The Secret Places of the Heart (10 page)

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

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

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

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

"You did not speak of her yesterday with any morbid excess of pity," the
doctor was constrained to remark.

"I abused her very probably. I forget exactly what I said...."

The doctor offered no assistance.

"But the reason why I abuse her is perfectly plain. I abuse her because
she distresses me by her misfortunes and instead of my getting anything
out of her, I go out to her. But I DO go out to her. All this time at
the back of my mind I am worrying about her. She has that gift of making
one feel for her. I am feeling that damned carbuncle almost as if it had
been my affair instead of hers.

"That carbuncle has made me suffer FRIGHTFULLY.... Why should I? It
isn't mine."

He regarded the doctor earnestly. The doctor controlled a strong desire
to laugh.

"I suppose the young lady—" he began.

"Oh! SHE puts in suffering all right. I've no doubt about that.

"I suppose," Sir Richmond went on, "now that I have told you so much
of this affair, I may as well tell you all. It is a sort of comedy, a
painful comedy, of irrelevant affections."

The doctor was prepared to be a good listener. Facts he would always
listen to; it was only when people told him their theories that he would
interrupt with his "Exactly."

"This young woman is a person of considerable genius. I don't know if
you have seen in the illustrated papers a peculiar sort of humorous
illustrations usually with a considerable amount of bite in them over
the name of Martin Leeds?

"Extremely amusing stuff."

"It is that Martin Leeds. I met her at the beginning of her career. She
talks almost as well as she draws. She amused me immensely. I'm not
the sort of man who waylays and besieges women and girls. I'm not the
pursuing type. But I perceived that in some odd way I attracted her
and I was neither wise enough nor generous enough not to let the thing
develop."

"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.

"I'd never had to do with an intellectually brilliant woman before. I
see now that the more imaginative force a woman has, the more likely she
is to get into a state of extreme self-abandonment with any male thing
upon which her imagination begins to crystallize. Before I came along
she'd mixed chiefly with a lot of young artists and students, all doing
nothing at all except talk about the things they were going to do. I
suppose I profited by the contrast, being older and with my hands full
of affairs. Perhaps something had happened that had made her recoil
towards my sort of thing. I don't know. But she just let herself go at
me."

"And you?"

"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before. It was her
wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't my contemporary
and as able as I was. As able to take care of herself. All sorts of
considerations that I should have shown to a sillier woman I never
dreamt of showing to her. I had never met anyone so mentally brilliant
before or so helpless and headlong. And so here we are on each other's
hands!"

"But the child?

"It happened to us. For four years now things have just happened to us.
All the time I have been overworking, first at explosives and now at
this fuel business. She too is full of her work.

"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with it. And
in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably fond of each other.
'Fond' is the word. But we are both too busy to look after either
ourselves or each other.

"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as if he
delivered a weighed and very important judgment.

"You see very much of each other?"

"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South Cornwall, and
we sometimes snatch a few days together, away somewhere in Surrey or up
the Thames or at such a place as Southend where one is lost in a crowd
of inconspicuous people. Then things go well—they usually go well at
the start—we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is creative,
she will light up a new place with flashes of humour, with a keenness of
appreciation...."

"But things do not always go well?"

"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man who measures
his words, "are apt to go wrong.... At the flat there is constant
trouble with the servants; they bully her. A woman is more entangled
with servants than a man. Women in that position seem to resent the work
and freedom of other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as
they would leave a man; they make trouble for her.... And when we have
had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in particular has gone
wrong—"

Sir Richmond stopped short.

"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor sounded.

"Almost always."

"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.

"It is difficult to describe.... The essential incompatibility of the
whole thing comes out."

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work anywhere. All she
wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on the other hand turns back to
the Fuel Commission...."

"Then any little thing makes trouble."

"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to the same
discussion; whether we ought really to go on together."

"It is you begin that?"

"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I am about.
She is as fond of me as I am of her."

"Fonder perhaps."

"I don't know. But she is—adhesive. Emotionally adhesive. All she wants
to do is just to settle down when I am there and go on with her work.
But then, you see, there is MY work."

"Exactly.... After all it seems to me that your great trouble is not
in yourselves but in social institutions. Which haven't yet fitted
themselves to people like you two. It is the sense of uncertainty makes
her, as you say, adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a
new age Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one—"

"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a little testily.

"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular situation, that it
is not the individuals to blame but the misfit of ideas and forms and
prejudices."

"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying
suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."

"But how?"

"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to the
peculiarities of our position.... She could be cleverer. Other women are
cleverer. Any other woman almost would be cleverer than she is."

"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is. She would
just be any other woman."

"Perhaps she would," said Sir Richmond darkly and desperately. "Perhaps
she would. Perhaps it would be better if she was."

Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.

"But here you see that it is that in my case, the fundamental
incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of
duty and work comes in. We cannot change social institutions in a year
or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case.
That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move
a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a
rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite
antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel—and everything to
do with fuel as a bore. It is an attack. We quarrel on that. It isn't as
though I found it so easy to stick to my work that I could disregard her
hostility. And I can't bear to part from her. I threaten it, distress
her excessively and then I am overcome by sympathy for her and I go back
to her.... In the ordinary course of things I should be with her now."

"If it were not for the carbuncle?"

"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me to see her
disfigured. She does not understand—" Sir Richmond was at a loss for a
phrase—"that it is not her good looks."

"She won't let you go to her?"

"It amounts to that.... And soon there will be all the trouble about
educating the girl. Whatever happens, she must have as good a chance
as—anyone...."

"Ah! That is worrying you too!"

"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier. It needs
constant tact and dexterity to fix things up. Neither of us have any. It
needs attention...."

Sir Richmond mused darkly.

Dr. Martineau thought aloud. "An incompetent delightful person with
Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of expression. She must
be attractive to many people. She could probably do without you. If once
you parted."

Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.

"You think I ought to part from her? On her account?"

"On her account. It might pain her. But once the thing was done—"

"I want to part. I believe I ought to part."

"Well?"

"But then my affection comes in."

"That extraordinary—TENDERNESS of yours?"

"I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"Anyone might get hold of her—if I let her down. She hasn't a tithe of
the ordinary coolheaded calculation of an average woman.... I've a duty
to her genius. I've got to take care of her."

To which the doctor made no reply.

"Nevertheless the idea of parting has been very much in my mind lately."

"Letting her go FREE?"

"You can put it in that way if you like."

"It might not be a fatal operation for either of you."

"And yet there are moods when parting is an intolerable idea. When one
is invaded by a flood of affection..... And old habits of association."

Dr. Martineau thought. Was that the right word,—affection? Perhaps it
was.

They had come out on the towing path close by the lock and they found
themselves threading their way through a little crowd of boating people
and lookers-on. For a time their conversation was broken. