that sort is. The moral

tangle of it. You don't know how its possibilities and

limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long before a

single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole

thing with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as

daylight. I might have seen it at first. . . . Three experts

who'd been got at; they thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour

men who'd do anything you wanted them to do provided you

called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the socialist art

critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make

nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway

managers, oil profiteers, financial adventurers. . . . "

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the

days before the war it was different. Then there was

abundance. A little grabbing or cornering was all to the

good. All to the good. It prevented things being used up too

fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia was

tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all

this is altered. We're living in a different world. The

public won't stand things it used to stand. It's a new

public. It's--wild. It'll smash up the show if they go too

far. Everything short and running shorter--food, fuel,

material. But these people go on. They go on as though

nothing had changed. . . . Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn

them. There are men on that Commission who would steal the

brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in

it. . . . It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles. It's--!

But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."

"You think there may be a smash-up?"

"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."

"A social smash-up."

"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"

"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All

sorts of people I find think that," said the doctor. "All

sorts of people lie awake thinking of it."

"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too,"

he said and seemed to reflect. But he was observing his

patient acutely--with his ears.

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and

left his sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered

swiftly what line of talk he had best follow.

Section 2

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor.

"It's at the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new

state of mind. Before the war it was abnormal--a phase of

neurasthenia. Now it is almost the normal state with whole

classes of intelligent people. Intelligent, I say. The others

always have been casual and adventurous and always will be. A

loss of confidence in the general background of life. So that

we seem to float over abysses."

"We do," said Sir Richmond.

"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in

the days of our assurance. There is a discord, a jarring."

The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and

dreadful sense of responsibility for the universe.

Accompanied by a realization that the job is overwhelmingly

too big for us."

"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond.

"Anyhow, what else is there to do? We MAY keep things

together. . . . "I've got to do my bit. And if only I could

hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows. But that's

where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous

to work well in my life. And never have I been so slack and

weak-willed and inaccurate. ... Sloppy. . . . Indolent. . . .

VISCIOUS! . . . "

The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted

him. "What's got hold of me? What's got hold of me? I used to

work well enough. It's as if my will had come untwisted and

was ravelling out into separate strands. I've lost my unity.

I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to recover my vigour. At

any cost."

Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out

of his mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr. Martineau, is

this: it's fatigue. It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much

effort. On too high a level. And too austere. One strains and

fags. FLAGS! 'Flags' I meant to say. One strains and flags

and then the lower stuff in one, the subconscious stuff,

takes control."

There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this,

and the doctor drew in the corners of his mouth and gave his

head a critical slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond

raise his voice and quicken his speech. "I want," he said, "a

good tonic. A pick-me-up, a stimulating harmless drug of some

sort. That's indicated anyhow. To begin with. Something to

pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to the scratch

again."

"I don't like the use of drugs," said the doctor.

The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to

disappointment. "But that's not reasonable," he cried.

"That's not reasonable. That's superstition. Call a thing a

drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug. Everything that

affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise

is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response

to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I

want food. When I'm overactive and sleepless I want

tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I want pulling together."

"But we don't know how to use drugs," the doctor objected.

"But you ought to know."

Dr. Martineau fixed his eye on a first floor window sill on

the opposite side of Harley Street. His manner suggested a

lecturer holding on to his theme.

"A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs--

all sorts of drugs--and work them in to our general way of

living. I have no prejudice against them at all. A time will

come when we shall correct our moods, get down to our

reserves of energy by their help, suspend fatigue, put off

sleep during long spells of exertion. At some sudden crisis

for example. When we shall know enough to know just how far

to go with this, that or the other stuff. And how to wash out

its after effects . . . . I quite agree with you,--in

principle . . . . But that time hasn't come yet. . . .

Decades of research yet. . . . If we tried that sort of thing

now, we should be like children playing with poisons and

explosives. . . . It's out of the question."

"I've been taking a few little things already. Easton Syrup

for example."

"Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the

way. Has it done you any good--any NETT good? It has--I can

see--broken your sleep."

The doctor turned round again to his patient and looked up

into his troubled face.

"Given physiological trouble I don't mind resorting to a

drug. Given structural injury I don't mind surgery. But

except for any little mischief your amateur drugging may have

done you do not seem to me to be either sick or injured.

You've no trouble either of structure or material. You are--

worried--ill in your mind, and otherwise perfectly sound.

It's the current of your thoughts, fermenting. If the trouble

is in the mental sphere, why go out of the mental sphere for

a treatment? Talk and thought; these are your remedies. Cool

deliberate thought. You're unravelled. You say it yourself.

Drugs will only make this or that unravelled strand behave

disproportionately. You don't want that. You want to take

stock of yourself as a whole--find out where you stand.

"But the Fuel Commission?"

"Is it sitting now?"

"Adjourned till after Whitsuntide. But there's heaps of work

to be done.

"Still," he added, "this is my one chance of any treatment."

The doctor made a little calculation. "Three weeks. . . .

It's scarcely time enough to begin."

"You're certain that no regimen of carefully planned and

chosen tonics--"

"Dismiss the idea. Dismiss it." He decided to take a plunge.

"I've just been thinking of a little holiday for myself. But

I'd like to see you through this. And if I am to see you

through, there ought to be some sort of beginning now. In

this three weeks. Suppose. . . . "

Sir Richmond leapt to his thought. "I'm free to go anywhere."

"Golf would drive a man of your composition mad?"

"It would."

"That's that. Still--. The country must be getting beautiful

again now,--after all the rain we have had. I have a little

two-seater. I don't know. . . . The repair people promise to

release it before Friday."

"But _I_ have a choice of two very comfortable little cars.

Why not be my guest?"

"That might be more convenient."

"I'd prefer my own car."

"Then what do you say?"

"I agree. Peripatetic treatment."

"South and west. We could talk on the road. In the evenings.

By the wayside. We might make the beginnings of a treatment.

. . . A simple tour. Nothing elaborate. You wouldn't bring a

man?"

"I always drive myself."

Section 3

"There's something very pleasant, said the doctor, envisaging

his own rash proposal, "in travelling along roads you don't

know and seeing houses and parks and villages and towns for

which you do not feel in the slightest degree responsible.

They hide all their troubles from the road. Their backyards

are tucked away out of sight, they show a brave face; there's

none of the nasty self-betrayals of the railway approach. And

everything will be fresh still. There will still be a lot of

apple-blossom--and bluebells. . . . And all the while we can

be getting on with your affair."

He was back at the window now. "I want the holiday myself,"

he said.

He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder. "Have you noted

how fagged and unstable EVERYBODY is getting? Everybody

intelligent, I mean."

"It's an infernally worrying time."

"Exactly. Everybody suffers."

"It's no GOOD going on in the old ways--"

"It isn't. And it's a frightful strain to get into any new

ways. So here we are.

"A man," the doctor expanded, "isn't a creature in vacuo.

He's himself and his world. He's a surface of contact, a

system of adaptations, between his essential self and his

surroundings. Well, our surroundings have become--how shall I

put it?--a landslide. The war which seemed such a definable

catastrophe in 1914 was, after all, only the first loud crack

and smash of the collapse. The war is over and--nothing is

over. This peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded

phrase. The slide goes on,--it goes, if anything, faster,

without a sign of stopping. And all our poor little

adaptations! Which we have been elaborating and trusting all

our lives! . . . One after another they fail us. We are

stripped. . . . We have to begin all over again. . . . I'm

fifty-seven and I feel at times nowadays like a chicken new

hatched in a thunderstorm."

The doctor walked towards the bookcase and turned.

"Everybody is like that...it isn't--what are you going to do?

It isn't--what am I going to do? It's--what are we all going

to do! . . Lord! How safe and established everything was in

1910, say. We talked of this great war that was coming, but

nobody thought it would come. We had been born in peace,

comparatively speaking; we had been brought up in peace.

There was talk of wars. There were wars--little wars--that

altered nothing material. . . . Consols used to be at 112 and

you fed your household on ten shillings a head a week. You

could run over all Europe, barring Turkey and Russia, without

even a passport. You could get to Italy in a day. Never were

life and comfort so safe--for respectable people. And we WERE

respectable people. . . . That was the world that made us

what we are. That was the sheltering and friendly greenhouse

in which we grew. We fitted our minds to that. . . . And here

we are with the greenhouse falling in upon us lump by lump,

smash and clatter, the wild winds of heaven tearing in

through the gaps."

Upstairs on Dr. Martineau's desk lay the typescript of the

opening chapters of a book that was intended to make a great

splash in the world, his PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE. He had his

metaphors ready.

"We said: 'This system will always go on. We needn't bother

about it.' We just planned our lives accordingly. It was like

a bird building its nest of frozen snakes. My father left me

a decent independence. I developed my position; I have lived

between here and the hospital, doing good work, enormously

interested, prosperous, mildly distinguished. I had been born

and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed that

someone else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I

never enquired."

"Nor did I" said Sir Richmond, "but--"

"And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on.

"Nobody had ever steered the ship. It was adrift."

"I realized that. I--"

"It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by

faith--as children do, as the animals do. At the back of the

healthy mind, human or animal, has been this persuasion:

'This is all right. This will go on. If I keep the rule, if I

do so and so, all will be well. I need not trouble further;

things are cared for.'"

"If we could go on like that!" said Sir Richmond.

"We can't. That faith is dead. The war--and the peace--have

killed it."

The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance

to the full moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote

things. "It may very well be that man is no more capable of

living out of that atmosphere of assurance than a tadpole is

of living out of water. His mental existence may be

conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable

of sustained social life. He may become frantically self-

seeking--incoherent . . . a stampede. . . . Human sanity

may--DISPERSE.

"That's our trouble," the doctor completed. "Our fundamental

trouble. All our confidences and our accustomed adaptations

are destroyed. We fit together no longer. We are--loose. We

don't know where we are nor what to do. The psychology of the

former time fails to give safe responses, and the psychology

of the New Age has still to develop."

Section 4

"That is all very well," said Sir Richmond in the resolute

voice of one who will be pent no longer. "That is all very

well as far as it goes. But it does not cover my case. I am

not suffering from inadaptation. I HAVE adapted. I have

thought things out. I think--much as you do. Much as you do.

So it's not that. But-- . . . Mind you, I am perfectly clear

where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the

breakup of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another

system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly.

Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in

human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted. We used to

say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've

muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of

world, planned and scientific, has to be got going.

Civilization renewed. Rebuilding civilization--while the

premises are still occupied and busy. It's an immense

enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some ways

it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips

my imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work.

Working as I do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall

presently join up. . . The attempt may fail; all things human

may fail; but on the other hand it may succeed. I never had

such faith in anything as I have in the rightness of the work

I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where my

difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self

says all that I have been saying, but-- The rest of me

won't follow. The rest of me refuses to attend, forgets,

straggles, misbehaves."

"Exactly."

The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all.

'Amazingly,' if you like. . . . I have this unlimited faith

in our present tremendous necessity--for work--for devotion;

I believe my share, the work I am doing, is essential to the

whole thing--and I work sluggishly. I work reluctantly. I

work damnably."

"Exact--" The doctor checked himself . "All that is

explicable. Indeed it is. Listen for a moment to me! Consider

what you are. Consider what we are. Consider what a man is

before you marvel at his ineptitudes of will. Face the

accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand

generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And

that ape again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his

forebear. A man's body, his bodily powers, are just the body

and powers of an ape, a little improved, a little adapted to

novel needs. That brings me to my point. CAN HIS MIND AND

WILL BE ANYTHING BETTER? For a few generations, a few

hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out

on the darknesses of life. . . . But the substance of man is

ape still. He may carry a light in his brain, but his

instincts move in the darkness. Out of that darkness he draws

his motives."

"Or fails to draw them," said Sir Richmond.

"Or fails. . . . And that is where these new methods of

treatment come in. We explore that failure. Together. What

the psychoanalyst does-and I will confess that I owe much to

the psychoanalyst--what he does is to direct thwarted,

disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of their

own nature. Which they have been accustomed to ignore and

forget. They come to us with high ambitions or lovely

illusions about themselves, torn, shredded, spoilt. They are

morally denuded. Dreams they hate pursue them; abhorrent

desires draw them; they are the prey of irresistible yet

uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs. The

first thing we ask them is this: 'What else could you

expect?'"

"What else could I expect?" Sir Richmond repeated, looking

down on him. "H'm!"

"The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly

unselfish, inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you are

ever anything else. . . . Do you realize that a few million

generations ago, everything that stirs in us, everything that

exalts human life, self-devotions, heroisms, the utmost

triumphs of art, the love--for love it is--that makes you and

me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round

world, was latent in the body of some little lurking beast

that crawled and hid among the branches of vanished and

forgotten Mesozoic trees? A petty egg-laying, bristle-covered

beast it was, with no more of the rudiments of a soul than

bare hunger, weak lust and fear. . . . People always seem to

regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance. It

isn't: it's a vital fact of the utmost practical importance.

That is what you are made of. Why should you expect--because

a war and a revolution have shocked you--that you should

suddenly be able to reach up and touch the sky?"

"H'm!" said Sir Richmond. "Have I been touching the sky!"

"You are trying to play the part of an honest rich man."

"I don't care to see the whole system go smash."

"Exactly," said the doctor, before he could prevent himself.

"But is it any good to tell a man that the job he is

attempting is above him--that he is just a hairy reptile

twice removed--and all that sort of thing?"

"Well, it saves him from hoping too much and being too

greatly disappointed. It recalls him to the proportions of

the job. He gets something done by not attempting everything.

. . . And it clears him up. We get him to look into himself,

to see directly and in measurable terms what it is that puts

him wrong and holds him back. He's no longer vaguely

incapacitated. He knows."

"That's diagnosis. That's not treatment."

"Treatment by diagnosis. To analyze a mental knot is to untie

it."

"You propose that I shall spend my time, until the Commission

meets, in thinking about myself. I wanted to forget myself."

"Like a man who tries to forget that his petrol is running

short and a cylinder missing fire. . . . No. Come back to the

question of what you are," said the doctor. "A creature of

the darkness with new lights. Lit and half-blinded by science

and the possibilities of controlling the world that it opens

out. In that light your will is all for service; you care

more for mankind than for yourself. You begin to understand

something of the self beyond your self. But it is a partial

and a shaded light as yet; a little area about you it makes

clear, the rest is still the old darkness--of millions of

intense and narrow animal generations. . . . You are like

someone who awakens out of an immemorial sleep to find

himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a

great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless

mountains--in a sunless universe. You are not alone in it.

You are not lord of all you survey. Your leadership is

disputed. The darkness even of the room you are in is full of

ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers and

purposes. . . . They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws

suddenly out of the darkness into the light of your

attention. They snatch things out of your hand, they trip

your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and cluster behind

you. Wherever your shadow falls, they creep right up to you,

creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The

souls of apes, monkeys, reptiles and creeping things haunt

the passages and attics and cellars of this living house in

which your consciousness has awakened . . . . "

The doctor gave this quotation from his unpublished book the

advantages of an abrupt break and a pause.

Sir Richmond shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "And you

propose a vermin hunt in the old tenement?"

"The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to

take stock and know what is there."

"Three weeks of self vivisection."

"To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself.

As an opening. . . . It will take longer than that if we are

to go through with the job."

It is a considerable--process."

"It is."

"Yet you shrink from simple things like drugs!"

"Self-knowledge--without anaesthetics."

"Has this sort of thing ever done anyone any good at all?"

"It has turned hundreds back to sanity and steady work."

"How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be?

Anyhow--we can break off at any time. . . . We'll try it.

We'll try it. . . . And so for this journey into the west of

England. . . . And--if we can get there--I'm not sure that we

can get there--into the secret places of my heart.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

LADY HARDY

The patient left the house with much more self possession

than he had shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau had thrust

him back from his intenser prepossessions to a more

generalized view of himself, had made his troubles objective

and detached him from them. He could even find something

amusing now in his situation. He liked the immense scope of

the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that

most of it was entirely true--and, in some untraceable

manner, absurd. There were entertaining possibilities in the

prospect of the doctor drawing him out--he himself partly

assisting and partly resisting.

He was a man of extensive reservations. His private life was

in some respects exceptionally private.

"I don't confide . . . . Do I even confide in myself? I

imagine I do . . . . Is there anything in myself that I

haven't looked squarely in the face? . . . How much are we

going into? Even as regards facts?

"Does it really help a man--to see himself?. . ."

Such thoughts engaged him until he found himself in his

study. His desk and his writing table were piled high with a

heavy burthen of work. Still a little preoccupied with Dr.

Martineau's exposition, he began to handle this

confusion. . . .

At half past nine he found himself with three hours of good

work behind him. It had seemed like two. He had not worked

like this for many weeks. "This is very cheering," he said.

"And unexpected. Can old Moon-face have hypnotized me?

Anyhow--. . . Perhaps I've only imagined I was ill. . . .

Dinner?" He looked at his watch and was amazed at the time.

"Good Lord! I've been at it three hours. What can have

happened? Funny I didn't hear the gong."

He went downstairs and found Lady Hardy reading a magazine in

a dining-room armchair and finely poised between devotion and

martyrdom. A shadow of vexation fell athwart his mind at the

sight of her.

"I'd no idea it was so late," he said. "I heard no gong."

"After you swore so at poor Bradley I ordered that there

should be no gongs when we were alone. I did come up to your

door about half past eight. I crept up. But I was afraid I

might upset you if I came in."

"But you've not waited--"

"I've had a mouthful of soup." Lady Hardy rang the bell.

"I've done some work at last," said Sir Richmond, astride on

the hearthrug.

"I'm glad," said Lady Hardy, without gladness. "I waited for

three hours."

Lady Hardy was a frail little blue-eyed woman with uneven

shoulders and a delicate sweet profile. Hers was that type of

face that under even the most pleasant and luxurious

circumstances still looks bravely and patiently enduring. Her

refinement threw a tinge of coarseness over his eager

consumption of his excellent clear soup.

"What's this fish, Bradley?" he asked.

"Turbot, Sir Richmond."

"Don't you have any?" he asked his wife.

"I've had a little fish, " said Lady Hardy.

When Bradley was out of the room, Sir Richmond remarked: "I

saw that nerves man, Dr. Martineau, to-day. He wants me to

take a holiday. "

The quiet patience of the lady's manner intensified. She said

nothing. A flash of resentment lit Sir Richmond's eyes. When

he spoke again, he seemed to answer unspoken accusations.

"Dr. Martineau's idea is that he should come with me."

The lady adjusted herself to a new point of view.

"But won't that be reminding you of your illness and

worries?"

"He seems a good sort of fellow. . . . I'm inclined to like

him. He'll be as good company as anyone. . . . This TOURNEDOS

looks excellent. Have some."

"I had a little bird," said Lady Hardy, "when I found you

weren't coming."

"But I say--don't wait here if you've dined. Bradley can see

to me."

She smiled and shook her head with the quiet conviction of

one who knew her duty better. "Perhaps I'll have a little ice

pudding when it comes," she said.

Sir Richmond detested eating alone in an atmosphere of

observant criticism. And he did not like talking with his

mouth full to an unembarrassed interlocutor who made no

conversational leads of her own. After a few mouthfuls he

pushed his plate away from him. "Then let's have up the ice

pudding," he said with a faint note of bitterness.

"But have you finished--?"

"The ice pudding!" he exploded wrathfully. "The ice pudding!"

Lady Hardy sat for a moment, a picture of meek distress.

Then, her delicate eyebrows raised, and the corners of her

mouth drooping, she touched the button of the silver table-

bell.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE DEPARTURE

Section 1

No wise man goes out upon a novel expedition without

misgivings. And between their first meeting and the appointed

morning both Sir Richmond Hardy and Dr. Martineau were the

prey of quite disagreeable doubts about each other,

themselves, and the excursion before them. At the time of

their meeting each had been convinced that he gauged the

other sufficiently for the purposes of the proposed tour.

Afterwards each found himself trying to recall the other with

greater distinctness and able to recall nothing but queer,

ominous and minatory traits. The doctor's impression of the

great fuel specialist grew ever darker, leaner, taller and

more impatient. Sir Richmond took on the likeness of a

monster obdurate and hostile, he spread upwards until like

the Djinn out of the bottle, he darkened the heavens. And he

talked too much. He talked ever so much too much. Sir

Richmond also thought that the doctor talked too much. In

addition, he read into his imperfect memory of the doctor's

face, an expression of protruded curiosity. What was all this

problem of motives and inclinations that they were "going

into" so gaily? He had merely consulted the doctor on a

simple, straightforward need for a nervous tonic--that was

what he had needed--a tonic. Instead he had engaged himself

for--he scarcely knew what--an indiscreet, indelicate, and

altogether undesirable experiment in confidences.

Both men were considerably reassured when at last they set

eyes on each other again. Indeed each was surprised to find

something almost agreeable in the appearance of the other.

Dr. Martineau at once perceived that the fierceness of Sir

Richmond was nothing more than the fierceness of an

overwrought man, and Sir Richmond realized at a glance that

the curiosity of Dr. Martineau's bearing had in it nothing

personal or base; it was just the fine alertness of the

scientific mind.

Sir Richmond had arrived nearly forty minutes late, and it

would have been evident to a much less highly trained

observer than Dr. Martineau that some dissension had arisen

between the little, ladylike, cream and black Charmeuse car

and its owner. There was a faint air of resentment and

protest between them. As if Sir Richmond had been in some way

rude to it.

The cap of the radiator was adorned with a little brass

figure of a flying Mercury. Frozen in a sprightly attitude,

its stiff bound and its fixed heavenward stare was highly

suggestive of a forced and tactful disregard of current

unpleasantness.

Nothing was said, however, to confirm or dispel this

suspicion of a disagreement between the man and the car. Sir

Richmond directed and assisted Dr. Martineau's man to adjust

the luggage at the back, and Dr. Martineau watched the

proceedings from his dignified front door. He was wearing a

suit of fawn tweeds, a fawn Homburg hat and a light Burberry,

with just that effect of special preparation for a holiday

which betrays the habitually busy man. Sir Richmond's brown

gauntness was, he noted, greatly set off by his suit of grey.

There had certainly been some sort of quarrel. Sir Richmond

was explaining the straps to Dr. Martineau's butler with the

coldness a man betrays when he explains the uncongenial

habits of some unloved intimate. And when the moment came to

start and the little engine did not immediately respond to

the electric starter, he said: "Oh! COME up, you--!"

His voice sank at the last word as though it was an entirely

confidential communication to the little car. And it was an

extremely low and disagreeable word. So Dr. Martineau decided

that it was not his business to hear it. . . .

It was speedily apparent that Sir Richmond was an experienced

and excellent driver. He took the Charmeuse out into the

traffic of Baker Street and westward through brisk and busy

streets and roads to Brentford and Hounslow smoothly and

swiftly, making a score of unhesitating and accurate

decisions without apparent thought. There was very little

conversation until they were through Brentford. Near

Shepherd's Bush, Sir Richmond had explained, "This is not my

own particular car. That was butted into at the garage this

morning and its radiator cracked. So I had to fall back on

this. It's quite a good little car. In its way. My wife

drives it at times. It has one or two constitutional

weaknesses--incidental to the make--gear-box over the back

axle for example--gets all the vibration. Whole machine

rather on the flimsy side. Still--"

He left the topic at that.

Dr. Martineau said something of no consequence about its

being a very comfortable little car.

Somewhere between Brentford and Hounslow, Sir Richmond

plunged into the matter between them. "I don't know how deep

we are going into these psychological probings of yours," he

said. "But I doubt very much if we shall get anything out of

them."

"Probably not," said Dr. Martineau.

"After all, what I want is a tonic. I don't see that there is

anything positively wrong with me. A certain lack of energy--

"

"Lack of balance," corrected the doctor. "You are wasting

energy upon internal friction. "But isn't that inevitable? No

machine is perfectly efficient. No man either. There is

always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the individual

idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as

she ought to pull--she never does. She's low in her class. So

with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of

energy waste. Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to

me. (Damn that omnibus! All over the road!)"

"We don't deny the imperfection--" began the doctor.

"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir

Richmond, opening up another line of thought.

"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it.

"These new methods of treatment are based on the idea of

imperfection. We begin with that. I began with that last

Tuesday. . . ."

Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and

for that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of

accumulations. Your psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me,

with a notion of stripping down to something fundamental. The

ape before was a tangle of accumulations, just as we are. So

it was with his forebears. So it has always been. All life is

an endless tangle of accumulations."

"Recognize it," said the doctor.

"And then?" said Sir Richmond, controversially.

"Recognize in particular your own tangle."

"Is my particular tangle very different from the general

tangle? (Oh! Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a

creature of undecided will, urged on by my tangled heredity

to do a score of entirely incompatible things. Mankind, all

life, is that."

"But our concern is the particular score of incompatible

things you are urged to do. We examine and weigh--we weigh--"

The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and

ultimately disastrous struggle began between Sir Richmond and

the little Charmeuse car. The doctor stopped in mid-sentence.

It was near Taplow station that the mutual exasperation of

man and machine was brought to a crisis by the clumsy

emergence of a laundry cart from a side road. Sir Richmond

was obliged to pull up smartly and stopped his engine. It

refused an immediate obedience to the electric starter. Then

it picked up, raced noisily, disengaged great volumes of

bluish smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition

to run on any gear but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought

aloud, unpleasing thoughts. He addressed the little car as a

person; he referred to ancient disputes and temperamental

incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse, ill-bred

man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There

were some moments of hope, dashed by the necessity of going

dead slow behind an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not

notice the outstretched arm of the driver of the van, and

stalled his engine for a second time. The electric starter

refused its office altogether.

For some moments Sir Richmond sat like a man of stone.

"I must wind it up " he said at last in a profound and awful

voice. "I must wind it up."

"I get out, don't I?" asked the doctor, unanswered, and did

so. Sir Richmond, after a grim search and the displacement

and replacement of the luggage, produced a handle from the

locker at the back of the car and prepared to wind.

There was a little difficulty. "Come UP!" he said, and the

small engine roared out like a stage lion.

The two gentlemen resumed their seats. The car started and

then by an unfortunate inadvertency Sir Richmond pulled the

gear lever over from the first speed to the reverse. There

was a metallic clangour beneath the two gentlemen, and the

car slowed down and stopped although the engine was still

throbbing wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke still

streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle

breeze. The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by

a gaunt madman, mouthing vileness, who had only a minute or

so before been a decent British citizen. He made some blind

lunges at the tremulous but obdurate car, but rather as if he

looked for offences and accusations than for displacements to

adjust. Quivering and refusing, the little car was

extraordinarily like some recalcitrant little old

aristocratic lady in the hands of revolutionaries, and this

made the behaviour of Sir Richmond seem even more outrageous

than it would otherwise have done. He stopped the engine, he

went down on his hands and knees in the road to peer up at

the gear-box, then without restoring the spark, he tried to

wind up the engine again. He spun the little handle with an

insane violence, faster and faster for--as it seemed to the

doctor--the better part of a minute. Beads of perspiration

appeared upon his brow and ran together; he bared his teeth

in a snarl; his hat slipped over one eye. He groaned with

rage. Then, using the starting handle as a club, he assailed

the car. He smote the brazen Mercury from its foothold and

sent it and a part of the radiator cap with it flying across

the road. He beat at the wings of the bonnet, until they bent

in under his blows. Finally, he hurled the starting-handle at

the wind-screen and smashed it. The starting-handle rattled

over the bonnet and fell to the ground. . . .

The paroxysm was over. Ten seconds later this cataclysmal

lunatic had reverted to sanity--a rather sheepish sanity.

He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned his

back on the car. He remarked in a voice of melancholy

detachment: "It was a mistake to bring that coupe."

Dr. Martineau had assumed an attitude of trained observation

on the side path. His hands rested on his hips and his hat

was a little on one side. He was inclined to agree with Sir

Richmond. "I don't know," he considered. "You wanted some

such blow-off as this."

"Did I? "

"The energy you have! That car must be somebody's whipping

boy."

"The devil it is!" said Sir Richmond, turning round sharply

and staring at it as if he expected it to display some

surprising and yet familiar features. Then he looked

questioningly and suspiciously at his companion.

"These outbreaks do nothing to amend the originating

grievance," said the doctor. "No. And at times they are even

costly. But they certainly lift a burthen from the nervous

system. . . . And now I suppose we have to get that little

ruin to Maidenhead."

"Little ruin!" repeated Sir Richmond. "No. There's lots of

life in the little beast yet."

He reflected. "She'll have to be towed." He felt in his

breast pocket. "Somewhere I have the R.A.C. order paper, the

Badge that will Get You Home. We shall have to hail some

passing car to take it into Maidenhead."

Dr. Martineau offered and Sir Richmond took and lit a

cigarette.

For a little while conversation hung fire. Then for the first

time Dr. Martineau heard his patient laugh.

"Amazing savage," said Sir Richmond. "Amazing savage!"

He pointed to his handiwork. "The little car looks ruffled.

Well it may."

He became grave again. "I suppose I ought to apologize.

"Dr. Martineau weighed the situation. "As between doctor and

patient," he said. "No."

"Oh!" said Sir Richmond, turned to a new point of view. "But

where the patient ends and the host begins. . . . I'm really

very sorry." He reverted to his original train of thought

which had not concerned Dr. Martineau at all. "After all, the

little car was only doing what she was made to do."

Section 2

The affair of the car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's

mind. Hitherto Dr. Martineau had perceived the possibility

and danger of a defensive silence or of a still more

defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond had once given

himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to an

unlimited extent. He embarked upon an apologetic discussion

of the choleric temperament.

He began as they stood waiting for the relief car from the

Maidenhead garage. "You were talking of the ghosts of apes

and monkeys that suddenly come out from the darkness of the

subconscious . . . ."

"You mean--when we first met at Harley Street?"

"That last apparition of mine seems to have been a gorilla at

least."

The doctor became precise. Gorillaesque. We are not descended

from gorillas."

"Queer thing a fit of rage is!"

"It's one of nature's cruder expedients. Crude, but I doubt

if it is fundamental. There doesn't seem to be rage in the

vegetable world, and even among the animals--? No, it is not

universal." He ran his mind over classes and orders. "Wasps

and bees certainly seem to rage, but if one comes to think,

most of the invertebrata show very few signs of it."

"I'm not so sure," said Sir Richmond. "I've never seen a

snail in a towering passion or an oyster slamming its shell

behind it. But these are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which

is after all a smouldering sort of rage. And take any more

active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not a smashing and

swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a disciplined, cold-

blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will

rage dangerously."

"A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has

ever seen a furious rabbit?"

"Don't the bucks fight?" questioned Sir Richmond.

Dr. Martineau admitted the point.

"I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can

remember. I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I

once threw a fork at my elder brother and it stuck in his

forehead, doing no serious damage--happily. There were whole

days of wrath--days, as I remember them. Perhaps they were

only hours. . . . I've never thought before what a peculiar

thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage? They

used to say it was the devil. If it isn't the devil, then

what the devil is it? "After all," he went on as the doctor

was about to answer his question; "as you pointed out, it

isn't the lowlier things that rage. It's the HIGHER things

and US."

"The devil nowadays," the doctor reflected after a pause, "so

far as man is concerned, is understood to be the ancestral

ape. And more particularly the old male ape."

But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. "Life

itself, flaring out. Brooking no contradiction." He came

round suddenly to the doctor's qualification. "Why male?

Don't little girls smash things just as much?"

"They don't," said Dr. Martineau. "Not nearly as much."

Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. "I suppose you have

watched any number of babies?"'

"Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do.

There's a lot of rage about most of them at first, male or

female. "

"Queer little eddies of fury. . . . Recently--it happens--

I've been seeing one. A spit of red wrath, clenching its

fists and squalling threats at a damned disobedient

universe."

The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and

questioningly at his companion's profile.

"Blind driving force," said Sir Richmond, musing.

"Isn't that after all what we really are?" he asked the

doctor. "Essentially--Rage. A rage in dead matter, making it

alive."

"Schopenhauer," footnoted the doctor. "Boehme."

"Plain fact, "said Sir Richmond. "No Rage--no Go."

"But rage without discipline?"

"Discipline afterwards. The rage first."

"But rage against what? And FOR what?"

"Against the Universe. And for--? That's more difficult. What

IS the little beast squalling itself crimson for? Ultimately?

. . . What is it clutching after? In the long run, what will

it get?"

("Yours the car in distress what sent this?" asked an

unheeded voice.)

"Of course, if you were to say 'desire'," said Dr. Martineau,

"then you would be in line with the psychoanalysts. They talk

of LIBIDO, meaning a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks

of it at times almost as if it were the universal driving

force."

"No," said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. "Not

desire. Desire would have a definite direction, and that is

just what this driving force hasn't. It's rage."

"Yours the car in distress what sent this?" the voice

repeated. It was the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car.

He was holding up the blue request for assistance that Sir

Richmond had recently filled in.

The two philosophers returned to practical matters.

Section 3

For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse

car with Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the brass Mercury

lay unheeded in the dusty roadside grass. Then it caught the

eye of a passing child.

He was a bright little boy of five. From the moment when he

caught the gleam of brass he knew that he had made the find

of his life. But his nurse was a timorous, foolish thing.

"You did ought to of left it there, Masterrarry," she said.

"Findings ain't keepings nowadays, not by no manner of means,

Masterrarry.

"Yew'd look silly if a policeman came along arsting people if

they seen a goldennimage.

"Arst yer 'ow you come by it and look pretty straight at

you."

All of which grumblings Master Harry treated with an

experienced disregard. He knew definitely that he would never

relinquish this bright and lovely possession again. It was

the first beautiful thing he had ever possessed. He was the

darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was

crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic

penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen

and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual

beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a

thing of a different order.

There was to be much conflict and distress, tears and wrath,

before the affinity of that cleanlimbed, shining figure and

his small soul was recognized. But he carried his point at

last. The Mercury became his inseparable darling, his symbol,

his private god, the one dignified and serious thing in a

little life much congested by the quaint, the burlesque, and

all the smiling, dull condescensions of adult love.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

AT MAIDENHEAD

Section 1

The little Charmeuse was towed to hospital and the two

psychiatrists took up their quarters at the Radiant Hotel

with its pleasant lawns and graceful landing stage at the

bend towards the bridge. Sir Richmond, after some trying work

at the telephone, got into touch with his own proper car. A

man would bring the car down in two days' time at latest, and

afterwards the detested coupe could go back to London. The

day was still young, and after lunch and coffee upon a sunny

lawn a boat seemed indicated. Sir Richmond astonished the

doctor by going to his room, reappearing dressed in tennis

flannels and looking very well in them. It occurred to the

doctor as a thing hitherto unnoted that Sir Richmond was not

indifferent to his personal appearance. The doctor had no

flannels, but he had brought a brown holland umbrella lined

with green that he had acquired long ago in Algiers, and this

served to give him something of the riverside quality.

The day was full of sunshine and the river had a Maytime

animation. Pink geraniums, vivid green lawns, gay awnings,

bright glass, white paint and shining metal set the tone of

Maidenhead life. At lunch there had been five or six small

tables with quietly affectionate couples who talked in

undertones, a tableful of bright-coloured Jews who talked in

overtones, and a family party from the Midlands, badly

smitten with shyness, who did not talk at all. "A resort, of

honeymoon couples," said the doctor, and then rather

knowingly: "Temporary honeymoons, I fancy, in one or two of

the cases."

"Decidedly temporary," said Sir Richmond, considering the

company--"in most of the cases anyhow. The two in the corner

might be married. You never know nowadays."

He became reflective. . . .

After lunch and coffee he rowed the doctor up the river

towards Cliveden.

"The last time I was here," he said, returning to the

subject, "I was here on a temporary honeymoon."

The doctor tried to look as though he had not thought that

could be possible.

"I know my Maidenhead fairly well," said Sir Richmond.

"Aquatic activities, such as rowing, punting, messing about

with a boat-hook, tying up, buzzing about in motor launches,

fouling other people's boats, are merely the stage business

of the drama. The ruling interests of this place are love--

largely illicit--and persistent drinking. . . . Don't you

think the bridge charming from here?"

"I shouldn't have thought--drinking," said Dr. Martineau,

after he had done justice to the bridge over his shoulder.

"Yes, the place has a floating population of quiet

industrious soakers. The incurable river man and the river

girl end at that."

Dr. Martineau encouraged Sir Richmond by an appreciative

silence.

"If we are to explore the secret places of the heart," Sir

Richmond went on, "we shall have to give some attention to

this Maidenhead side of life. It is very material to my case.

I have,--as I have said--BEEN HERE. This place has beauty and

charm; these piled-up woods behind which my Lords Astor and

Desborough keep their state, this shining mirror of the

water, brown and green and sky blue, this fringe of reeds and

scented rushes and forget-me-not and lilies, and these

perpetually posing white swans: they make a picture. A little

artificial it is true; one feels the presence of a

Conservancy Board, planting the rushes and industriously

nicking the swans; but none the less delightful. And this

setting has appealed to a number of people as an invitation,

as, in a way, a promise. They come here, responsive to that

promise of beauty and happiness. They conceive of themselves

here, rowing swiftly and gracefully, punting beautifully,

brandishing boat-hooks with ease and charm. They look to

meet, under pleasant or romantic circumstances, other

possessors and worshippers of grace and beauty here. There

will be glowing evenings, warm moonlight, distant voices

singing. . . .There is your desire, doctor, the desire you

say is the driving force of life. But reality mocks it. Boats

bump and lead to coarse ungracious quarrels; rowing can be

curiously fatiguing; punting involves dreadful indignities.

The romance here tarnishes very quickly. Romantic encounters

fail to occur; in our impatience we resort to--accosting.

Chilly mists arise from the water and the magic of distant

singing is provided, even excessively, by boatloads of cads--

with collecting dishes. When the weather keeps warm there

presently arises an extraordinary multitude of gnats, and

when it does not there is a need for stimulants. That is why

the dreamers who come here first for a light delicious brush

with love, come down at last to the Thamesside barmaid with

her array of spirits and cordials as the quintessence of all

desire."

"I say," said the doctor. "You tear the place to pieces."

"The desires of the place," said Sir Richmond.

"I'm using the place as a symbol."

He held his sculls awash, rippling in the water.

"The real force of life, the rage of life, isn't here," he

said. "It's down underneath, sulking and smouldering. Every

now and then it strains and cracks the surface. This stretch

of the Thames, this pleasure stretch, has in fact a curiously

quarrelsome atmosphere. People scold and insult one another

for the most trivial things, for passing too close, for

taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose. Most

of these notice boards on the bank show a thoroughly nasty

spirit. People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats. You

hear people quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk

along the towing path. There is remarkably little happy

laughter here. The RAGE, you see, is hostile to this place,

the RAGE breaks through. . . . The people who drift from one

pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the

riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of pleasure, trying

to forget the rage. . . ."

"Isn't it that there is some greater desire at the back of

the human mind?" the doctor suggested. "Which refuses to be

content with pleasure as an end?"

"What greater desire?" asked Sir Richmond, disconcertingly.

"Oh! . . . " The doctor cast about.

"There is no such greater desire," said Sir Richmond. "You

cannot name it. It is just blind drive. I admit its

discontent with pleasure as an end--but has it any end of its

own? At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking

its desire and hasn't found it."

"Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an

afternoon smile under his green umbrella. "Go on."

Section 2

"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond,

"I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift

down this backwater.) "

"Big these trees are," said the doctor with infinite

approval.

"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant

motives I am. I do not seem to deserve to be called a

personality. I cannot discover even a general direction. Much

more am I like a taxi-cab in which all sorts of aims and

desires have travelled to their destination and got out. Are

we all like that?"

"A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain

thread of memory?" said the doctor and considered. "More than

that. More than that. We have leading ideas, associations,

possessions, liabilities."

"We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us

from complete dispersal."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a

consistency, that we call character."

"It changes."

"Consistently with itself."

"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir

Richmond, going off at a tangent. "My sentimental education.

I wonder if it differs very widely from yours or most men's."

"Some men are more eventful in these matters than others,"

said the doctor,--it sounded--wistfully.

"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I

suspect, whether they are eventful or not. The brakes may be

strong or weak but the drive is the same. I can't remember

much of the beginnings of curiosity and knowledge in these

matters. Can you?"

"Not much," said the doctor. "No."

"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions,

monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't

remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may

have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy

curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall

anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively

interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy,

and a certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative

slavishness--not towards actual women but towards something

magnificently feminine. My first love--"

Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was

Britannia as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I

must have been a very little chap at the time of the

Britannia affair. I just clung to her in my imagination and

did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little later, a

secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the

Crystal Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can

remember,--for all of them. But I don't remember anything

very monstrous or incestuous in my childish imaginations,--

such things as Freud, I understand, lays stress upon. If

there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort in my

case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a

child which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and

sees a lot of pictures of the nude human body, and so on,

gets its mind shifted off any possible concentration upon the

domestic aspect of sex. I got to definite knowledge pretty

early. By the time I was eleven or twelve."

"Normally? "

"What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be

forgetting much secret and shameful curiosity. I got my ideas

into definite form out of a little straightforward

physiological teaching and some dissecting of rats and mice.

My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of his

times and my people believed in him. I think much of this

distorted perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds

about sex and develops into evil vices and still more evil

habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things."

"Not entirely," said the doctor.

"Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes

through the stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN."

"I've not read it."

"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up

in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of

purity and decency and under threats of hell fire."

"Horrible!"

"Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that

make young people write unclean words in secret places. "

"Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters

nowadays. Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode."

"On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and

clean," said Sir Richmond. "What stands out in my memory now

is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely

and kind and powerful and wonderful. That ruled my secret

imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my mind as I

grew up."

"The mother complex," said Dr. Martineau as a passing

botanist might recognize and name a flower.

Sir Richmond stared at him for a moment.

"It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any

mother or any particular woman at all. Far better to call it

the goddess complex."

"The connexion is not perhaps immediately visible," said the

doctor.

"There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond. "The women of my

adolescent dreams were stripped and strong and lovely. They

were great creatures. They came, it was clearly traceable,

from pictures sculpture--and from a definite response in

myself to their beauty. My mother had nothing whatever to do

with that. The women and girls about me were fussy bunches of

clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream

world of love and worship."

"Were you co-educated?"

"No. But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger

than myself, and there were plenty of girls in my circle. I

thought some of them pretty--but that was a different affair.

I know that I didn't connect them with the idea of the loved

and worshipped goddesses at all, because I remember when I

first saw the goddess in a real human being and how amazed I

was at the discovery. . . . I was a boy of twelve or

thirteen. My people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney

Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the Marsh

accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a

little old forgotten silent wind-bitten village crouching

under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water there were

miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage

brown woman. Shining and with a texture--the very same. And

one day as I was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy

fashion,--there were some ribs of a wrecked boat buried in

the sand near a groin and I was busy with them--a girl ran

out from a tent high up on the beach and across the sands to

the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and not

in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to

inflict on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a

blue handkerchief. She ran swiftly and gracefully, intent

upon the white line of foam ahead. I can still remember how

the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as she went

past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have

ever seen--to this day. She lifted up her arms and thrust

through the dazzling white and green breakers and plunged

into the water and swam; she swam straight out for a long way

as it seemed to me, and presently came in and passed me again

on her way back to her tent, light and swift and sure. The

very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful. Suddenly

I realized that there could be living people in the world as

lovely as any goddess. . . . She wasn't in the least out of

breath.

"That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I

doubt sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else. I kept

the thing very secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing

so secret. Until now I have never told a soul about it. I

resorted to all sorts of tortuous devices and excuses to get

a chance of seeing her again without betraying what it was I

was after."

Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.

"And did you meet her again?"

"Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person

and not recognized her. A day or so later I was stabbed to

the heart by the discovery that the tent she came out of had

been taken away. "

"She had gone?"

"For ever."

Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.

Section 3

"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things,"

Sir Richmond resumed presently. "Never. I do not think any

man is. We are too much plastered-up things, too much the

creatures of a tortuous and complicated evolution."

Dr. Martineau, under his green umbrella, nodded his conceded

agreement.

"This--what shall I call it?--this Dream of Women, grew up in

my mind as I grew up--as something independent of and much

more important than the reality of Women. It came only very

slowly into relation with that. That girl on the Dymchurch

beach was one of the first links, but she ceased very

speedily to be real--she joined the women of dreamland at

last altogether. She became a sort of legendary incarnation.

I thought of these dream women not only as something

beautiful but as something exceedingly kind and helpful. The

girls and women I met belonged to a different

creation. . . ."

Sir Richmond stopped abruptly and rowed a few long strokes.

Dr. Martineau sought information.

"I suppose," he said, "there was a sensuous element in these

dreamings?"

"Certainly. A very strong one. It didn't dominate but it was

a very powerful undertow."

"Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to

concentrate? To group itself about a single figure, the sort

of thing that Victorians would have called an ideal?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There

was always a tremendous lot of variety in my mind. In fact

the thing I liked least in the real world was the way it was

obsessed by the idea of pairing off with one particular set

and final person. I liked to dream of a blonde goddess in her

own Venusberg one day, and the next I would be off over the

mountains with an armed Brunhild."

"You had little thought of children?"

"As a young man?"

"Yes."

"None at all. I cannot recall a single philoprogenitive

moment. These dream women were all conceived of, and I was

conceived of, as being concerned in some tremendous

enterprise--something quite beyond domesticity. It kept us

related--gave us dignity. . . . Certainly it wasn't babies."

"All this is very interesting, very interesting, from the

scientific point of view. A PRIORI it is not what one might

have expected. Reasoning from the idea that all instincts and

natural imaginations are adapted to a biological end and

seeing that sex is essentially a method of procreation, one

might reasonably expect a convergence, if not a complete

concentration, upon the idea of offspring. It is almost as if

there were other ends to be served. It is clear that Nature

has not worked this impulse out to any sight of its end. Has

not perhaps troubled to do so. The instinct of the male for

the female isn't primarily for offspring--not even in the

most intelligent and farseeing types. The desire just points

to glowing satisfactions and illusions. Quite equally I think

the desire of the female for the male ignores its end. Nature

has set about this business in a CHEAP sort of way. She is

like some pushful advertising tradesman. She isn't frank

with us; she just humbugs us into what she wants with us. All

very well in the early Stone Age--when the poor dear things

never realized that their mutual endearments meant all the

troubles and responsibilities of parentage. But NOW--!"

He shook his head sideways and twirled the green umbrella

like an animated halo around his large broad-minded face.

Sir Richmond considered. "Desire has never been the chief

incentive of my relations with women. Never. So far as I can

analyze the thing, it has been a craving for a particular

sort of life giving companionship."

"That I take it is Nature's device to keep the lovers

together in the interest of the more or less unpremeditated

offspring."

"A poor device, if that is its end. It doesn't keep parents

together; more often it tears them apart. The wife or the

mistress, so soon as she is encumbered with children, becomes

all too manifestly not the companion goddess. . . ."

Sir Richmond brooded over his sculls and thought.

"Throughout my life I have been an exceedingly busy man. I

have done a lot of scientific work and some of it has been

very good work. And very laborious work. I've travelled much.

I've organized great business developments. You might think

that my time has been fairly well filled without much

philandering. And all the time, all the time, I've been--

about women--like a thirsty beast looking for water. . . .

Always. Always. All through my life."

Dr. Martineau waited through another silence.

"I was very grave about it at first. I married young. I

married very simply and purely. I was not one of those young

men who sow a large crop of wild oats. I was a fairly decent

youth. It suddenly appeared to me that a certain smiling and

dainty girl could make herself into all the goddesses of my

dreams. I had but to win her and this miracle would occur. Of

course I forget now the exact things I thought and felt then,

but surely I had some such persuasion. Or why should I have

married her? My wife was seven years younger than myself,--a

girl of twenty. She was charming. She is charming. She is a

wonderfully intelligent and understanding woman. She has made

a home for me--a delightful home. I am one of those men who

have no instinct for home making. I owe my home and all the

comfort and dignity of my life to her ability. I have no

excuse for any misbehaviour--so far as she is concerned. None

at all. By all the rules I should have been completely

happy. But instead of my marriage satisfying me, it presently

released a storm of long-controlled desires and imprisoned

cravings. A voice within me became more and more urgent.

'This will not do. This is not love. Where are your

goddesses? This is not love.' . . . And I was unfaithful to

my wife within four years of my marriage. It was a sudden

overpowering impulse. But I suppose the ground had been

preparing for a long time. I forget now all the emotions of

that adventure. I suppose at the time it seemed beautiful and

wonderful. . . . I do not excuse myself. Still less do I

condemn myself. I put the facts before you. So it was."

"There were no children by your marriage?"

"Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive. We

have had three. My daughter was married two years ago. She is

in America. One little boy died when he was three. The other

is in India, taking up the Mardipore power scheme again now

that he is out of the army. . . . No, it is simply that I was

hopelessly disappointed with everything that a good woman and

a decent marriage had to give me. Pure disappointment and

vexation. The anti-climax to an immense expectation built up

throughout an imaginative boyhood and youth and early

manhood. I was shocked and ashamed at my own disappointment.

I thought it mean and base. Nevertheless this orderly

household into which I had placed my life, these almost

methodical connubialities . . . ."

He broke off in mid-sentence.

Dr. Martineau shook his head disapprovingly.

"No," he said, "it wasn't fair to your wife."

"It was shockingly unfair. I have always realized that. I've

done what I could to make things up to her. . . . Heaven

knows what counter disappointments she has concealed. . . .

But it is no good arguing about rights and wrongs now. This

is not an apology for my life. I am telling you what

happened.

"Not for me to judge," said Dr. Martineau. "Go on."

"By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had

satisfied none but the most transitory desires and I had

incurred a tremendous obligation. That obligation didn't

restrain me from making desperate lunges at something vaguely

beautiful that I felt was necessary to me; but it did cramp

and limit these lunges. So my story flops down into the

comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable,

married man. . .I was still driven by my dream of some

extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought

it like an area sneak. Gods! What a story it is when one

brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and

sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world--somewhere.

Hidden away from me. I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear

lost thing, now in the corners of a smiling mouth, now in

dark eyes beneath a black smoke of hair, now in a slim form

seen against the sky. Often I cared nothing for the woman I

made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding

from me . . . . "

Sir Richmond's voice altered.

"I don't see what possible good it can do to talk over these

things." He began to row and rowed perhaps a score of

strokes. Then he stopped and the boat drove on with a whisper

of water at the bow and over the outstretched oar blades.

"What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried.

"What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She

drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even

get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief.

See what a fantastic thing I am when you take the machine to

pieces! I have been a busy and responsible man throughout my

life. I have handled complicated public and industrial

affairs not unsuccessfully and discharged quite big

obligations fully and faithfully. And all the time, hidden

away from the public eye, my life has been laced by the

thread of these--what can one call them? --love adventures.

How many? you ask. I don't know. Never have I been a whole-

hearted lover; never have I been able to leave love alone. .

. . Never has love left me alone.

"And as I am made, said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence,

"AS I AM MADE--I do not believe that I could go on without

these affairs. I know that you will be disposed to dispute

that.

Dr. Martineau made a reassuring noise.

"These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally

necessary. It is only latterly that I have begun to perceive

this. Women MAKE life for me. Whatever they touch or see or

desire becomes worth while and otherwise it is not worth

while. Whatever is lovely in my world, whatever is

delightful, has been so conveyed to me by some woman. Without

the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in

the world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much,

valuing nothing."

He paused.

"You are, I think, abnormal," considered the doctor.

"Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a

wasting fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no

kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The

world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud,

logical necessity and utter desolation--with nothing whatever

worth fighting for. Whatever justifies effort, whatever

restores energy is hidden in women . . . ."

"An access of sex," said Dr. Martineau. " This is a

phase. . . ."

"It is how I am made," said Sir Richmond.

A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. "It

isn't how you are made. We are getting to something in all

this. It is, I insist, a mood of how you are made. A

distinctive and indicative mood."

Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.

"I would go through it all again. . . . There are times when

the love of women seems the only real thing in the world to

me. And always it remains the most real thing. I do not know

how far I may be a normal man or how far I may not be, so to

speak, abnormally male, but to me life has very little

personal significance and no value or power until it has a

woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say

anything that matters a woman must be present as a medium. I

don't mean that it has no significance mentally and

logically; I mean that irrationally and emotionally it has no

significance. Works of art, for example, bore me, literature

bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores

me, unless I find in it some association with a woman's

feeling. It isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture

is fine or a mountain valley lovely, but that it doesn't

matter a rap to me whether it is or whether it isn't until

there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if you like to

call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness or

pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes

in and breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even

rest until a woman makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I

do without women and that is work, joylessly but effectively,

and latterly for some reason that it is up to you to

discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."

Section 4

"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous

visit here. It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago. We

rowed down this same backwater. I can see my companion's

hand--she had very pretty hands with rosy palms--trailing in

the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly under her

sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected

from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was

one of those people who seem always to be happy and to

radiate happiness.

"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a

thoroughly bad lot. She had about as much morality, in the

narrower sense of the word, as a monkey. And yet she stands

out in my mind as one of the most honest women I have ever

met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of that

effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her

candid blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner. . . .

But--no! She was really honest.

"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet

rushes and crushed them in her hand. She adds a remembered

brightness to this afternoon.

"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman

who was here with me came nearest to being my friend. You

know, what we call virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap

to any real friendliness with a man. Until she gets to an age

when virtue and fidelity are no longer urgent practical

concerns, a good woman, by the very definition of feminine

goodness, isn't truly herself. Over a vast extent of her

being she is RESERVED. She suppresses a vast amount of her

being, holds back, denies, hides. On the other hand, there is

a frankness and honesty in openly bad women arising out of

the admitted fact that they are bad, that they hide no

treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious and

delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal.

Intellectually they seem to be more manly and vigorous

because they are, as people say, unsexed. Many old women,

thoroughly respectable old women, have the same quality.

Because they have gone out of the personal sex business.

Haven't you found that?"

"I have never," said the doctor, known what you call an

openly bad woman,--at least, at all intimately. . . . "

Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion.

"You have avoided them!"

"They don't attract me."

"They repel you?"

"For me," said the doctor, "for any friendliness, a woman

must be modest. . . . My habits of thought are old-fashioned,

I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there

were no barriers, no reservation, that in any fashion she

might more than meet me half way . . . "

His facial expression completed his sentence.

"Now I wonder," whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a

moment before he carried the great research into the

explorer's country. "You are afraid of women?" he said, with

a smile to mitigate the impertinence.

"I respect them."

"An element of fear."

"Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like.

Anyhow I do not let myself go with them. I have never let

myself go."

"You lose something. You lose a reality of insight."

There was a thoughtful interval.

"Having found so excellent a friend," said the doctor, "why

did you ever part from her?"

Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau's

face remained slantingly interrogative. He had found the

effective counterattack and he meant to press it. "I was

jealous of her," Sir Richmond admitted. "I couldn't stand

that side of it."

Section 5

After a meditative silence the doctor became briskly

professional again.

"You care for your wife," he said. "You care very much for

your wife. She is, as you say, your great obligation and you

are a man to respect obligations. I grasp that. Then you tell

me of these women who have come and gone. . . . About them

too you are perfectly frank. . . There remains someone

else." Sir Richmond stared at his physician.

"Well," he said and laughed. "I didn't pretend to have made

my autobiography anything more than a sketch."

"No, but there is a special person, the current person."

"I haven't dilated on my present situation, I admit."

"From some little things that have dropped from you, I should

say there is a child."

"That," said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, "is a good

guess." "Not older than three." "Two years and a half."

"You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated. At

any rate, you can't go to her. That leaves you at loose ends,

because for some time, for two or three years at least, you

have ceased to be--how shall I put it?--an emotional

wanderer." "I begin to respect your psychoanalysis."

"Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine

companionship for weary men. I guess she is a very jolly

companion to be with, amusing, restful--interesting."

"H'm," said Sir Richmond. "I think that is a fair

description. When she cares, that is. When she is in good

form."

"Which she isn't at present," hazarded the doctor. He

exploded a mine of long-pent exasperation.

"She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever

known. Health is a woman's primary duty. But she is incapable

of the most elementary precautions. She is maddeningly

receptive to every infection. At the present moment, when I

am ill, when I am in urgent need of help and happiness, she

has let that wretched child get measles and she herself won't

let me go near her because she has got something disfiguring,

something nobody else could ever have or think of having,

called CARBUNCLE. Carbuncle!"

"It is very painful," said Dr. Martineau. "No doubt it is,"

said Sir Richmond.

"No doubt it is." His voice grew bitter. He spoke with

deliberation. "A perfectly aimless, useless illness,--and as

painful as it CAN be."

He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously. And indeed he had

slammed a door. The doctor realized that for the present

there was no more self-dissection to be got from Sir

Richmond.

For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up

to the foaming weir to the left of the lock by an occasional

stroke. Now with a general air of departure he swung the boat

round and began to row down stream towards the bridge and the

Radiant Hotel.

"Time we had tea," he said,

Section 6

After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the

lawn, brooding darkly--apparently over the crime of the

carbuncle. The doctor went to his room, ostensibly to write

a couple of letters and put on a dinner jacket, but really to

make a few notes of the afternoon's conversation and meditate

over his impressions while they were fresh.

His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he

sank. . . A number of very discrepant things were busy in his

mind. He had experienced a disconcerting personal attack.

There was a whirl of active resentment in the confusion.

"Apologetics of a rake," he tried presently.

"A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing. Every

third manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some

such undertow of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an

imaginative laxity, the temptations of the trip to London--

weakness masquerading as a psychological necessity. The Lady

of the Carbuncle seems to have got rather a hold upon him.

She has kept him in order for three or four years."

The doctor scrutinized his own remarks with a judicious

expression.

"I am not being fair. He ruffled me. Even if it is true, as I

said, that every third manufacturer from the midlands is in

much the same case as he is, that does not dismiss the case.

It makes it a more important one, much more important: it

makes it a type case with the exceptional quality of being

self-expressive. Almost too selfexpressive.

"Sir Richmond does, after all, make out a sort of case for

himself. . . .

"A valid case?"

The doctor sat deep in his chair, frowning judicially with

the fingers of one hand apposed to the fingers of the other.

"He makes me bristle because all his life and ideas challenge

my way of living. But if I eliminate the personal element? "

He pulled a sheet of note-paper towards him and began to jot

down notes with a silver-cased pencil. Soon he discontinued

writing and sat tapping his pencil-case on the table. "The

amazing selfishness of his attitude! I do not think that

once--not once--has he judged any woman except as a

contributor to his energy and peace of mind. . . . Except in

the case of his wife. . . .

"For her his habit of respect was formed before his ideas

developed. . . .

"That I think explains HER. . . .

"What was his phrase about the unfortunate young woman with

the carbuncle? . . . 'Totally Useless and unnecessary

illness,' was it? . . .

"Now has a man any right by any standards to use women as

this man has used them?

"By any standards?"

The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the

corners of his mouth drawn in.

For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing

an increasing part in the good doctor's life. He was writing

this book of his, writing it very deliberately and

laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, but much more was

he dreaming and thinking about this book. Its publication was

to mark an epoch in human thought and human affairs

generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment

in the doctor's own little world. It was to bring home to

people some various aspects of one very startling

proposition: that human society had arrived at a phase when

the complete restatement of its fundamental ideas had become

urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate,

partial adjustments to two centuries of changing conditions

had to give place to a rapid reconstruction of new

fundamental ideas. And it was a fact of great value in the

drama of these secret dreams that the directive force towards

this fundamentally reconstructed world should be the pen of

an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected

of any great excesses of enterprise.

The written portions of this book were already in a highly

polished state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal

with a smooth urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the

thoughts of one intelligent being could possibly be shocking

to another. Upon this the doctor was very insistent. Conduct,

he held, could never be sufficiently discreet, thought could

never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat a

law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a

natural law. That the social well-being demands. But as a

scientific man, in one's stated thoughts and in public

discussion, the case was altogether different. There was no

offence in any possible hypothesis or in the contemplation of

any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was

bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and

spirit of the game, but if one was not playing that game

then there was no reason why one should not contemplate the

completest reversal of all its methods and the alteration and

abandonment of every rule. Correctness of conduct, the doctor

held, was an imperative concomitant of all really free

thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things

that must be divorced absolutely from revolutionary conduct.

It was to the neglect of these obvious principles, as the

doctor considered them, that the general muddle in

contemporary marital affairs was very largely due. We left

divorce-law revision to exposed adulterers and marriage

reform to hot adolescents and craving spinsters driven by the

furies within them to assertions that established nothing and

to practical demonstrations that only left everybody

thoroughly uncomfortable. Far better to leave all these

matters to calm, patient men in easy chairs, weighing typical

cases impartially, ready to condone, indisposed to envy.

In return for which restraint on the part of the eager and

adventurous, the calm patient man was prepared in his

thoughts to fly high and go far. Without giving any

guarantee, of course, that he might not ultimately return to

the comfortable point of inaction from which he started.

In Sir Richmond, Dr. Martineau found the most interesting and

encouraging confirmation of the fundamental idea of THE

PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, the immediate need of new criteria

of conduct altogether. Here was a man whose life was

evidently ruled by standards that were at once very high and

very generous. He was overworking himself to the pitch of

extreme distress and apparently he was doing this for ends

that were essentially unselfish. Manifestly there were many

things that an ordinary industrial or political magnate would

do that Sir Richmond would not dream of doing, and a number

of things that such a man would not feel called upon to do

that he would regard as imperative duties. And mixed up with

so much fine intention and fine conduct was this disreputable

streak of intrigue and this extraordinary claim that such

misconduct was necessary to continued vigour of action.

"To energy of thought it is not necessary," said Dr.

Martineau, and considered for a time. "Yet--certainly--I am

not a man of action. I admit it. I make few decisions.

"The chapters of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE dealing with

women were still undrafted, but they had already greatly

exercised the doctor's mind. He found now that the case of

Sir Richmond had stirred his imagination. He sat with his

hands apposed, his head on one side, and an expression of

great intellectual contentment on his face while these

emancipated ideas gave a sort of gala performance in his

mind.

The good doctor did not dislike women, he had always guarded

himself very carefully against misogyny, but he was very

strongly disposed to regard them as much less necessary in

the existing scheme of things than was generally assumed.

Women, he conceded, had laid the foundations of social life.

Through their contrivances and sacrifices and patience the

fierce and lonely patriarchal family-herd of a male and his

women and off spring had grown into the clan and tribe; the

woven tissue of related families that constitute the human

comity had been woven by the subtle, persistent protection of

sons and daughters by their mothers against the intolerant,

jealous, possessive Old Man. But that was a thing, of the

remote past. Little was left of those ancient struggles now

but a few infantile dreams and nightmares. The greater human

community, human society, was made for good. And being made,

it had taken over the ancient tasks of the woman, one by one,

until now in its modern forms it cherished more sedulously

than she did, it educated, it housed and comforted, it

clothed and served and nursed, leaving the wife privileged,

honoured, protected, for the sake of tasks she no longer did

and of a burthen she no longer bore. "Progress has

TRIVIALIZED women," said the doctor, and made a note of the

word for later consideration.

"And woman has trivialized civilization," the doctor tried.

"She has retained her effect of being central, she still

makes the social atmosphere, she raises men's instinctive

hopes of help and direction. Except," the doctor stipulated,

"for a few highly developed modern types, most men found the

sense of achieving her a necessary condition for sustained

exertion. And there is no direction in her any more.

"She spends," said the doctor, "she just spends. She spends

excitingly and competitively for her own pride and glory, she

drives all the energy of men over the weirs of gain. . . .

"What are we to do with the creature?" whispered the doctor.

Apart from the procreative necessity, was woman an

unavoidable evil? The doctor's untrammelled thoughts began to

climb high, spin, nose dive and loop the loop. Nowadays we

took a proper care of the young, we had no need for high

birth rates, quite a small proportion of women with a gift in

that direction could supply all the offspring that the world

wanted. Given the power of determining sex that science was

slowly winning today, and why should we have so many women

about? A drastic elimination of the creatures would be quite

practicable. A fantastic world to a vulgar imagination, no

doubt, but to a calmly reasonable mind by no means fantastic.

But this was where the case of Sir Richmond became so

interesting. Was it really true that the companionship of

women was necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it

the fact that the drive of life towards action, as

distinguished from contemplation, arose out of sex and needed

to be refreshed by the reiteration of that motive? It was a

plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor's ideas

of natural selection and of the conditions of a survival that

have made us what we are. It was in tune with the Freudian

analyses.

"SEX NOT ONLY A RENEWAL OF LIFE IN THE SPECIES," noted the

doctor's silver pencil; "SEX MAY BE ALSO A RENEWAL OF ENERGY

IN THE INDIVIDUAL."

After some musing he crossed out "sex" and wrote above it

"sexual love."

"That is practically what he claims, Dr. Martineau said. "In

which case we want the completest revision of all our

standards of sexual obligation. We want a new system of

restrictions and imperatives altogether."

It was a fixed idea of the doctor's that women were quite

incapable of producing ideas in the same way that men do, but

he believed that with suitable encouragement they could be

induced to respond quite generously to such ideas. Suppose

therefore we really educated the imaginations of women;

suppose we turned their indubitable capacity for service

towards social and political creativeness, not in order to

make them the rivals of men in these fields, but their moral

and actual helpers. "A man of this sort wants a mistress-

mother," said the doctor. "He wants a sort of woman who cares

more for him and his work and honour than she does for child

or home or clothes or personal pride. "But are there such

women? Can there be such a woman?"

"His work needs to be very fine to deserve her help. But

admitting its fineness? . . .

"The alternative seems to be to teach the sexes to get along

without each other.

"A neutralized world. A separated world. How we should jostle

in the streets! But the early Christians have tried it

already. The thing is impossible.

"Very well, then, we have to make women more responsible

again. In a new capacity. We have to educate them far more

seriously as sources of energy--as guardians and helpers of

men. And we have to suppress them far more rigorously as

tempters and dissipaters. Instead of mothering babies they

have to mother the race. . . . "

A vision of women made responsible floated before his eyes.

"Is that man working better since you got hold of him? If

not, why not? "Or again,--Jane Smith was charged with

neglecting her lover to the common danger. . . . The

inspector said the man was in a pitiful state, morally quite

uncombed and infested with vulgar, showy ideas. . . ."

The doctor laughed, telescoped his pencil and stood up.

Section 7

It became evident after dinner that Sir Richmond also had

been thinking over the afternoon's conversation.

He and Dr. Martineau sat in wide-armed cane chairs on the

lawn with a wickerwork table bearing coffee cups and little

glasses between them. A few other diners chatted and

whispered about similar tables but not too close to our

talkers to disturb them; the dining room behind them had

cleared its tables and depressed its illumination. The moon,

in its first quarter, hung above the sunset, sank after

twilight, shone brighter and brighter among the western

trees, and presently had gone, leaving the sky to an

increasing multitude of stars. The Maidenhead river wearing

its dusky blue draperies and its jewels of light had

recovered all the magic Sir Richmond had stripped from it in

the afternoon. The grave arches of the bridge, made complete

circles by the reflexion of the water, sustained, as if by

some unifying and justifying reason, the erratic flat flashes

and streaks and glares of traffic that fretted to and fro

overhead. A voice sang intermittently and a banjo tinkled,

but remotely enough to be indistinct and agreeable.

"After all," Sir Richmond began abruptly," the search for

some sort of sexual modus vivendi is only a means to an end.

One does not want to live for sex but only through sex. The

main thing in my life has always been my work. This

afternoon, under the Maidenhead influence, I talked too much

of sex. I babbled. Of things one doesn't usually . . . "

"It was very illuminating," said the doctor.

"No doubt. But a temporary phase. It is the defective bearing

talks. . . . Just now--I happen to be irritated."

The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor's face.

"The work is the thing," said Sir Richmond. So long as one

can keep one's grip on it."

"What," said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and

sending wreaths of smoke up towards the star-dusted zenith,

"what is your idea of your work? I mean, how do you see it in

relation to yourself--and things generally?"

"Put in the most general terms?"

"Put in the most general terms."

"I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It

is hard to put something one is always thinking about in

general terms or to think of it as a whole. . . . Now. . . .

Fuel? . . .

"I suppose it was my father's business interests that pushed

me towards specialization in fuel. He wanted me to have a

thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific

training was less easy to get for a boy than it is today. And

much more inspiring when you got it. My mind was framed, so

to speak, in geology and astronomical physics. I grew up to

think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in

history and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman

empire. I don't know what your pocket map of the universe is,

the map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other

general ideas. To me this planet is a little ball of oxides

and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface. And

we, the minutest particles in that tarnish. Who can

nevertheless, in some unaccountable way, take in the idea of

this universe as one whole, who begin to dream of taking

control of it."

"That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view.

I suppose I have much the same general idea of the world. On

rather more psychological lines."

"We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something

that is only just beginning to be aware of what it is--and

what it might be."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "Good."

He went on eagerly. "That is precisely how I see it. You and

I are just particles in the tarnish, as you call it, who are

becoming dimly awake to what we are, to what we have in

common. Only a very few of us have got as far even as this.

These others here, for example . . . ."

He indicated the rest of Maidenhead by a movement.

"Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy

solicitudes fill them up. They haven't begun to get out of

themselves."

"We, I suppose, have," doubted Sir Richmond.

"We have."

The doctor had no doubt. He lay back in his chair, with his

hands behind his head and his smoke ascending vertically to

heaven. With the greatest contentment he began quoting

himself. "This getting out of one's individuality--this

conscious getting out of one's individuality--is one of the

most important and interesting aspects of the psychology of

the new age that is now dawning. As compared with any

previous age. Unconsciously, of course, every true artist,

every philosopher, every scientific investigator, so far as

his art or thought went, has always got out of himself,--has

forgotten his personal interests and become Man thinking for

the whole race. And intimations of the same thing have been

at the heart of most religions. But now people are beginning

to get this detachment without any distinctively religious

feeling or any distinctive aesthetic or intellectual impulse,

as if it were a plain matter of fact. Plain matter of fact,

that we are only incidentally ourselves. That really each one

of us is also the whole species, is really indeed all life. "

"A part of it."

"An integral part-as sight is part of a man . . . with no

absolute separation from all the rest--no more than a

separation of the imagination. The whole so far as his

distinctive quality goes. I do not know how this takes shape

in your mind, Sir Richmond, but to me this idea of actually

being life itself upon the world, a special phase of it

dependent upon and connected with all other phases, and of

being one of a small but growing number of people who

apprehend that, and want to live in the spirit of that, is

quite central. It is my fundamental idea. We,--this small

but growing minority--constitute that part of life which

knows and wills and tries to rule its destiny. This new

realization, the new psychology arising out of it is a fact

of supreme importance in the history of life. It is like the

appearance of self-consciousness in some creature that has

not hitherto had self-consciousness. And so far as we are

concerned, we are the true kingship of the world.

Necessarily. We who know, are the true king. . . .I wonder

how this appeals to you. It is stuff I have thought out very

slowly and carefully and written and approved. It is the very

core of my life. . . . And yet when one comes to say these

things to someone else, face to face. . . . It is much more

difficult to say than to write."

Sir Richmond noted how the doctor's chair creaked as he

rolled to and fro with the uneasiness of these intimate

utterances.

"I agree," said Sir Richmond presently. "One DOES think in

this fashion. Something in this fashion. What one calls one's

work does belong to something much bigger than ourselves.

"Something much bigger," he expanded.

"Which something we become," the doctor urged, "in so far as

our work takes hold of us."

Sir Richmond made no answer to this for a little while. "Of

course we trail a certain egotism into our work," he said.

"Could we do otherwise? But it has ceased to be purely

egotism. It is no longer, 'I am I' but 'I am part.'. . . One

wants to be an honourable part."

"You think of man upon his planet," the doctor pursued. "I

think of life rather as a mind that tries itself over in

millions and millions of trials. But it works out to the same

thing."

"I think in terms of fuel," said Sir Richmond.

He was still debating the doctor's generalization. "I suppose

it would be true to say that I think of myself as mankind on

his planet, with very considerable possibilities and with

only a limited amount of fuel at his disposal to achieve

them. Yes. . . . I agree that I think in that way. . . . I

have not thought much before of the way in which I think

about things--but I agree that it is in that way. Whatever

enterprises mankind attempts are limited by the sum total of

that store of fuel upon the planet. That is very much in my

mind. Besides that he has nothing but his annual allowance of

energy from the sun."

"I thought that presently we were to get unlimited energy

from atoms," said the doctor.

"I don't believe in that as a thing immediately practicable.

No doubt getting a supply of energy from atoms is a

theoretical possibility, just as flying was in the time of

Daedalus; probably there were actual attempts at some sort of

glider in ancient Crete. But before we get to the actual

utilization of atomic energy there will be ten thousand

difficult corners to turn; we may have to wait three or four

thousand years for it. We cannot count on it. We haven't it

in hand. There may be some impasse. All we have surely is

coal and oil,--there is no surplus of wood now--only an

annual growth. And water-power is income also, doled out day

by day. We cannot anticipate it. Coal and oil are our only

capital. They are all we have for great important efforts.

They are a gift to mankind to use to some supreme end or to

waste in trivialities. Coal is the key to metallurgy and oil

to transit. When they are done we shall either have built up

such a fabric of apparatus, knowledge and social organization

that we shall be able to manage without them--or we shall

have travelled a long way down the slopes of waste towards

extinction. . . . To-day, in getting, in distribution, in use

we waste enormously. . . .As we sit here all the world is

wasting fuel fantastically."

"Just as mentally--educationally we waste," the doctor

interjected.

"And my job is to stop what I can of that waste, to do what I

can to organize, first of all sane fuel getting and then sane

fuel using. And that second proposition carries us far. Into

the whole use we are making of life.

"First things first," said Sir Richmond. If we set about

getting fuel sanely, if we do it as the deliberate,

co-operative act of the whole species, then it follows that

we shall look very closely into the use that is being made of

it. When all the fuel getting is brought into one view as a

common interest, then it follows that all the fuel burning

will be brought into one view. At present we are getting fuel

in a kind of scramble with no general aim. We waste and lose

almost as much as we get. And of what we get, the waste is

idiotic.

"I won't trouble you," said Sir Richmond, "with any long

discourse on the ways of getting fuel in this country. But

land as you know is owned in patches and stretches that were

determined in the first place chiefly by agricultural

necessities. When it was divided up among its present owners

nobody was thinking about the minerals beneath. But the

lawyers settled long ago that the landowner owned his land

right down to the centre of the earth. So we have the

superficial landlord as coal owner trying to work his coal

according to the superficial divisions, quite irrespective of

the lie of the coal underneath. Each man goes for the coal

under his own land in his own fashion. You get three shafts

where one would suffice and none of them in the best possible

place. You get the coal coming out of this point when it

would be far more convenient to bring it out at that--miles

away. You get boundary walls of coal between the estates,

abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each coal owner

sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you know

of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over

the country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get

it into the silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful,

airpoisoning, fog-creating fireplace.

"And this stuff," said Sir Richmond, bringing his hand down

so smartly on the table that the startled coffee cups cried

out upon the tray; "was given to men to give them power over

metals, to get knowledge with, to get more power with."

"The oil story, I suppose, is as bad."

"The oil story is worse. . . .

"There is a sort of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce

parenthesis, "that the supplies of oil are inexhaustible--

that you can muddle about with oil anyhow. . . . Optimism of

knaves and imbeciles. . . . They don't want to be pulled up

by any sane considerations. . . ."

For some moments he kept silence--as if in unspeakable

commination.

"Here I am with some clearness of vision--my only gift; not

very clever, with a natural bad temper, and a strong sexual

bias, doing what I can to get a broader handling of the fuel

question--as a common interest for all mankind. And I find

myself up against a lot of men, subtle men, sharp men,

obstinate men, prejudiced men, able to get round me, able to

get over me, able to blockade me. . . . Clever men--yes, and

all of them ultimately damned--oh! utterly damned--fools.

Coal owners who think only of themselves, solicitors who

think backwards, politicians who think like a game of cat's-

cradle, not a gleam of generosity not a gleam."

"What particularly are you working for?" asked the doctor.

"I want to get the whole business of the world's fuel

discussed and reported upon as one affair so that some day it

may be handled as one affair in the general interest."

"The world, did you say? You meant the empire?"

"No, the world. It is all one system now. You can't work it

in bits. I want to call in foreign representatives from the

beginning."

"Advisory--consultative?"

"No. With powers. These things interlock now internationally

both through labour and finance. The sooner we scrap this

nonsense about an autonomous British Empire complete in

itself, contra mundum, the better for us. A world control is

fifty years overdue. Hence these disorders. "

"Still--it's rather a difficult proposition, as things are."

"Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond

in the tone of one who swears. "Don't I know that perhaps

it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I

say, let's try to get it done. And everybody says, difficult,

difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only

real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another

says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted!

Every decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares? Along this

line of comprehensive scientific control the world has to go

or it will retrogress, it will muddle and rot. . . ."

"I agree," said Dr. Martineau.

"So I want a report to admit that distinctly. I want it to go

further than that. I want to get the beginnings, the germ, of

a world administration. I want to set up a permanent world

commission of scientific men and economists--with powers,

just as considerable powers as I can give them--they'll be

feeble powers at the best--but still some sort of SAY in the

whole fuel supply of the world. A say--that may grow at last

to a control. A right to collect reports and receive accounts

for example, to begin with. And then the right to make

recommendations. . . . You see? . . . No, the international

part is not the most difficult part of it. But my beastly

owners and their beastly lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of

what they call their freedom of action. And my labour men,

because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself, sit and watch and

suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at and too

incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a

world control on scientific lines even less than the owners.

They try to think that fuel production can carry an unlimited

wages bill and the owners try to think that it can pay

unlimited profits, and when I say; 'This business is

something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it's a

service and a common interest,' they stare at me--" Sir

Richmond was at a loss for an image. "Like a committee in a

thieves' kitchen when someone has casually mentioned the

law."

"But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?"

"It can be done. If I can stick it out."

"But with the whole Committee against you!"

"The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn't against

me. Every individual is . . . ."

Sir Richmond found it difficult to express. "The psychology

of my Committee ought to interest you. . . . It is probably a

fair sample of the way all sorts of things are going

nowadays. It's curious. . . . There is not a man on that

Committee who is quite comfortable within himself about the

particular individual end he is there to serve. It's there I

get them. They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately

I admit, but they are bitter and obstinate because they

pursue them against an internal opposition--which is on my

side. They are terrified to think, if once they stopped

fighting me, how far they might not have to go with me."

"A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very

closely with my own ideas."

"A world conscience? World conscience? I don't know. But I do

know that there is this drive in nearly every member of the

Committee, some drive anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is

the same drive that drives me. But I am the most driven. It

has turned me round. It hasn't turned them. I go East and

they go West. And they don't want to be turned round.

Tremendously, they don't."

"Creative undertow," said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it

were. "An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology

of a new age strengthened by education--it may play a

directive part."

"They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this

creative undertow--if you like to call it that--we do get

along. I am leader or whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of

a bolting flock. . . .I believe they will report for a

permanent world commission; I believe I have got them up to

that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League

of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this

League of Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-

tracking arrangement for all sorts of important world issues.

And they will find they have to report for some sort of

control. But there again they will shy. They will report for

it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down

again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They

will alter the composition of the Committee so as to make it

innocuous."

"How?"

"Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far

as Britain is concerned with muck of the colonial politician

type and tame labour representatives, balance with shady new

adventurer millionaires, get in still shadier stuff from

abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame experts after

their own hearts,--experts who will make merely advisory

reports, which will not be published. . . ."

"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the

cloak of YOUR Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing

more?"

"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of

doing right--indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing

right--and still leave things just exactly what they were

before. And as I suffer under the misfortune of seeing the

thing rather more clearly, I have to shepherd the conscience

of the whole Committee. . . . But there is a conscience

there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee."

He turned appealingly to the doctor. "Why should I have to be

the conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this

exhausting inhuman job? . . . . In their hearts these others

know. . . . Only they won't know. . . . Why should it fall

on me?"

"You have to go through with it," said Dr. Martineau.

"I have to go through with it, but it's a hell of utterly

inglorious squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting

the same fight within themselves that they fight with me.

They know exactly where I am, that I too am doing my job

against internal friction. The one thing before all others

that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high

horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of

special moral superiority to men who are on the whole as good

men as I am or better. That shows all the time. You see the

sort of man I am. I've a broad streak of personal vanity. I

fag easily. I'm short-tempered. I've other things, as you

perceive. When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore, I

get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable

sense of ill usage. Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be

working with me steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly

witty. He gets a laugh round the table at my expense. Young

Dent, the more intelligent of the labour men, reads me a

lecture in committee manners. Old Cassidy sees HIS opening

and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me

spluttering self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down,

and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report

dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case.

Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You

see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and

an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great

deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the

doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own

consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible

little piggy-wigs and not bother any more about what is to

happen to mankind in the long run. . . . Do you begin to

realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin, that

that Committee is for me?"

"You have to go through with it," Dr. Martineau repeated.

"I have. If I can. But I warn you I have been near breaking

point. And if I tumble off the high horse, if I can't keep

going regularly there to ride the moral high horse, that

Committee will slump into utter scoundrelism. It will turn

out a long, inconsistent, botched, unreadable report that

will back up all sorts of humbugging bargains and sham

settlements. It will contain some half-baked scheme to pacify

the miners at the expense of the general welfare. It won't

even succeed in doing that. But in the general confusion old

Cassidy will get away with a series of hauls that may run

into millions. Which will last his time--damn him! And that

is where we are. . . . Oh! I know! I know! . . . . I must do

this job. I don't need any telling that my life will be

nothing and mean nothing unless I bring this thing

through. . . .

"But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!"

The doctor watched his friend's resentful black silhouette

against the lights on the steely river, and said nothing for

awhile.

"Why did I ever undertake to play it?" Sir Richmond appealed.

"Why has it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am,

why am I not a poor thing altogether?"

Section 8

"I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the

doctor after an interval.

"I am INTOLERABLE to myself."

"And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as

you do. You want help; you want reassurance. And you feel

they can give it."

"I wonder if it has been quite like that," Sir Richmond

reflected.

By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the

mother complex. "You want help and reassurance as a child

does," he said. "Women and women alone seem capable of giving

that, of telling you that you are surely right, that

notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that even when

you are wrong it doesn't so much matter, you are still in

spirit right. They can show their belief in you as no man

can. With all their being they can do that."

"Yes, I suppose they could."

"They can. You have said already that women are necessary to

make things real for you."

"Not my work," said Sir Richmond. "I admit that it might be

like that, but it isn't like that. It has not worked out like

that. The two drives go on side by side in me. They have no

logical connexion. All I can say is that for me, with my

bifid temperament, one makes a rest from the other, and is so

far refreshment and a renewal of energy. But I do not find

women coming into my work in any effectual way. "

The doctor reflected further. "I suppose," he began and

stopped short.

He heard Sir Richmond move in his chair, creaking an

interrogation.

"You have never," said the doctor, "turned to the idea of

God?"

Sir Richmond grunted and made no other answer for the better

part of a minute.

As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling

star streaked the deep blue above them.

"I can't believe in a God," said Sir Richmond.

"Something after the fashion of a God," said the doctor

insidiously.

"No," said Sir Richmond. "Nothing that reassures."

"But this loneliness, this craving for companionship. . . ."

"We have all been through that," said Sir Richmond. "We have

all in our time lain very still in the darkness with our

souls crying out for the fellowship of God, demanding some

sign, some personal response. The faintest feeling of

assurance would have satisfied us."

"And there has never been a response?"

"Have YOU ever had a response?"

"Once I seemed to have a feeling of exaltation and security."

"Well?"

"Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been

reading William James on religious experiences and I was

thinking very much of Conversion. I tried to experience

Conversion. . . ."

"Yes? "

"It faded."

"It always fades," said Sir Richmond with anger in his voice.

"I wonder how many people there are nowadays who have passed

through this last experience of ineffectual invocation, this

appeal to the fading shadow of a vanished God. In the night.

In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak to me! Does he answer?

In the silence you hear the little blood vessels whisper in

your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on the

darkness. . . . "

Dr. Martineau sat without a word.

"I can believe that over all things Righteousness rules. I

can believe that. But Righteousness is not friendliness nor

mercy nor comfort nor any such dear and intimate things. This

cuddling up to Righteousness! It is a dream, a delusion and a

phase. I've tried all that long ago. I've given it up long

ago. I've grown out of it. Men do--after forty. Our souls

were made in the squatting-place of the submen of ancient

times. They are made out of primitive needs and they die

before our bodies as those needs are satisfied. Only young

people have souls, complete. The need for a personal God,

feared but reassuring, is a youth's need. I no longer fear

the Old Man nor want to propitiate the Old Man nor believe he

matters any more. I'm a bit of an Old Man myself I discover.

Yes. But the other thing still remains. "

"The Great Mother of the Gods," said Dr. Martineau--still

clinging to his theories.

"The need of the woman," said Sir Richmond. "I want mating

because it is my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I

am a social animal and I want it from another social animal.

Not from any God--any inconceivable God. Who fades and

disappears. No. . . .

"Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know.

Perhaps it lasts as long as life does. How can I tell?"

He was silent for a little while. Then his voice sounded in

the night, as if he spoke to himself. "But as for the God of

All Things consoling and helping! Imagine it! That up there--

having fellowship with me! I would as soon think of cooling

my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with those

stars."

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES

Section 1

A gust of confidence on the part of a person naturally or

habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of

recoil. At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed

to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each

had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of

intimacy. They discussed the weather, which seemed to be

settling down to the utmost serenity of which the English

spring is capable, they talked of Sir Richmond's coming car

and of the possible routes before them. Sir Richmond produced

the Michelin maps which he had taken out of the pockets of

the little Charmeuse. The Bath Road lay before them, he

explained, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Silbury

Hill which overhangs Avebury. Both travellers discovered a

common excitement at the mention of Avebury and Silbury Hill.

Both took an intelligent interest in archaeology. Both had

been greatly stimulated by the recent work of Elliot Smith

and Rivers upon what was then known as the Heliolithic

culture. It had revived their interest in Avebury and

Stonehenge. The doctor moreover had been reading Hippisley

Cox's GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND.

Neither gentleman had ever seen Avebury, but Dr. Martineau

had once visited Stonehenge.

"Avebury is much the oldest," said the doctor. They must have

made Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C. It may be five

thousand years old or even more. It is the most important

historical relic in the British Isles. And the most

neglected. "

They exchanged archaeological facts. The secret places of the

heart rested until the afternoon.

Then Sir Richmond saw fit to amplify his confessions in one

particular.

Section 2

The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise

as the morning advanced. They had walked by the road to

Marlow and had lunched at a riverside inn, returning after a

restful hour in an arbour on the lawn of this place to tea at

Maidenhead. It was as they returned that Sir Richmond took up

the thread of their overnight conversation again.

"In the night," he said, "I was thinking over the account I

tried to give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out

of drawing."

"Facts?" asked the doctor.

"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the

proportions. . . . I don't know if I gave you the effect of

something Don Juanesque? . . ."

"Vulgar poem," said the doctor remarkably." I discounted

that."

"Vulgar!"

"Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a

kitchen."

Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing

that used to be called a pet aversion.

"I don't want you to think that I run about after women in an

habitual and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt

them in the interests of my work and energy. Your questions

had set me theorizing about myself. And I did my best to

improvise a scheme of motives yesterday. It was, I perceive,

a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My nocturnal

reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things

that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the

wanderings of desire have no single drive. All sorts of

motives come in, high and low, down to sheer vulgar

imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true in it all

was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue phase

falls naturally into these complications because they are

more attractive to his type and far easier and more

refreshing to the mind, at the outset, than anything else.

And they do work a sort of recovery in him, They send him

back to his work refreshed--so far, that is, as his work is

concerned."

"At the OUTSET they are easier," said the doctor.

Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the

outset counts. The more tired one is the more readily one

moves along the line of least resistance. . . .

"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of

my work goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it.

What I said about that was near the truth of things. . . .

"But there is another set of motives altogether, "Sir

Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the ground for

his real business, "that I didn't go into at all yesterday."

He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before

you realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much

swayed by my affections."

Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine

self-reproach in Sir Richmond's voice.

"I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond

of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration

and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing.

They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and

hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little

and human and suddenly I find they've GOT me. I'm distressed.

I'm filled with something between pity and an impulse of

responsibility. I become tender towards them. I am impelled

to take care of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure

them, to make them stop hurting at any cost. I don't see why

it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people

that grips me most, but it is. I don't know why it should be

their failures that gives them power over me, but it is. I

told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just

now. SHE'S got me in that way; she's got me tremendously."

"You did not speak of her yesterday with any morbid excess of

pity," the doctor was constrained to remark.

"I abused her very probably. I forget exactly what I

said. . . ."

The doctor offered no assistance.

"But the reason why I abuse her is perfectly plain. I abuse

her because she distresses me by her misfortunes and instead

of my getting anything out of her, I go out to her. But I DO

go out to her. All this time at the back of my mind I am

worrying about her. She has that gift of making one feel for

her. I am feeling that damned carbuncle almost as if it had

been my affair instead of hers.

"That carbuncle has made me suffer FRIGHTFULLY. . . . Why

should I? It isn't mine."

He regarded the doctor earnestly. The doctor controlled a

strong desire to laugh.

"I suppose the young lady--" he began.

"Oh! SHE puts in suffering all right. I've no doubt about

that.

"I suppose," Sir Richmond went on, "now that I have told you

so much of this affair, I may as well tell you all. It is a

sort of comedy, a painful comedy, of irrelevant affections."

The doctor was prepared to be a good listener. Facts he would

always listen to; it was only when people told him their

theories that he would interrupt with his "Exactly."

"This young woman is a person of considerable genius. I don't

know if you have seen in the illustrated papers a peculiar

sort of humorous illustrations usually with a considerable

amount of bite in them over the name of Martin Leeds?

"Extremely amusing stuff."

"It is that Martin Leeds. I met her at the beginning of her

career. She talks almost as well as she draws. She amused me

immensely. I'm not the sort of man who waylays and besieges

women and girls. I'm not the pursuing type. But I perceived

that in some odd way I attracted her and I was neither wise

enough nor generous enough not to let the thing develop."

"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.

"I'd never had to do with an intellectually brilliant woman

before. I see now that the more imaginative force a woman

has, the more likely she is to get into a state of extreme

self-abandonment with any male thing upon which her

imagination begins to crystallize. Before I came along she'd

mixed chiefly with a lot of young artists and students, all

doing nothing at all except talk about the things they were

going to do. I suppose I profited by the contrast, being

older and with my hands full of affairs. Perhaps something

had happened that had made her recoil towards my sort of

thing. I don't know. But she just let herself go at me."

"And you?"

"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before.

It was her wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't

my contemporary and as able as I was. As able to take care of

herself. All sorts of considerations that I should have shown

to a sillier woman I never dreamt of showing to her. I had

never met anyone so mentally brilliant before or so helpless

and headlong. And so here we are on each other's hands! "

"But the child?

"It happened to us. For four years now things have just

happened to us. All the time I have been overworking, first

at explosives and now at this fuel business. She too is full

of her work.

"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with

it. And in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably

fond of each other. 'Fond' is the word. But we are both too

busy to look after either ourselves or each other.

"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as

if he delivered a weighed and very important judgment.

"You see very much of each other?"

"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South

Cornwall, and we sometimes snatch a few days together, away

somewhere in Surrey or up the Thames or at such a place as

Southend where one is lost in a crowd of inconspicuous

people. "Then things go well--they usually go well at the

start--we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is

creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of

humour, with a keenness of appreciation . . . . "

"But things do not always go well?"

"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man

who measures his words, "are apt to go wrong. . . . At the

flat there is constant trouble with the servants; they bully

her. A woman is more entangled with servants than a man.

Women in that position seem to resent the work and freedom of

other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as they

would leave a man; they make trouble for her. . . . And when

we have had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in

particular has gone wrong--"

Sir Richmond stopped short.

"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor

sounded.

"Almost always."

"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.

"It is difficult to describe. . . . The essential

incompatibility of the whole thing comes out."

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work

anywhere. All she wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on

the other hand turns back to the Fuel Commission . . . ."

"Then any little thing makes trouble."

"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to

the same discussion; whether we ought really to go on

together."

"It is you begin that?"

"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I

am about. She is as fond of me as I am of her."

"Fonder perhaps."

'I don't know. But she is--adhesive. Emotionally adhesive.

All she wants to do is just to settle down when I am there

and go on with her work. But then, you see, there is MY

work."

"Exactly. . . . After all it seems to me that your great

trouble is not in yourselves but in social institutions.

Which haven't yet fitted themselves to people like you two.

It is the sense of uncertainty makes her, as you say,

adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a new age

Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one--"

"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a

little testily.

"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular

situation, that it is not the individuals to blame but the

misfit of ideas and forms and prejudices."

"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying

suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."

"But how?"

"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to

the peculiarities of our position. . . . She could be

cleverer. Other women are cleverer. Any other woman almost

would be cleverer than she is."

"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is.

She would just be any other woman."

"Perhaps she would," said Sir Richmond darkly and

desperately. "Perhaps she would. Perhaps it would be better

if she was."

Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.

"But here you see that it is that in my case, the fundamental

incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider

conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social

institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change

them to suit an individual case. That would be like

suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano.

As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She

is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my

duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and

treats fuel--and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is

an attack. We quarrel on that. It isn't as though I found it

so easy to stick to my work that I could disregard her

hostility. And I can't bear to part from her. I threaten it,

distress her excessively and then I am overcome by sympathy

for her and I go back to her. . . . In the ordinary course of

things I should be with her now."

"If it were not for the carbuncle?"

"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me

to see her disfigured. She does not understand--" Sir

Richmond was at a loss for a phrase--"that it is not her good

looks."

"She won't let you go to her?"

"It amounts to that. . . . And soon there will be all the

trouble about educating the girl. Whatever happens, she must

have as good a chance as--anyone. . . . "

"Ah! That is worrying you too!"

"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier.

It needs constant tact and dexterity to fix things up.

Neither of us have any. It needs attention. . . . "

Sir Richmond mused darkly.

Dr. Martineau thought aloud. "An incompetent delightful

person with Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of

expression. She must be attractive to many people. She could

probably do without you. If once you parted."

Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.

"You think I ought to part from her? On her account?"

"On her account. It might pain her. But once the thing was

done--"

"I want to part. I believe I ought to part."

"Well?"

"But then my affection comes in."

"That extraordinary--TENDERNESS of yours?"

"I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"Anyone might get hold of her--if I let her down. She hasn't

a tithe of the ordinary coolheaded calculation of an average

woman. . . . I've a duty to her genius. I've got to take care

of her."

To which the doctor made no reply.

"Nevertheless the idea of parting has been very much in my

mind lately."

"Letting her go FREE?"

"You can put it in that way if you like."

"It might not be a fatal operation for either of you."

"And yet there are moods when parting is an intolerable idea.

When one is invaded by a flood of affection.". . . . And old

habits of association."

Dr. Martineau thought. Was that the right word,--affection?

Perhaps it was.

They had come out on the towing path close by the lock and

they found themselves threading their way through a little

crowd of boating people and lookers-on. For a time their

conversation was broken. Sir Richmond resumed it.

"But this is where we cease to be Man on his Planet and all

the rest of it. This is where the idea of a definite task,

fanatically followed to the exclusion of all minor

considerations, breaks down. When the work is good, when we

are sure we are all right, then we may carry off things with

a high hand. But the work isn't always good, we aren't always

sure. We blunder, we make a muddle, we are fatigued. Then the

sacrificed affections come in as accusers. Then it is that we

want to be reassured."

"And then it is that Miss Martin Leeds--?"

"Doesn't," Sir Richmond snapped.

Came a long pause.

"And yet--

"It is extraordinarily difficult to think of parting from

Martin."

Section 3

In the evening after dinner Dr. Martineau sought, rather

unsuccessfully, to go on with the analysis of Sir Richmond.

But Sir Richmond was evidently a creature of moods. Either he

regretted the extent of his confidences or the slight

irrational irritation that he felt at waiting for his car

affected his attitude towards his companion, or Dr.

Martineau's tentatives were ill-chosen. At any rate he would

not rise to any conversational bait that the doctor could

devise. The doctor found this the more regrettable because it

seemed to him that there was much to be worked upon in this

Martin Leeds affair. He was inclined to think that she and

Sir Richmond were unduly obsessed by the idea that they had

to stick together because of the child, because of the look

of the thing and so forth, and that really each might be

struggling against a very strong impulse indeed to break off

the affair. It seemed evident to the doctor that they jarred

upon and annoyed each other extremely. On the whole

separating people appealed to a doctor's mind more strongly

than bringing them together. Accordingly he framed his

enquiries so as to make the revelation of a latent antipathy

as easy as possible.

He made several not very well-devised beginnings. At the

fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he

said, "I can't fiddle about any more with my motives

to-day."

An awkward silence followed. On reflection Sir Richmond

seemed to realize that this sentence needed some apology. "I

admit," he said, "that this expedition has already been a

wonderfully good thing for me. These confessions have made me

look into all sorts of things-squarely. But--

"I'm not used to talking about myself or even thinking

directly about myself. What I say, I afterwards find

disconcerting to recall. I want to alter it. I can feel

myself wallowing into a mess of modifications and

qualifications."

"Yes, but--"

"I want a rest anyhow. . . ."

There was nothing for Dr. Martineau to say to that.

The two gentlemen smoked for some time in a slightly

uncomfortable silence. Dr. Martineau cleared his throat twice

and lit a second cigar. They then agreed to admire the bridge

and think well of Maidenhead. Sir Richmond communicated

hopeful news about his car, which was to arrive the next

morning before ten--he'd just ring the fellow up presently to

make sure--and Dr. Martineau retired early and went rather

thoughtfully to bed. The spate of Sir Richmond's confidences,

it was evident, was over.

Section 4

Sir Richmond's car arrived long before ten, brought down by a

young man in a state of scared alacrity--Sir Richmond had

done some vigorous telephoning before turning in,--the

Charmeuse set off in a repaired and chastened condition to

town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two investigators

into the springs of human conduct were able to resume their

westward journey. They ran through scattered Twyford with its

pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities

of Reading, by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up

long wooded slopes to Savernake forest, where they found the

road heavy and dusty, still in its war-time state, and so

down a steep hill to the wide market street which is

Marlborough. They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the

afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest

artificial mound in Europe. They left the car by the roadside

and clambered to the top and were very learned and

inconclusive about the exact purpose of this vast heap of

chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before the

temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.

Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road

into the wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn

there kept by pleasant people, and they garaged the car in

the cowshed and took two rooms for the night that they might

the better get the atmosphere of the ancient place. Wonderful

indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already two

thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a

great wall of earth with its ditch most strangely on its

inner and not on its outer side; and within this enclosure

gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that,

even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete. A whole

village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for

the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall

is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and

paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre. There

are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when

it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part

the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed.

To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow

creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons

change. Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare

sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow

here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and

hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that

forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of

England, these roads already disused when the Romans made

their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced

for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury

and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the

Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn,

and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.

The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed

the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up

the down to the northward to get a general view of the

village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm

April sunset. The matter of their conversation remained

prehistoric. Both were inclined to find fault with the

archaeological work that had been done on the place. "Clumsy

treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said. "They bore into Silbury

Hill and expect to find a mummified chief or something

sensational of that sort, and they don't, and they report

nothing. They haven't sifted finely enough; they haven't

thought subtly enough. These walls of earth ought to tell

what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods

they used. Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a

cattle land? Were these hills covered by forests? I don't

know. These archaeologists don't know. Or if they do they

haven't told me, which is just as bad. I don't believe they

know.

"What trade came here along these tracks? So far as I know,

they had no beasts of burthen. But suppose one day someone

were to find a potsherd here from early Knossos, or a

fragment of glass from Pepi's Egypt."

The place had stirred up his imagination. He wrestled with

his ignorance as if he thought that by talking he might

presently worry out some picture of this forgotten world,

without metals, without beasts of burthen, without letters,

without any sculpture that has left a trace, and yet with a

sense of astronomical fact clear enough to raise the great

gnomon of Silbury, and with a social system complex enough to

give the large and orderly community to which the size of

Avebury witnesses and the traffic to which the green roads

testify.

The doctor had not realized before the boldness and

liveliness of his companion's mind. Sir Richmond insisted

that the climate must have been moister and milder in those

days; he covered all the downlands with woods, as Savernake

was still covered; beneath the trees he restored a thicker,

richer soil. These people must have done an enormous lot with

wood. This use of stones here was a freak. It was the very

strangeness of stones here that had made them into sacred

things. One thought too much of the stones of the Stone Age.

Who would carve these lumps of quartzite when one could carve

good oak? Or beech--a most carvable wood. Especially when

one's sharpest chisel was a flint. "It's wood we ought to

look for," said Sir Richmond. "Wood and fibre." He declared

that these people had their tools of wood, their homes of

wood, their gods and perhaps their records of wood. "A peat

bog here, even a few feet of clay, might have pickled some

precious memoranda. . . . No such luck. . . . Now in

Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron

age--half way to our own times--quite beautifully pickled."

Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir

Richmond nor the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the

riddle why the ditch was inside and not outside the great

wall.

"And what was our Mind like in those days?" said Sir

Richmond. "That, I suppose, is what interests you. A vivid

childish mind, I guess, with not a suspicion as yet that it

was Man ruling his Planet or anything of that sort."

The doctor pursed his lips. "None," he delivered judicially.

"If one were able to recall one's childhood--at the age of

about twelve or thirteen--when the artistic impulse so often

goes into abeyance and one begins to think in a troubled,

monstrous way about God and Hell, one might get something

like the mind of this place."

"Thirteen. You put them at that already? . . . These people,

you think, were religious?"

"Intensely. In that personal way that gives death a nightmare

terror. And as for the fading of the artistic impulse,

they've left not a trace of the paintings and drawings and

scratchings of the Old Stone people who came before them."

"Adults with the minds of thirteen-year-old children.

Thirteen-year-old children with the strength of adults--and

no one to slap them or tell them not to. . . . After all,

they probably only thought of death now and then. And they

never thought of fuel. They supposed there was no end to

that. So they used up their woods and kept goats to nibble

and kill the new undergrowth. DID these people have goats? "

"I don't know," said the doctor. So little is known."

"Very like children they must have been. The same unending

days. They must have thought that the world went on for ever-

just as they knew it--like my damned Committee does. . . .

With their fuel wasting away and the climate changing

imperceptibly, century by century. . . . Kings and important

men followed one another here for centuries and centuries. .

. . They had lost their past and had no idea of any future. .

. . They had forgotten how they came into the land . . . When

I was a child I believed that my father's garden had been

there for ever. . . .

"This is very like trying to remember some game one played

when one was a child. It is like coming on something that one

built up with bricks and stones in some forgotten part of the

garden. . . . "

"The life we lived here," said the doctor, has left its

traces in traditions, in mental predispositions, in still

unanalyzed fundamental ideas."

"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond.

"Presently we shall remember a lot more about all this. We

shall remember what it was like to live in this place, and

the long journey hither, age by age out of the south. We

shall remember the sacrifices we made and the crazy reasons

why we made them. We sowed our corn in blood here. We had

strange fancies about the stars. Those we brought with us out

of the south where the stars are brighter. And what like were

those wooden gods of ours? I don't remember. . . . But I

could easily persuade myself that I had been here before."

They stood on the crest of the ancient wall and the setting

sun cast long shadows of them athwart a field of springing

wheat.

"Perhaps we shall come here again," the doctor carried on Sir

Richmond's fancy; "after another four thousand years or so,

with different names and fuller minds. And then I suppose

that this ditch won't be the riddle it is now."

"Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused.

"Our muddles were unconscious. We drifted from mood to mood

and forgot. There was more sunshine then, more laughter

perhaps, and blacker despair. Despair like the despair of

children that can weep itself to sleep. . . . It's

over. . . . Was it battle and massacre that ended that long

afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some

exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine? Or

did strange men bring a sickness--measles, perhaps, or the

black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our

woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into

the land across the southern sea? I can't remember. . . . "

Sir Richmond turned about. "I would like to dig up the bottom

of this ditch here foot by foot--and dry the stuff and sift

it--very carefully. . . . Then I might begin to remember

things."

Section 5

In the evening, after a pleasant supper, they took a turn

about the walls with the moon sinking over beyond Silbury,

and then went in and sat by lamplight before a brightly fussy

wood fire and smoked. There were long intervals of friendly

silence.

"I don't in the least want to go on talking about myself, "

said Sir Richmond abruptly.

"Let it rest then," said the doctor generously.

"To-day, among these ancient memories, has taken me out of

myself wonderfully. I can't tell you how good Avebury has

been for me. This afternoon half my consciousness has seemed

to be a tattooed creature wearing a knife of stone. . . . "

"The healing touch of history."

"And for the first time my damned Committee has mattered

scarcely a rap. "

Sir Richmond stretched himself in his chair and blinked

cheerfully at his cigar smoke.

"Nevertheless," he said, "this confessional business of yours

has been an excellent exercise. It has enabled me to get

outside myself, to look at myself as a Case. Now I can even

see myself as a remote Case. That I needn't bother about

further. . . . So far as that goes, I think we have done all

that there is to be done."

"I shouldn't say that--quite--yet," said the doctor.

"I don't think I'm a subject for real psychoanalysis at all.

I'm not an overlaid sort of person. When I spread myself out

there is not much indication of a suppressed wish or of

anything masked or buried of that sort. What you get is a

quite open and recognized discord of two sets of motives."

The doctor considered. "Yes, I think that is true. Your

LIBIDO is, I should say, exceptionally free. Generally you

are doing what you want to do--overdoing, in fact, what you

want to do and getting simply tired."

"Which is the theory I started with. I am a case of fatigue

under irritating circumstances with very little mental

complication or concealment."

"Yes," said the doctor. "I agree. You are not a case for

psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, at all. You are in open

conflict with yourself, upon moral and social issues.

Practically open. Your problems are problems of conscious

conduct."

"As I said."

"Of what renunciations you have consciously to make."

Sir Richmond did not answer that. . . .

"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for

magnanimity. This day particularly has been a good day. When

we stood on this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be

standing outside myself in an immense still sphere of past

and future. I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw

myself four thousand years away, and all my distresses as

very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in

London the case is altogether different; after three hours or

so of the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed

moment of personality. There is no past any longer, there is

no future, there is only the rankling dispute. For all those

three hours, perhaps, I have been thinking of just what I had

to say, just how I had to say it, just how I looked while I

said it, just how much I was making myself understood, how I

might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented,

challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used

up. At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding,

desperately fighting, pin-point of SELF. . . . One goes back

to one's home unable to recover. Fighting it over again. All

night sometimes . . . . I get up and walk about the room and

curse . . . . Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame

of mind to Westminster?"

"When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor,

unhelpfully. He added after some seconds, "Milton knew of

these troubles. 'Not without dust and heat' he wrote--a great

phrase."

"But the dust chokes me," said Sir Richmond.

He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay

beside him on the table. But he did not open it. He held it

in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all

that evening. "I do not think that I shall stir up my motives

any more for a time. Better to go on into the west country

cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past."

"I can prescribe nothing better," said Dr. Martineau.

"Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on

one or two of your minor entanglements."

"I don't want to think of them, said Sir Richmond. "Let me

get right away from everything. Until my skin has grown

again."

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

Section 1

Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over

the downs round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and

Netheravon and Amesbury to Stonehenge.

Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now,

with Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a poorer thing

than he had remembered it to be. Sir Richmond was frankly

disappointed. After the real greatness and mystery of the

older place, it seemed a poor little heap of stones; it did

not even dominate the landscape; it was some way from the

crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was

further dwarfed by the colossal air-ship hangars and

clustering offices of the air station that the great war had

called into existence upon the slopes to the south-west. "It

looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old giantess had

left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more

impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that

capped the neighbouring crests.

The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to

pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side

of the road stood a travelstained middle-class automobile,

with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things

therein--a family automobile with father no doubt at the

wheel. Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at its tail.

They were impeded at the entrance by a difference of opinion

between the keeper of the turnstile and a small but resolute

boy of perhaps five or six who proposed to leave the

enclosure. The custodian thought that it would be better if

his nurse or his mother came out with him.

"She keeps on looking at it, " said the small boy. "It isunt

anything. I want to go and clean the car."

"You won't SEE Stonehenge every day, young man," said the

custodian, a little piqued.

"It's only an old beach," said the small boy, with extreme

conviction. "It's rocks like the seaside. And there isunt no

sea."

The man at the turnstile mutely consulted the doctor.

"I don't see that he can get into any harm here," the doctor

advised, and the small boy was released from archaeology.

He strolled to the family automobile, produced an EN-TOUT-CAS

pocket-handkerchief and set himself to polish the lamps with

great assiduity. The two gentlemen lingered at the turnstile

for a moment or so to watch his proceedings. "Modern child,"

said Sir Richmond. "Old stones are just old stones to him.

But motor cars are gods."

"You can hardly expect him to understand--at his age," said

the custodian, jealous for the honor of Stonehenge. . . .

"Reminds me of Martin's little girl," said Sir Richmond, as

he and Dr. Martineau went on towards the circle. "When she

encountered her first dragon-fly she was greatly delighted.

'0h, dee' lill' a'eplane,' she said."

As they approached the grey old stones they became aware of a

certain agitation among them. A voice, an authoritative bass

voice, was audible, crying, "Anthony!" A nurse appeared

remotely going in the direction of the aeroplane sheds, and

her cry of "Master Anthony" came faintly on the breeze. An

extremely pretty young woman of five or six and twenty became

visible standing on one of the great prostrate stones in the

centre of the place. She was a black-haired, sun-burnt

individual and she stood with her arms akimbo, quite frankly

amused at the disappearance of Master Anthony, and offering

no sort of help for his recovery. On the greensward before

her stood the paterfamilias of the family automobile, and he

was making a trumpet with his hands in order to repeat the

name of Anthony with greater effect. A short lady in grey

emerged from among the encircling megaliths, and one or two

other feminine personalities produced effects of movement

rather than of individuality as they flitted among the

stones. "Well," said the lady in grey, with that rising

intonation of humorous conclusion which is so distinctively

American, "those Druids have GOT him."

"He's hiding," said the automobilist, in a voice that

promised chastisement to a hidden hearer. "That's what he is

doing. He ought not to play tricks like this. A great boy who

is almost six."

"If you are looking for a small, resolute boy of six," said

Sir Richmond, addressing himself to the lady on the rock

rather than to the angry parent below, "he's perfectly safe

and happy. The Druids haven't got him. Indeed, they've failed

altogether to get him. 'Stonehenge,' he says, 'is no good.'

So he's gone back to clean the lamps of your car."

"Aa-oo. So THAT'S it! " said Papa. "Winnie, go and tell Price

he's gone back to the car. . . . They oughtn't to have let

him out of the enclosure. . . ."

The excitement about Master Anthony collapsed. The rest of

the people in the circles crystallized out into the central

space as two apparent sisters and an apparent aunt and the

nurse, who was packed off at once to supervise the lamp

cleaning. The head of the family found some difficulty, it

would seem, in readjusting his mind to the comparative

innocence of Anthony, and Sir Richmond and the young lady on

the rock sought as if by common impulse to establish a

general conversation. There were faint traces of excitement

in her manner, as though there had been some controversial

passage between herself and the family gentleman.

"We were discussing the age of this old place," she said,

smiling in the frankest and friendliest way. "How old do YOU

think it is?"

The father of Anthony intervened, also with a shadow of

controversy in his manner. "I was explaining to the young

lady that it dates from the early bronze age. Before

chronology existed. . . . But she insists on dates."

"Nothing of bronze has ever been found here," said Sir

Richmond.

"Well, when was this early bronze age, anyhow?" said the

young lady.

Sir Richmond sought a recognizable datum. "Bronze got to

Britain somewhere between the times of Moses and Solomon."

"Ah! " said the young lady, as who should say, 'This man at

least talks sense.'

"But these stones are all shaped," said the father of the

family. "It is difficult to see how that could have been done

without something harder than stone."

"I don't SEE the place," said the young lady on the stone. "I

can't imagine how they did it up--not one bit."

"Did it up!" exclaimed the father of the family in the tone

of one accustomed to find a gentle sport in the intellectual

frailties of his womenkind.

"It's just the bones of a place. They hung things round it.

They draped it."

"But what things?" asked Sir Richmond.

"Oh! they had things all right. Skins perhaps. Mats of

rushes. Bast cloth. Fibre of all sorts. Wadded stuff."

"Stonehenge draped! It's really a delightful idea;" said the

father of the family, enjoying it.

"It's quite a possible one," said Sir Richmond.

"Or they may have used wicker," the young lady went on,

undismayed. She seemed to concede a point. "Wicker IS

likelier."

"But surely," said the father of the family with the

expostulatory voice and gesture of one who would recall

erring wits to sanity, "it is far more impressive standing

out bare and noble as it does. In lonely splendour."

"But all this country may have been wooded then," said Sir

Richmond. "In which case it wouldn't have stood out. It

doesn't stand out so very much even now."

"You came to it through a grove," said the young lady,

eagerly picking up the idea.

"Probably beech," said Sir Richmond.

"Which may have pointed to the midsummer sunrise," said Dr.

Martineau, unheeded.

"These are NOVEL ideas," said the father of the family in the

reproving tone of one who never allows a novel idea inside

HIS doors if he can prevent it.

"Well," said the young lady, "I guess there was some sort of

show here anyhow. And no human being ever had a show yet

without trying to shut people out of it in order to make them

come in. I guess this was covered in all right. A dark

hunched old place in a wood. Beech stems, smooth, like

pillars. And they came to it at night, in procession, beating

drums, and scared half out of their wits. They came in THERE

and went round the inner circle with their torches. And so

they were shown. The torches were put out and the priests did

their mysteries. Until dawn broke. That is how they worked

it."

"But even you can't tell what the show was, V.V." said the

lady in grey, who was standing now at Dr. Martineau's elbow.

"Something horrid," said Anthony's younger sister to her

elder in a stage whisper.

"BLUGGY," agreed Anthony's elder sister to the younger, in a

noiseless voice that certainly did not reach father.

"SQUEALS! . . . ."

This young lady who was addressed as "V.V." was perhaps one

or two and twenty, Dr. Martineau thought,--he was not very

good at feminine ages. She had a clear sun-browned

complexion, with dark hair and smiling lips. Her features

were finely modelled, with just that added touch of breadth

in the brow and softness in the cheek bones, that faint

flavour of the Amerindian, one sees at times in American

women. Her voice was a very soft and pleasing voice, and she

spoke persuasively and not assertively as so many American

women do. Her determination to make the dry bones of

Stonehenge live shamed the doctor's disappointment with the

place. And when she had spoken, Dr. Martineau noted that she

looked at Sir Richmond as if she expected him at least to

confirm her vision. Sir Richmond was evidently prepared to

confirm it.

With a queer little twinge of infringed proprietorship, the

doctor saw Sir Richmond step up on the prostrate megalith and

stand beside her, the better to appreciate her point of view.

He smiled down at her. "Now why do you think they came in

THERE?" he asked.

The young lady was not very clear about her directions. She

did not know of the roadway running to the Avon river, nor of

the alleged race course to the north, nor had she ever heard

that the stones were supposed to be of two different periods

and that some of them might possibly have been brought from a

very great distance.

Section 2

Neither Dr. Martineau nor the father of the family found the

imaginative reconstruction of the Stonehenge rituals quite so

exciting as the two principals. The father of the family

endured some further particulars with manifest impatience, no

longer able, now that Sir Richmond was encouraging the girl,

to keep her in check with the slightly derisive smile proper

to her sex. Then he proclaimed in a fine loud tenor, "All

this is very imaginative, I'm afraid." And to his family,

"Time we were pressing on. Turps, we must go-o. Come,

Phoebe!"

As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came

floating back. "Talking wanton nonsense. . . . Any

professional archaeologist would laugh, simply laugh. . . ."

He passed out of the world.

With a faint intimation of dismay Dr. Martineau realized that

the two talkative ladies were not to be removed in the family

automobile with the rest of the party. Sir Richmond and the

younger lady went on very cheerfully to the population,

agriculture, housing and general scenery of the surrounding

Downland during the later Stone Age. The shorter, less

attractive lady, whose accent was distinctly American, came

now and stood at the doctor's elbow. She seemed moved to play

the part of chorus to the two upon the stone.

"When V.V. gets going," she remarked, "she makes things come

alive."

Dr. Martineau hated to be addressed suddenly by strange

ladies. He started, and his face assumed the distressed

politeness of the moon at its full. "Your friend," he said,

"interested in archaeology? "

"Interested!" said the stouter lady. "Why! She's a fiend at

it. Ever since we came on Carnac. "

"You've visited Carnac?"

"That's where the bug bit her." said the stout lady with a

note of querulous humour. "Directly V.V. set eyes on Carnac,

she just turned against all her up-bringing. 'Why wasn't I

told of this before?' she said. 'What's Notre Dame to this?

This is where we came from. This is the real starting point

of the MAYFLOWER. Belinda,' she said, 'we've got to see all

we can of this sort of thing before we go back to America.

They've been keeping this from us.' And that's why we're here

right now instead of being shopping in Paris or London like

decent American women."

The younger lady looked down on her companion with something

of the calm expert attention that a plumber gives to a tap

that is misbehaving, and like a plumber refrained from

precipitate action. She stood with the backs of her hands

resting on her hips.

"Well," she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir

Richmond and the rest to the doctor. "it is nearer the

beginnings of things than London or Paris."

"And nearer to us, " said Sir Richmond.

"I call that just--paradoxical," said the shorter lady, who

appeared to be called Belinda.

"Not paradoxical," Dr. Martineau contradicted gently. "Life

is always beginning again. And this is a time of fresh

beginnings."

"Now that's after V.V.'s own heart," cried the stout lady in

grey. "She'll agree to all that. She's been saying it right

across Europe. Rome, Paris, London; they're simply just done.

They don't signify any more. They've got to be cleared away."

"You let me tell my own opinions, Belinda," said the young

lady who was called V.V. "I said that if people went on

building with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals for two

thousand years, it was time they were cleared up and taken

away."

"Corinthian capitals?" Sir Richmond considered it and laughed

cheerfully. "I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of

thing."

"The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument! "

said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. "It gave

me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might

understand English. "

The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at

herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. "When one is

travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics

in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with

Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me

for everything in Europe that I don't want and have no sort

of use for. It isn't a bad sort of capital in its way, florid

and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;--and that a whole

continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get

past it! . . ."

"It's the classical tradition."

"It puzzles me."

"It's the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed

spread by the Romans all over western Europe."

"And it smothers the history of Europe. You can't see Europe

because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble

Arches and ARCS DE TRIOMPHE. You never get away from it. It

is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech

and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can't sit down.

'The empire, gentlemen--the Empire. Empire.' Rome itself is

perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round

stupid arches as though it couldn't imagine that you could

possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter's and that

frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of

Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They

will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes

on."

"AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS," said Dr. Martineau.

"This Roman empire seems to be Europe's first and last idea.

A fixed idea. And such a poor idea! . . . America never came

out of that. It's no good-telling me that it did. It escaped

from it. . . . So I said to Belinda here, 'Let's burrow, if

we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of

people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus

weeds got hold of us.'"

"I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly

Corinthian, something called the Capitol," Sir Richmond

reflected. "And other buildings. A Treasury."

"That is different," said the young lady, so conclusively

that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on that

score.

"A last twinge of Europeanism," she vouchsafed. "We were

young in those days."

"You are well beneath the marble here."

She assented cheerfully.

"A thousand years before it."

"Happy place! Happy people!"

"But even this place isn't the beginning of things here.

Carnac was older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have

you heard in America of Avebury? It may have predated this

place, they think, by another thousand years."

"Avebury?" said the lady who was called Belinda.

"But what is this Avebury?" asked V.V. "I've never heard of

the place."

"I thought it was a lord," said Belinda.

Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau,

embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder of Avebury.

Possibly he exaggerated Avebury. . . .

It was Dr. Martineau who presently brought this disquisition

upon Avebury to a stop by a very remarkable gesture. He

looked at his watch. He drew it out ostentatiously, a thick,

respectable gold watch, for the doctor was not the sort of

man to wear his watch upon his wrist. He clicked it open and

looked at it. Thereby he would have proclaimed his belief

this encounter was an entirely unnecessary interruption of

his healing duologue with Sir Richmond, which must now be

resumed.

But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to

have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking

about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to

light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a

chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too

quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found

himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate

the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where

their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some

way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir

Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The

luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young

lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with

Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr.

Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was

to be thrust into an extreme proximity with him and the

balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.

Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine

historical imagination before, and he was evidently very

greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was

to be got out of this encounter.

Section 3

Sir Richmond displayed a complete disregard of the sufferings

of Dr. Martineau, shamefully compressed behind him. Of these

he was to hear later. He ran his overcrowded little car,

overcrowded so far as the dicky went, over the crest of the

Down and down into Amesbury and on to Salisbury, stopping to

alight and stretch the legs of the party when they came in

sight of Old Sarum.

"Certainly they can do with a little stretching," said Dr.

Martineau grimly.

This charming young woman had seized upon the imagination of

Sir Richmond to the temporary exclusion of all other

considerations. The long Downland gradients, quivering very

slightly with the vibration of the road, came swiftly and

easily to meet and pass the throbbing little car as he sat

beside her and talked to her. He fell into that expository

manner which comes so easily to the native entertaining the

visitor from abroad.

"In England, it seems to me there are four main phases of

history. Four. Avebury, which I would love to take you to see

to-morrow. Stonehenge. Old Sarum, which we shall see in a

moment as a great grassy mound on our right as we come over

one of these crests. Each of them represents about a thousand

years. Old Sarum was Keltic; it, saw the Romans and the

Saxons through, and for a time it was a Norman city. Now it

is pasture for sheep. Latest as yet is Salisbury,--English,

real English. It may last a few centuries still. It is little

more than seven hundred years old. But when I think of those

great hangars back there by Stonehenge, I feel that the next

phase is already beginning. Of a world one will fly to the

ends of, in a week or so. Our world still. Our people, your

people and mine, who are going to take wing so soon now, were

made in all these places. We are visiting the old homes. I am

glad I came back to it just when you were doing the same

thing."

"I'm lucky to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller,"

she said; "with a car."

"You're the first American I've ever met whose interest in

history didn't seem--" He sought for an inoffensive word.

"Silly? Oh! I admit it. It's true of a lot of us. Most of us.

We come over to Europe as if it hadn't anything to do with us

except to supply us with old pictures and curios generally.

We come sight-seeing. It's romantic. It's picturesque. We

stare at the natives--like visitors at a Zoo. We don't

realize that we belong. . . . I know our style. . . . But we

aren't all like that. Some of us are learning a bit better

than that. We have one or two teachers over there to lighten

our darkness. There's Professor Breasted for instance. He

comes sometimes to my father's house. And there's James

Harvey Robinson and Professor Hutton Webster. They've been

trying to restore our memory."

"I've never heard of any of them," said Sir Richmond.

"You hear so little of America over here. It's quite a large

country and all sorts of interesting things happen there

nowadays. And we are waking up to history. Quite fast. We

shan't always be the most ignorant people in the world. We

are beginning to realize that quite a lot of things happened

between Adam and the Mayflower that we ought to be told

about. I allow it's a recent revival. The United States has

been like one of those men you read about in the papers who

go away from home and turn up in some distant place with

their memories gone. They've forgotten what their names were

or where they lived or what they did for a living; they've

forgotten everything that matters. Often they have to begin

again and settle down for a long time before their memories

come back. That's how it has been with us. Our memory is just

coming back to us."

"And what do you find you are?"

"Europeans. Who came away from kings and churches-@-and

Corinthian capitals."

"You feel all this country belongs to you?"

"As much as it does to you."

Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. "But if I say that

America belongs to me as much as it does to you?"

"We are one people," she said.

"We"

"Europe. These parts of Europe anyhow. And ourselves."

"You are the most civilized person I've met for weeks and

weeks." "Well, you are the first civilized person I've met in

Europe for a long time. If I understand you."

"There are multitudes of reasonable, civilized people in

Europe."

"I've heard or seen very little of them.

"They're scattered, I admit."

"And hard to find."

"So ours is a lucky meeting. I've wanted a serious talk to an

American for some time. I want to know very badly what you

think you are up to with the world,--our world. "

"I'm equally anxious to know what England thinks she is

doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult to

understand. On any hypothesis-that is honourable to her."

"H'm," said Sir Richmond.

"I assure you we don't like it. This Irish business. We feel

a sort of ownership in England. It's like finding your

dearest aunt torturing the cat."

"We must talk of that," said Sir Richmond.

"I wish you would."

"It is a cat and a dog--and they have been very naughty

animals. And poor Aunt Britannia almost deliberately lost her

temper. But I admit she hits about in a very nasty fashion."

"And favours the dog."

"She does."

"I want to know all you admit."

"You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the

pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury. If you are

free?"

"We're travelling together, just we two. We are wandering

about the south of England on our way to Falmouth. Where I

join a father in a few days' time, and I go on with him to

Paris. And if you and your friend are coming to the Old

George--"

"We are," said Sir Richmond.

"I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And

seeing Avebury to-morrow. Why not? Perhaps if we did as the

Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate

something of the extreme informality of our behaviour."

"My name is Hardy. I've been a munition manufacturer. I was

slightly wounded by a stray shell near Arras while I was

inspecting some plant I had set up, and also I was hit by a

stray knighthood. So my name is now Sir Richmond Hardy. My

friend is a very distinguished Harley Street physician.

Chiefly nervous and mental cases. His name is Dr. Martineau.

He is quite as civilized as I am. He is also a philosophical

writer. He is really a very wise and learned man indeed. He

is full of ideas. He's stimulated me tremendously. You must

talk to him."

Sir Richmond glanced over his shoulder at the subject of

these commendations. Through the oval window glared an

expression of malignity that made no impression whatever on

his preoccupied mind.

"My name," said the young lady, "is Grammont. The war whirled

me over to Europe on Red Cross work and since the peace I've

been settling up things and travelling about Europe. My

father is rather a big business man in New York."

"The oil Grammont?"

"He is rather deep in oil, I believe. He is coming over to

Europe because he does not like the way your people are

behaving in Mesopotamia. He is on his way to Paris now. Paris

it seems is where everything is to be settled against you.

Belinda is a sort of companion I have acquired for the

purposes of independent travel. She was Red Cross too. I must

have somebody and I cannot bear a maid. Her name is Belinda

Seyffert. From Philadelphia originally. You have that?

Seyffert, Grammont?"

"And Hardy?" "Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau."

"And-Ah!--That great green bank there just coming into sight

must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away

when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop

here for a little while. . . . "

Then it was that Dr. Martineau was grim about the stretching

of his legs.

Section 4

The sudden prospect which now opened out before Sir Richmond

of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming

companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with

this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self-

examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate

possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard

of Dr. Martineau's possible objections to any such

modification of their original programme. When they arrived

in Salisbury, the doctor did make some slight effort to

suggest a different hotel from that in which the two ladies

had engaged their rooms, but on the spur of the moment and in

their presence he could produce no sufficient reason for

refusing the accommodation the Old George had ready for him.

He was reduced to a vague: "We don't want to inflict

ourselves--" He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any

adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert,

before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst

the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And

only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the

engagements to which Sir Richmond had committed himself.

"I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow,"

said Sir Richmond. "These ladies were nearly missing it."

The thing took the doctor's breath away. For the moment he

could say nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An

objection formulated itself very slowly. "But that dicky," he

whispered.

His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the

completeness of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had

been a cathedral city; it was essentially and purely that.

The church at its best, in the full tide of its mediaeval

ascendancy, had called it into being. He was making some

extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the

buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss

Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory

qualifications. "Our age will leave the ruins of hotels,"

said Sir Richmond. "Railway arches and hotels."

"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the

Empire comes nearest to it . . . . "

As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant

to walk round and about Salisbury. He foresaw that walk with

the utmost clearness. In front and keeping just a little

beyond the range of his intervention, Sir Richmond would go

with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring

up the rear. "If I do," he muttered, "I'll be damned!" an

unusually strong expression for him.

"You said--?" asked Miss Seyffert.

"That I have some writing to do--before the post goes," said

the doctor brightly.

"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with

ill-concealed dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a

fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest

fashion when he said this.

"I'm afraid," said the doctor mulishly. "Impossible."

(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first

to look for shops," she said. "There's those things you want

to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can

all go together as far as that. And while you are shopping,

if you wouldn't mind getting one or two things

for me. . . ."

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be

let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also

clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he

might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and

eager to resume with him. . . .

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He

could think over his notes. . . .

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little

speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the

unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that

were being made without his consent in their common

programme. . . .

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting

and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America.

"Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't

correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively

reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he

judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl"

with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible

purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less

appropriate for her than the word "boy." She had an air of

having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far

she had lived each several year of her existence in a

distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental

profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could talk

with her as if he talked with a man like himself--but with a

zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first

came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert

thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of

those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever

women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking

for effect at all, she was talking because she was

tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of

history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as

she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made

their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact

gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-

iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum,

aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and

the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon

the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old

houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some

moments surveying it.

"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir

Richmond. "But why, I wonder, did we build it? "

"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with

her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp

against the blue. "I've been away for so long-over there-that

I forget altogether. Why DID we build it?"

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and

thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her

mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in

Europe. "My friend, the philosopher," he had said, "will not

have it that we are really the individuals we think we are.

You must talk to him--he is a very curious and subtle

thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he

says, passing thoughts. We are--what does he call it? --Man

on his Planet, taking control of life."

"Man and woman," she had amended.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had

failed altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on

the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss

Grammont and Sir Richmond found very great difficulty in

recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.

"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond.

"But the impulse was losing its force. "

She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly

quizzical expression.

But he had his reply ready.

"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were

already very clever engineers. What interested us here wasn't

the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display

our power over stone. We made it into reeds and branches. We

squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest

and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think people have

ever feared and worshipped in this--this artist's lark--as

they did in Stonehenge?"

"I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here,"

she said.

Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. "The spirit of the

Gothic cathedrals," he said, "is the spirit of the sky-

scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition.

The Freemasons on the building could hardly refrain from

jeering at the little priest they had left down below there,

performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his altar. He was

just their excuse for doing it all."

"Sky-scrapers?" she conceded. "An early display of the sky-

scraper spirit. . . . You are doing your best to make me feel

thoroughly at home."

"You are more at home here still than in that new country of

ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do

begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other

cathedrals we built in Europe. . . . It was the fun of

building made us do it. . . "

"H'm," she said. "And my sky-scrapers?"

"Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most

about America. It's still large enough, mentally and

materially, to build all sorts of things. . . . Over here,

the sites are frightfully crowded. . . . "

"And what do you think we are building now? And what do you

think you are building over here?"

"What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up.

I believe it is time we began to build in earnest. For

good. . . ."

"But are we building anything at all?"

"A new world."

"Show it me," she said.

"We're still only at the foundations," said Sir Richmond."

Nothing shows as yet."

"I wish I could believe they were foundations."

"But can you doubt we are scrapping the old? . . ."

It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so

they strolled to and fro round and about the west end and

along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging

their ideas very frankly and freely about the things that had

recently happened to the world and what they thought they

ought to be doing in it.

Section 5

After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a

corner of the smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished

hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the

second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed from tweedy

pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but

definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their

coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of

Miss Grammont's hair and a necklace of the same colourings

kept the peace between her jolly sun-burnt cheek and her soft

untanned neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included

a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a

plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr.

Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.

The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of

the steady continuity of Sir Richmond's duologue with Miss

Grammont. Miss Seyffert's methods were too discursive and

exclamatory. She broke every thread that appeared. The Old

George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss

Seyffert laced the entire evening with her recognition of the

fact. "Just look at that old beam!" she would cry suddenly. "

To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot

in America!"

Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she

chose. After the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy

contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat

deep in a basket chair and spoke now and then. Miss Seyffert

gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the

cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.

Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her

chair threw out the statement that Italy was frightfully

overpopulated. "In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a

cheese. Nobody seems to be living. Everyone is too busy

keeping alive."

"Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules," said

Miss Seyffert.

"Little children working like slaves," said Miss Grammont.

"And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the

roadside. Who ought to be getting wages--sufficient. . . ."

"Begging--from foreigners--is just a sport in Italy," said

Sir Richmond. "It doesn't imply want. But I agree that a

large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole

world is. Don't you think so, Martineau?"

"Well--yes--for its present social organization. "

"For any social organization," said Sir Richmond.

"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added

amazingly: "I'm out for Birth Control all the time."

A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of

sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty

coffee cup.

"The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives," said

Sir Richmond. "Which amount to nothing. Which do not even

represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources,

the fuel and surplus energy of the world."

"I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives," Miss

Grammont reflected.

"Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are

just vain repetitions--imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions

of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all

that they do has been done better before. Because they are

crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as

for liking their lives, they need never have had the chance."

"How many people are there in the world?" she asked abruptly.

"I don't know. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions

perhaps."

"And in your world?"

"I'd have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At

most. It would be quite enough for this little planet, for a

time, at any rate. Don't you think so, doctor?"

"I don't know," said Dr. Martineau. "Oddly enough, I have

never thought about that question before. At least, not from

this angle."

"But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million

aristocrats?" began Miss Grammont. "My native instinctive

democracy--"

"Need not be outraged," said Sir Richmond. "Any two hundred

and fifty million would do, They'd be able to develop fully,

all of them. As things are, only a minority can do that. The

rest never get a chance."

"That's what I always say," said Miss Seyffert.

"A New Age," said Dr. Martineau; "a New World. We may be

coming to such a stage, when population, as much as fuel,

will be under a world control. If one thing, why not the

other? I admit that the movement of thought is away from

haphazard towards control--"

"I'm for control all the time," Miss Seyffert injected,

following up her previous success.

"I admit", the doctor began his broken sentence again with

marked patience, "that the movement of thought is away from

haphazard towards control--in things generally. But is the

movement of events?"

"The eternal problem of man," said Sir Richmond. "Can our

wills prevail?"

There came a little pause.

Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert. "If YOU

are," said Belinda.

"I wish I could imagine your world," said Miss Grammont,

rising, "of two hundred and fifty millions of fully developed

human beings with room to live and breathe in and no need for

wars. Will they live in palaces? Will they all be healthy? .

. . Machines will wait on them. No! I can't imagine it.

Perhaps I shall dream of it. My dreaming self may be

cleverer."

She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they

stood hand in hand, appreciatively. . . .

"Well!" said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two

Americans, "This is a curious encounter."

"That young woman has brains," said Sir Richmond, standing

before the fireplace. There was no doubt whatever which young

woman he meant. But Dr. Martineau grunted.

"I don't like the American type," the doctor pronounced

judicially.

"I do," Sir Richmond countered.

The doctor thought for a moment or so. "You are committed to

the project of visiting Avebury?" he said.

"They ought to see Avebury, " said Sir Richmond.

"H'm," said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts

and staring at the fire. "Birth Control! I NEVER did."

Sir Richmond smiled down on the top of the doctor's head and

said nothing.

"I think" said the doctor and paused. "I shall leave this

Avebury expedition to you."

"We can be back in the early afternoon," said Sir Richmond.

"To give them a chance of seeing the cathedral. The chapter

house here is not one to miss . . . . "

"And then I suppose we shall go on?

"As you please," said Sir Richmond insincerely.

"I must confess that four people make the car at any rate

seem tremendously overpopulated. And to tell the truth, I do

not find this encounter so amusing as you seem to do. . . . I

shall not be sorry when we have waved good-bye to those young

ladies, and resume our interrupted conversation."

Sir Richmond considered something mulish in the doctor's

averted face.

"I find Miss Grammont an extremely interesting--and

stimulating human being.

"Evidently."

The doctor sighed, stood up and found himself delivering one

of the sentences he had engendered during his solitary

meditations in his room before dinner. He surprised himself

by the plainness of his speech. "Let me be frank," he said,

regarding Sir Richmond squarely. "Considering the general

situation of things and your position, I do not care very

greatly for the part of an accessory to what may easily

develop, as you know very well, into a very serious

flirtation. An absurd, mischievous, irrelevant flirtation.

You may not like the word. You may pretend it is a

conversation, an ordinary intellectual conversation. That is

not the word. Simply that is not the word. You people eye one

another. . . . Flirtation. I give the affair its proper name.

That is all. Merely that. When I think--But we will not

discuss it now. . . . Good night. . . . Forgive me if I put

before you, rather bluntly, my particular point of view."

Sir Richmond found himself alone. With his eyebrows raised.

Section 6

After twenty-four eventful hours our two students of human

motives found themselves together again by the fireplace in

the Old George smoking-room. They had resumed their overnight

conversation, in a state of considerable tension.

"If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said

Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit

it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place like this.

I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau.

"I am not coming on if these young women are."

"But if you consider it scandalous--and really, Martineau,

really! as one man to another, it does seem to me to be a bit

pernickety of you, a broad and original thinker as you are--"

"Thought is one matter. Rash, inconsiderate action quite

another. And above all, if I spend another day in or near the

company of Miss Belinda Seyffert I shall--I shall be

extremely rude to her."

"But," said Sir Richmond and bit his lower lip and

considered.

"We might drop Belinda," he suggested turning to his friend

and speaking in low, confidential tones. "She is quite a

manageable person. Quite. She could--for example--be left

behind with the luggage and sent on by train. I do not know

if you realize how the land lies in that quarter. It needs

only a word to Miss Grammont. "

There was no immediate reply. For a moment he had a wild hope

that his companion would agree, and then he perceived that

the doctor's silence meant only the preparation of an

ultimatum.

"I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more

than I do to Miss Seyffert."

Sir Richmond said nothing.

"It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different

angle if I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert has asked

me if you were a married man."

"And of course you told her I was."

"On the second occasion."

Sir Richmond smiled again.

"Frankly," said the doctor, "this adventure is altogether

uncongenial to me. It is the sort of thing that has never

happened in my life. This highway coupling--"

"Don't you think," said Sir Richmond, "that you are attaching

rather too much--what shall I say--romantic?--flirtatious?--

meaning to this affair? I don't mind that after my rather

lavish confessions you should consider me a rather oversexed

person, but isn't your attitude rather unfair,--unjust,

indeed, and almost insulting, to this Miss Grammont? After

all, she's a young lady of very good social position indeed.

She doesn't strike you--does she?--as an undignified or

helpless human being. Her manners suggest a person of

considerable self-control. And knowing less of me than you

do, she probably regards me as almost as safe as--a maiden

aunt say. I'm twice her age. We are a party of four. There

are conventions, there are considerations. . . . Aren't you

really, my dear Martineau, overdoing all this side of this

very pleasant little enlargement of our interests."

"AM I?" said Dr. Martineau and brought a scrutinizing eye to

bear on Sir Richmond's face.

"I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so,"

Sir Richmond admitted.

"Then I shall prefer to leave your party."

There were some moments of silence.

"I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma," said

Sir Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his voice.

"It is not a dilemma," said Dr. Martineau, with a

corresponding loss of asperity. "I grant you we discover we

differ upon a question of taste and convenience. But before I

suggested this trip, I had intended to spend a little time

with my old friend Sir Kenelm Latter at Bournemouth. Nothing

simpler than to go to him now . . . ."

"I shall be sorry all the same."

"I could have wished," said the doctor, "that these ladies

had happened a little later. . . ."

The matter was settled. Nothing more of a practical nature

remained to be said. But neither gentleman wished to break

off with a harsh and bare decision.

"When the New Age is here," said Sir Richmond, "then, surely,

a friendship between a man and a woman will not be subjected

to the--the inconveniences your present code would set about

it? They would travel about together as they chose?"

"The fundamental principle of the new age," said the doctor,

will be Honi soit qui mal y pense. In these matters. With

perhaps Fay ce que vouldras as its next injunction. So long

as other lives are not affected. In matters of personal

behaviour the world will probably be much more free and

individuals much more open in their conscience and honour

than they have ever been before. In matters of property,

economics and public conduct it will probably be just the

reverse. Then, there will be much more collective control and

much more insistence, legal insistence, upon individual

responsibility. But we are not living in a new age yet; we

are living in the patched-up ruins of a very old one. And

you-- if you will forgive me--are living in the patched up

remains of a life that had already had its complications.

This young lady, whose charm and cleverness I admit, behaves

as if the new age were already here. Well, that may be a very

dangerous mistake both for her and for you. . . . This

affair, if it goes on for a few days more, may involve very

serious consequences indeed, with which I, for one, do not

wish to be involved."

Sir Richmond, upon the hearthrug, had a curious feeling that

he was back in the head master's study at Caxton.

Dr. Martineau went on with a lucidity that Sir Richmond found

rather trying, to give his impression of Miss Grammont and

her position in life.

"She is," he said, "manifestly a very expensively educated

girl. And in many ways interesting. I have been watching her.

I have not been favoured with very much of her attention, but

that fact has enabled me to see her in profile. Miss Seyffert

is a fairly crude mixture of frankness, insincerity and self-

explanatory egotism, and I have been able to disregard a

considerable amount of the conversation she has addressed to

me. Now I guess this Miss Grammont has had no mother since

she was quite little."

"Your guesses, doctor, are apt to be pretty good," said Sir

Richmond.

"You know that?"

"She has told me as much."

"H'm. Well--She impressed me as having the air of a girl who

has had to solve many problems for which the normal mother

provides ready made solutions. That is how I inferred that

there was no mother. I don't think there has been any

stepmother, either friendly or hostile? There hasn't been. I

thought not. She has had various governesses and companions,

ladies of birth and education, engaged to look after her and

she has done exactly what she liked with them. Her manner

with Miss Seyffert, an excellent manner for Miss Seyffert, by

the bye, isn't the sort of manner anyone acquires in a day.

Or for one person only. She is a very sure and commanding

young woman."

Sir Richmond nodded.

"I suppose her father adores and neglects her, and whenever

she has wanted a companion or governess butchered, the thing

has been done. . . . These business Americans, I am told,

neglect their womenkind, give them money and power, let them

loose on the world. . . . It is a sort of moral laziness

masquerading as affection. . . . Still I suppose custom and

tradition kept this girl in her place and she was petted,

honoured, amused, talked about but not in a harmful way, and

rather bored right up to the time when America came into the

war. Theoretically she had a tremendously good time."

"I think this must be near the truth of her biography," said

Sir Richmond.

"I suppose she has lovers."

"You don't mean--?" "No, I don't. Though that is a matter

that ought to have no special interest for you. I mean that

she was surrounded by a retinue of men who wanted to marry

her or who behaved as though they wanted to marry her or who

made her happiness and her gratifications and her

condescensions seem a matter of very great importance to

them. She had the flattery of an extremely uncritical and

unexacting admiration. That is the sort of thing that

gratifies a silly woman extremely. Miss Grammont is not silly

and all this homage and facile approval probably bored her

more than she realized. To anyone too intelligent to be

steadily excited by buying things and wearing things and

dancing and playing games and going to places of

entertainment, and being given flowers, sweets, jewellery,

pet animals, and books bound in a special sort of leather,

the prospect of being a rich man's only daughter until such

time as it becomes advisable to change into a rich man's

wealthy wife, is probably not nearly so amusing as envious

people might suppose. I take it Miss Grammont had got all she

could out of that sort of thing some time before the war, and

that she had already read and thought rather more than most

young women in her position. Before she was twenty I guess

she was already looking for something more interesting in the

way of men than a rich admirer with an automobile full of

presents. Those who seek find."

"What do you think she found?"

"What would a rich girl find out there in America? I don't

know. I haven't the material to guess with. In London a girl

might find a considerable variety of active, interesting men,

rising politicians, university men of distinction, artists

and writers even, men of science, men--there are still such

men--active in the creative work of the empire.

"In America I suppose there is at least an equal variety,

made up of rather different types. She would find that life

was worth while to such people in a way that made the

ordinary entertainments and amusements of her life a

monstrous silly waste of time. With the facility of her sex

she would pick up from one of them the idea that made life

worth while for him. I am inclined to think there was someone

in her case who did seem to promise a sort of life that was

worth while. And that somehow the war came to alter the look

of that promise.

"How?"

"I don't know. Perhaps I am only romancing. But for this

young woman I am convinced this expedition to Europe has

meant experience, harsh educational experience and very

profound mental disturbance. There have been love

experiences; experiences that were something more than the

treats and attentions and proposals that made up her life

when she was sheltered over there. And something more than

that. What it is I don't know. The war has turned an ugly

face to her. She has seen death and suffering and ruin.

Perhaps she has seen people she knew killed. Perhaps the man

has been killed. Or she has met with cowardice or cruelty or

treachery where she didn't expect it. She has been shocked

out of the first confidence of youth. She has ceased to take

the world for granted. It hasn't broken her but it has

matured her. That I think is why history has become real to

her. Which so attracts you in her. History, for her, has

ceased to be a fabric of picturesque incidents; it is the

study of a tragic struggle that still goes on. She sees

history as you see it and I see it. She is a very grown-up

young woman.

"It's just that," said Sir Richmond. "It's just that. If you

see as much in Miss Grammont as all that, why don't you want

to come on with us? You see the interest of her."

"I see a lot more than that. You don't know what an advantage

it is to be as I am, rather cold and unresponsive to women

and unattractive and negligible--negligible, that is the

exact word--to them. YOU can't look at a woman for five

minutes without losing sight of her in a mist of imaginative

excitement. Because she looks back at you. I have the

privilege of the negligible--which is a cool head. Miss

Grammont has a startled and matured mind, an original mind.

Yes. And there is something more to be said. Her intelligence

is better than her character."

"I don't quite see what you are driving at."

"The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than

their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we understand it,

seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss

Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character. And as I

have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no

discipline. . . . You also are a person of high intelligence

and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You--

on account of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss

Martin Leeds--"

"Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?"

"This IS the confessional. It closes to-morrow morning but it

is the confessional still. Look at the thing frankly. You, I

say, are also at loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir,

don't we both know that ever since we left London you have

been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in

petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha'porth of

kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You're a stray man

looking for a mistress. Miss Grammont being a woman is a

little more selective than that. But if she's at a loose end

as I suppose, she isn't protected by the sense of having made

her selection. And she has no preconceptions of what she

wants. You are a very interesting man in many ways. You carry

marriage and entanglements lightly. With an air of being

neither married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall

in love with you."

"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an

ill-concealed eagerness.

Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. "These

miracles--grotesquely--happen," he said. "She knows nothing

of Martin Leeds. . . . You must remember that. . . .

"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the

phrase goes, what is to follow?"

There was a pause.

Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he

took counsel with them and then decided to take offence.

"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous. You talk of falling

in love as though it was impossible for a man and woman to be

deeply interested in each other without that. And the gulf in

our ages--in our quality! From the Psychologist of a New Age

I find this amazing. Are men and women to go on for ever--

separated by this possibility into two hardly communicating

and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be

friendship and companionship between men and women without

passion?"

"You ought to know even better than I do that there is not.

For such people as you two anyhow. And at present the world

is not prepared to tolerate friendship and companionship WITH

that accompaniment. That is the core of this situation."

A pause fell between the two gentlemen. They had smoothed

over the extreme harshness of their separation and there was

very little more to be said.

"Well," said Sir Richmond in conclusion, "I am very sorry

indeed, Martineau, that we have to part like this."

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

COMPANIONSHIP

Section 1

"Well," said Dr. Martineau, extending his hand to Sir

Richmond on the Salisbury station platform, "I leave you to

it."

His round face betrayed little or no vestiges of his

overnight irritation.

"Ought you to leave me to it?" smiled Sir Richmond.

"I shall be interested to learn what happens."

"But if you won't stay to see!"

"Now Sir, please," said the guard respectfully but firmly,

and Dr. Martineau got in.

Sir Richmond walked thoughtfully down the platform towards

the exit.

"What else could I do?" he asked aloud to nobody in

particular.

For a little while he thought confusedly of the collapse of

his expedition into the secret places of his own heart with

Dr. Martineau, and then his prepossession with Miss Grammont

resumed possession of his mind. Dr. Martineau was forgotten.

Section 2

For the better part of forty hours, Sir Richmond had either

been talking to Miss Grammont, or carrying on imaginary

conversations with her in her absence, or sleeping and

dreaming dreams in which she never failed to play a part,

even if at times it was an altogether amazing and incongruous

part. And as they were both very frank and expressive people,

they already knew a very great deal about each other.

For an American Miss Grammont was by no means

autobiographical. She gave no sketches of her idiosyncrasies,

and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her

contemporaries about herself. She either concealed or she had

lost any great interest in her own personality. But she was

interested in and curious about the people she had met in

life, and her talk of them reflected a considerable amount of

light upon her own upbringing and experiences. And her liking

for Sir Richmond was pleasingly manifest. She liked his turn

of thought, she watched him with a faint smile on her lips as

he spoke, and she spread her opinions before him carefully in

that soft voice of hers like a shy child showing its

treasures to some suddenly trusted and favoured visitor.

Their ways of thought harmonized. They talked at first

chiefly about the history of the world and the extraordinary

situation of aimlessness in a phase of ruin to which the

Great War had brought all Europe, if not all mankind. The

world excited them both in the same way; as a crisis in which

they were called upon to do something--they did not yet

clearly know what. Into this topic they peered as into some

deep pool, side by side, and in it they saw each other

reflected.

The visit to Avebury had been a great success. It had been a

perfect springtime day, and the little inn had been delighted

at the reappearance of Sir Richmond's car so soon after its

departure. Its delight was particularly manifest in the cream

and salad it produced for lunch. Both Miss Grammont and Miss

Seyffert displayed an intelligent interest in their food.

After lunch they had all gone out to the stones and the wall.

Half a dozen sunburnt children were putting one of the

partially overturned megaliths to a happy use by clambering

to the top of it and sliding on their little behinds down its

smooth and sloping side amidst much mirthful squealing.

Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont had walked round the old

circumvallation together, but Belinda Seyffert had strayed

away from them, professing an interest in flowers. It was not

so much that she felt they had to be left together that made

her do this as her own consciousness of being possessed by a

devil who interrupted conversations.

When Miss Grammont was keenly interested in a conversation,

then Belinda had learnt from experience that it was wiser to

go off with her devil out of the range of any temptation to

interrupt.

"You really think," said Miss Grammont, "that it would be

possible to take this confused old world and reshape it, set

it marching towards that new world of yours--of two hundred

and fifty million fully developed, beautiful and happy

people?"

"Why not? Nobody is doing anything with the world except

muddle about. Why not give it a direction? "

"You'd take it in your hands like clay?"

"Obdurate clay with a sort of recalcitrant, unintelligent

life of its own."

Her imagination glowed in her eyes and warmed her voice. "I

believe what you say is possible. If people dare."

"I am tired of following little motives that are like flames

that go out when you get to them. I am tired of seeing all

the world doing the same. I am tired of a world in which

there is nothing great but great disasters. Here is something

mankind can attempt, that we can attempt."

"And will? "

"I believe that as Mankind grows up this is the business Man

has to settle down to and will settle down to."

She considered that.

"I've been getting to believe something like this.

But-- . . . it frightens me. I suppose most of us have this

same sort of dread of taking too much upon ourselves."

"So we just live like pigs. Sensible little piggywiggys. I've

got a Committee full of that sort of thing. We live like

little modest pigs. And let the world go hang. And pride

ourselves upon our freedom from the sin of presumption.

"Not quite that!"

"Well! How do you put it?"

"We are afraid," she said. "It's too vast. We want bright

little lives of our own. "

"Exactly--sensible little piggy-wiggys."

"We have a right to life--and happiness.

"First," said Sir Richmond, "as much right as a pig has to

food. But whether we get life and happiness or fail to get

them we human beings who have imaginations want something

more nowadays. . . . Of course we want bright lives, of

course we want happiness. Just as we want food, just as we

want sleep. But when we have eaten, when we have slept, when

we have jolly things about us--it is nothing. We have been

made an exception of--and got our rations. The big thing

confronts us still. It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it

is the thing we have to think about. I do not know why it

should be so, but I am compelled by something in my nature to

want to serve this idea of a new age for mankind. I want it

as my culminating want. I want a world in order, a

disciplined mankind going on to greater things. Don't you?"

"Now you tell me of it," she said with a smile, "I do."

"But before--?"

"No. You've made it clear. It wasn't clear before."

"I've been talking of this sort of thing with my friend Dr.

Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as talking. That

perhaps is why I'm so clear and positive."

"I don't complain that you are clear and positive. I've been

coming along the same way. . . . It's refreshing to meet

you."

"I found it refreshing to meet Martineau." A twinge of

conscience about Dr. Martineau turned Sir Richmond into a new

channel. "He's a most interesting man," he said. "Rather shy

in some respects. Devoted to his work. And he's writing a

book which has saturated him in these ideas. Only two nights

ago we stood here and talked about it. The Psychology of a

New Age. The world, he believes, is entering upon a new phase

in its history, the adolescence, so to speak, of mankind. It

is an idea that seizes the imagination. There is a flow of

new ideas abroad, he thinks, widening realizations,

unprecedented hopes and fears. There is a consciousness of

new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing the

adolescence of our race. It is giving history a new and more

intimate meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer

relation with public affairs,--making them matter as formerly

they didn't seem to matter. That idea of the bright little

private life has to go by the board."

"I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had

been thinking over some such question before.

"The private life," she said, "has a way of coming aboard

again."

Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of

him.

"You have some sort of work cut out for you," she said

abruptly.

"Yes. Yes, I have."

"I haven't," she said.

"So that I go about," she added, like someone who is looking

for something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbing too

searching a question at you--what you have found."

Sir Richmond considered. "Incidentally," he smiled, " I want

to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and

barbaric person, your father. I am doing my best to help lay

the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel

production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commission in

London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole

world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington

presently with proposals. "

Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. "I suppose," she said,

"poor father IS rather like an unbroken mule in business

affairs. So many of our big business men in America are.

He'll lash out at you."

"I don't mind if only he lashes out openly in the sight of

all men."

She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely.

"Tell me what you want to do to him. You find out so many

things for me that I seem to have been thinking about in a

sort of almost invisible half-conscious way. I've been

suspecting for a long time that Civilization wasn't much good

unless it got people like my father under some sort of

control. But controlling father--as distinguished from

managing him!" She reviewed some private and amusing

memories. "He is a most intractable man."

Section 3

They had gone on to talk of her father and of the types of

men who controlled international business. She had had

plentiful opportunities for observation in their homes and

her own. Gunter Lake, the big banker, she knew particularly

well, because, it seemed, she had been engaged or was engaged

to marry him. "All these people," she said, "are pushing

things about, affecting millions of lives, hurting and

disordering hundreds of thousands of people. They don't seem

to know what they are doing. They have no plans in

particular. . . . And you are getting something going that

will be a plan and a direction and a conscience and a control

for them? You will find my father extremely difficult, but

some of our younger men would love it.

"And," she went on; "there are American women who'd love it

too. We're petted. We're kept out of things. We aren't

placed. We don't get enough to do. We're spenders and wasters

--not always from choice. While these fathers and brothers

and husbands of ours play about with the fuel and power and

life and hope of the world as though it was a game of poker.

With all the empty unspeakable solemnity of the male. And

treat us as though we ought to be satisfied if they bring

home part of the winnings.

"That can't go on," she said.

Her eyes went back to the long, low, undulating skyline of

the downs. She spoke as though she took up the thread of some

controversy that had played a large part in her life. "That

isn't going on," she said with an effect of conclusive

decision.

Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned

from Salisbury station to the Old George after his farewell

to Martineau. He recalled too the soft firmness of her

profile and the delicate line of her lifted chin. He felt

that this time at any rate he was not being deceived by the

outward shows of a charming human being. This young woman had

real firmness of character to back up her free and

independent judgments. He smiled at the idea of any facile

passion in the composition of so sure and gallant a

personality. Martineau was very fine-minded in many respects,

but he was an old maid; and like all old maids he saw man and

woman in every encounter. But passion was a thing men and

women fell back upon when they had nothing else in common.

When they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark

seemed to weave a fresh thread of common interest, then it

wasn't so necessary. It might happen, but it wasn't so

necessary. . . . If it did it would be a secondary thing to

companionship. That's what she was,--a companion.

But a very lovely and wonderful companion, the companion one

would not relinquish until the very last moment one could

keep with her.

Her views about America and about her own place in the world

seemed equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.

"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen,"

she had said. That didn't mean that she attached very much

importance to her recently acquired vote. She evidently

classified voters into the irresponsible who just had votes

and the responsible who also had a considerable amount of

property as well. She had no illusions about the power of the

former class. It didn't exist. They were steered to their

decisions by people employed, directed or stimulated by

"father" and his friends and associates, the owners of

America, the real "responsible citizens." Or they fell a prey

to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries." But

anyhow they were steered. She herself, it was clear, was

bound to become a very responsible citizen indeed. She would

some day, she laughed, be swimming in oil and such like

property. Her interest in Sir Richmond's schemes for a

scientific world management of fuel was therefore, she

realized, a very direct one. But it was remarkable to find a

young woman seeing it like that.

Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards

her. He despised and distrusted women generally, and it was

evident he had made it quite clear to her how grave an error

it was on her part to persist in being a daughter and not a

son. At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was

disposed to agree with father upon that. When Mr. Grammont's

sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he

gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up

against the machinations of adventurers by means of trustees,

partners, lawyers, advisers, agreements and suchlike

complications, or for acquiring a workable son by marriage.

To this last idea it would seem the importance in her life of

the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed. But

another mood of the old man's was distrust of anything that

could not be spoken of as his "own flesh and blood," and then

he would direct his attention to a kind of masculinization of

his daughter and to schemes for giving her the completest

control of all he had to leave her provided she never married

nor fell under masculine sway. "After all," he would reflect

as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's ideal,

"there was Hetty Green."

This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of

seventeen from the educational care of an English gentlewoman

warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe,

and thrust her for the mornings and a moiety of the

afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but

competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down

town. She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern

independent of Mr. Grammont, because he feared his own people

wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages

and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned

casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a

trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent

of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical

Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a

commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had

really done responsible work.

But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even

for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party

he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an

improper familiarity with socialist ideas. This had produced

a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of

a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake. Gunter Lake, Sir

Richmond gathered, wasn't half a bad fellow. Generally it

would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of

speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake

had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his

behaviour under bad treatment. There was some story, however,

connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss

Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell. About that story

Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after

his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely

guessing.

So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated

up in fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond's

mind in the course of a day and a half. The fragments came up

as allusions or by way of illustration. The sustaining topic

was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under

scientific control, the Utopia of fully developed people

fully developing the resources of the earth. For a number of

trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the

project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and

presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was

justified in doing. It was true that Dr. Martineau had not

said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but

also it was true that they had not crystallized out in Sir

Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea

of a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh

rules of conduct and of different relationships between human

beings. And it throws those who talk about it into the

companionship of a common enterprise. To-morrow the New Age

will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure

of only a few human beings.

So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to

ask: "What are we to do with such types as father?" and to

fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise. They had

agreed by a tacit consent to a common conception of the world

they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense

organization of mature commonsense, healthy and secure,

gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet

beyond dreaming. They were prepared to think of the makers of

the Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age

savages as a phase, in their late childhood, and of this

great world order Sir Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn

was already at hand. And in such long perspectives, the

states, governments and institutions of to-day became very

temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed. Both

these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion

with an unwonted courage and freedom because the other one

had been disposed to think in this fashion before. Sir

Richmond was still turning over in his mind the happy mutual

release of the imagination this chance companionship had

brought about when he found himself back again at the

threshold of the Old George.

Section 4

Sir Richmond Hardy was not the only man who was thinking

intently about Miss Grammont at that particular moment. Two

gentlemen were coming towards her across the Atlantic whose

minds, it chanced, were very busily occupied by her affairs.

One of these was her father, who was lying in his brass bed

in his commodious cabin on the Hollandia, regretting his

diminishing ability to sleep in the early morning now, even

when he was in the strong and soothing air of mid-Atlantic,

and thinking of V.V. because she had a way of coming into his

mind when it was undefended; and the other was Mr. Gunter

Lake on the Megantic, one day out from Sandy Hook, who found

himself equally sleepless and preoccupied. And although Mr.

Lake was a man of vast activities and complicated engagements

he was coming now to Europe for the express purpose of seeing

V.V. and having things out with her fully and completely

because, in spite of all that had happened, she made such an

endless series of delays in coming to America.

Old Grammont as he appeared upon the pillow of his bed by the

light of a rose-shaded bedside lamp, was a small-headed,

grey-haired gentleman with a wrinkled face and sunken brown

eyes. Years of business experience, mitigated only by such

exercise as the game of poker affords, had intensified an

instinctive inexpressiveness. Under the most solitary

circumstances old Grammont was still inexpressive, and the

face that stared at the, ceiling of his cabin and the problem

of his daughter might have been the face of a pickled head in

a museum, for any indication it betrayed of the flow of

thought within. He lay on his back and his bent knees lifted

the bed-clothes into a sharp mountain. He was not even trying

to sleep.

Why, he meditated, had V.V. stayed on in Europe so much

longer than she need have done? And why had Gunter Lake

suddenly got into a state of mind about her? Why didn't the

girl confide in her father at least about these things? What

was afoot? She had thrown over Lake once and it seemed she

was going to turn him down again. Well, if she was an

ordinary female person that was a silly sort of thing to do.

With her fortune and his--you could buy the world. But

suppose she was not all ordinary female person. . . . Her

mother hadn't been ordinary anyhow, whatever else you called

her, and no one could call Grammont blood all ordinary fluid.

. . . Old Grammont had never had any delusions about Lake. If

Lake's father hadn't been a big man Lake would never have

counted for anything at all. Suppose she did turn him down.

In itself that wasn't a thing to break her father's heart.

What did matter was not whether she threw Lake over but what

she threw him over for. If it was because he wasn't man

enough, well and good. But if it was for some other lover,

some good-looking, worthless impostor, some European title or

suchlike folly--!

At the thought of a lover for V.V. a sudden flood of anger

poured across the old man's mind, behind the still mask of

his face. It infuriated him even to think of V.V., his little

V.V., his own girl, entertaining a lover, being possibly--

most shameful thought--IN LOVE! Like some ordinary silly

female, sinking to kisses, to the deeds one could buy and pay

for. His V.V.! The idea infuriated and disgusted him. He

fought against it as a possibility. Once some woman in New

York had ventured to hint something to him of some fellow,

some affair with an artist, Caston; she had linked this

Caston with V.V.'s red cross nursing in Europe. . . . Old

Grammont had made that woman sorry she spoke. Afterwards he

had caused enquiries to be made about this Caston, careful

enquiries. It seems that he and V.V. had known each other,

there had been something. But nothing that V.V. need be

ashamed of. When old Grammont's enquiry man had come back

with his report, old Grammont had been very particular about

that. At first the fellow had not been very clear, rather

muddled indeed as to how things were--no doubt he had wanted

to make out there was something just to seem to earn his

money. Old Grammont had struck the table sharply and the eyes

that looked out of his mask had blazed. "What have you found

out against her?" he had asked in a low even voice.

"Absolutely nothing, Sir," said the agent, suddenly white to

the lips. . . .

Old Grammont stared at his memory of that moment for a while.

That affair was all right, quite all right. Of course it was

all right. And also, happily, Caston was among the dead. But

it was well her broken engagement with Lake had been resumed

as though it had never been broken off. If there had been any

talk that fact answered it. And now that Lake had served his

purpose old Grammont did not care in the least if he was

shelved. V.V. could stand alone.

Old Grammont had got a phrase in his mind that looked like

dominating the situation. He dreamt of saying to V.V.: "V.V.,

I'm going to make a man of you--if you're man enough." That

was a large proposition; it implied--oh! it implied all sorts

of things. It meant that she would care as little for

philandering as an able young business man. Perhaps some day,

a long time ahead, she might marry. There wasn't much reason

for it, but it might be she would not wish to be called a

spinster. "Take a husband," thought old Grammont, "when I am

gone, as one takes a butler, to make the household complete."

In previous meditations on his daughter's outlook old

Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the

precedent of Queen Victoria. She had had no husband of the

lord and master type, so to speak, but only a Prince Consort,

well in hand. Why shouldn't the Grammont heiress dominate her

male belonging, if it came to that, in the same fashion? Why

shouldn't one tie her up and tie the whole thing up, so far

as any male belonging was concerned, leaving V.V. in all

other respects free? How could one do it?

The speculative calm of the sunken brown eyes deepened.

His thoughts went back to the white face of the private

enquiry agent. "Absolutely nothing, Sir." What had the fellow

thought of hinting? Nothing of that kind in V.V.'s

composition, never fear. Yet it was a curious anomaly that

while one had a thousand ways of defending one's daughter and

one's property against that daughter's husband, there was no

power on earth by which a father could stretch his dead hand

between that daughter and the undue influence of a lover.

Unless you tied her up for good and all, lover or none. . . .

One was left at the mercy of V.V.'s character. . . .

"I ought to see more of her," he thought. "She gets away from

me. Just as her mother did." A man need not suspect his

womenkind but he should know what they are doing. It is duty,

his protective duty to them. These companions, these Seyffert

women and so forth, were all very well in their way; there

wasn't much they kept from you if you got them cornered and

asked them intently. But a father's eye is better. He must go

about with the girl for a time, watch her with other men,

give her chances to talk business with him and see if she

took them. "V.V., I'm going to make a man of you," the phrase

ran through his brain. The deep instinctive jealousy of the

primordial father was still strong in old Grammont's blood.

It would be pleasant to go about with her on his right hand

in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and

unapproachable,--above that sort of nonsense, above all other

masculine subjugation.

"V.V., I'm going to make a man of you. . . ."

His mind grew calmer. Whatever she wanted in Paris should be

hers. He'd just let her rip. They'd be like sweethearts

together, he and his girl.

Old Grammont dozed off into dreamland.

Section 5

The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr.

Grammont upon the Atlantic, were of a gentler, more romantic

character. In them V.V. was no longer a daughter in the

fierce focus of a father's jealousy, but the goddess

enshrined in a good man's heart. Indeed the figure that the

limelight of the reverie fell upon was not V.V. at all but

Mr. Gunter Lake himself, in his favourite role of the perfect

lover.

An interminable speech unfolded itself. "I ask for nothing in

return. I've never worried you about that Caston business and

I never will. Married to me you shall be as free as if you

were unmarried. Don't I know, my dear girl, that you don't

love me yet. Let that be as you wish. I want nothing you are

not willing to give me, nothing at all. All I ask is the

privilege of making life happy--and it shall be happy--for

you. . . . All I ask. All I ask. Protect, guard,

cherish. . . ."

For to Mr. Gunter Lake it seemed there could be no lovelier

thing in life than a wife "in name only" slowly warmed into a

glow of passion by the steadfast devotion and the strength

and wisdom of a mate at first despised. Until at last a day

would come. . . .

"My darling!" Mr. Gunter Lake whispered to the darkness. "My

little guurl. IT HAS BEEN WORTH THE WAITING. . . ."

Section 6

Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old

George with a telegram in her hand. "My father reported his

latitude and longitude by wireless last night. The London

people think he will be off Falmouth in four days' time. He

wants me to join his liner there and go on to Cherbourg and

Paris. He's arranged that. He is the sort of man who can

arrange things like that. There'll be someone at Falmouth to

look after us and put us aboard the liner. I must wire them

where I can pick up a telegram to-morrow."

"Wells in Somerset," said Sir :Richmond.

His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he

wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town

that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury,

perched on a hill, a Saxon town, where Alfred had gathered

his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled

over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come

near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a little

sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views.

They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they

would go in the afternoon through the pleasant west country

where the Celts had prevailed against the old folk of the

Stonehenge temple and the Romans against the Celts and the

Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the Danes against

the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes and

entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace,

to Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh

village the Celts had made for themselves three or four

hundred years before the Romans came. And at Glastonbury also

there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey

that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to

Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and

sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the

story of Europe right up to Reformation times.

"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will

be like turning over the pages of the history of our family,

to and fro. There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in

it, but there will be something from almost every chapter

that comes after Stonehenge. Rome will be poorly represented,

but that may come the day after at Bath. And the next day too

I want to show you something of our old River Severn. We will

come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There

we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which

the tobacco comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set

sail thither--was it yesterday or the day before? You will

understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out

of this dreaming land--to Africa and America and the whole

wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with

their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour

problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester,

mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath

we'll get in somehow. And then as an Anglo-American showman I

shall be tempted to run you northward a little way past

Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here and there and show

you monuments bearing little shields with the stars and

stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the

Washington family monuments."

"It was not only from England that America came," said Miss

Grammont.

"But England takes an American memory back most easily and

most fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the

emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin

Europe. . . . For you and me anyhow this is our past, this

was our childhood, and this is our land." He interrupted

laughing as she was about to reply. "Well, anyhow," he said,

"it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with

the ripest history in every grain of its soil. So we'll send

a wire to your London people and tell them to send their

instructions to Wells."

"I'll tell Belinda," she said, "to be quick with her

packing."

Section 7

As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details

of his excellent programme and revised their impressions of

the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime

sunlight of Wiltshire and Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting

the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was

inevitable that their conversation should become, by

imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They

kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr.

Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their

Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed

the idiosyncrasies of their position. They might profess to

be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts

that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old Grammont

and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon

the Fuel Commission became more and more important. "What

shall we do with this planet of ours? " gave way by the

easiest transitions to "What are you and I doing and what

have we got to do? How do you feel about it all? What do you

desire and what do you dare?"

It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel

Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even

greater than his own. He found that she was very much better

read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and

that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp

of economic ideas. He thought her attitude towards socialism

a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as

socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of

natural resources as a common property administered in the

common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by

it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the

merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few,

under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class

jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she

had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a

class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public

impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since

departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every

class; there was no stratification of either rightness or

righteousness.

He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the

Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he

found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau

and with a surer confidence of understanding. Perhaps his

talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made

them more readily expressible than they would have been

otherwise. He argued against the belief that any class could

be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the

conflict of motives he found in all the members of his

Committee and most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion

he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that there was not

a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable

drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one

who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive towards the right

thing. "That," said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life so

interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic

disappointments, so hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every

man is a feeble man and every man is a good man. My motives

come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in response to the

circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most men

will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given

perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and

vile. People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps

that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly. The

other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with

Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.

Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a

great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken

brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly

the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back

their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became one

solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until

one understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had

changed but the sunshine. And given a change in laws and

prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy

traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will

all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working

together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end. They

aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any

inner necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in

the present drama. Which is nearly at the end of its run."

"That's a hopeful view," said Miss Grammont. "I don't see the

flaw in it--if there is a flaw."

"There isn't one, " said Sir Richmond. "It is my chief

discovery about life. I began with the question of fuel and

the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my

generalization applies to all human affairs. Human beings are

fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate idiots,--I grant you.

That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak. But they

are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty

well materially if once we hammer out a sane collective

method of getting and using fuel. Which people generally will

understand--in the place of our present methods of snatch and

wrangle. Of that I am absolutely convinced. Some work, some

help, some willingness you can get out of everybody. That's

the red. And the same principle applies to most labour and

property problems, to health, to education, to population,

social relationships and war and peace. We haven't got the

right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no

system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all

these respects. But there is a right system possible none the

less. Let us only hammer our way through to the sane and

reasonable organization in this and that and the other human

affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for

good. We may not live to see even the beginnings of success,

but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced

organized science, if only there are a few faithful,

persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run

certainly save mankind and make human life clean and

splendid, happy work in a clear mind. If I could live to see

it!"

"And as for us--in our time?"

"Measured by the end we serve, we don't matter. You know we

don't matter."

"We have to find our fun in the building and in our

confidence that we do really build."

"So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship,"

said Sir Richmond.

"So long as our confidence lasts," she repeated after him.

"Ah!" cried Sir Richmond. "There it is! So long as our

confidence lasts! So long as one keeps one's mind steady.

That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss. I

went to him for advice. I haven't known him for more than a

month. It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to you. It

was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of

work. My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing

evaporated. My will failed me. I don't know if you will

understand what that means. It wasn't that my reason didn't

assure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to

do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow that seemed

a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had

gone out of it. . . . "

He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.

"I don't know why I tell you these things," he said.

"You tell them me," she said.

"It's a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his

ailments."

"No. No. Go on."

"I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my

work went on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I

was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the

Committee, day afterday. It was being up against men who

didn't reason against me but who just showed by everything

they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn't matter to

them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs,

reading papers, going about a world in which all the

organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream

of is tacitly denied. I don't know if it seems an

extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady

refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-

operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very

near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men.

You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense. They, and

everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more

immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this

remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for

myself. . . ."

He paused.

"Go on," said Miss Grammont. "I think I understand this. "

"And yet I know I am right."

"I know you are right. I'm certain. Go on.

"If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society

had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the

others still kept them selves cloaked--if he was a normal

sensitive man--he might have felt something of a fool. He

might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red he was and

the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is

the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some

sense of history and some sense of a larger life within us

than our merely personal life. We don't want to go on with

the old story merely. We want to live somehow in that larger

life and to live for its greater ends and lose something

unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are

only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to

do and will presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau

talks about begins to come it may come very quickly--as the

red came at Prague. But for the present everyone hesitates

about throwing back the cloak."

"Until the cloak becomes unbearable," she said, repeating his

word.

"I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I

was ill. I thought I was overworked. But the real trouble was

a loneliness that robbed me of all driving force. Nobody

seemed thinking and feeling with me. . . . I have never

realized until now what a gregarious beast man is. It needed

only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas

and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I

talk to you--That is why I have clutched at your company.

Because here you are, coming from thousands of miles away,

and you talk my ideas, you fall into my ways of thought as

though we had gone to the same school."

"Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school," she said.

"You mean?"

"Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something

better in life than the first things it promised us."

"But you--? Disappointed? I thought that in America people

might be educating already on different lines--"

"Even in America," Miss Grammont said, "crops only grow on

the ploughed land."

Section 8

Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of

Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of King Arthur

and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells

and a pleasant inn, with a quaint little garden before its

front door that gave directly upon the cathedral. The three

tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner to the

sculptures on the western face. The great screen of wrought

stone rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a

clear blue sky in which the moon hung, round and already

bright. That western facade with its hundreds of little

figures tells the whole story of God and Man from Adam to the

Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it. It is an

even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that

goes round the chapter house at Salisbury. It presented the

universe, said Sir Richmond, as a complete crystal globe. It

explained everything in life in a simple and natural manner,

hope, heaven, devil and despair. Generations had lived and

died mentally within that crystal globe, convinced that it

was all and complete.

"And now," said Miss Grammont, "we are in limitless space and

time. The crystal globe is broken."

"And?" said Belinda amazingly--for she had been silent for

some time, "the goldfish are on the floor, V.V. Free to flop

about. Are they any happier?"

It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best

left alone. "I trow not," said Belinda, giving the last touch

to it.

After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the

cathedral and along by the moat of the bishop's palace, and

Miss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to

her friends, a duty she had neglected for some days. The

evening was warm and still and the moon was approaching its

full and very bright. Insensibly the soft afterglow passed

into moonlight.

At first the two companions talked very little. Sir Richmond

was well content with this tacit friendliness and Miss

Grammont was preoccupied because she was very strongly moved

to tell him things about herself that hitherto she had told

to no one. It was not merely that she wanted to tell him

these things but also that for reasons she did not put as yet

very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought

to know. She talked of herself at first in general terms.

"Life comes on anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting

for ever and then suddenly one tears into life," she said. It

was even more so for women than it was for men. You are shown

life, a crowded vast spectacle full of what seems to be

intensely interesting activities and endless delightful and

frightful and tragic possibilities, and you have hardly had

time to look at it before you are called upon to make

decisions. And there is something in your blood that urges

you to decisive acts. Your mind, your reason resists. "Give

me time," it says. "They clamour at you with treats, crowds,

shows, theatres, all sorts of things; lovers buzz at you,

each trying to fix you part of his life when you are trying

to get clear to live a little of your own." Her father had

had one merit at any rate. He had been jealous of her lovers

and very ready to interfere.

"I wanted a lover to love," she said. "Every girl of course

wants that. I wanted to be tremendously excited. . . . And at

the same time I dreaded the enormous interference. . . .

"I wasn't temperamentally a cold girl. Men interested and

excited me, but there were a lot of men about and they

clashed with each other. Perhaps way down in some out of the

way place I should have fallen in love quite easily with the

one man who came along. But no man fixed his image. After a

year or so I think I began to lose the power which is natural

to a young girl of falling very easily into love. I became

critical of the youths and men who were attracted to me and I

became analytical about myself. . . .

"I suppose it is because you and I are going to part so soon

that I can speak so freely to you. . . . But there are things

about myself that I have never had out even with myself. I

can talk to myself in you--"

She paused baffled. "I know exactly," said Sir Richmond.

"In my composition I perceive there have always been two

ruling strains. I was a spoilt child at home, a rather

reserved girl at school, keen on my dignity. I liked respect.

I didn't give myself away. I suppose one would call that

personal pride. Anyhow it was that streak made me value the

position of being a rich married woman in New York. That was

why I became engaged to Lake. He seemed to be as good a man

as there was about. He said he adored me and wanted me to

crown his life. He wasn't ill-looking or ill-mannered. The

second main streak in my nature wouldn't however fit in with

that."

She stopped short.

"The second streak, " said Sir Richmond.

"Oh!--Love of beauty, love of romance. I want to give things

their proper names; I don't want to pretend to you. . . . It

was more or less than that. . . . It was--imaginative

sensuousness. Why should I pretend it wasn't in me? I believe

that streak is in all women."

"I believe so too. In all properly constituted women."

"I tried to devote that streak to Lake," she said. "I did my

best for him. But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an

idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business

as a lover. And that side of me fell in love, the rest of me

protesting, with a man named Caston. It was a notorious

affair. Everybody in New York couples my name with Caston.

Except when my father is about. His jealousy has blasted an

area of silence--in that matter--all round him. He will not

know of that story. And they dare not tell him. I should pity

anyone who tried to tell it him."

"What sort of man was this Caston?"

Miss Grammont seemed to consider. She did not look at Sir

Richmond; she kept her profile to him.

"He was," she said deliberately, "a very rotten sort of man."

She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial. "I

believe I always knew he wasn't right. But he was very

handsome. And ten years younger than Lake. And nobody else

seemed to be all right, so I swallowed that. He was an

artist, a painter. Perhaps you know his work." Sir Richmond

shook his head. "He could make American business men look

like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and

he was beginning to be popular. He made love to me. In

exactly the way Lake didn't. If I shut my eyes to one or two

things, it was delightful. I liked it. But my father would

have stood a painter as my husband almost as cheerfully as he

would a man of colour. I made a fool of myself, as people

say, about Caston. Well--when the war came, he talked in a

way that irritated me. He talked like an East Side Annunzio,

about art and war. It made me furious to know it was all talk

and that he didn't mean business. . . . I made him go."

She paused for a moment. "He hated to go."

"Then I relented. Or I missed him and I wanted to be made

love to. Or I really wanted to go on my own account. I

forget. I forget my motives altogether now. That early war

time was a queer time for everyone. A kind of wildness got

into the blood. . . . I threw over Lake. All the time things

had been going on in New York I had still been engaged to

Lake. I went to France. I did good work. I did do good work.

And also things were possible that would have seemed

fantastic in America. You know something of the war-time

atmosphere. There was death everywhere and people snatched at

gratifications. Caston made 'To-morrow we die' his text. We

contrived three days in Paris together--not very cleverly.

All sorts of people know about it. . . . We went very far."

She stopped short. "Well?" said Sir Richmond.

"He did die. . . ."

Another long pause. "They told me Caston had been killed. But

someone hinted--or I guessed--that there was more in it than

an ordinary casualty.

"Nobody, I think, realizes that I know. This is the first

time I have ever confessed that I do know. He was--shot. He

was shot for cowardice."

"That might happen to any man," said Sir Richmond presently.

"No man is a hero all round the twenty-four hours. Perhaps he

was caught by circumstances, unprepared. He may have been

taken by surprise."

"It was the most calculated, cold-blooded cowardice

imaginable. He let three other men go on and get killed. . ."

"No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know

nothing about. It was vile, contemptible cowardice and

meanness. It fitted in with a score of ugly little things I

remembered. It explained them all. I know the evidence and

the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because

they were exactly in character. . . . And that, you see, was

my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to

whom I had given myself with both hands."

Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed

in the same even tones of careful statement. "I wasn't

disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly

sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a

life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself,

I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest realization

that what you and I have been calling the bright little

personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over

and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot.

And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and

nothing particular to do with them."

"That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.

"It didn't seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of

something or go to pieces. I couldn't turn to religion. I had

no religion. And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that. I

had a kind of revelation one night. 'Either I find out what

all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost

myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of something

bigger than myself. And becoming that. That's why I have been

making a sort of historical pilgrimage. . . . That's my

story, Sir Richmond. That's my education. . . . Somehow

though your troubles are different, it seems to me that my

little muddle makes me understand how it is with you. What

you've got, this idea of a scientific ordering of the world,

is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been

feeling my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold

of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a

still greater economic and educational control of which it is

a part. I want to make that idea a part of myself. Rather I

want to make myself a part of it. When you talk of it I

believe in it altogether."

"And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you."

Section 9

Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's

confidences. His dispute with Dr. Martineau was present in

his mind, so that he did not want to make love to her. But he

was extremely anxious to express his vivid sense of the value

of her friendship. And while he hesitated over this difficult

and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself, and

in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's

thoughts.

"Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself," she

said; "now that I have told you so much. I did a thing that

still puzzles me. I was filled with a sense of hopeless

disaster in France and I suppose I had some sort of desperate

idea of saving something out of the situation. . . . I

renewed my correspondence with Gunter Lake. He made the

suggestion I knew he would make, and I renewed our

engagement."

"To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?"

"Yes."

"But you don't love him?"

"That's always been plain to me. But what I didn't realize,

until I had given my promise over again, was that I dislike

him acutely."

"You hadn't realized that before?"

"I hadn't thought about him sufficiently. But now I had to

think about him a lot. The other affair had given me an idea

perhaps of what it means to be married to a man. And here I

am drifting back to him. The horrible thing about him is the

steady ENVELOPING way in which he has always come at me.

Without fellowship. Without any community of ideas. Ready to

make the most extraordinary bargains. So long as he can in

any way fix me and get me. What does it mean? What is there

behind those watching, soliciting eyes of his? I don't in the

least love him, and this desire and service and all the rest

of it he offers me--it's not love. It's not even such love as

Caston gave me. It's a game he plays with his imagination."

She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond's mind.

"This is illuminating," he said. "You dislike Lake acutely.

You always have disliked him."

"I suppose I have. But it's only now I admit it to myself."

"Yes. And you might, for example, have married him in New

York before the war."

"It came very near to that."

"And then probably you wouldn't have discovered you disliked

him. You wouldn't have admitted it to yourself."

"I suppose I shouldn't. I suppose I should have tried to

believe I loved him."

"Women do this sort of thing. Odd! I never realized it

before. And there are endless wives suppressing an acute

dislike. My wife does. I see now quite clearly that she

detests me. Reasonably enough. From her angle I'm entirely

detestable. But she won't admit it, won't know of it. She

never will. To the end of my life, always, she will keep that

detestation unconfessed. She puts a face on the matter. We

both do. And this affair of yours. . . . Have you thought how

unjust it is to Lake?"

"Not nearly so much as I might have done."

"It is unfair to him. Atrociously unfair. He's not my sort of

man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the

peculiar laws of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of

lover with an immense self-conceit at the back of his

crawlingness."

"He has," she endorsed.

"He backs himself to crawl--until he crawls triumphantly

right over you . . . . I don't like to think of the dream he

has . . . . I take it he will lose. Is it fair to go into

this game with him?"

"In the interests of Lake," she said, smiling softly at Sir

Richmond in the moonlight. "But you are perfectly right."

"And suppose he doesn't lose!"

Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.

"There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a

civilized woman may approach one another. Passionate desire

is not enough. What is called love is not enough. Pledges,

rational considerations, all these things are worthless. All

these things are compatible with hate. The primary essential

is friendship, clear understanding, absolute confidence. Then

within that condition, in that elect relationship, love is

permissible, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will--

all things are permissible. . . ."

Came a long pause between them.

"Dear old cathedral," said Miss Grammont, a little

irrelevantly. She had an air of having concluded something

that to Sir Richmond seemed scarcely to have begun. She stood

looking at the great dark facade edged with moonlight for

some moments, and then turned towards the hotel, which showed

a pink-lit window.

"I wonder," she said, "if Belinda is still up, And what she

will think when I tell her of the final extinction of Mr.

