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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;