The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Secret Places of the Heart

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: February 21, 2006 [EBook #1734]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART ***




Produced by Dianne Bean and David Widger





THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART


By H. G. Wells


1922



CONTENTS

     Chapter

     1. THE CONSULTATION

     2. LADY HARDY

     3. THE DEPARTURE

     4. AT MAIDENHEAD

     5. IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES

     6. THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

     7. COMPANIONSHIP

     8. FULL MOON

     9. THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY




THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART




CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE CONSULTATION

Section 1

The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was accustomed
to let in visitors who had this air of being annoyed and finding one
umbrella too numerous for them. It mattered nothing to her that the
gentleman was asking for Dr. Martineau as if he was asking for something
with an unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of his
umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive mahogany stand.
"What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the door of the consulting
room.

"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly with its
distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond Hardy."

The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in undivided
possession of the large indifferent apartment in which the nervous and
mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to
the distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase
containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical works, some
paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and
a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced
rather than mitigated the promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted
to the midmost of the three windows and stared out despondently at
Harley Street.

For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty jacket on
its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.

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

"Rush out of the place?...

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

He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended not to
hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can do for me," he
said.

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

There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the figure that
confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height wanted at least three
inches of Sir Richmond's five feet eleven; he was humanly plump, his
face was round and pink and cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of
the full moon, of what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air
and exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short or he
had braced them too high so that he seemed to have grown out of them
quite recently. Sir Richmond had been dreading an encounter with some
dominating and mesmeric personality; this amiable presence dispelled his
preconceived resistances.

Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been running
upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets, seemed intent only on
disavowals. "People come here and talk. It does them good, and sometimes
I am able to offer a suggestion.

"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded the idea.

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

"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork. Overwork never
hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can work--good straightforward
work, without internal resistance, until he drops,--and never hurt
himself. You must be working against friction."

"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to death....
And it's so DAMNED important I SHOULDN'T break down. It's VITALLY
important."

He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering gesture
of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags. I explode at any
little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily for ten minutes and I can't
leave off working."

"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond Hardy? In the
papers. What is it?"

"Fuel."

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly can't afford
to have you ill."

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

"Your technical knowledge--"

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the national
fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's what I'm up
against. You don't know the job I have to do. You don't know what a
Commission of that sort is. The moral tangle of it. You don't know how
its possibilities and limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long
before a single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole thing
with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as daylight. I
might have seen it at first.... Three experts who'd been got at; they
thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted
them to do provided you called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the
socialist art critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers,
oil profiteers, financial adventurers...."

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the days before
the war it was different. Then there was abundance. A little grabbing
or cornering was all to the good. All to the good. It prevented things
being used up too fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia
was tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all this
is altered. We're living in a different world. The public won't stand
things it used to stand. It's a new public. It's--wild. It'll smash up
the show if they go too far. Everything short and running shorter--food,
fuel, material. But these people go on. They go on as though nothing had
changed.... Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn them. There are men on
that Commission who would steal the brakes off a mountain railway just
before they went down in it.... It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles.
It's--! But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."

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

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

"A social smash-up."

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

"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All sorts of
people I find think that," said the doctor. "All sorts of people lie
awake thinking of it."

"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too," he said and
seemed to reflect. But he was observing his patient acutely--with his
ears.

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and left his
sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered swiftly
what line of talk he had best follow.

Section 2

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor. "It's at
the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new state of mind.
Before the war it was abnormal--a phase of neurasthenia. Now it is
almost the normal state with whole classes of intelligent people.
Intelligent, I say. The others always have been casual and adventurous
and always will be. A loss of confidence in the general background of
life. So that we seem to float over abysses."

"We do," said Sir Richmond.

"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in the days
of our assurance. There is a discord, a jarring."

The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and dreadful sense
of responsibility for the universe. Accompanied by a realization that
the job is overwhelmingly too big for us."

"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond. "Anyhow, what
else is there to do? We MAY keep things together.... I've got to do my
bit. And if only I could hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows.
But that's where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous
to work well in my life. And never have I been so slack and weak-willed
and inaccurate.... Sloppy.... Indolent.... VICIOUS!..."

The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted him. "What's
got hold of me? What's got hold of me? I used to work well enough. It's
as if my will had come untwisted and was ravelling out into separate
strands. I've lost my unity. I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to
recover my vigour. At any cost."

Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out of his
mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr. Martineau, is this: it's fatigue.
It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much effort. On too high a level. And
too austere. One strains and fags. FLAGS! 'Flags' I meant to say. One
strains and flags and then the lower stuff in one, the subconscious
stuff, takes control."

There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this, and the
doctor drew in the corners of his mouth and gave his head a critical
slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond raise his voice and
quicken his speech. "I want," he said, "a good tonic. A pick-me-up,
a stimulating harmless drug of some sort. That's indicated anyhow. To
begin with. Something to pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to
the scratch again."

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

The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to disappointment.
"But that's not reasonable," he cried. "That's not reasonable. That's
superstition. Call a thing a drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug.
Everything that affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink.
Noise is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response to
stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I want food. When
I'm overactive and sleepless I want tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I
want pulling together."

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

"But you ought to know."

Dr. Martineau fixed his eye on a first floor window sill on the opposite
side of Harley Street. His manner suggested a lecturer holding on to his
theme.

"A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs--all sorts
of drugs--and work them in to our general way of living. I have no
prejudice against them at all. A time will come when we shall correct
our moods, get down to our reserves of energy by their help, suspend
fatigue, put off sleep during long spells of exertion. At some sudden
crisis for example. When we shall know enough to know just how far to
go with this, that or the other stuff. And how to wash out its after
effects.... I quite agree with you,--in principle.... But that time
hasn't come yet.... Decades of research yet.... If we tried that sort
of thing now, we should be like children playing with poisons and
explosives.... It's out of the question."

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

"Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the way. Has it
done you any good--any NETT good? It has--I can see--broken your sleep."

The doctor turned round again to his patient and looked up into his
troubled face.

"Given physiological trouble I don't mind resorting to a drug. Given
structural injury I don't mind surgery. But except for any little
mischief your amateur drugging may have done you do not seem to me to
be either sick or injured. You've no trouble either of structure or
material. You are--worried--ill in your mind, and otherwise perfectly
sound. It's the current of your thoughts, fermenting. If the trouble is
in the mental sphere, why go out of the mental sphere for a treatment?
Talk and thought; these are your remedies. Cool deliberate thought.
You're unravelled. You say it yourself. Drugs will only make this or
that unravelled strand behave disproportionately. You don't want that.
You want to take stock of yourself as a whole--find out where you stand.

"But the Fuel Commission?"

"Is it sitting now?"

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

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

The doctor made a little calculation. "Three weeks.... It's scarcely
time enough to begin."

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

"Dismiss the idea. Dismiss it." He decided to take a plunge. "I've just
been thinking of a little holiday for myself. But I'd like to see you
through this. And if I am to see you through, there ought to be some
sort of beginning now. In this three weeks. Suppose...."

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

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

"It would."

"That's that. Still--. The country must be getting beautiful again
now,--after all the rain we have had. I have a little two-seater. I
don't know.... The repair people promise to release it before Friday."

"But _I_ have a choice of two very comfortable little cars. Why not be
my guest?"

"That might be more convenient."

"I'd prefer my own car."

"Then what do you say?"

"I agree. Peripatetic treatment."

"South and west. We could talk on the road. In the evenings. By the
wayside. We might make the beginnings of a treatment. ... A simple tour.
Nothing elaborate. You wouldn't bring a man?"

"I always drive myself."

Section 3

"There's something very pleasant," said the doctor, envisaging his own
rash proposal, "in travelling along roads you don't know and seeing
houses and parks and villages and towns for which you do not feel in
the slightest degree responsible. They hide all their troubles from the
road. Their backyards are tucked away out of sight, they show a brave
face; there's none of the nasty self-betrayals of the railway approach.
And everything will be fresh still. There will still be a lot of
apple-blossom--and bluebells.... And all the while we can be getting on
with your affair."

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

He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder. "Have you noted how fagged
and unstable EVERYBODY is getting? Everybody intelligent, I mean."

"It's an infernally worrying time."

"Exactly. Everybody suffers."

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

"It isn't. And it's a frightful strain to get into any new ways. So here
we are.

"A man," the doctor expanded, "isn't a creature in vacuo. He's himself
and his world. He's a surface of contact, a system of adaptations,
between his essential self and his surroundings. Well, our surroundings
have become--how shall I put it?--a landslide. The war which seemed
such a definable catastrophe in 1914 was, after all, only the first loud
crack and smash of the collapse. The war is over and--nothing is over.
This peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded phrase. The slide goes
on,--it goes, if anything, faster, without a sign of stopping. And all
our poor little adaptations! Which we have been elaborating and trusting
all our lives!... One after another they fail us. We are stripped....
We have to begin all over again.... I'm fifty-seven and I feel at times
nowadays like a chicken new hatched in a thunderstorm."

The doctor walked towards the bookcase and turned.

"Everybody is like that...it isn't--what are you going to do? It
isn't--what am I going to do? It's--what are we all going to do!... Lord!
How safe and established everything was in 1910, say. We talked of this
great war that was coming, but nobody thought it would come. We had been
born in peace, comparatively speaking; we had been brought up in peace.
There was talk of wars. There were wars--little wars--that altered
nothing material.... Consols used to be at 112 and you fed your
household on ten shillings a head a week. You could run over all Europe,
barring Turkey and Russia, without even a passport. You could get to
Italy in a day. Never were life and comfort so safe--for respectable
people. And we WERE respectable people.... That was the world that made
us what we are. That was the sheltering and friendly greenhouse in
which we grew. We fitted our minds to that.... And here we are with the
greenhouse falling in upon us lump by lump, smash and clatter, the wild
winds of heaven tearing in through the gaps."

Upstairs on Dr. Martineau's desk lay the typescript of the opening
chapters of a book that was intended to make a great splash in the
world, his PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE. He had his metaphors ready.

"We said: 'This system will always go on. We needn't bother about it.'
We just planned our lives accordingly. It was like a bird building
its nest of frozen snakes. My father left me a decent independence. I
developed my position; I have lived between here and the hospital, doing
good work, enormously interested, prosperous, mildly distinguished. I
had been born and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed
that someone else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I never
enquired."

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

"And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on. "Nobody had ever
steered the ship. It was adrift."

"I realized that. I--"

"It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by faith--as
children do, as the animals do. At the back of the healthy mind, human
or animal, has been this persuasion: 'This is all right. This will go
on. If I keep the rule, if I do so and so, all will be well. I need not
trouble further; things are cared for.'"

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

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

The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance to the full
moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote things. "It may very well
be that man is no more capable of living out of that atmosphere of
assurance than a tadpole is of living out of water. His mental
existence may be conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become
incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically
self-seeking--incoherent... a stampede.... Human sanity may--DISPERSE.

"That's our trouble," the doctor completed. "Our fundamental trouble.
All our confidences and our accustomed adaptations are destroyed. We fit
together no longer. We are--loose. We don't know where we are nor what
to do. The psychology of the former time fails to give safe responses,
and the psychology of the New Age has still to develop."

Section 4

"That is all very well," said Sir Richmond in the resolute voice of one
who will be pent no longer. "That is all very well as far as it goes.
But it does not cover my case. I am not suffering from inadaptation. I
HAVE adapted. I have thought things out. I think--much as you do. Much
as you do. So it's not that. But--... Mind you, I am perfectly clear
where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the breakup
of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another system or perish
amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly. Science and plan have to
replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted.
Granted. We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it.
We've muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of world,
planned and scientific, has to be got going. Civilization renewed.
Rebuilding civilization--while the premises are still occupied and busy.
It's an immense enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some
ways it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips my
imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work. Working as I
do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall presently join up... The
attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand
it may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the
rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where
my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all
that I have been saying, but--The rest of me won't follow. The rest of
me refuses to attend, forgets, straggles, misbehaves."

"Exactly."

The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all. 'Amazingly,'
if you like.... I have this unlimited faith in our present tremendous
necessity--for work--for devotion; I believe my share, the work I am
doing, is essential to the whole thing--and I work sluggishly. I work
reluctantly. I work damnably."

"Exact--" The doctor checked himself. "All that is explicable. Indeed it
is. Listen for a moment to me! Consider what you are. Consider what
we are. Consider what a man is before you marvel at his ineptitudes
of will. Face the accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand
generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And that ape
again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his forebear. A man's
body, his bodily powers, are just the body and powers of an ape, a
little improved, a little adapted to novel needs. That brings me to my
point. CAN HIS MIND AND WILL BE ANYTHING BETTER? For a few generations,
a few hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out on
the darknesses of life.... But the substance of man is ape still. He may
carry a light in his brain, but his instincts move in the darkness. Out
of that darkness he draws his motives."

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

"Or fails.... And that is where these new methods of treatment come in.
We explore that failure. Together. What the psychoanalyst does-and I
will confess that I owe much to the psychoanalyst--what he does is to
direct thwarted, disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of
their own nature. Which they have been accustomed to ignore and
forget. They come to us with high ambitions or lovely illusions about
themselves, torn, shredded, spoilt. They are morally denuded. Dreams
they hate pursue them; abhorrent desires draw them; they are the prey of
irresistible yet uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs.
The first thing we ask them is this: 'What else could you expect?'"

"What else could I expect?" Sir Richmond repeated, looking down on him.
"H'm!"

"The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly unselfish,
inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you are ever anything
else.... Do you realize that a few million generations ago, everything
that stirs in us, everything that exalts human life, self-devotions,
heroisms, the utmost triumphs of art, the love--for love it is--that
makes you and me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round
world, was latent in the body of some little lurking beast that crawled
and hid among the branches of vanished and forgotten Mesozoic trees?
A petty egg-laying, bristle-covered beast it was, with no more of the
rudiments of a soul than bare hunger, weak lust and fear.... People
always seem to regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance.
It isn't: it's a vital fact of the utmost practical importance. That
is what you are made of. Why should you expect--because a war and a
revolution have shocked you--that you should suddenly be able to reach
up and touch the sky?"

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

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

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

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

"But is it any good to tell a man that the job he is attempting is above
him--that he is just a hairy reptile twice removed--and all that sort of
thing?"

"Well, it saves him from hoping too much and being too greatly
disappointed. It recalls him to the proportions of the job. He gets
something done by not attempting everything. ... And it clears him up.
We get him to look into himself, to see directly and in measurable
terms what it is that puts him wrong and holds him back. He's no longer
vaguely incapacitated. He knows."

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

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

"You propose that I shall spend my time, until the Commission meets, in
thinking about myself. I wanted to forget myself."

"Like a man who tries to forget that his petrol is running short and
a cylinder missing fire.... No. Come back to the question of what you
are," said the doctor. "A creature of the darkness with new lights. Lit
and half-blinded by science and the possibilities of controlling the
world that it opens out. In that light your will is all for service;
you care more for mankind than for yourself. You begin to understand
something of the self beyond your self. But it is a partial and a shaded
light as yet; a little area about you it makes clear, the rest is
still the old darkness--of millions of intense and narrow animal
generations.... You are like someone who awakens out of an immemorial
sleep to find himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a
great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless mountains--in a
sunless universe. You are not alone in it. You are not lord of all you
survey. Your leadership is disputed. The darkness even of the room you
are in is full of ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers
and purposes.... They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws suddenly out of
the darkness into the light of your attention. They snatch things out
of your hand, they trip your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and
cluster behind you. Wherever your shadow falls, they creep right up to
you, creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The souls
of apes, monkeys, reptiles and creeping things haunt the passages and
attics and cellars of this living house in which your consciousness has
awakened...."

The doctor gave this quotation from his unpublished book the advantages
of an abrupt break and a pause.

Sir Richmond shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "And you propose a
vermin hunt in the old tenement?"

"The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to take stock
and know what is there."

"Three weeks of self vivisection."

"To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself. As an
opening.... It will take longer than that if we are to go through with
the job."

"It is a considerable--process."

"It is."

"Yet you shrink from simple things like drugs!"

"Self-knowledge--without anaesthetics."

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

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

"How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be? Anyhow--we
can break off at any time.... We'll try it. We'll try it.... And so for
this journey into the west of England.... And--if we can get there--I'm
not sure that we can get there--into the secret places of my heart."




CHAPTER THE SECOND

LADY HARDY

The patient left the house with much more self possession than he had
shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau had thrust him back from his
intenser prepossessions to a more generalized view of himself, had made
his troubles objective and detached him from them. He could even find
something amusing now in his situation. He liked the immense scope of
the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that most of it
was entirely true--and, in some untraceable manner, absurd. There were
entertaining possibilities in the prospect of the doctor drawing him
out--he himself partly assisting and partly resisting.

He was a man of extensive reservations. His private life was in some
respects exceptionally private.

"I don't confide.... Do I even confide in myself? I imagine I do.... Is
there anything in myself that I haven't looked squarely in the face?...
How much are we going into? Even as regards facts?

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

Such thoughts engaged him until he found himself in his study. His desk
and his writing table were piled high with a heavy burthen of work.
Still a little preoccupied with Dr. Martineau's exposition, he began to
handle this confusion....

At half past nine he found himself with three hours of good work behind
him. It had seemed like two. He had not worked like this for many weeks.
"This is very cheering," he said. "And unexpected. Can old Moon-face
have hypnotized me? Anyhow--... Perhaps I've only imagined I was ill....
Dinner?" He looked at his watch and was amazed at the time. "Good Lord!
I've been at it three hours. What can have happened? Funny I didn't hear
the gong."

He went downstairs and found Lady Hardy reading a magazine in a
dining-room armchair and finely poised between devotion and martyrdom. A
shadow of vexation fell athwart his mind at the sight of her.

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

"After you swore so at poor Bradley I ordered that there should be no
gongs when we were alone. I did come up to your door about half past
eight. I crept up. But I was afraid I might upset you if I came in."

"But you've not waited--"

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

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

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

Lady Hardy was a frail little blue-eyed woman with uneven shoulders and
a delicate sweet profile. Hers was that type of face that under even
the most pleasant and luxurious circumstances still looks bravely and
patiently enduring. Her refinement threw a tinge of coarseness over his
eager consumption of his excellent clear soup.

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

"Turbot, Sir Richmond."

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

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

When Bradley was out of the room, Sir Richmond remarked: "I saw that
nerves man, Dr. Martineau, to-day. He wants me to take a holiday."

The quiet patience of the lady's manner intensified. She said nothing.
A flash of resentment lit Sir Richmond's eyes. When he spoke again, he
seemed to answer unspoken accusations. "Dr. Martineau's idea is that he
should come with me."

The lady adjusted herself to a new point of view.

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

"He seems a good sort of fellow.... I'm inclined to like him. He'll
be as good company as anyone.... This TOURNEDOS looks excellent. Have
some."

"I had a little bird," said Lady Hardy, "when I found you weren't
coming."

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

She smiled and shook her head with the quiet conviction of one who knew
her duty better. "Perhaps I'll have a little ice pudding when it comes,"
she said.

Sir Richmond detested eating alone in an atmosphere of observant
criticism. And he did not like talking with his mouth full to an
unembarrassed interlocutor who made no conversational leads of her own.
After a few mouthfuls he pushed his plate away from him. "Then let's
have up the ice pudding," he said with a faint note of bitterness.

"But have you finished--?"

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

Lady Hardy sat for a moment, a picture of meek distress. Then, her
delicate eyebrows raised, and the corners of her mouth drooping, she
touched the button of the silver table-bell.




CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE DEPARTURE

Section 1

No wise man goes out upon a novel expedition without misgivings. And
between their first meeting and the appointed morning both Sir Richmond
Hardy and Dr. Martineau were the prey of quite disagreeable doubts about
each other, themselves, and the excursion before them. At the time
of their meeting each had been convinced that he gauged the other
sufficiently for the purposes of the proposed tour. Afterwards each
found himself trying to recall the other with greater distinctness
and able to recall nothing but queer, ominous and minatory traits.
The doctor's impression of the great fuel specialist grew ever darker,
leaner, taller and more impatient. Sir Richmond took on the likeness of
a monster obdurate and hostile, he spread upwards until like the Djinn
out of the bottle, he darkened the heavens. And he talked too much. He
talked ever so much too much. Sir Richmond also thought that the doctor
talked too much. In addition, he read into his imperfect memory of the
doctor's face, an expression of protruded curiosity. What was all this
problem of motives and inclinations that they were "going into" so
gaily? He had merely consulted the doctor on a simple, straightforward
need for a nervous tonic--that was what he had needed--a tonic. Instead
he had engaged himself for--he scarcely knew what--an indiscreet,
indelicate, and altogether undesirable experiment in confidences.

Both men were considerably reassured when at last they set eyes on
each other again. Indeed each was surprised to find something almost
agreeable in the appearance of the other. Dr. Martineau at once
perceived that the fierceness of Sir Richmond was nothing more than the
fierceness of an overwrought man, and Sir Richmond realized at a glance
that the curiosity of Dr. Martineau's bearing had in it nothing personal
or base; it was just the fine alertness of the scientific mind.

Sir Richmond had arrived nearly forty minutes late, and it would have
been evident to a much less highly trained observer than Dr. Martineau
that some dissension had arisen between the little, ladylike, cream and
black Charmeuse car and its owner. There was a faint air of resentment
and protest between them. As if Sir Richmond had been in some way rude
to it.

The cap of the radiator was adorned with a little brass figure of a
flying Mercury. Frozen in a sprightly attitude, its stiff bound and its
fixed heavenward stare was highly suggestive of a forced and tactful
disregard of current unpleasantness.

Nothing was said, however, to confirm or dispel this suspicion of a
disagreement between the man and the car. Sir Richmond directed and
assisted Dr. Martineau's man to adjust the luggage at the back, and Dr.
Martineau watched the proceedings from his dignified front door. He was
wearing a suit of fawn tweeds, a fawn Homburg hat and a light Burberry,
with just that effect of special preparation for a holiday which betrays
the habitually busy man. Sir Richmond's brown gauntness was, he noted,
greatly set off by his suit of grey. There had certainly been some sort
of quarrel. Sir Richmond was explaining the straps to Dr. Martineau's
butler with the coldness a man betrays when he explains the uncongenial
habits of some unloved intimate. And when the moment came to start and
the little engine did not immediately respond to the electric starter,
he said: "Oh! COME up, you--!"

His voice sank at the last word as though it was an entirely
confidential communication to the little car. And it was an extremely
low and disagreeable word. So Dr. Martineau decided that it was not his
business to hear it....

It was speedily apparent that Sir Richmond was an experienced and
excellent driver. He took the Charmeuse out into the traffic of
Baker Street and westward through brisk and busy streets and roads
to Brentford and Hounslow smoothly and swiftly, making a score of
unhesitating and accurate decisions without apparent thought. There
was very little conversation until they were through Brentford. Near
Shepherd's Bush, Sir Richmond had explained, "This is not my own
particular car. That was butted into at the garage this morning and
its radiator cracked. So I had to fall back on this. It's quite a good
little car. In its way. My wife drives it at times. It has one or two
constitutional weaknesses--incidental to the make--gear-box over the
back axle for example--gets all the vibration. Whole machine rather on
the flimsy side. Still--"

He left the topic at that.

Dr. Martineau said something of no consequence about its being a very
comfortable little car.

Somewhere between Brentford and Hounslow, Sir Richmond plunged into
the matter between them. "I don't know how deep we are going into these
psychological probings of yours," he said. "But I doubt very much if we
shall get anything out of them."

"Probably not," said Dr. Martineau.

"After all, what I want is a tonic. I don't see that there is anything
positively wrong with me. A certain lack of energy--"

"Lack of balance," corrected the doctor. "You are wasting energy upon
internal friction."

"But isn't that inevitable? No machine is perfectly efficient. No man
either. There is always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the
individual idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as
she ought to pull--she never does. She's low in her class. So with
myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of energy waste.
Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to me. (Damn that omnibus! All
over the road!)"

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

"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir Richmond,
opening up another line of thought.

"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it. "These new
methods of treatment are based on the idea of imperfection. We begin
with that. I began with that last Tuesday...."

Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and for
that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of accumulations. Your
psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me, with a notion of stripping down
to something fundamental. The ape before was a tangle of accumulations,
just as we are. So it was with his forebears. So it has always been. All
life is an endless tangle of accumulations."

"Recognize it," said the doctor.

"And then?" said Sir Richmond, controversially.

"Recognize in particular your own tangle."

"Is my particular tangle very different from the general tangle? (Oh!
Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a creature of undecided will,
urged on by my tangled heredity to do a score of entirely incompatible
things. Mankind, all life, is that."

"But our concern is the particular score of incompatible things you are
urged to do. We examine and weigh--we weigh--"

The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and ultimately
disastrous struggle began between Sir Richmond and the little Charmeuse
car. The doctor stopped in mid-sentence.

It was near Taplow station that the mutual exasperation of man and
machine was brought to a crisis by the clumsy emergence of a laundry
cart from a side road. Sir Richmond was obliged to pull up smartly and
stopped his engine. It refused an immediate obedience to the electric
starter. Then it picked up, raced noisily, disengaged great volumes of
bluish smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition to run on any
gear but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought aloud, unpleasing thoughts.
He addressed the little car as a person; he referred to ancient disputes
and temperamental incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse,
ill-bred man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There were
some moments of hope, dashed by the necessity of going dead slow behind
an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not notice the outstretched arm
of the driver of the van, and stalled his engine for a second time. The
electric starter refused its office altogether.

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

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

"I get out, don't I?" asked the doctor, unanswered, and did so. Sir
Richmond, after a grim search and the displacement and replacement of
the luggage, produced a handle from the locker at the back of the car
and prepared to wind.

There was a little difficulty. "Come UP!" he said, and the small engine
roared out like a stage lion.

The two gentlemen resumed their seats. The car started and then by an
unfortunate inadvertency Sir Richmond pulled the gear lever over from
the first speed to the reverse. There was a metallic clangour beneath
the two gentlemen, and the car slowed down and stopped although the
engine was still throbbing wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke
still streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle breeze.
The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by a gaunt madman,
mouthing vileness, who had only a minute or so before been a decent
British citizen. He made some blind lunges at the tremulous but obdurate
car, but rather as if he looked for offences and accusations than for
displacements to adjust. Quivering and refusing, the little car was
extraordinarily like some recalcitrant little old aristocratic lady
in the hands of revolutionaries, and this made the behaviour of Sir
Richmond seem even more outrageous than it would otherwise have done. He
stopped the engine, he went down on his hands and knees in the road to
peer up at the gear-box, then without restoring the spark, he tried
to wind up the engine again. He spun the little handle with an insane
violence, faster and faster for--as it seemed to the doctor--the better
part of a minute. Beads of perspiration appeared upon his brow and ran
together; he bared his teeth in a snarl; his hat slipped over one eye.
He groaned with rage. Then, using the starting handle as a club, he
assailed the car. He smote the brazen Mercury from its foothold and sent
it and a part of the radiator cap with it flying across the road. He
beat at the wings of the bonnet, until they bent in under his blows.
Finally, he hurled the starting-handle at the wind-screen and smashed
it. The starting-handle rattled over the bonnet and fell to the
ground....

The paroxysm was over. Ten seconds later this cataclysmal lunatic had
reverted to sanity--a rather sheepish sanity.

He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned his back on the
car. He remarked in a voice of melancholy detachment: "It was a mistake
to bring that coupe."

Dr. Martineau had assumed an attitude of trained observation on the side
path. His hands rested on his hips and his hat was a little on one
side. He was inclined to agree with Sir Richmond. "I don't know," he
considered. "You wanted some such blow-off as this."

"Did I?"

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

"The devil it is!" said Sir Richmond, turning round sharply and staring
at it as if he expected it to display some surprising and yet familiar
features. Then he looked questioningly and suspiciously at his
companion.

"These outbreaks do nothing to amend the originating grievance," said
the doctor. "No. And at times they are even costly. But they certainly
lift a burthen from the nervous system.... And now I suppose we have to
get that little ruin to Maidenhead."

"Little ruin!" repeated Sir Richmond. "No. There's lots of life in the
little beast yet."

He reflected. "She'll have to be towed." He felt in his breast pocket.
"Somewhere I have the R.A.C. order paper, the Badge that will Get
You Home. We shall have to hail some passing car to take it into
Maidenhead."

Dr. Martineau offered and Sir Richmond took and lit a cigarette.

For a little while conversation hung fire. Then for the first time Dr.
Martineau heard his patient laugh.

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

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

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

Dr. Martineau weighed the situation. "As between doctor and patient,"
he said. "No."

"Oh!" said Sir Richmond, turned to a new point of view. "But where the
patient ends and the host begins.... I'm really very sorry." He reverted
to his original train of thought which had not concerned Dr. Martineau
at all. "After all, the little car was only doing what she was made to
do."

Section 2

The affair of the car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's mind. Hitherto
Dr. Martineau had perceived the possibility and danger of a defensive
silence or of a still more defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond
had once given himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to
an unlimited extent. He embarked upon an apologetic discussion of the
choleric temperament.

He began as they stood waiting for the relief car from the Maidenhead
garage. "You were talking of the ghosts of apes and monkeys that
suddenly come out from the darkness of the subconscious...."

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

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

The doctor became precise. "Gorillaesque. We are not descended from
gorillas."

"Queer thing a fit of rage is!"

"It's one of nature's cruder expedients. Crude, but I doubt if it is
fundamental. There doesn't seem to be rage in the vegetable world, and
even among the animals--? No, it is not universal." He ran his mind over
classes and orders. "Wasps and bees certainly seem to rage, but if one
comes to think, most of the invertebrata show very few signs of it."

"I'm not so sure," said Sir Richmond. "I've never seen a snail in a
towering passion or an oyster slamming its shell behind it. But these
are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which is after all a smouldering sort
of rage. And take any more active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not
a smashing and swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a disciplined,
cold-blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will rage
dangerously."

"A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has ever seen a
furious rabbit?"

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

Dr. Martineau admitted the point.

"I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can remember.
I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I once threw a fork
at my elder brother and it stuck in his forehead, doing no serious
damage--happily. There were whole days of wrath--days, as I remember
them. Perhaps they were only hours.... I've never thought before what
a peculiar thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage? They
used to say it was the devil. If it isn't the devil, then what the devil
is it? After all," he went on as the doctor was about to answer his
question; "as you pointed out, it isn't the lowlier things that rage.
It's the HIGHER things and US."

"The devil nowadays," the doctor reflected after a pause, "so far as
man is concerned, is understood to be the ancestral ape. And more
particularly the old male ape."

But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. "Life itself,
flaring out. Brooking no contradiction." He came round suddenly to the
doctor's qualification. "Why male? Don't little girls smash things just
as much?"

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

Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. "I suppose you have watched
any number of babies?"'

"Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do. There's a lot of
rage about most of them at first, male or female."

"Queer little eddies of fury.... Recently--it happens--I've been seeing
one. A spit of red wrath, clenching its fists and squalling threats at a
damned disobedient universe."

The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and questioningly
at his companion's profile.

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

"Isn't that after all what we really are?" he asked the doctor.
"Essentially--Rage. A rage in dead matter, making it alive."

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

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

"But rage without discipline?"

"Discipline afterwards. The rage first."

"But rage against what? And FOR what?"

"Against the Universe. And for--? That's more difficult. What IS the
little beast squalling itself crimson for? Ultimately? ... What is it
clutching after? In the long run, what will it get?"

("Yours the car in distress what sent this?" asked an unheeded voice.)

"Of course, if you were to say 'desire'," said Dr. Martineau, "then you
would be in line with the psychoanalysts. They talk of LIBIDO, meaning
a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks of it at times almost as if it
were the universal driving force."

"No," said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. "Not desire. Desire
would have a definite direction, and that is just what this driving
force hasn't. It's rage."

"Yours the car in distress what sent this?" the voice repeated. It was
the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car. He was holding up the blue
request for assistance that Sir Richmond had recently filled in.

The two philosophers returned to practical matters.

Section 3

For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse car with
Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the brass Mercury lay unheeded in the
dusty roadside grass. Then it caught the eye of a passing child.

He was a bright little boy of five. From the moment when he caught the
gleam of brass he knew that he had made the find of his life. But his
nurse was a timorous, foolish thing. "You did ought to of left it there,
Masterrarry," she said.

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

"Yew'd look silly if a policeman came along arsting people if they seen
a goldennimage.