Lake. I think she rather looked forward to being the intimate

friend, secrets and everything, of Mrs. Gunter Lake."

Section 10

Sir Richmond woke up at dawn and he woke out of an

extraordinary dream. He was saying to Miss Grammont:

"There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds.

There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds."

He saw her as he had seen her the evening before, light and

cool, coming towards him in the moonlight from the hotel. But

also in the inconsistent way of dreams he was very close to

her kind, faintly smiling face, and his eyes were wet with

tears and he was kissing her hand. "My dear wife and mate,"

he was saying, and suddenly he was kissing her cool lips.

He woke up and stared at his dream, which faded out only very

slowly before the fresh sun rise upon the red tiles and tree

boughs outside the open window, and before the first stir and

clamour of the birds.

He felt like a court in which some overwhelmingly

revolutionary piece of evidence had been tendered. All the

elaborate defence had broken down at one blow. He sat up on

the edge of his bed, facing the new fact.

"This is monstrous and ridiculous," he said, "and Martineau

judged me exactly. I am in love with her. . . . I am head

over heels in love with her. I have never been so much in

love or so truly in love with anyone before."

Section 11

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

and Miss Grammont. Because each was now vividly aware of

being in love with the other and so neither was able to see

how things were with the other. They were afraid of each

other. A restraint had come upon them both, a restraint that

was greatly enhanced by their sense of Belinda, acutely

observant, ostentatiously tactful and self-effacing, and

prepared at the slightest encouragement to be overwhelmingly

romantic and sympathetic. Their talk waned, and was revived

to an artificial activity and waned again. The historical

interest had evaporated from the west of England and left

only an urgent and embarrassing present.

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

day was set in Severn landscapes. They first saw the great

river like a sea with the Welsh mountains hanging in the sky

behind as they came over the Mendip crest above Shipham. They

saw it again as they crossed the hill before Clifton Bridge,

and so they continued, climbing to hill crests for views at

Alveston and near Dursley, and so to Gloucester and the

lowest bridge and thence back down stream again through fat

meadow lands at first and much apple-blossom and then over

gentle hills through wide, pale Nownham and Lidney and

Alvington and Woolaston to old Chepstow and its brown castle,

always with the widening estuary to the left of them and its

foaming shoals and shining sand banks. From Chepstow they

turned back north along the steep Wye gorge to Tintern, and

there at the snug little Beaufort Arms with its prim lawn and

flower garden they ended the day's journey.

Tintern Abbey they thought a poor graceless mass of ruin down

beside the river, and it was fenced about jealously and

locked up from their invasion. After dinner Sir Richmond and

Miss Grammont went for a walk in the mingled twilight and

moonlight up the hill towards Chepstow. Both of them were

absurdly and nervously pressing to Belinda to come with them,

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

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

Perhaps she would change and come out a little later. "Yes,

come later," said Miss Grammont and led the way to the door.

They passed through the garden. "I think we go up the hill? "

said Sir Richmond.

"Yes," she agreed, "up the hill."

Followed a silence.

Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and

disconnected talk about Tintern Abbey, concerning, which she

had no history ready, and then, still lamer, about whether

Monmouthshire is in England or Wales, silence fell again. The

silence lengthened, assumed a significance, a dignity that no

common words might break.

Then Sir Richmond spoke. "I love, you, he said, "with all my

heart."

Her soft voice came back after a stillness. "I love you," she

said, "with all myself."

"I had long ceased to hope, " said Sir -Richmond, that I

should ever find a friend . . . a lover . . . perfect

companionship . . . . "

They went on walking side by side, without touching each

other or turning to each other.

"All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive

in me," she said. . . .

"Cool and sweet," said Sir Richmond. "Such happiness as I

could not have imagined."

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

and swept down upon them, lit their two still faces brightly

and passed.

"My dear," she whispered in the darkness between the high

hedges.

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

her face, dim and tender, looking up to his.

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

desired in his dream. . . .

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat

explanations of why she had not followed them, and enlarged

upon the moonlight effect of the Abbey ruins from the inn

lawn. But the scared congratulations in her eyes betrayed her

recognition that momentous things had happened between the

two.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

FULL MOON

Section 1

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of

having found such happiness as he could not have imagined.

But when he awoke in the night that happiness had evaporated.

He awoke suddenly out of this love dream that had lasted now

for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of astonishment

and dismay.

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

parted also from that process of self-exploration that they

had started together, but now he awakened to find it

established and in full activity in his mind. Something or

someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an

abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he

thought he was doing with Miss Grammont and whither he

thought he was taking her, how he proposed to reconcile the

close relationship with her that he was now embarked upon

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

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

Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn't come into the case at all.

He had done his utmost to keep Martin Leeds out of his head

throughout the development of this affair. Now in an unruly

and determined way that was extremely characteristic of her

she seemed resolute to break in.

She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client

but without any hostility, of the claims of Miss Grammont to

be let alone. The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had

maintained to himself that he had not made love to Miss

Grammont, that their mutual attraction had been irresistible

and had achieved its end in spite of their resolute and

complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind. He

admitted to himself that driven by a kind of instinctive

necessity he had led their conversation step by step to a

realization and declaration of love, and that it did not

exonerate him in the least that Miss Grammont had been quite

ready and willing to help him and meet him half way. She

wanted love as a woman does, more than a man does, and he had

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

love and loving.

"She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship,

and you have made her that tremendous promise. That was

implicit in your embrace. And how can you keep that promise?"

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

quality of her thought.

"You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be

interrupted or abandoned if you take her. Whatever is not

mortgaged to your work is mortgaged to me. For the strange

thing in all this is that you and I love one another--and

have no power to do otherwise. In spite of all this.

"You have nothing to give her but stolen goods," said the

shadow of Martin. "You have nothing to give anyone personally

any more. . . .

"Think of the love that she desires and think of this love

that you can give. . . .

"Is there any new thing in you that you can give her that you

haven't given me? You and I know each other very well;

perhaps I know YOU too well. Haven't you loved me as much as

you can love anyone? Think of all that there has been between

us that you are ready now, eager now to set aside and forget

as though it had never been. For four days you have kept me

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

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

ever be so intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled

together, wept together, jested happily and jested bitterly.

You have spared me not at all. Pitiless and cruel you have

been to me. You have reckoned up all my faults against me as

though they were sins. You have treated me at times

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

sometimes treated me. And yet I have your love--as no other

woman can ever have it. Even now when you are wildly in love

with this girl's freshness and boldness and cleverness I come

into your mind by right and necessity."

"She is different," argued Sir Richmond.

"But you are the same," said the shadow of Martin with

Martin's unsparing return. "Your love has never been a

steadfast thing. It comes and goes like the wind. You are an

extravagantly imperfect lover. But I have learnt to accept

you, as people accept the English weather. . . . Never in all

your life have you loved, wholly, fully, steadfastly--as

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

not your wife nor your children, nor me, nor our child, nor

any living thing. Pleasant to all of us at times--at times

bitterly disappointing. You do not even love this work of

yours steadfastly, this work to which you sacrifice us all in

turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have these

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

it is you are made. . . .

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

much simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it--as you

can do--and then fail it, as you will do. . . . "

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

"Should I fail her? . . ."

For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his

mind.

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and

unforeseeing his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had

been just a blind drive to get hold of her and possess

her. . . .

Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence

again.

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

perfect love, my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy,

its ruthless criticism? Has the world ever seen a perfect

lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection that brings us together

in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all, likely to get

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

mine? And isn't it good for her that she should love?"

"Perfect love cherishes. Perfect love foregoes."

Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the

immediate question. "Perfect love," the phrase was his point

of departure. Was it true that he could not love passionately

and completely? Was that fundamentally what was the matter

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

world of mankind? It had not yet come to that power of loving

which makes action full and simple and direct and

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

is still an eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent. He

lacks the courage to love and the wisdom to love. Love is

here. But it comes and goes, it is mixed with greeds and

jealousies and cowardice and cowardly reservations. One hears

it only in snatches and single notes. It is like something

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

altogether ran away with Sir Richmond's half dreaming mind.

Some day perhaps all life would go to music.

Love was music and power. If he had loved. enough he need

never have drifted away from his wife. Love would have

created love, would have tolerated and taught and inspired.

Where there is perfect love there is neither greed nor

impatience. He would have done his work calmly. He would have

won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and

quarrelling with it perpetually. . . .

"Flimsy creatures," he whispered. "Uncertain health.

Uncertain strength. A will that comes and goes. Moods of

baseness. Moods of utter beastliness. . . . Love like April

sunshine. April? . .."

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

summer sunshine, into a continuing music, of love. He thought

of a world like some great playhouse in which players and

orchestra and audience all co-operate in a noble production

without dissent or conflict. He thought he was the savage of

thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great world that is

still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead. His effort to see

more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy

pinnacles and to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his

dream and left him awake again and wrestling with the problem

of Miss Grammont.

Section 2

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

release Miss Grammont from the adventure into which he had

drawn her. This decision stood out stern-and inevitable in

his mind with no conceivable alternative.

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

difficulty. He was profoundly in love with her, he was still

only learning how deeply, and she was not going to play a

merely passive part in this affair. She was perhaps as deeply

in love with him. . . .

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and

disavowals. He could not bear to think of her

disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to

disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To

turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in

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

It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making

a grimace at her. . . . It would scar her with a second

humiliation. . . ."

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

contrive by some sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to

go from her suddenly? But a mere sudden parting would not end

things between them now unless he went off abruptly without

explanations or any arrangements for further communications.

At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit but

evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her

father at Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that

Sir Richmond realized that now it could not end in that

fashion, that with the whisper of love and the touching of

lips, something had been started that would go on, that would

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

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

perhaps even more humiliated with an aching mystery to

distress her. "Why did he go? Was it something I said?--

something he found out or imagined? "

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this

problem. She and he had got into each other's lives to stay:

the real problem was the terms upon which they were to stay

in each other's lives. Close association had brought them to

the point of being, in the completest sense, lovers; that

could not be; and the real problem was the transmutation of

their relationship to some form compatible with his honour

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

floated into Sir Richmond's head. "Sublimate," he whispered.

"We have to sublimate this affair. We have to put this

relationship upon a Higher Plane.

His mind stopped short at that.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart.

"God! How I loathe the Higher Plane! . . . .

"God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some

poor little kid who has to wear irons on its legs.

"I WANT her. . . . Do you hear, Martin? I want her. "

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

Miss Grammont--Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out--

traversing Europe and Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit

beach in the South Seas. . . .

His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and

fantastic interruptions had not occurred.

"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane--and

keep it there. We two love one another--that has to be

admitted now. (I ought never to have touched her. I ought

never to have thought of touching her.) But we two are too

high, our aims and work and obligations are too high for any

ordinary love making. That sort of thing would embarrass us,

would spoil everything.

"Spoil everything," he repeated, rather like a small boy who

learns an unpalatable lesson.

For a time Sir Richmond, exhausted by moral effort, lay

staring at the darkness.

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

if I can carry myself. She's a finer thing than I am. . . .

On the whole I am glad it's only one more day. Belinda will

be about. . . . Afterwards we can write to each other. . . .

If we can get over the next day it will be all right. Then we

can write about fuel and politics--and there won't be her

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

First class idea-- sublimate! . . . . And I will go back to

dear old Martin who's all alone there and miserable; I'll be

kind to her and play my part and tell her her Carbuncle scar

rather becomes her. . . . And in a little while I shall be

altogether in love with her again.

"Queer what a brute I've always been to Martin."

"Queer that Martin can come in a dream to me and take the

upper hand with me.

"Queer that NOW--I love Martin."

He thought still more profoundly. "By the time the Committee

meets again I shall have been tremendously refreshed."

He repeated:--"Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them

there. Then go back to Martin. And so to the work. That's

it. . . ."

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

Richmond fell asleep during the fourth recapitulation of this

programme.

Section 3

When Miss Grammont appeared at breakfast Sir Richmond saw at

once that she too had had a restless night. When she came

into the little long breakfast room of the inn with its brown

screens and its neat white tables it seemed to him that the

Miss Grammont of his nocturnal speculations, the beautiful

young lady who had to be protected and managed and loved

unselfishly, vanished like some exorcised intruder. Instead

was this real dear young woman, who had been completely

forgotten during the reign of her simulacrum and who now

returned completely remembered, familiar, friendly, intimate.

She touched his hand for a moment, she met his eyes with the

shadow of a smile in her own.

"Oranges!" said Belinda from the table by the window.

"Beautiful oranges."

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

the fashion in which grape fruits are prepared upon liners

and in the civilized world of the west. "He's getting us tea

spoons," said Belinda, as they sat down.

"This is realler England than ever," she said. "I've been up

an hour. I found a little path down to the river bank. It's

the greenest morning world and full of wild flowers. Look at

these."

"That's lady's smock," said Sir Richmond. "It's not really a

flower; it's a quotation from Shakespeare."

"And there are cowslips!"

"CUCKOO BUDS OF YELLOW HUE. DO PAINT THE MEADOWS WITH

DELIGHT. All the English flowers come out of Shakespeare. I

don't know what we did before his time."

The waiter arrived with the tea spoons for the oranges.

Belinda, having distributed these, resumed her discourse of

enthusiasm for England. She asked a score of questions about

Gloucester and Chepstow, the Severn and the Romans and the

Welsh, and did not wait for the answers. She did not want

answers; she talked to keep things going. Her talk masked a

certain constraint that came upon her companions after the

first morning's greetings were over.

Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin

maps. "To-day," he said," we will run back to Bath--from

which it will be easy for you to train to Falmouth. We will

go by Monmouth and then turn back through the Forest of Dean,

where you will get glimpses of primitive coal mines still

worked by two men and a boy with a windlass and a pail.

Perhaps we will go through Cirencester. I don't know. Perhaps

it is better to go straight to Bath. In the very heart of

Bath you will find yourselves in just the same world you

visited at Pompeii. Bath is Pompeii overlaid by Jane Austen's

England."

He paused for a moment. "We can wire to your agents from here

before we start and we can pick up their reply at Gloucester

or Nailsworth or even Bath itself. So that if your father is

nearer than we suppose--But I think to-morrow afternoon will

be soon enough for Falmouth, anyhow."

He stopped interrogatively.

Miss Grammont's face was white. "That will do very well," she

said.

Section 4,

They started, but presently they came to high banks that

showed such masses of bluebells, ragged Robin, great

stitchwort and the like that Belinda was not to be

restrained. She clamoured to stop the car and go up the bank

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

and Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont sat down near the car

while Belinda carried her enthusiastic onslaught on the

flowers up the steep bank and presently out of earshot.

The two lovers said unheeded things about the flowers to each

other and then fell silent. Then Miss Grammont turned her

head and seemed deliberately to measure her companion's

distance. Evidently she judged her out of earshot.

"Well, said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. "We love

one another. Is that so still?"

"I could not love you more."

"It wasn't a dream?"

"No."

"And to-morrow we part?"

He looked her in the eyes. "I have been thinking of that all

night," he said at last.

"I too."

"And you think--?"

"That we must part. Just as we arranged it when was it? Three

days or three ages ago? There is nothing else in the world to

do except for us to go our ways. . . . I love you. That means

for a woman--It means that I want to be with you. But that is

impossible. . . . Don't doubt whether I love you because I

say--impossible. . . . "

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

moved to oppose it flatly. "Nothing that one can do is

impossible."

She glanced again at Belinda and bent down towards him."

Suppose," she said, "you got back into that car with me;

suppose that instead of going on as we have planned, you took

me away. How much of us would go?"

"You would go," said Sir Richmond, "and my heart."

"And this work of yours? And your honour? For the honour of a

man in this New Age of yours will be first of all in the work

he does for the world. And you will leave your work to be

just a lover. And the work that I might do because of my

father's wealth; all that would vanish too. We should leave

all of that, all of our usefulness, all that much of

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

of vision, just the sense that you mattered. What has made

you love me? Just that I have understood the dream of your

work. All that we should have to leave behind. We should

specialize, in our own scandal. We should run away just for

one thing. To think, by sharing the oldest, simplest, dearest

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

really we had lost each other, lost all that mattered. . . ."

Her face was flushed with the earnestness of her conviction.

Her eyes were bright with tears. "Don't think I don't love

you. It's so hard to say all this. Somehow it seems like

going back on something--something supreme. Our instincts

have got us. . . . Don't think I'd hold myself from you,

dear. I'd give myself to you with both hands. I love you--

When a woman loves--I at any rate--she loves altogether. But

this thing--I am convinced--cannot be. I must go my own way,

the way I have to go. My father is the man, obstinate, more

than half a savage. For me--I know it--he has the jealousy of

ten husbands. If you take me--If our secret becomes

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

and your life will become wholly this Feud, nothing but this

Feud. You have to fight him anyhow--that is why I of all

people must keep out of the quarrel. For him, it would be an

immense excitement, full of the possibility of fierce

satisfactions; for you, whether you won me or lost me, it

would be utter waste and ruin."

She paused and then went on:--"And for me too, waste and

ruin. I shall be a woman fought over. I shall be fought over

as dogs fight over a bone. I shall sink back to the level of

Helen of Troy. I shall cease to be a free citizen, a

responsible free person. Whether you win me or lose me it

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

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

dreaming about will go the same way. We shall just be another

romantic story. . . . No!"

Sir Richmond sat still, a little like a sullen child, she

thought. "I hate all this," he said slowly. "I didn't think

of your father before, and now I think of him it sets me

bristling for a fight. It makes all this harder to give up.

And yet, do you know, in the night I was thinking, I was

coming to conclusions, very like yours. For quite other

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

anyhow and hear of each other?"

"That goes without saying."

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

Would affect you, touch you too closely. . . . I was sorry--I

had kissed you."

"Not I. No. Don't be sorry for that. I am glad we have fallen

in love, more glad than I have been of anything else in my

life, and glad we have spoken plainly. . . . Though we have

to part. And--"

Her whisper came close to him. "For a whole day yet, all

round the clock twice, you and I have one another."

Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within

earshot.

"I don't know the name of a single one of these flowers" she

cried, "except the bluebells. Look at this great handful I've

gotten! Springtime in Italy doesn't compare with it, not for

a moment."

Section 5

Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with

her alert interest in their emotions all too thinly and

obviously veiled, it seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond

and Miss Grammont to talk not of themselves but of Man and

Woman and of that New Age according to the prophet Martineau,

which Sir Richmond had partly described and mainly invented

and ascribed to his departed friend. They talked

anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an

absurd pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the

little car, scarcely glancing at one another, but side by

side and touching each other, and all the while they were

filled with tenderness and love and hunger for one another.

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

phase in the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and

brutish past which has left its traces in human bones mingled

with the bones of hyaenas and cave bears beneath the

stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those nearly

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

than an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile

imaginations. That brief journey in the west country had lit

up phase after phase in the long teaching and discipline of

man as he had developed depth of memory and fixity of purpose

out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming childhood

of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient

wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now,

and how, as they had followed one another, man's idea of

woman and woman's idea of man had changed with them, until

nowadays in the minds of civilized men brute desire and

possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost

completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free

mutual loyalty. "Overlaid," he said. "The older passions are

still there like the fires in an engine." He invented a

saying for Dr. Martineau that the Man in us to-day was still

the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his will, his wrath

against the universe increased rather than diminished. If to-

day he ceases to crack his brother's bones and rape and bully

his womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater

game and means to crack this world and feed upon its marrow

and wrench their secrets from the stars.

And furthermore it would seem that the prophet Martineau had

declared that in this New Age that was presently to dawn for

mankind, jealousy was to be disciplined even as we had

disciplined lust and anger; instead of ruling our law it was

to be ruled by law and custom. No longer were the jealousy of

strange peoples, the jealousy of ownership and the jealousy

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

be one peace and law throughout the world, one economic

scheme and a universal freedom for men and women to possess

and give themselves.

"And how many generations yet must there be before we reach

that Utopia?" Miss Grammont asked.

"I wouldn't put it at a very great distance."

"But think of all the confusions of the world!"

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

religions and theories and stupidities. There are great lumps

of disorderly strength in it, but as a whole it is a weak

world. It goes on by habit. There's no great idea in

possession and the only possible great idea is this one. The

New Age may be nearer than we dare to suppose."

"If I could believe that!"

"There are many more people think as we do than you suppose.

Are you and I such very strange and wonderful and exceptional

people?"

"No. I don't think so."

"And yet the New World is already completely established in

our hearts. What has been done in our minds can be done in

most minds. In a little while the muddled angry mind of Man

upon his Planet will grow clear and it will be this idea that

will have made it clear. And then life will be very different

for everyone. That tyranny of disorder which oppresses every

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

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

better instructed and a better behaved world. We shall live

at our ease, not perpetually anxious, not resentful and

angry. And that will alter all the rules of love. Then we

shall think more of the loveliness of other people because it

will no longer be necessary to think so much of the dangers

and weaknesses and pitifulliesses of other people. We shall

not have to think of those who depend upon us for happiness

and selfrespect. We shall not have to choose between a

wasteful fight for a personal end or the surrender of our

heart's desire."

"Heart's desire," she whispered. "Am I indeed your heart's

desire?"

Sir Richmond sank his head and voice in response.

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

Sir Richmond suddenly remembered Miss Seyffert and half

turned his face towards her. Her forehead was just visible

over the hood of the open coupe. She appeared to be

intelligently intent upon the scenery. Then he broke out

suddenly into a tirade against the world. "But I am bored by

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

am bitterly resentful to-day. This is a world of fools and

brutes in which we live, a world of idiotic traditions,

imbecile limitations, cowardice, habit, greed and mean

cruelty. It is a slum of a world, a congested district, an

insanitary jumble of souls and bodies. Every good thing,

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

life of a slum missionary, a sanitary inspector, an underpaid

teacher. I am bored. Oh God! how I am bored! I am bored by

our laws and customs. I am bored by our rotten empire and its

empty monarchy. I am bored by its parades and its flags and

its sham enthusiasms. I am bored by London and its life, by

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

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

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

claims of people and the feelings of people. Damn people! I

am bored by profiteers and by the snatching they call

business enterprise. Damn every business man! I am bored by

politics and the universal mismanagement of everything. I am

bored by France, by AngloSaxondom, by German self-pity, by

Bolshevik fanaticism. I am bored by these fools' squabbles

that devastate the world. I am bored by Ireland, Orange and

Green. Curse the Irish--north and south together! Lord! how I

HATE the Irish from Carson to the last Sinn Feiner! And I am

bored by India and by Egypt. I am bored by Poland and by

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

Damn their rights! Curse their rights! I am bored to death by

this year and by last year and by the prospect of next year.

I am bored--I am horribly bored--by my work. I am bored by

every sort of renunciation. I want to live with the woman I

love and I want to work within the limits of my capacity.

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

Good! No skid."

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

and had stopped his spark and pulled up neatly within a yard

of the fore-wheel of a waggon that was turning in the road so

as to block the way completely.

"That almost had me. . . .

"And now you feel better?" said Miss Grammont.

"Ever so much," said Sir Richmond and chuckled.

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

For a minute or so neither spoke.

"You ought to be smacked hard for that outbreak,--my dear,"

said Miss Grammont.

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

are among the supremely fortunate ones of our time. We have

no excuse for misbehaviour. Got nothing to grumble at. Always

I am lucky. THAT--with the waggon--was a very near thing. God

spoils us.

"We two," he went on, after a pause, "are among the most

fortunate people alive. We are both rich and easily rich.

That gives us freedoms few people have. We have a vision of

the whole world in which we live. It's in a mess--but that is

by the way. The mass of mankind never gets enough education

to have even a glimpse of the world as a whole. They never

get a chance to get the hang of it. It is really possible for

us to do things that will matter in the world. All our time

is our own; all our abilities we are free to use. Most

people, most intelligent and educated people, are caught in

cages of pecuniary necessity; they are tied to tasks they

can't leave, they are driven and compelled and limited by

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

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

world, but anyhow we are free to do our best to alter it. If

I were a clerk in Hoxton and you were a city typist, then we

MIGHT swear. "

"It was you who swore," smiled Miss Grammont.

"It's the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city

typist who really keep me at my work. Any smacking ought to

come from them. I couldn't do less than I do in the face of

their helplessness. Nevertheless a day will come--through

what we do and what we refrain from doing when there will be

no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and no captive typists

in the city. And nobody at all to consider."

"According to the prophet Martineau," said Miss Grammont.

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

"Heighho!" cried Miss Grammont. "A thousand years ahead! When

fathers are civilized. When all these phanton people who

intervene on your side--no! I don't want to know anything

about them, but I know of them by instinct--when they also

don't matter."

"Then you and I can have things out with each other--

THOROUGHLY," said Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in

his voice, charging the little hill before him as though he

charged at Time.

Section 6

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

Grammont's agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in

the afternoon. They came into the town through unattractive

and unworthy outskirts, and only realized the charm of the

place after they had garaged their car at the Pulteney Hotel

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

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

hung with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an

astonishing extent; some former proprietor must have had a

mania for replicas and the place is eventful with white

marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and Queen

Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of

Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the

Royal Academy, amidst which splendours a competent staff

administers modern comforts with an old-fashioned civility.

But round and about the Pulteney one has still the scenery of

Georgian England, the white, faintly classical terraces and

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

Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops

full of "presents from Bath"; the Pump Room with its water

drinkers and a fine array of the original Bath chairs.

Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories

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

and the Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath

to Baalbek. And they considered a little doubtfully the

seventeenth century statue of Bladud, who is said to have

been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded the city

in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred

years before the Romans came.

In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and

Miss Grammont and was very enthusiastic about everything, but

in the evening after dinner it was clear that her role was to

remain in the hotel. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out

into the moonlit gloaming; they crossed the bridge again and

followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey

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

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

lights about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down

below dancing on the grass. These little lights, these

bobbing black heads and the lilting music, this little

inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy illumination,

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

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

could be very beautiful. They went to the parapet above the

river and stood there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and

smoking cigarettes. Miss Grammont was moved to declare the

Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch, its effect of height

over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses above,

more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. Down below

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

the foaming weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against

the rush of the water lower down the stream.

"Dear England!" said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious

spectacle. "How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly

things!"

"It is the home we come from."

"You belong to it still."

"No more than you do. I belong to a big overworking modern

place called London which stretches its tentacles all over

the world. I am as much a home-coming tourist as you are.

Most of this western country I am seeing for the first time."

She said nothing for a space. "I've not a word to say to-

night," she said. "I'm just full of a sort of animal

satisfaction in being close to you. . . . And in being with

you among lovely things. . . . Somewhere--Before we part to-

night--. . . . "

"Yes?" he said to her pause, and his face came very near to

hers.

I want you to kiss me. "

"Yes," he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely

aware of the promenaders passing close to them.

"It's a promise?"

"Yes."

Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and

gripped it and pressed it. "My dear!" he whispered, tritest

and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man

and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the

shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the

darkling populous about them with their silent interchanges.

"There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,"

she said. "After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to

think of them. But now--every rational thing seems dissolved

in this moonlight. . . ."

Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual

dignity of their relationship.

"I suppose I ought to be more concerned tonight about the

work I have to do in the world and anxious for you to tell me

this and that, but indeed I am not concerned at all about it.

I seem to have it in outline all perfectly clear. I mean to

play a man's part in the world just as my father wants me to

do. I mean to win his confidence and work with him--like a

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

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

and learn how to be the servant of the world. . . . We two

have to live like trusted servants who have been made

guardians of a helpless minor. We have to put things in order

and keep them in order against the time when Man--Man whom we

call in America the Common Man--can take hold of his world--"

"And release his servants," said Sir Richmond.

"All that is perfectly clear in my mind. That is what I am

going to live for; that is what I have to do."

She stopped abruptly. "All that is about as interesting to-

night--in comparison with the touch of your dear fingers--as

next month's railway time-table."

But later she found a topic that could hold their attention

for a time.

"We have never said a word about religion," she said.

Sir Richmond paused for a moment. "I am a godless man," he

said. "The stars and space and time overwhelm my imagination.

I cannot imagine anything above or beyond them."

She thought that over. "But there are divine things," she

said.

"YOU are divine. . . . I'm not talking lovers' nonsense," he

hastened to add. "I mean that there is something about human

beings--not just the everyday stuff of them, but something

that appears intermittently--as though a light shone through

something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it

is a divinity revealed to me by other people-- And even by

myself in my own heart.

"I'm never surprised at the badness of human beings," said

Sir Richmond; "seeing how they have come about and what they

are; but I have been surprised time after time by fine

things . . . . Often in people I disliked or thought little

of . . . . I can understand that I find you full of divine

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

Necessarily I keep on discovering loveliness in you. But I

have seen divine things in dear old Martineau, for example. A

vain man, fussy, timid--and yet filled with a passion for

truth, ready to make great sacrifices and to toil

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

my Committee, it is astonishing at times to discover what

streaks of goodness even the really bad men can show. . . .

But one can't make use of just anyone's divinity. I can see

the divinity in Martineau but it leaves me cold. He tired me

and bored me. . . . But I live on you. It's only through love

that the God can reach over from one human being to another.

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

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

drink and turn them into imagination, invention and creative

energy; it is still more wonderful that we should take an

animal urging and turn it into a light to discover beauty and

an impulse towards the utmost achievements of which we are

capable. All love is a sacrament and all lovers are priests

to each other. You and I--"

Sir Richmond broke off abruptly. "I spent three days trying

to tell this to Dr. Martineau. But he wasn't the priest I had

to confess to and the words wouldn't come. I can confess it

to you readily enough . . . ."

"I cannot tell," said Miss Grammont, "whether this is the

last wisdom in life or moonshine. I cannot tell whether I am

thinking or feeling; but the noise of the water going over

the weir below is like the stir in my heart. And I am

swimming in love and happiness. Am I awake or am I dreaming

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

hard and tight. I'm trembling with love for you and all the

world. . . . If I say more I shall be weeping."

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

one another.

Presently the band down below and the dancing ceased and the

little lights were extinguished. The silent moon seemed to

grow brighter and larger and the whisper of the waters

louder. A crowd of young people flowed out of the gardens and

passed by on their way home. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont

strolled through the dispersing crowd and over the Toll

Bridge and went exploring down a little staircase that went

down from the end of the bridge to the dark river, and then

came back to their old position at the parapet looking upon

the weir and the Pulteney Bridge. The gardens that had been

so gay were already dark and silent as they returned, and the

streets echoed emptily to the few people who were still

abroad.

"It's the most beautiful bridge in the world," said Miss

Grammont, and gave him her hand again.

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

The silence healed again.

"Well?" said Sir Richmond.

"Well?" said Miss Grammont smiling very faintly.

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

lights of the hotel and the watchful eyes of your dragon. "

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

"She is a miracle of tact."

"She does not really watch. But she is curious--and very

sympathetic. "

"She is wonderful." . . . .

"That man is still fishing," said Miss Grammont.

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

foam below as though it was the only thing of interest in the

world. Then she turned to Sir Richmond.

"I would trust Belinda with my life, she said. "And anyhow-

now--we need not worry about Belinda."

Section 7

At the breakfast table it was Belinda who was the most

nervous of the three, the most moved, the most disposed to

throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her

companions had passed beyond the idea of separation; it was

as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the high

dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they

had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers;

they seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their

bearing. It would have pleased Belinda better, seeing how

soon they were to be torn apart, if they had not made quite

such excellent breakfasts. She even suspected them of having

slept well. Yet yesterday they had been deeply stirred. They

had stayed out late last night, so late that she had not

heard them come in. Perhaps then they had passed the climax

of their emotions. Sir Richmond, she learnt, was to take the

party to Exeter, where there would be a train for Falmouth a

little after two. If they started from Bath about nine that

would give them an ample margin of time in which to deal with

a puncture or any such misadventure.

They crested the Mendips above Shepton Mallet, ran through

Tilchester and Ilminster into the lovely hill country about

Up-Ottery and so to Honiton and the broad level road to

Exeter. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont were in a state of

happy gravity; they sat contentedly side by side, talking

very little. They had already made their arrangements for

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

letters or protestations. That might prove a mutual torment.

Their love was to be implicit. They were to write at

intervals about political matters and their common interests,

and to keep each other informed of their movements about the

world.

"We shall be working together," she said, speaking suddenly

out of a train of thought she had been following, "we shall

be closer together than many a couple who have never spent a

day apart for twenty years."

Then presently she said: "In the New Age all lovers will have

to be accustomed to meeting and parting. We women will not be

tied very much by domestic needs. Unless we see fit to have

children. We shall be going about our business like men; we

shall have world-wide businesses--many of us--just as men

will. . . .

"It will be a world full of lovers' meetings."

Some day--somewhere--we two will certainly meet again."

"Even you have to force circumstances a little," said Sir

Richmond.

"We shall meet, she said, "without doing that."

"But where?" he asked unanswered. . . .

"Meetings and partings," she said. "Women will be used to

seeing their lovers go away. Even to seeing them go away to

other women who have borne them children and who have a

closer claim on them."

"No one-" began Sir Richmond, startled.

"But I don't mind very much. It's how things are. If I were a

perfectly civilized woman I shouldn't mind at all. If men and

women are not to be tied to each other there must needs be

such things as this."

"But you," said Sir Richmond. I at any rate am not like that.

I cannot bear the thought that YOU--"

"You need not bear it, my dear. I was just trying to imagine

this world that is to be. Women I think are different from

men in their jealousy. Men are jealous of the other man;

women are jealous for their man--and careless about the other

woman. What I love in you I am sure about. My mind was empty

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

shall feel you moving about in the same world with me. I'm

not likely to think of anyone else for a very long

time. . . . Later on, who knows? I may marry. I make no vows.

But I think until I know certainly that you do not want me

any more it will be impossible for me to marry or to have a

lover. I don't know, but that is how I believe it will be

with me. And my mind feels beautifully clear now and settled.

I've got your idea and made it my own, your idea that we

matter scarcely at all, but that the work we do matters

supremely. I'll find my rope and tug it, never fear. Half way

round the world perhaps some day you will feel me tugging."

"I shall feel you're there," he said, "whether you tug or

not. . . ."

"Three miles left to Exeter," he reported presently.

She glanced back at Belinda.

"It is good that we have loved, my dear," she whispered. "Say

it is good."

"The best thing in all my life," he said, and lowered his

head and voice to say: "My dearest dear."

"Heart's desire--still--?"

"Heart's delight. . . . Priestess of life. . . . Divinity."

She smiled and nodded and suddenly Belinda, up above their

lowered heads, accidentally and irrelevantly, no doubt,

coughed.

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

all. Hardly had Sir Richmond secured a luncheon basket for

the two travellers before the train came into the station. He

parted from Miss Grammont with a hand clasp. Belinda was

flushed and distressed at the last but her friend was quiet

and still. "Au revoir," said Belinda without conviction when

Sir Richmond shook her hand.

Section 8.

Sir Richmond stood quite still on the platform as the train

ran out of the station. He did not move until it had

disappeared round the bend. Then he turned, lost in a brown

study, and walked very slowly towards the station exit.

"The most wonderful thing in my life," he thought. "And

already--it is unreal.

"She will go on to her father whom she knows ten thousand

times more thoroughly than she knows me; she will go on to

Paris, she will pick up all the threads of her old story, be

reminded of endless things in her life, but never except in

the most casual way of these days: they will be cut off from

everything else that will serve to keep them real; and as for

me--this connects with nothing else in my life at all. . . .

It is as disconnected as a dream. . . . Already it is hardly

more substantial than a dream. . . .

"We shall write letters. Do letters breathe faster or slower

as you read them?

"We may meet.

"Where are we likely to meet again? ... I never realized

before how improbable it is that we shall meet again. And if

we meet? . . .

"Never in all our lives shall we be really TOGETHER again.

It's over--With a completeness. . . .

"Like death."

He came opposite the bookstalls and stopped short and stared

with unseeing eyes at the display of popular literature. He

was wondering now whether after all he ought to have let her

go. He experienced something of the blank amazement of a

child who has burst its toy balloon. His golden globe of

satisfaction in an instant had gone. An irrational sense of

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

loved him truly and altogether could she have left him like

this? Neither of them surely had intended so complete a

separation. He wanted to go back and recall that train.

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

anger. Whatever happened that must not happen. He pulled

himself together. What was it he had to do now? He had not to

be angry, he had not even to be sorry. They had done the

right thing. Outside the station his car was waiting.

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

go somewhere. Of course! down into Cornwall to Martin's

cottage. He had to go down to her and be kind and comforting

about that carbuncle. To be kind? . . . If this thwarted

feeling broke out into anger he might be tempted to take it

out of Martin. That at any rate he must not do. He had always

for some inexplicable cause treated Martin badly. Nagged her

and blamed her and threatened her. That must stop now. No

shadow of this affair must lie on Martin. . . . And Martin

must never have a suspicion of any of this. . . .

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

of her as he had seen her many times, with the tears close,

fighting with her back to the wall, with all her wit and

vigour gone, because she loved him more steadfastly than he

did her. Whatever happened he must not take it out of Martin.

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

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

only he could go now and talk to Martin--and face all the

facts of life with her, even as he had done with that phantom

Martin in his dream. . . .

But things were not like that.

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

both needed replenishing, and so he would have to go up the

hill into Exeter town again. He got into his car and sat with

his fingers on the electric starter.

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

Committee met again, eight days for golden kindness. He would

distress Martin by no clumsy confession. He would just make

her happy as she loved to be made happy. . . . Nevertheless.

Nevertheless. . . .

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

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

go to Martin. . . . And then the work!

He laughed suddenly.

"I'll take it out of the damned Commission. I'll make old

Rumford Brown sit up."

He was astonished to find himself thinking of the affairs of

the Commission with a lively interest and no trace of

fatigue. He had had his change; he had taken his rest; he was

equal to his task again already. He started his engine and

steered his way past a van and a waiting cab.

"Fuel," he said.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY

Section 1

The Majority and Minority Reports of the Fuel Commission were

received on their first publication with much heat and

disputation, but there is already a fairly general agreement

that they are great and significant documents, broadly

conceived and historically important. They do lift the

questions of fuel supply and distribution high above the

level of parochial jealousies and above the petty and

destructive profiteering of private owners and traders, to a

view of a general human welfare. They form an important link

in a series of private and public documents that are slowly

opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods

conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may

yet arrest the drift of our western civilization towards

financial and commercial squalor and the social collapse that

must ensue inevitably on that. In view of the composition of

the Committee, the Majority Report is in itself an amazing

triumph of Sir Richmond's views; it is astonishing that he

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

there securely advanced while he carried on the adherents he

had altogether won, including, of course, the labour

representatives, to the further altitudes of the Minority

Report.

After the Summer recess the Majority Report was discussed and

adopted. Sir Richmond had shown signs of flagging energy in

June, but he had come back in September in a state of

exceptional vigour; for a time he completely dominated the

Committee by the passionate force of his convictions and the

illuminating scorn he brought to bear on the various

subterfuges and weakening amendments by which the meaner

interests sought to save themselves in whole or in part from

the common duty of sacrifice. But toward the end he fell ill.

He had worked to the pitch of exhaustion. He neglected a cold

that settled on his chest. He began to cough persistently and

betray an increasingly irritable temper. In the last fights

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

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

at table was marked with scattered lozenges and scraps of

paper torn to the minutest shreds. Such good manners as had

hitherto mitigated his behaviour on the Committee departed

from him, He carried his last points, gesticulating and

coughing and wheezing rather than speaking. But he had so

hammered his ideas into the Committee that they took the

effect of what he was trying to say.

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

passing of the Majority Report. The Minority Report, his own

especial creation, he never signed. It was completed by Wast

and Carmichael. . . .

After their parting at Salisbury station Dr. Martineau heard

very little of Sir Richmond for a time except through the

newspapers, which contained frequent allusions to the

Committee. Someone told him that Sir Richmond had been

staying at Ruan in Cornwall where Martin Leeds had a cottage,

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

his car from Cornwall to a conference with Sir Peter Davies

in Glamorganshire.

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

Lady Hardy at a luncheon party. He was seated next to her and

he found her a very pleasing and sympathetic person indeed.

She talked to him freely and simply of her husband and of the

journey the two men had taken together. Either she knew

nothing of the circumstances of their parting or if she did

she did not betray her knowledge. "That holiday did him a

world of good," she said. "He came back to his work like a

giant. I feel very grateful to you."

Dr. Martineau said it was a pleasure to have helped Sir

Richmond's work in any way. He believed in him thoroughly.

Sir Richmond was inspired by great modern creative ideas.

"Forgive me if I keep you talking about him," said Lady

Hardy. "I wish I could feel as sure that I had been of use to

him."

Dr. Martineau insisted. "I know very well that you are."

"I do what I can to help him carry his enormous burthen of

toil" she said. "I try to smooth his path. But he is a

strange silent creature at times. "

Her eyes scrutinized the doctor's face.

It was not the doctor's business to supplement Sir Richmond's

silences. Yet he wished to meet the requirements of this lady

if he could. "He is one of those men," he said, "who are

driven by forces they do not fully understand. A man of

genius."

"Yes," she said in an undertone of intimacy. Genius. . . . A

great irresponsible genius. . . . Difficult to help. . . . I

wish I could do more for him."

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

the doctor found the time had come to turn to his left-hand

neighbour.

Section 2

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

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

Sir Richmond was already seriously ill. But he was still

going about his business as though he was perfectly well. He

had not mistaken his man. Dr. Martineau received him as

though there had never been a shadow of offence between them.

He came straight to the point. "Martineau," he said, "I must

have those drugs I asked you for when first I came to you

now. I must be bolstered up. I can't last out unless I am.

I'm at the end of my energy. I come to you because you will

understand. The Commission can't go on now for more than

another three weeks. Whatever happens afterwards I must keep

going until then."

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

what he could to patch up his friend for his last struggles

with the opposition in the Committee. "Pro forma," he said,

stethoscope in hand, "I must order you to bed. You won't go.

But I order you. You must know that what you are doing is

risking your life. Your lungs are congested, the bronchial

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

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

any time this may pass into pneumonia. And there's not much

in you just now to stand up against pneumonia. . . ."

"I'll take all reasonable care."

"Is your wife at home!"

"She is in Wales with her people. But the household is well

trained. I can manage."

"Go in a closed car from door to door. Wrap up like a mummy.

I wish the Committee room wasn't down those abominable House

of Commons corridors. . . ."

They parted with an affectionate handshake.

Section 3

Death approved of Sir Richmond's determination to see the

Committee through. Our universal creditor gave this

particular debtor grace to the very last meeting. Then he

brushed a gust of chilly rain across the face of Sir Richmond

as he stood waiting for his car outside the strangers'

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

almost intolerably tired, but scarcely noted the changed

timbre of the wheezy notes in his throat. He rose later each

day and with ebbing vigour, jotted down notes and corrections

upon the proofs of the Minority Report. He found it

increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would correct

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

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

became painful and his breathing difficult. His head ached

and a sense of some great impending evil came upon him. His

skin was suddenly a detestable garment to wear. He took his

temperature with a little clinical thermometer he kept by him

and found it was a hundred and one. He telephoned hastily for

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

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

doctor arrived.

"Forgive my sending for you," he said. "Not your line. I

know. . . . My wife's G.P.--an exasperating sort of ass.

Can't stand him. No one else."

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

the doctor replaced by one from Lady Hardy's room. He had

twisted the bed-clothes into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was

on the floor.

Sir Richmond's bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep

seemed to have been an admitted necessity rather than a

principal purpose. On one hand it opened into a business-like

dressing and bath room, on the other into the day study. It

bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who had long

lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated

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

work near the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at

night, a silver biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely

intent industry of the small hours. There was a bookcase of

bluebooks, books of reference and suchlike material, and some

files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged photograph of

Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was littered

with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir

Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty

retreat to bed. And lying among the proofs, as though it had

been taken out and looked at quite recently was the

photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr. Martineau's mind hung

in doubt and then he knew it for the young American of

Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And

now it was not his business to know.

These various observations printed themselves on Dr.

Martineau's mind after his first cursory examination of his

patient and while he cast about for anything that would give

this large industrious apartment a little more of the

restfulness and comfort of a sick room. "I must get in a

night nurse at once," he said. "We must find a small table

somewhere to put near the bed.

"I am afraid you are very ill," he said, returning to the

bedside. "This is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will you

let me call in another man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to

consult?"

"I'm in your hands, said Sir Richmond. I want to pull

through."

"He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for

the case--and everything."

The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of

nurse hard on his heels. Sir Richmond submitted almost

silently to his expert handling and was sounded and looked to

and listened at.

"H'm," said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir

Richmond: "We've got to take care of you.

"There's a lot about this I don't like," said the second

doctor and drew Dr. Martineau by the arm towards the study.

For a moment or so Sir Richmond listened to the low murmur of

their voices, but he did not feel very deeply interested in

what they were saying. He began to think what a decent chap

Dr. Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his

professional training had made him, how completely he had

ignored the smothered incivilities of their parting at

Salisbury. All men ought to have some such training, Not a

bad idea to put every boy and girl through a year or so of

hospital service. . . . Sir Richmond must have dozed, for his

next perception was of Dr. Martineau standing over him and

saying "I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill

indeed. Much more so than I thought you were at first."

Sir Richmond's raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this

fact.

"I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for."

Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.

"Don't want her about," he said, and after a pause, "Don't

want anybody about."

"But if anything happens-?"

"Send then."

An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond's

face. He seemed to regard the matter as settled. He closed

his eyes.

For a time Dr. Martineau desisted. He went to the window and

turned to look again at the impassive figure on the bed. Did

Sir Richmond fully understand? He made a step towards his

patient and hesitated. Then he brought a chair and sat down

at the bedside.

Sir Richmond opened his eyes and regarded him with a slight

frown.

"A case of pneumonia," said the doctor, "after great exertion

and fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected turns."

Sir Richmond, cheek on pillow, seemed to assent.

"I think if you want to be sure that Lady Hardy sees you

again-- . . . If you don't want to take risks about

that--. . . One never knows in these cases. Probably there is

a night train."

Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning. But he

stuck to his point. His voice was faint but firm. "Couldn't

make up anything to say to her. Anything she'd like."

Dr. Martineau rested on that for a little while. Then he

said: "If there is anyone else?"

"Not possible," said Sir Richmond, with his eyes on the

ceiling.

"But to see?"

Sir Richmond turned his head to Dr. Martineau. His face

puckered like a peevish child's. "They'd want things said to

them...Things to remember...I CAN'T. I'm tired out."

"Don't trouble," whispered Dr. Martineau, suddenly

remorseful.

But Sir Richmond was also remorseful. "Give them my love," he

said. "Best love...Old Martin. Love."

Dr. Martineau was turning away when Sir Richmond spoke again

in a whisper. "Best love...Poor at the best. . . ."

He dozed for a time. Then he made a great effort. "I can't

see them, Martineau, until I've something to say. It's like

that. Perhaps I shall think of some kind things to say--after

a sleep. But if they came now...I'd say something wrong. Be

cross perhaps. Hurt someone. I've hurt so many. People

exaggerate...People exaggerate--importance these occasions."

"Yes, yes," whispered Dr. Martineau. "I quite understand."

Section 4

For a time Sir Richmond dozed. Then he stirred and muttered.

"Second rate. . . Poor at the best. . . Love. . . Work.

All. . ."

"It had been splendid work," said Dr. Martineau, and was not

sure that Sir Richmond heard.

"Those last few days. . . lost my grip. . . Always lose my

damned grip.

"Ragged them. . . . Put their backs up . . . .Silly....

"Never.... Never done anything--WELL ....

"It's done. Done. Well or ill....

"Done."

His voice sank to the faintest whisper. "Done for ever and

ever ... and ever . . . and ever."

Again he seemed to doze.

Dr. Martineau stood up softly. Something beyond reason told

him that this was certainly a dying man. He was reluctant to

go and he had an absurd desire that someone, someone for whom

Sir Richmond cared, should come and say good-bye to him, and

for Sir Richmond to say good-bye to someone. He hated this

lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had

sought intimacy so persistently and vainly. It was

extraordinary--he saw it now for the first time--he loved

this man. If it had been in his power, he would at that

moment have anointed him with kindness.

The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy

writing desk, littered like a recent battlefield. The

photograph of the American girl drew his eyes. What had

happened? Was there not perhaps some word for her? He turned

about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir

Richmond's eyes open and regarding him. In them he saw an

expression he had seen there once or twice before, a faint

but excessively irritating gleam of amusement.

"Oh!--WELL!" said Dr. Martineau and turned away. He went to

the window and stared out as his habit was.

Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor's back

until his eyes closed again.

It was their last exchange. Sir Richmond died that night in

the small hours, so quietly that for some time the night

nurse did not observe what had happened. She was indeed

roused to that realization by the ringing of the telephone

bell in the adjacent study.

Section 5

For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake

unable to sleep. He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond

lying on his uncomfortable little bed in his big bedroom and

by the curious effect of loneliness produced by the nocturnal

desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir Richmond of any

death-bed partings. He realized how much this man, who had

once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back

upon himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely

he had taken counsel with anyone in his later years. His mind

now dwelt apart. Even if people came about him he would still

be facing death alone.

And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might

slip out of a crowded assembly, unobserved. Even now he might

be going. The doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had

talked of the rage of life in a young baby, how we drove into

life in a sort of fury, how that rage impelled us to do this

and that, how we fought and struggled until the rage spent

itself and was gone. That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond

was now perhaps very near its end. Presently it would fade

and cease, and the stream that had made it and borne it would

know it no more.

Dr. Martineau's thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture

land of dreams. He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as

it were away from him along a narrow path, a path that

followed the crest of a ridge, between great darknesses,

enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and below. He was going

along this path without looking back, without a thought for

those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him on

his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him

walking, without haste or avidity, walking as a man might

along some great picture gallery with which he was perhaps

even over familiar. His hands would be in his pockets, his

indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him. And as he

strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him.

His figure became dim and dimmer.

Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide

the beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just

dissolve that figure into itself?

Was that indeed the end?

Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can

neither imagine nor disbelieve in immortality. Dimmer and

dimmer grew the figure but still it remained visible. As one

can continue to see a star at dawn until one turns away. Or

one blinks or nods and it is gone.

Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless

generations. Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so

clearly, faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic

peoples believed from Avebury to Polynesia? Not always have

we had to go alone and unprepared into uncharted darknesses.

For a time the dream artist used a palette of the doctor's

vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a new roll of

the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been

looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked

figure, crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific

monsters, ferrying a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the

scales of judgment before the very throne of Osiris and stood

waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed his conscience and

that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead, crouched ready

if the judgment went against him. The doctor's attention

concentrated upon the scales. A memory of Swedengorg's Heaven

and Hell mingled with the Egyptian fantasy. Now at last it

was possible to know something real about this man's soul,

now at last one could look into the Secret Places of his

Heart. Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis head, were

reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it

to the supreme judge.

Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams. His

anxiety to plead for his friend had brought him in. He too

had become a little painted figure and he was bearing a book

in his hand. He wanted to show that the laws of the new world

could not be the same as those of the old, and the book he

was bringing as evidence was his own Psychology of a New Age.

The clear thought of that book broke up his dream by

releasing a train of waking troubles. . . . You have been six

months on Chapter Ten; will it ever be ready for

Osiris? . . . will it ever be ready for print? . . .

Dream and waking thoughts were mingled like sky and cloud

upon a windy day in April. Suddenly he saw again that lonely

figure on the narrow way with darknesses above and darknesses

below and darknesses on every hand. But this time it was not

Sir Richmond. . . . Who was it? Surely it was Everyman.

Everyman had to travel at last along that selfsame road,

leaving love, leaving every task and every desire. But was it

Everyman? . . . A great fear and horror came upon the doctor.

That little figure was himself! And the book which was his

particular task in life was still undone. He himself stood in

his turn upon that lonely path with the engulfing darknesses

about him. . . .

He seemed to wrench himself awake.

He lay very still for some moments and then he sat up in bed.

An overwhelming conviction had arisen--in his mind that Sir

Richmond was dead. He felt he must know for certain. He

switched on his electric light, mutely interrogated his round

face reflected in the looking glass, got out of bed, shuffled

on his slippers and went along the passage to the telephone.

He hesitated for some seconds and then lifted the receiver.

It was his call which aroused the nurse to the fact of Sir

Richmond's death.

Section 6

Lady Hardy arrived home in response to Dr. Martineau's

telegram late on the following evening. He was with her next

morning, comforting and sympathetic. Her big blue eyes,

bright with tears, met his very wistfully; her little body

seemed very small and pathetic in its simple black dress. And

yet there was a sort of bravery about her. When he came into

the drawing-room she was in one of the window recesses

talking to a serious-looking woman of the dressmaker type.

She left her business at once to come to him. "Why did I not

know in time?" she cried.

"No one, dear lady, had any idea until late last night," he

said, taking both her hands in his for a long friendly

sympathetic pressure.

"I might have known that if it had been possible you would

have told me," she said.

"You know," she added, "I don't believe it yet. I don't

realize it. I go about these formalities--"

"I think I can understand that."

"He was always, you know, not quite here . . . . It is as if

he were a little more not quite here . . . . I can't believe

it is over. . . . "

She asked a number of questions and took the doctor's advice

upon various details of the arrangements. "My daughter Helen

comes home to-morrow afternoon," she explained. "She is in

Paris. But our son is far, far away in the Punjab. I have

sent him a telegram. . . . It is so kind of you to come in to

me."

Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy's

disposition to treat him as a friend of the family. He had

conceived a curious, half maternal affection for Sir Richmond

that had survived even the trying incident of the Salisbury

parting and revived very rapidly during the last few weeks.

This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy. Hers was a

type that had always appealed to him. He could understand so

well the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting

herself to gather together some preservative and reassuring

evidences of this man who had always been; as she put it,

"never quite here." It was as if she felt that now it was at

last possible to make a definite reality of him. He could be

fixed. And as he was fixed he would stay. Never more would he

be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance

wither the interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was

finding much comfort in this task of reconstruction. She had

gathered together in the drawingroom every presentable

portrait she had been able to find of him. He had never, she

said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil sketch

done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a

number of photographs, several of which--she wanted the

doctor's advice upon this point--she thought might be

enlarged; there was a statuette done by some woman artist who

had once beguiled him into a sitting. There was also a

painting she had had worked up from a photograph and some

notes. She flitted among these memorials, going from one to

the other, undecided which to make the standard portrait. "

That painting, I think, is most like," she said: "as he was

before the war. But the war and the Commission changed him,--

worried him and aged him. . . . I grudged him to that

Commission. He let it worry him frightfully."

"It meant very much to him," said Dr. Martineau.

"It meant too much to him. But of course his ideas were

splendid. You know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of

book done, explaining his ideas. He would never write. He

despised it--unreasonably. A real thing done, he said, was

better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he said, but

women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And

I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary

official biography. . . . I have thought of young Leighton,

the secretary of the Commission. He seems thoroughly

intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile

Richmond's views with those of the big business men on the

Committee. He might do. . . . Or perhaps I might be able to

persuade two or three people to write down their impressions

of him. A sort of memorial volume. . . . But he was shy of

friends. There was no man he talked to very intimately about

his ideas unless it was to you . . . I wish I had the

writer's gift, doctor."

Section 7

It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr.

Martineau by telephone. "Something rather disagreeable," she

said. "If you could spare the time. If you could come round.

"It is frightfully distressing," she said when he got round

to her, and for a time she could tell him nothing more. She

was having tea and she gave him some. She fussed about with

cream and cakes and biscuits. He noted a crumpled letter

thrust under the edge of the silver tray.

"He talked, I know, very intimately with you," she said,

coming to it at last. "He probably went into things with you

that he never talked about with anyone else. Usually he was

very reserved, Even with me there were things about which he

said nothing."

"We did," said Dr. Martineau with discretion, "deal a little

with his private life.

"There was someone--"

Dr. Martineau nodded and then, not to be too portentous, took

and bit a biscuit.

"Did he by any chance ever mention someone called Martin

Leeds?"

Dr. Martineau seemed to reflect. Then realizing that this was

a mistake, he said: "He told me the essential facts."

The poor lady breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm glad," she said

simply. She repeated, "Yes, I'm glad. It makes things easier

now."

Dr. Martineau looked his enquiry.

"She wants to come and see him."

"Here?"

"Here! And Helen here! And the servants noticing everything!

I've never met her. Never set eyes on her. For all I know she

may want to make a scene." There was infinite dismay in her

voice.

Dr. Martineau was grave. "You would rather not receive her?"

"I don't want to refuse her. I don't want even to seem

heartless. I understand, of course, she has a sort of claim.

" She sobbed her reluctant admission. "I know it. I

know. . . . There was much between them."

Dr. Martineau pressed the limp hand upon the little tea

table. "I understand, dear lady," he said. "I understand. Now

. . . suppose _I_ were to write to her and arrange--I do not

see that you need be put to the pain of meeting her. Suppose

I were to meet her here myself?

"If you COULD!"

The doctor was quite prepared to save the lady any further

distresses, no matter at what trouble to himself. "You are so

good to me," she said, letting the tears have their way with

her.

"I am silly to cry," she said, dabbing her eyes.

"We will get it over to-morrow," he reassured her. "You need

not think of it again."

He took over Martin's brief note to Lady Hardy and set to

work by telegram to arrange for her visit. She was in London

at her Chelsea flat and easily accessible. She was to come to

the house at mid-day on the morrow, and to ask not for Lady

Hardy but for him. He would stay by her while she was in the

house, and it would be quite easy for Lady Hardy to keep

herself and her daughter out of the way. They could, for

example, go out quietly to the dressmakers in the closed car,

for many little things about the mourning still remained to

be seen to.

Section 8

Miss Martin Leeds arrived punctually, but the doctor was well

ahead of his time and ready to receive her. She was ushered

into the drawing room where he awaited her. As she came

forward the doctor first perceived that she had a very sad

and handsome face, the face of a sensitive youth rather than

the face of a woman. She had fine grey eyes under very fine

brows; they were eyes that at other times might have laughed

very agreeably, but which were now full of an unrestrained

sadness. Her brown hair was very untidy and parted at the

side like a man's. Then he noted that she seemed to be very

untidily dressed as if she was that rare and, to him, very

offensive thing, a woman careless of her beauty. She was

short in proportion to her broad figure and her broad

forehead.

"You are Dr. Martineau?" she said. "He talked of you." As she

spoke her glance went from him to the pictures that stood

about the room. She walked up to the painting and stood in

front of it with her distressed gaze wandering about her.

"Horrible!" she said. "Absolutely horrible! . . . Did SHE do

this?"

Her question disconcerted the doctor very much. "You mean

Lady Hardy?" he asked. "She doesn't paint."

"No, no. I mean, did she get all these things together? "

"Naturally," said Dr. Martineau.

"None of them are a bit like him. They are like blows aimed

at his memory. Not one has his life in it. How could she do

it? Look at that idiot statuette! . . . He was

extraordinarily difficult to get. I have burnt every

photograph I had of him. For fear that this would happen;

that he would go stiff and formal--just as you have got him

here. I have been trying to sketch him almost all the time

since he died. But I can't get him back. He's gone."

She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if

she expected him to understand her, but because she had to

say these things which burthened her mind to someone. "I have

done hundreds of sketches. My room is littered with them.

When you turn them over he seems to be lurking among them.

But not one of them is like him."

She was trying to express something beyond her power. "It is

as if someone had suddenly turned out the light."

She followed the doctor upstairs. "This was his study," the

doctor explained.

"I know it. I came here once," she said.

They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay.

Dr. Martineau, struck by a sudden memory, glanced nervously

at the desk, but someone had made it quite tidy and the

portrait of Aliss Grammont had disappeared. Miss Leeds walked

straight across to the coffin and stood looking down on the

waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir Richmond's brows

and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than they had

ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane

smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she

sighed deeply.

She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as

though she talked at that silent presence in the coffin. "I

think he loved," she said. "Sometimes I think he loved me.

But it is hard to tell. He was kind. He could be intensely

kind and yet he didn't seem to care for you. He could be

intensely selfish and yet he certainly did not care for

himself. . . . Anyhow, I loved HIM. . . . There is nothing

left in me now to love anyone else--for ever. . . ."

She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man

with her head a little on one side. "Too kind," she said very

softly.

"There was a sort of dishonesty in his kindness. He would not

let you have the bitter truth. He would not say he did not

love you. . . .

"He was too kind to life ever to call it the foolish thing it

is. He took it seriously because it takes itself seriously.

He worked for it and killed himself with work for

it . . . . "

She turned to Dr. Martineau and her face was streaming with

tears. "And life, you know, isn't to be taken seriously. It

is a joke--a bad joke--made by some cruel little god who has

caught a neglected planet. . . . Like torturing a stray

cat. . . . But he took it seriously and he gave up his life

for it.

"There was much happiness he might have had. He was very

capable of happiness. But he never seemed happy. This work of

his came before it. He overworked and fretted our happiness

away. He sacrificed his happiness and mine."

She held out her hands towards the doctor. "What am I to do

now with the rest of my life? Who is there to laugh with me

now and jest?

"I don't complain of him. I don't blame him. He did his

best--to be kind.

"But all my days now I shall mourn for him and long for

him. . . . "

She turned back to the coffin. Suddenly she lost every

vestige of self-control. She sank down on her knees beside

the trestle. "Why have you left me!" she cried.

"Oh! Speak to me, my darling! Speak to me, I TELL YOU! Speak

to me!"

It was a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful.

She beat her hands upon the coffin. She wept loudly and

fiercely as a child does....

Dr. Martineau drifted feebly to the window.

He wished he had locked the door. The servants might hear and

wonder what it was all about. Always he had feared love for

the cruel thing it was, but now it seemed to him for the

first time that he realized its monstrous cruelty.

THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg etext of The Secret Places of the Heart by H.

G. Wells