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

All of which grumblings Master Harry treated with an experienced
disregard. He knew definitely that he would never relinquish this bright
and lovely possession again. It was the first beautiful thing he had
ever possessed. He was the darling of fond and indulgent parents and his
nursery was crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic
penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen and every
variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual beastliness. This figure,
solid, delicate and gracious, was a thing of a different order.

There was to be much conflict and distress, tears and wrath, before
the affinity of that clean-limbed, shining figure and his small soul was
recognized. But he carried his point at last. The Mercury became his
inseparable darling, his symbol, his private god, the one dignified
and serious thing in a little life much congested by the quaint, the
burlesque, and all the smiling, dull condescensions of adult love.




CHAPTER THE FOURTH

AT MAIDENHEAD

Section 1

The little Charmeuse was towed to hospital and the two psychiatrists
took up their quarters at the Radiant Hotel with its pleasant lawns and
graceful landing stage at the bend towards the bridge. Sir Richmond,
after some trying work at the telephone, got into touch with his own
proper car. A man would bring the car down in two days' time at latest,
and afterwards the detested coupe could go back to London. The day was
still young, and after lunch and coffee upon a sunny lawn a boat seemed
indicated. Sir Richmond astonished the doctor by going to his room,
reappearing dressed in tennis flannels and looking very well in them. It
occurred to the doctor as a thing hitherto unnoted that Sir Richmond was
not indifferent to his personal appearance. The doctor had no flannels,
but he had brought a brown holland umbrella lined with green that he had
acquired long ago in Algiers, and this served to give him something of
the riverside quality.

The day was full of sunshine and the river had a Maytime animation. Pink
geraniums, vivid green lawns, gay awnings, bright glass, white paint and
shining metal set the tone of Maidenhead life. At lunch there had been
five or six small tables with quietly affectionate couples who talked in
undertones, a tableful of bright-coloured Jews who talked in overtones,
and a family party from the Midlands, badly smitten with shyness, who
did not talk at all. "A resort, of honeymoon couples," said the doctor,
and then rather knowingly: "Temporary honeymoons, I fancy, in one or two
of the cases."

"Decidedly temporary," said Sir Richmond, considering the company--"in
most of the cases anyhow. The two in the corner might be married. You
never know nowadays."

He became reflective....

After lunch and coffee he rowed the doctor up the river towards
Cliveden.

"The last time I was here," he said, returning to the subject, "I was
here on a temporary honeymoon."

The doctor tried to look as though he had not thought that could be
possible.

"I know my Maidenhead fairly well," said Sir Richmond. "Aquatic
activities, such as rowing, punting, messing about with a boat-hook,
tying up, buzzing about in motor launches, fouling other people's boats,
are merely the stage business of the drama. The ruling interests of this
place are love--largely illicit--and persistent drinking.... Don't you
think the bridge charming from here?"

"I shouldn't have thought--drinking," said Dr. Martineau, after he had
done justice to the bridge over his shoulder.

"Yes, the place has a floating population of quiet industrious soakers.
The incurable river man and the river girl end at that."

Dr. Martineau encouraged Sir Richmond by an appreciative silence.

"If we are to explore the secret places of the heart," Sir Richmond went
on, "we shall have to give some attention to this Maidenhead side of
life. It is very material to my case. I have,--as I have said--BEEN
HERE. This place has beauty and charm; these piled-up woods behind which
my Lords Astor and Desborough keep their state, this shining mirror
of the water, brown and green and sky blue, this fringe of reeds and
scented rushes and forget-me-not and lilies, and these perpetually
posing white swans: they make a picture. A little artificial it is true;
one feels the presence of a Conservancy Board, planting the rushes and
industriously nicking the swans; but none the less delightful. And this
setting has appealed to a number of people as an invitation, as, in a
way, a promise. They come here, responsive to that promise of beauty
and happiness. They conceive of themselves here, rowing swiftly and
gracefully, punting beautifully, brandishing boat-hooks with ease and
charm. They look to meet, under pleasant or romantic circumstances,
other possessors and worshippers of grace and beauty here. There will
be glowing evenings, warm moonlight, distant voices singing....There is
your desire, doctor, the desire you say is the driving force of life.
But reality mocks it. Boats bump and lead to coarse ungracious
quarrels; rowing can be curiously fatiguing; punting involves dreadful
indignities. The romance here tarnishes very quickly. Romantic
encounters fail to occur; in our impatience we resort to--accosting.
Chilly mists arise from the water and the magic of distant singing
is provided, even excessively, by boatloads of cads--with collecting
dishes. When the weather keeps warm there presently arises an
extraordinary multitude of gnats, and when it does not there is a need
for stimulants. That is why the dreamers who come here first for a light
delicious brush with love, come down at last to the Thamesside barmaid
with her array of spirits and cordials as the quintessence of all
desire."

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

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

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

He held his sculls awash, rippling in the water.

"The real force of life, the rage of life, isn't here," he said. "It's
down underneath, sulking and smouldering. Every now and then it strains
and cracks the surface. This stretch of the Thames, this pleasure
stretch, has in fact a curiously quarrelsome atmosphere. People scold
and insult one another for the most trivial things, for passing too
close, for taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose. Most
of these notice boards on the bank show a thoroughly nasty spirit.
People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats. You hear people
quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk along the towing path.
There is remarkably little happy laughter here. The RAGE, you see, is
hostile to this place, the RAGE breaks through.... The people who
drift from one pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the
riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of pleasure, trying to forget
the rage...."

"Isn't it that there is some greater desire at the back of the human
mind?" the doctor suggested. "Which refuses to be content with pleasure
as an end?"

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

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

"There is no such greater desire," said Sir Richmond. "You cannot name
it. It is just blind drive. I admit its discontent with pleasure as an
end--but has it any end of its own? At the most you can say that the
rage in life is seeking its desire and hasn't found it."

"Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an afternoon smile
under his green umbrella. "Go on."

Section 2

"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been
trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)"

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

"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant motives I am.
I do not seem to deserve to be called a personality. I cannot discover
even a general direction. Much more am I like a taxi-cab in which all
sorts of aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got
out. Are we all like that?"

"A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of
memory?" said the doctor and considered. "More than that. More than
that. We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities."

"We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from
complete dispersal."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a consistency,
that we call character."

"It changes."

"Consistently with itself."

"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir Richmond,
going off at a tangent. "My sentimental education. I wonder if it
differs very widely from yours or most men's."

"Some men are more eventful in these matters than others," said the
doctor,--it sounded--wistfully.

"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I suspect, whether
they are eventful or not. The brakes may be strong or weak but the drive
is the same. I can't remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and
knowledge in these matters. Can you?"

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

"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous
imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't remember much of that sort
of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were
probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I
can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively
interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a
certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative slavishness--not towards
actual women but towards something magnificently feminine. My first
love--"

Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was Britannia
as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I must have been a very
little chap at the time of the Britannia affair. I just clung to her in
my imagination and did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little
later, a secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the Crystal
Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can remember,--for all
of them. But I don't remember anything very monstrous or incestuous
in my childish imaginations,--such things as Freud, I understand, lays
stress upon. If there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort
in my case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a child
which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and sees a lot of
pictures of the nude human body, and so on, gets its mind shifted off
any possible concentration upon the domestic aspect of sex. I got to
definite knowledge pretty early. By the time I was eleven or twelve."

"Normally?"

"What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be forgetting much
secret and shameful curiosity. I got my ideas into definite form out of
a little straightforward physiological teaching and some dissecting of
rats and mice. My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of
his times and my people believed in him. I think much of this distorted
perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds about sex and develops
into evil vices and still more evil habits, is due to the mystery we
make about these things."

"Not entirely," said the doctor.

"Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes through the
stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A
YOUNG MAN."

"I've not read it."

"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up in darkness
and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of purity and decency and
under threats of hell fire."

"Horrible!"

"Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that make young
people write unclean words in secret places."

"Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters nowadays.
Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode."

"On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and clean," said
Sir Richmond. "What stands out in my memory now is this idea, of a
sort of woman goddess who was very lovely and kind and powerful and
wonderful. That ruled my secret imaginations as a boy, but it was very
much in my mind as I grew up."

"The mother complex," said Dr. Martineau as a passing botanist might
recognize and name a flower.

Sir Richmond stared at him for a moment.

"It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any mother or any
particular woman at all. Far better to call it the goddess complex."

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

"There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond. "The women of my adolescent
dreams were stripped and strong and lovely. They were great creatures.
They came, it was clearly traceable, from pictures sculpture--and from
a definite response in myself to their beauty. My mother had nothing
whatever to do with that. The women and girls about me were fussy
bunches of clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream
world of love and worship."

"Were you co-educated?"

"No. But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger than myself,
and there were plenty of girls in my circle. I thought some of them
pretty--but that was a different affair. I know that I didn't connect
them with the idea of the loved and worshipped goddesses at all, because
I remember when I first saw the goddess in a real human being and how
amazed I was at the discovery.... I was a boy of twelve or thirteen. My
people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days
before the automobile had made the Marsh accessible to the Hythe and
Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent wind-bitten
village crouching under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water
there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage
brown woman. Shining and with a texture--the very same. And one day as I
was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy fashion,--there were some
ribs of a wrecked boat buried in the sand near a groin and I was busy
with them--a girl ran out from a tent high up on the beach and across
the sands to the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and
not in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to inflict
on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a blue handkerchief. She
ran swiftly and gracefully, intent upon the white line of foam ahead. I
can still remember how the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as
she went past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have
ever seen--to this day. She lifted up her arms and thrust through the
dazzling white and green breakers and plunged into the water and swam;
she swam straight out for a long way as it seemed to me, and presently
came in and passed me again on her way back to her tent, light and
swift and sure. The very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful.
Suddenly I realized that there could be living people in the world as
lovely as any goddess.... She wasn't in the least out of breath.

"That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I doubt
sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else. I kept the thing very
secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing so secret. Until now I
have never told a soul about it. I resorted to all sorts of tortuous
devices and excuses to get a chance of seeing her again without
betraying what it was I was after."

Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.

"And did you meet her again?"

"Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person and not
recognized her. A day or so later I was stabbed to the heart by the
discovery that the tent she came out of had been taken away."

"She had gone?"

"For ever."

Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.

Section 3

"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things," Sir Richmond
resumed presently. "Never. I do not think any man is. We are too
much plastered-up things, too much the creatures of a tortuous and
complicated evolution."

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

"This--what shall I call it?--this Dream of Women, grew up in my mind as
I grew up--as something independent of and much more important than the
reality of Women. It came only very slowly into relation with that. That
girl on the Dymchurch beach was one of the first links, but she ceased
very speedily to be real--she joined the women of dreamland at last
altogether. She became a sort of legendary incarnation. I thought of
these dream women not only as something beautiful but as something
exceedingly kind and helpful. The girls and women I met belonged to a
different creation...."

Sir Richmond stopped abruptly and rowed a few long strokes.

Dr. Martineau sought information.

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

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

"Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to concentrate?
To group itself about a single figure, the sort of thing that Victorians
would have called an ideal?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There was always
a tremendous lot of variety in my mind. In fact the thing I liked least
in the real world was the way it was obsessed by the idea of pairing off
with one particular set and final person. I liked to dream of a blonde
goddess in her own Venusberg one day, and the next I would be off over
the mountains with an armed Brunhild."

"You had little thought of children?"

"As a young man?"

"Yes."

"None at all. I cannot recall a single philoprogenitive moment. These
dream women were all conceived of, and I was conceived of, as being
concerned in some tremendous enterprise--something quite beyond
domesticity. It kept us related--gave us dignity.... Certainly it wasn't
babies."

"All this is very interesting, very interesting, from the scientific
point of view. A PRIORI it is not what one might have expected.
Reasoning from the idea that all instincts and natural imaginations are
adapted to a biological end and seeing that sex is essentially a method
of procreation, one might reasonably expect a convergence, if not a
complete concentration, upon the idea of offspring. It is almost as
if there were other ends to be served. It is clear that Nature has
not worked this impulse out to any sight of its end. Has not perhaps
troubled to do so. The instinct of the male for the female isn't
primarily for offspring--not even in the most intelligent and farseeing
types. The desire just points to glowing satisfactions and illusions.
Quite equally I think the desire of the female for the male ignores its
end. Nature has set about this business in a CHEAP sort of way. She is
like some pushful advertising tradesman. She isn't frank with us; she
just humbugs us into what she wants with us. All very well in the early
Stone Age--when the poor dear things never realized that their mutual
endearments meant all the troubles and responsibilities of parentage.
But NOW--!"

He shook his head sideways and twirled the green umbrella like an
animated halo around his large broad-minded face.

Sir Richmond considered. "Desire has never been the chief incentive of
my relations with women. Never. So far as I can analyze the thing, it
has been a craving for a particular sort of life giving companionship."

"That I take it is Nature's device to keep the lovers together in the
interest of the more or less unpremeditated offspring."

"A poor device, if that is its end. It doesn't keep parents together;
more often it tears them apart. The wife or the mistress, so soon as
she is encumbered with children, becomes all too manifestly not the
companion goddess...."

Sir Richmond brooded over his sculls and thought.

"Throughout my life I have been an exceedingly busy man. I have done a
lot of scientific work and some of it has been very good work. And
very laborious work. I've travelled much. I've organized great business
developments. You might think that my time has been fairly well
filled without much philandering. And all the time, all the time, I've
been--about women--like a thirsty beast looking for water.... Always.
Always. All through my life."

Dr. Martineau waited through another silence.

"I was very grave about it at first. I married young. I married very
simply and purely. I was not one of those young men who sow a large crop
of wild oats. I was a fairly decent youth. It suddenly appeared to me
that a certain smiling and dainty girl could make herself into all the
goddesses of my dreams. I had but to win her and this miracle would
occur. Of course I forget now the exact things I thought and felt then,
but surely I had some such persuasion. Or why should I have married her?
My wife was seven years younger than myself,--a girl of twenty. She
was charming. She is charming. She is a wonderfully intelligent and
understanding woman. She has made a home for me--a delightful home. I am
one of those men who have no instinct for home making. I owe my home and
all the comfort and dignity of my life to her ability. I have no excuse
for any misbehaviour--so far as she is concerned. None at all. By
all the rules I should have been completely happy. But instead of my
marriage satisfying me, it presently released a storm of long-controlled
desires and imprisoned cravings. A voice within me became more and more
urgent. 'This will not do. This is not love. Where are your goddesses?
This is not love.'... And I was unfaithful to my wife within four years
of my marriage. It was a sudden overpowering impulse. But I suppose the
ground had been preparing for a long time. I forget now all the emotions
of that adventure. I suppose at the time it seemed beautiful and
wonderful.... I do not excuse myself. Still less do I condemn myself. I
put the facts before you. So it was."

"There were no children by your marriage?"

"Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive. We have had
three. My daughter was married two years ago. She is in America. One
little boy died when he was three. The other is in India, taking up the
Mardipore power scheme again now that he is out of the army.... No, it
is simply that I was hopelessly disappointed with everything that a
good woman and a decent marriage had to give me. Pure disappointment and
vexation. The anti-climax to an immense expectation built up throughout
an imaginative boyhood and youth and early manhood. I was shocked
and ashamed at my own disappointment. I thought it mean and base.
Nevertheless this orderly household into which I had placed my life,
these almost methodical connubialities...."

He broke off in mid-sentence.

Dr. Martineau shook his head disapprovingly.

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

"It was shockingly unfair. I have always realized that. I've done what
I could to make things up to her.... Heaven knows what counter
disappointments she has concealed.... But it is no good arguing about
rights and wrongs now. This is not an apology for my life. I am telling
you what happened.

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

"By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had satisfied
none but the most transitory desires and I had incurred a tremendous
obligation. That obligation didn't restrain me from making desperate
lunges at something vaguely beautiful that I felt was necessary to me;
but it did cramp and limit these lunges. So my story flops down into the
comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable, married man...I
was still driven by my dream of some extravagantly beautiful inspiration
called love and I sought it like an area sneak. Gods! What a story it
is when one brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and
sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world--somewhere. Hidden away
from me. I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear lost thing, now in the
corners of a smiling mouth, now in dark eyes beneath a black smoke of
hair, now in a slim form seen against the sky. Often I cared nothing for
the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding
from me...."

Sir Richmond's voice altered.

"I don't see what possible good it can do to talk over these things." He
began to row and rowed perhaps a score of strokes. Then he stopped
and the boat drove on with a whisper of water at the bow and over the
outstretched oar blades.

"What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried. "What a
fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She drives us into
indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even get the children which are
her only excuse for her mischief. See what a fantastic thing I am when
you take the machine to pieces! I have been a busy and responsible man
throughout my life. I have handled complicated public and industrial
affairs not unsuccessfully and discharged quite big obligations fully
and faithfully. And all the time, hidden away from the public eye,
my life has been laced by the thread of these--what can one call
them?--love adventures. How many? you ask. I don't know. Never have I
been a whole-hearted lover; never have I been able to leave love
alone.... Never has love left me alone.

"And as I am made," said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence, "AS I AM
MADE--I do not believe that I could go on without these affairs. I know
that you will be disposed to dispute that."

Dr. Martineau made a reassuring noise.

"These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally necessary. It is
only latterly that I have begun to perceive this. Women MAKE life
for me. Whatever they touch or see or desire becomes worth while
and otherwise it is not worth while. Whatever is lovely in my world,
whatever is delightful, has been so conveyed to me by some woman.
Without the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in the
world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much, valuing nothing."

He paused.

"You are, I think, abnormal," considered the doctor.

"Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a wasting
fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no kindness in
existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The world is a battlefield,
trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud, logical necessity and utter
desolation--with nothing whatever worth fighting for. Whatever justifies
effort, whatever restores energy is hidden in women...."

"An access of sex," said Dr. Martineau. "This is a phase...."

"It is how I am made," said Sir Richmond.

A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. "It isn't how
you are made. We are getting to something in all this. It is, I insist,
a mood of how you are made. A distinctive and indicative mood."

Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.

"I would go through it all again.... There are times when the love
of women seems the only real thing in the world to me. And always it
remains the most real thing. I do not know how far I may be a normal man
or how far I may not be, so to speak, abnormally male, but to me life
has very little personal significance and no value or power until it
has a woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say anything
that matters a woman must be present as a medium. I don't mean that it
has no significance mentally and logically; I mean that irrationally and
emotionally it has no significance. Works of art, for example, bore me,
literature bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores
me, unless I find in it some association with a woman's feeling. It
isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture is fine or a mountain
valley lovely, but that it doesn't matter a rap to me whether it is or
whether it isn't until there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if
you like to call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness
or pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes in and
breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even rest until a woman
makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I do without women and that is
work, joylessly but effectively, and latterly for some reason that it is
up to you to discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."

Section 4

"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous visit here.
It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago. We rowed down this same
backwater. I can see my companion's hand--she had very pretty hands with
rosy palms--trailing in the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly
under her sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected
from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was one of those
people who seem always to be happy and to radiate happiness.

"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a thoroughly bad
lot. She had about as much morality, in the narrower sense of the word,
as a monkey. And yet she stands out in my mind as one of the most honest
women I have ever met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of
that effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her candid
blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner.... But--no! She was
really honest.

"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet rushes
and crushed them in her hand. She adds a remembered brightness to this
afternoon.

"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman who was
here with me came nearest to being my friend. You know, what we call
virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap to any real friendliness with
a man. Until she gets to an age when virtue and fidelity are no longer
urgent practical concerns, a good woman, by the very definition of
feminine goodness, isn't truly herself. Over a vast extent of her being
she is RESERVED. She suppresses a vast amount of her being, holds back,
denies, hides. On the other hand, there is a frankness and honesty in
openly bad women arising out of the admitted fact that they are bad,
that they hide no treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious
and delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal. Intellectually
they seem to be more manly and vigorous because they are, as people say,
unsexed. Many old women, thoroughly respectable old women, have the
same quality. Because they have gone out of the personal sex business.
Haven't you found that?"

"I have never," said the doctor, "known what you call an openly bad
woman,--at least, at all intimately...."

Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion. "You have
avoided them!"

"They don't attract me."

"They repel you?"

"For me," said the doctor, "for any friendliness, a woman must be
modest.... My habits of thought are old-fashioned, I suppose, but
the mere suggestion about a woman that there were no barriers, no
reservation, that in any fashion she might more than meet me half
way..."

His facial expression completed his sentence.

"Now I wonder," whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a moment
before he carried the great research into the explorer's country.
"You are afraid of women?" he said, with a smile to mitigate the
impertinence.

"I respect them."

"An element of fear."

"Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like. Anyhow I
do not let myself go with them. I have never let myself go."

"You lose something. You lose a reality of insight."

There was a thoughtful interval.

"Having found so excellent a friend," said the doctor, "why did you ever
part from her?"

Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau's
face remained slantingly interrogative. He had found the effective
counterattack and he meant to press it. "I was jealous of her," Sir
Richmond admitted. "I couldn't stand that side of it."

Section 5

After a meditative silence the doctor became briskly professional again.

"You care for your wife," he said. "You care very much for your wife.
She is, as you say, your great obligation and you are a man to respect
obligations. I grasp that. Then you tell me of these women who have come
and gone.... About them too you are perfectly frank... There remains
someone else." Sir Richmond stared at his physician.

"Well," he said and laughed. "I didn't pretend to have made my
autobiography anything more than a sketch."

"No, but there is a special person, the current person."

"I haven't dilated on my present situation, I admit."

"From some little things that have dropped from you, I should say there
is a child."

"That," said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, "is a good guess."

"Not older than three."

"Two years and a half."

"You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated. At any rate,
you can't go to her. That leaves you at loose ends, because for some
time, for two or three years at least, you have ceased to be--how
shall I put it?--an emotional wanderer."

"I begin to respect your psychoanalysis."

"Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine
companionship for weary men. I guess she is a very jolly companion to be
with, amusing, restful--interesting."

"H'm," said Sir Richmond. "I think that is a fair description. When she
cares, that is. When she is in good form."

"Which she isn't at present," hazarded the doctor. He exploded a mine of
long-pent exasperation.

"She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever known.
Health is a woman's primary duty. But she is incapable of the most
elementary precautions. She is maddeningly receptive to every infection.
At the present moment, when I am ill, when I am in urgent need of help
and happiness, she has let that wretched child get measles and
she herself won't let me go near her because she has got something
disfiguring, something nobody else could ever have or think of having,
called CARBUNCLE. Carbuncle!"

"It is very painful," said Dr. Martineau. "No doubt it is," said Sir
Richmond.

"No doubt it is." His voice grew bitter. He spoke with deliberation. "A
perfectly aimless, useless illness,--and as painful as it CAN be."

He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously. And indeed he had slammed
a door. The doctor realized that for the present there was no more
self-dissection to be got from Sir Richmond.

For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up to the
foaming weir to the left of the lock by an occasional stroke. Now with
a general air of departure he swung the boat round and began to row down
stream towards the bridge and the Radiant Hotel.

"Time we had tea," he said.

Section 6

After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the lawn,
brooding darkly--apparently over the crime of the carbuncle. The doctor
went to his room, ostensibly to write a couple of letters and put on
a dinner jacket, but really to make a few notes of the afternoon's
conversation and meditate over his impressions while they were fresh.

His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he sank...
A number of very discrepant things were busy in his mind. He had
experienced a disconcerting personal attack. There was a whirl of active
resentment in the confusion.

"Apologetics of a rake," he tried presently.

"A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing. Every third
manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some such undertow
of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an imaginative laxity,
the temptations of the trip to London--weakness masquerading as a
psychological necessity. The Lady of the Carbuncle seems to have got
rather a hold upon him. She has kept him in order for three or four
years."

The doctor scrutinized his own remarks with a judicious expression.

"I am not being fair. He ruffled me. Even if it is true, as I said, that
every third manufacturer from the midlands is in much the same case as
he is, that does not dismiss the case. It makes it a more important
one, much more important: it makes it a type case with the exceptional
quality of being self-expressive. Almost too selfexpressive.

"Sir Richmond does, after all, make out a sort of case for himself....

"A valid case?"

The doctor sat deep in his chair, frowning judicially with the fingers
of one hand apposed to the fingers of the other. "He makes me bristle
because all his life and ideas challenge my way of living. But if I
eliminate the personal element?"

He pulled a sheet of note-paper towards him and began to jot down notes
with a silver-cased pencil. Soon he discontinued writing and sat tapping
his pencil-case on the table. "The amazing selfishness of his attitude!
I do not think that once--not once--has he judged any woman except as
a contributor to his energy and peace of mind.... Except in the case of
his wife....

"For her his habit of respect was formed before his ideas developed....

"That I think explains HER....

"What was his phrase about the unfortunate young woman with the
carbuncle?... 'Totally Useless and unnecessary illness,' was it?...

"Now has a man any right by any standards to use women as this man has
used them?

"By any standards?"

The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the corners of his
mouth drawn in.

For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing an
increasing part in the good doctor's life. He was writing this book of
his, writing it very deliberately and laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A
NEW AGE, but much more was he dreaming and thinking about this book.
Its publication was to mark an epoch in human thought and human affairs
generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment in the
doctor's own little world. It was to bring home to people some various
aspects of one very startling proposition: that human society had
arrived at a phase when the complete restatement of its fundamental
ideas had become urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate,
partial adjustments to two centuries of changing conditions had to give
place to a rapid reconstruction of new fundamental ideas. And it was
a fact of great value in the drama of these secret dreams that the
directive force towards this fundamentally reconstructed world should be
the pen of an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected
of any great excesses of enterprise.

The written portions of this book were already in a highly polished
state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal with a smooth
urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the thoughts of one intelligent
being could possibly be shocking to another. Upon this the doctor was
very insistent. Conduct, he held, could never be sufficiently discreet,
thought could never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat
a law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a natural law.
That the social well-being demands. But as a scientific man, in one's
stated thoughts and in public discussion, the case was altogether
different. There was no offence in any possible hypothesis or in the
contemplation of any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was
bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and spirit of the
game, but if one was not playing that game then there was no reason why
one should not contemplate the completest reversal of all its methods
and the alteration and abandonment of every rule. Correctness of
conduct, the doctor held, was an imperative concomitant of all really
free thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things that
must be divorced absolutely from revolutionary conduct. It was to the
neglect of these obvious principles, as the doctor considered them, that
the general muddle in contemporary marital affairs was very largely due.
We left divorce-law revision to exposed adulterers and marriage reform
to hot adolescents and craving spinsters driven by the furies
within them to assertions that established nothing and to practical
demonstrations that only left everybody thoroughly uncomfortable. Far
better to leave all these matters to calm, patient men in easy chairs,
weighing typical cases impartially, ready to condone, indisposed to
envy.

In return for which restraint on the part of the eager and adventurous,
the calm patient man was prepared in his thoughts to fly high and
go far. Without giving any guarantee, of course, that he might not
ultimately return to the comfortable point of inaction from which he
started.

In Sir Richmond, Dr. Martineau found the most interesting and
encouraging confirmation of the fundamental idea of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A
NEW AGE, the immediate need of new criteria of conduct altogether. Here
was a man whose life was evidently ruled by standards that were at once
very high and very generous. He was overworking himself to the pitch
of extreme distress and apparently he was doing this for ends that
were essentially unselfish. Manifestly there were many things that an
ordinary industrial or political magnate would do that Sir Richmond
would not dream of doing, and a number of things that such a man would
not feel called upon to do that he would regard as imperative duties.
And mixed up with so much fine intention and fine conduct was this
disreputable streak of intrigue and this extraordinary claim that such
misconduct was necessary to continued vigour of action.

"To energy of thought it is not necessary," said Dr. Martineau, and
considered for a time. "Yet--certainly--I am not a man of action. I
admit it. I make few decisions."

The chapters of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE dealing with women were
still undrafted, but they had already greatly exercised the doctor's
mind. He found now that the case of Sir Richmond had stirred his
imagination. He sat with his hands apposed, his head on one side, and
an expression of great intellectual contentment on his face while these
emancipated ideas gave a sort of gala performance in his mind.

The good doctor did not dislike women, he had always guarded himself
very carefully against misogyny, but he was very strongly disposed to
regard them as much less necessary in the existing scheme of things than
was generally assumed. Women, he conceded, had laid the foundations of
social life. Through their contrivances and sacrifices and patience the
fierce and lonely patriarchal family-herd of a male and his women
and off spring had grown into the clan and tribe; the woven tissue of
related families that constitute the human comity had been woven by the
subtle, persistent protection of sons and daughters by their mothers
against the intolerant, jealous, possessive Old Man. But that was a
thing, of the remote past. Little was left of those ancient struggles
now but a few infantile dreams and nightmares. The greater human
community, human society, was made for good. And being made, it had
taken over the ancient tasks of the woman, one by one, until now in its
modern forms it cherished more sedulously than she did, it educated, it
housed and comforted, it clothed and served and nursed, leaving the wife
privileged, honoured, protected, for the sake of tasks she no longer did
and of a burthen she no longer bore. "Progress has TRIVIALIZED women,"
said the doctor, and made a note of the word for later consideration.

"And woman has trivialized civilization," the doctor tried.

"She has retained her effect of being central, she still makes the
social atmosphere, she raises men's instinctive hopes of help and
direction. Except," the doctor stipulated, "for a few highly developed
modern types, most men found the sense of achieving her a necessary
condition for sustained exertion. And there is no direction in her any
more.

"She spends," said the doctor, "she just spends. She spends excitingly
and competitively for her own pride and glory, she drives all the energy
of men over the weirs of gain....

"What are we to do with the creature?" whispered the doctor.

Apart from the procreative necessity, was woman an unavoidable evil? The
doctor's untrammelled thoughts began to climb high, spin, nose dive and
loop the loop. Nowadays we took a proper care of the young, we had no
need for high birth rates, quite a small proportion of women with a gift
in that direction could supply all the offspring that the world wanted.
Given the power of determining sex that science was slowly winning
today, and why should we have so many women about? A drastic elimination
of the creatures would be quite practicable. A fantastic world to a
vulgar imagination, no doubt, but to a calmly reasonable mind by no
means fantastic. But this was where the case of Sir Richmond became
so interesting. Was it really true that the companionship of women was
necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it the fact that the
drive of life towards action, as distinguished from contemplation, arose
out of sex and needed to be refreshed by the reiteration of that motive?
It was a plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor's ideas
of natural selection and of the conditions of a survival that have made
us what we are. It was in tune with the Freudian analyses.

"SEX NOT ONLY A RENEWAL OF LIFE IN THE SPECIES," noted the doctor's
silver pencil; "SEX MAY BE ALSO A RENEWAL OF ENERGY IN THE INDIVIDUAL."

After some musing he crossed out "sex" and wrote above it "sexual love."

"That is practically what he claims," Dr. Martineau said. "In which
case we want the completest revision of all our standards of sexual
obligation. We want a new system of restrictions and imperatives
altogether."

It was a fixed idea of the doctor's that women were quite incapable of
producing ideas in the same way that men do, but he believed that with
suitable encouragement they could be induced to respond quite generously
to such ideas. Suppose therefore we really educated the imaginations of
women; suppose we turned their indubitable capacity for service towards
social and political creativeness, not in order to make them the rivals
of men in these fields, but their moral and actual helpers. "A man of
this sort wants a mistress-mother," said the doctor. "He wants a sort of
woman who cares more for him and his work and honour than she does for
child or home or clothes or personal pride."

"But are there such women? Can there be such a woman?"

"His work needs to be very fine to deserve her help. But admitting its
fineness?...

"The alternative seems to be to teach the sexes to get along without
each other."

"A neutralized world. A separated world. How we should jostle in the
streets! But the early Christians have tried it already. The thing is
impossible."

"Very well, then, we have to make women more responsible again. In a
new capacity. We have to educate them far more seriously as sources of
energy--as guardians and helpers of men. And we have to suppress them
far more rigorously as tempters and dissipaters. Instead of mothering
babies they have to mother the race...."

A vision of women made responsible floated before his eyes.

"Is that man working better since you got hold of him? If not, why not?"

"Or again,--Jane Smith was charged with neglecting her lover to the
common danger.... The inspector said the man was in a pitiful state,
morally quite uncombed and infested with vulgar, showy ideas...."

The doctor laughed, telescoped his pencil and stood up.

Section 7

It became evident after dinner that Sir Richmond also had been thinking
over the afternoon's conversation.

He and Dr. Martineau sat in wide-armed cane chairs on the lawn with a
wickerwork table bearing coffee cups and little glasses between them. A
few other diners chatted and whispered about similar tables but not too
close to our talkers to disturb them; the dining room behind them had
cleared its tables and depressed its illumination. The moon, in its
first quarter, hung above the sunset, sank after twilight, shone
brighter and brighter among the western trees, and presently had gone,
leaving the sky to an increasing multitude of stars. The Maidenhead
river wearing its dusky blue draperies and its jewels of light had
recovered all the magic Sir Richmond had stripped from it in the
afternoon. The grave arches of the bridge, made complete circles by the
reflexion of the water, sustained, as if by some unifying and justifying
reason, the erratic flat flashes and streaks and glares of traffic that
fretted to and fro overhead. A voice sang intermittently and a banjo
tinkled, but remotely enough to be indistinct and agreeable.

"After all," Sir Richmond began abruptly, "the search for some sort of
sexual modus vivendi is only a means to an end. One does not want to
live for sex but only through sex. The main thing in my life has always
been my work. This afternoon, under the Maidenhead influence, I talked
too much of sex. I babbled. Of things one doesn't usually..."

"It was very illuminating," said the doctor.

"No doubt. But a temporary phase. It is the defective bearing talks....
Just now--I happen to be irritated."

The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor's face.

"The work is the thing," said Sir Richmond. "So long as one can keep
one's grip on it."

"What," said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and sending wreaths
of smoke up towards the star-dusted zenith, "what is your idea of your
work? I mean, how do you see it in relation to yourself--and things
generally?"

"Put in the most general terms?"

"Put in the most general terms."

"I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It is hard to
put something one is always thinking about in general terms or to think
of it as a whole.... Now.... Fuel?...

"I suppose it was my father's business interests that pushed me towards
specialization in fuel. He wanted me to have a thoroughly scientific
training in days when a scientific training was less easy to get for a
boy than it is today. And much more inspiring when you got it. My mind
was framed, so to speak, in geology and astronomical physics. I grew up
to think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in history
and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman empire. I don't know
what your pocket map of the universe is, the map, I mean, by which you
judge all sorts of other general ideas. To me this planet is a little
ball of oxides and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface.
And we, the minutest particles in that tarnish. Who can nevertheless, in
some unaccountable way, take in the idea of this universe as one whole,
who begin to dream of taking control of it."

"That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view. I
suppose I have much the same general idea of the world. On rather more
psychological lines."

"We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something that is
only just beginning to be aware of what it is--and what it might be."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "Good."

He went on eagerly. "That is precisely how I see it. You and I are just
particles in the tarnish, as you call it, who are becoming dimly awake
to what we are, to what we have in common. Only a very few of us have
got as far even as this. These others here, for example...."

He indicated the rest of Maidenhead by a movement.

"Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy solicitudes fill
them up. They haven't begun to get out of themselves."

"We, I suppose, have," doubted Sir Richmond.

"We have."

The doctor had no doubt. He lay back in his chair, with his hands behind
his head and his smoke ascending vertically to heaven. With the greatest
contentment he began quoting himself. "This getting out of one's
individuality--this conscious getting out of one's individuality--is one
of the most important and interesting aspects of the psychology of
the new age that is now dawning. As compared with any previous age.
Unconsciously, of course, every true artist, every philosopher, every
scientific investigator, so far as his art or thought went, has always
got out of himself,--has forgotten his personal interests and become Man
thinking for the whole race. And intimations of the same thing have been
at the heart of most religions. But now people are beginning to get
this detachment without any distinctively religious feeling or any
distinctive aesthetic or intellectual impulse, as if it were a plain
matter of fact. Plain matter of fact, that we are only incidentally
ourselves. That really each one of us is also the whole species, is
really indeed all life."

"A part of it."

"An integral part-as sight is part of a man... with no absolute
separation from all the rest--no more than a separation of the
imagination. The whole so far as his distinctive quality goes. I do not
know how this takes shape in your mind, Sir Richmond, but to me this
idea of actually being life itself upon the world, a special phase of it
dependent upon and connected with all other phases, and of being one
of a small but growing number of people who apprehend that, and want to
live in the spirit of that, is quite central. It is my fundamental idea.
We,--this small but growing minority--constitute that part of life which
knows and wills and tries to rule its destiny. This new realization, the
new psychology arising out of it is a fact of supreme importance in the
history of life. It is like the appearance of self-consciousness in some
creature that has not hitherto had self-consciousness. And so far as we
are concerned, we are the true kingship of the world. Necessarily. We
who know, are the true king....I wonder how this appeals to you. It
is stuff I have thought out very slowly and carefully and written and
approved. It is the very core of my life.... And yet when one comes
to say these things to someone else, face to face.... It is much more
difficult to say than to write."

Sir Richmond noted how the doctor's chair creaked as he rolled to and
fro with the uneasiness of these intimate utterances.

"I agree," said Sir Richmond presently. "One DOES think in this fashion.
Something in this fashion. What one calls one's work does belong to
something much bigger than ourselves.

"Something much bigger," he expanded.

"Which something we become," the doctor urged, "in so far as our work
takes hold of us."

Sir Richmond made no answer to this for a little while. "Of course we
trail a certain egotism into our work," he said.

"Could we do otherwise? But it has ceased to be purely egotism. It is
no longer, 'I am I' but 'I am part.'... One wants to be an honourable
part."

"You think of man upon his planet," the doctor pursued. "I think of
life rather as a mind that tries itself over in millions and millions of
trials. But it works out to the same thing."

"I think in terms of fuel," said Sir Richmond.

He was still debating the doctor's generalization. "I suppose it would
be true to say that I think of myself as mankind on his planet, with
very considerable possibilities and with only a limited amount of fuel
at his disposal to achieve them. Yes.... I agree that I think in that
way.... I have not thought much before of the way in which I think about
things--but I agree that it is in that way. Whatever enterprises mankind
attempts are limited by the sum total of that store of fuel upon the
planet. That is very much in my mind. Besides that he has nothing but
his annual allowance of energy from the sun."

"I thought that presently we were to get unlimited energy from atoms,"
said the doctor.

"I don't believe in that as a thing immediately practicable. No doubt
getting a supply of energy from atoms is a theoretical possibility,
just as flying was in the time of Daedalus; probably there were actual
attempts at some sort of glider in ancient Crete. But before we get
to the actual utilization of atomic energy there will be ten thousand
difficult corners to turn; we may have to wait three or four thousand
years for it. We cannot count on it. We haven't it in hand. There may be
some impasse. All we have surely is coal and oil,--there is no surplus
of wood now--only an annual growth. And water-power is income also,
doled out day by day. We cannot anticipate it. Coal and oil are our only
capital. They are all we have for great important efforts. They are a
gift to mankind to use to some supreme end or to waste in trivialities.
Coal is the key to metallurgy and oil to transit. When they are done
we shall either have built up such a fabric of apparatus, knowledge and
social organization that we shall be able to manage without them--or
we shall have travelled a long way down the slopes of waste towards
extinction.... To-day, in getting, in distribution, in use we
waste enormously....As we sit here all the world is wasting fuel
fantastically."

"Just as mentally--educationally we waste," the doctor interjected.

"And my job is to stop what I can of that waste, to do what I can to
organize, first of all sane fuel getting and then sane fuel using. And
that second proposition carries us far. Into the whole use we are making
of life.

"First things first," said Sir Richmond. If we set about getting fuel
sanely, if we do it as the deliberate, co-operative act of the whole
species, then it follows that we shall look very closely into the use
that is being made of it. When all the fuel getting is brought into one
view as a common interest, then it follows that all the fuel burning
will be brought into one view. At present we are getting fuel in a kind
of scramble with no general aim. We waste and lose almost as much as we
get. And of what we get, the waste is idiotic.

"I won't trouble you," said Sir Richmond, "with any long discourse on
the ways of getting fuel in this country. But land as you know is owned
in patches and stretches that were determined in the first place chiefly
by agricultural necessities. When it was divided up among its present
owners nobody was thinking about the minerals beneath. But the lawyers
settled long ago that the landowner owned his land right down to the
centre of the earth. So we have the superficial landlord as coal owner
trying to work his coal according to the superficial divisions, quite
irrespective of the lie of the coal underneath. Each man goes for the
coal under his own land in his own fashion. You get three shafts where
one would suffice and none of them in the best possible place. You get
the coal coming out of this point when it would be far more convenient
to bring it out at that--miles away. You get boundary walls of coal
between the estates, abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each
coal owner sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you
know of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over the
country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get it into
the silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful, airpoisoning,
fog-creating fireplace.

"And this stuff," said Sir Richmond, bringing his hand down so smartly
on the table that the startled coffee cups cried out upon the tray; "was
given to men to give them power over metals, to get knowledge with, to
get more power with."

"The oil story, I suppose, is as bad."

"The oil story is worse....

"There is a sort of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce parenthesis,
"that the supplies of oil are inexhaustible--that you can muddle about
with oil anyhow.... Optimism of knaves and imbeciles.... They don't want
to be pulled up by any sane considerations...."

For some moments he kept silence--as if in unspeakable commination.

"Here I am with some clearness of vision--my only gift; not very clever,
with a natural bad temper, and a strong sexual bias, doing what I can
to get a broader handling of the fuel question--as a common interest
for all mankind. And I find myself up against a lot of men, subtle men,
sharp men, obstinate men, prejudiced men, able to get round me, able to
get over me, able to blockade me.... Clever men--yes, and all of them
ultimately damned--oh! utterly damned--fools. Coal owners who think only
of themselves, solicitors who think backwards, politicians who think
like a game of cat's-cradle, not a gleam of generosity not a gleam."

"What particularly are you working for?" asked the doctor.

"I want to get the whole business of the world's fuel discussed and
reported upon as one affair so that some day it may be handled as one
affair in the general interest."

"The world, did you say? You meant the empire?"

"No, the world. It is all one system now. You can't work it in bits. I
want to call in foreign representatives from the beginning."

"Advisory--consultative?"

"No. With powers. These things interlock now internationally both
through labour and finance. The sooner we scrap this nonsense about an
autonomous British Empire complete in itself, contra mundum, the better
for us. A world control is fifty years overdue. Hence these disorders."

"Still--it's rather a difficult proposition, as things are."

"Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond in the tone
of one who swears. "Don't I know that perhaps it's impossible! But it's
the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And
everybody says, difficult, difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try.
And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another
says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every
decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares? Along this line of
comprehensive scientific control the world has to go or it will
retrogress, it will muddle and rot...."

"I agree," said Dr. Martineau.

"So I want a report to admit that distinctly. I want it to go
further than that. I want to get the beginnings, the germ, of a world
administration. I want to set up a permanent world commission of
scientific men and economists--with powers, just as considerable powers
as I can give them--they'll be feeble powers at the best--but still some
sort of SAY in the whole fuel supply of the world. A say--that may grow
at last to a control. A right to collect reports and receive
accounts for example, to begin with. And then the right to make
recommendations.... You see?... No, the international part is not the
most difficult part of it. But my beastly owners and their beastly
lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of what they call their freedom of
action. And my labour men, because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself,
sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at
and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a world
control on scientific lines even less than the owners. They try to think
that fuel production can carry an unlimited wages bill and the owners
try to think that it can pay unlimited profits, and when I say; 'This
business is something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it's a
service and a common interest,' they stare at me--" Sir Richmond was
at a loss for an image. "Like a committee in a thieves' kitchen when
someone has casually mentioned the law."

"But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?"

"It can be done. If I can stick it out."

"But with the whole Committee against you!"

"The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn't against me. Every
individual is...."

Sir Richmond found it difficult to express. "The psychology of my
Committee ought to interest you.... It is probably a fair sample of the
way all sorts of things are going nowadays. It's curious.... There is
not a man on that Committee who is quite comfortable within himself
about the particular individual end he is there to serve. It's there I
get them. They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately I admit,
but they are bitter and obstinate because they pursue them against an
internal opposition--which is on my side. They are terrified to think,
if once they stopped fighting me, how far they might not have to go with
me."

"A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very closely with
my own ideas."

"A world conscience? World conscience? I don't know. But I do know that
there is this drive in nearly every member of the Committee, some drive
anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is the same drive that drives me.
But I am the most driven. It has turned me round. It hasn't turned them.
I go East and they go West. And they don't want to be turned round.
Tremendously, they don't."

"Creative undertow," said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were.
"An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology of a new age
strengthened by education--it may play a directive part."

"They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this creative
undertow--if you like to call it that--we do get along. I am leader or
whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of a bolting flock....I believe
they will report for a permanent world commission; I believe I have got
them up to that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League
of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this League of
Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-tracking arrangement for
all sorts of important world issues. And they will find they have to
report for some sort of control. But there again they will shy. They
will report for it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down
again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They will alter
the composition of the Committee so as to make it innocuous."

"How?"

"Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far as Britain
is concerned with muck of the colonial politician type and tame labour
representatives, balance with shady new adventurer millionaires, get in
still shadier stuff from abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame
experts after their own hearts,--experts who will make merely advisory
reports, which will not be published...."

"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR
Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?"

"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing
right--indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing right--and still
leave things just exactly what they were before. And as I suffer under
the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to
shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee.... But there is a
conscience there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee."

He turned appealingly to the doctor. "Why should I have to be the
conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this exhausting
inhuman job?.... In their hearts these others know.... Only they won't
know.... Why should it fall on me?"

"You have to go through with it," said Dr. Martineau.

"I have to go through with it, but it's a hell of utterly inglorious
squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting the same fight within
themselves that they fight with me. They know exactly where I am, that I
too am doing my job against internal friction. The one thing before all
others that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high
horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of special moral
superiority to men who are on the whole as good men as I am or better.
That shows all the time. You see the sort of man I am. I've a broad
streak of personal vanity. I fag easily. I'm short-tempered. I've other
things, as you perceive. When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore,
I get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable sense of
ill usage. Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be working with me
steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly witty. He gets a laugh round
the table at my expense. Young Dent, the more intelligent of the labour
men, reads me a lecture in committee manners. Old Cassidy sees HIS
opening and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me
spluttering self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down, and as my
stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves
to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will
happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am
just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a
great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt
in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences.
And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not
bother any more about what is to happen to mankind in the long run....
Do you begin to realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin,
that that Committee is for me?"

"You have to go through with it," Dr. Martineau repeated.

"I have. If I can. But I warn you I have been near breaking point. And
if I tumble off the high horse, if I can't keep going regularly there
to ride the moral high horse, that Committee will slump into utter
scoundrelism. It will turn out a long, inconsistent, botched, unreadable
report that will back up all sorts of humbugging bargains and sham
settlements. It will contain some half-baked scheme to pacify the miners
at the expense of the general welfare. It won't even succeed in doing
that. But in the general confusion old Cassidy will get away with
a series of hauls that may run into millions. Which will last his
time--damn him! And that is where we are.... Oh! I know! I know!.... I
must do this job. I don't need any telling that my life will be nothing
and mean nothing unless I bring this thing through....

"But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!"

The doctor watched his friend's resentful black silhouette against the
lights on the steely river, and said nothing for awhile.

"Why did I ever undertake to play it?" Sir Richmond appealed. "Why has
it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am, why am I not a poor
thing altogether?"

Section 8

"I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the doctor after an
interval.

"I am INTOLERABLE to myself."

"And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as you do. You
want help; you want reassurance. And you feel they can give it."

"I wonder if it has been quite like that," Sir Richmond reflected.

By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the mother complex.
"You want help and reassurance as a child does," he said. "Women and
women alone seem capable of giving that, of telling you that you are
surely right, that notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that
even when you are wrong it doesn't so much matter, you are still in
spirit right. They can show their belief in you as no man can. With all
their being they can do that."

"Yes, I suppose they could."

"They can. You have said already that women are necessary to make things
real for you."

"Not my work," said Sir Richmond. "I admit that it might be like that,
but it isn't like that. It has not worked out like that. The two drives
go on side by side in me. They have no logical connexion. All I can say
is that for me, with my bifid temperament, one makes a rest from the
other, and is so far refreshment and a renewal of energy. But I do not
find women coming into my work in any effectual way."

The doctor reflected further. "I suppose," he began and stopped short.

He heard Sir Richmond move in his chair, creaking an interrogation.

"You have never," said the doctor, "turned to the idea of God?"

Sir Richmond grunted and made no other answer for the better part of a
minute.

As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling star
streaked the deep blue above them.

"I can't believe in a God," said Sir Richmond.

"Something after the fashion of a God," said the doctor insidiously.

"No," said Sir Richmond. "Nothing that reassures."

"But this loneliness, this craving for companionship...."

"We have all been through that," said Sir Richmond. "We have all in our
time lain very still in the darkness with our souls crying out for the
fellowship of God, demanding some sign, some personal response. The
faintest feeling of assurance would have satisfied us."

"And there has never been a response?"

"Have YOU ever had a response?"

"Once I seemed to have a feeling of exaltation and security."

"Well?"

"Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been reading
William James on religious experiences and I was thinking very much of
Conversion. I tried to experience Conversion...."

"Yes?"

"It faded."

"It always fades," said Sir Richmond with anger in his voice. "I wonder
how many people there are nowadays who have passed through this last
experience of ineffectual invocation, this appeal to the fading shadow
of a vanished God. In the night. In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak
to me! Does he answer? In the silence you hear the little blood vessels
whisper in your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on the darkness...."

Dr. Martineau sat without a word.

"I can believe that over all things Righteousness rules. I can believe
that. But Righteousness is not friendliness nor mercy nor comfort nor
any such dear and intimate things. This cuddling up to Righteousness! It
is a dream, a delusion and a phase. I've tried all that long ago. I've
given it up long ago. I've grown out of it. Men do--after forty. Our
souls were made in the squatting-place of the submen of ancient times.
They are made out of primitive needs and they die before our bodies as
those needs are satisfied. Only young people have souls, complete. The
need for a personal God, feared but reassuring, is a youth's need. I no
longer fear the Old Man nor want to propitiate the Old Man nor believe
he matters any more. I'm a bit of an Old Man myself I discover. Yes. But
the other thing still remains."

"The Great Mother of the Gods," said Dr. Martineau--still clinging to
his theories.

"The need of the woman," said Sir Richmond. "I want mating because it is
my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I am a social animal and I
want it from another social animal. Not from any God--any inconceivable
God. Who fades and disappears. No....

"Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know. Perhaps it
lasts as long as life does. How can I tell?"

He was silent for a little while. Then his voice sounded in the night,
as if he spoke to himself. "But as for the God of All Things consoling
and helping! Imagine it! That up there--having fellowship with me! I
would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking
hands with those stars."




CHAPTER THE FIFTH

IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES


Section 1

A gust of confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually
reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil. At breakfast
next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and
Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite
impossible excess of intimacy. They discussed the weather, which seemed
to be settling down to the utmost serenity of which the English spring
is capable, they talked of Sir Richmond's coming car and of the possible
routes before them. Sir Richmond produced the Michelin maps which he
had taken out of the pockets of the little Charmeuse. The Bath Road lay
before them, he explained, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough,
Silbury Hill which overhangs Avebury. Both travellers discovered a
common excitement at the mention of Avebury and Silbury Hill. Both took
an intelligent interest in archaeology. Both had been greatly stimulated
by the recent work of Elliot Smith and Rivers upon what was then known
as the Heliolithic culture. It had revived their interest in Avebury and
Stonehenge. The doctor moreover had been reading Hippisley Cox's GREEN
ROADS OF ENGLAND.

Neither gentleman had ever seen Avebury, but Dr. Martineau had once
visited Stonehenge.

"Avebury is much the oldest," said the doctor. "They must have made
Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C. It may be five thousand years old
or even more. It is the most important historical relic in the British
Isles. And the most neglected."

They exchanged archaeological facts. The secret places of the heart
rested until the afternoon.

Then Sir Richmond saw fit to amplify his confessions in one particular.

Section 2

The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise as the
morning advanced. They had walked by the road to Marlow and had lunched
at a riverside inn, returning after a restful hour in an arbour on the
lawn of this place to tea at Maidenhead. It was as they returned that
Sir Richmond took up the thread of their overnight conversation again.

"In the night," he said, "I was thinking over the account I tried to
give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out of drawing."

"Facts?" asked the doctor.

"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the
proportions.... I don't know if I gave you the effect of something Don
Juanesque?..."

"Vulgar poem," said the doctor remarkably. "I discounted that."

"Vulgar!"

"Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a kitchen."

Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing that used to
be called a pet aversion.

"I don't want you to think that I run about after women in an habitual
and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt them in the interests
of my work and energy. Your questions had set me theorizing about
myself. And I did my best to improvise a scheme of motives yesterday.
It was, I perceive, a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My
nocturnal reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things
that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the wanderings of
desire have no single drive. All sorts of motives come in, high and low,
down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true
in it all was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue
phase falls naturally into these complications because they are more
attractive to his type and far easier and more refreshing to the mind,
at the outset, than anything else. And they do work a sort of recovery
in him, They send him back to his work refreshed--so far, that is, as
his work is concerned."

"At the OUTSET they are easier," said the doctor.

Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the outset counts.
The more tired one is the more readily one moves along the line of least
resistance....

"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of my work
goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it. What I said about
that was near the truth of things....

"But there is another set of motives altogether," Sir Richmond went on
with an air of having cleared the ground for his real business, "that I
didn't go into at all yesterday."

He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before you
realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much swayed by my
affections."

Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine self-reproach
in Sir Richmond's voice.

"I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them.
Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of
falling in love. Almost the opposite thing. They cry or they come some
mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something
distressingly little and human and suddenly I find they've GOT me. I'm
distressed. I'm filled with something between pity and an impulse of
responsibility. I become tender towards them. I am impelled to take care
of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure them, to make them stop
hurting at any cost. I don't see why it should be the weak and sickly
and seamy side of people that grips me most, but it is. I don't know why
it should be their failures that gives them power over me, but it is. I
told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just now. SHE'S
got me in that way; she's got me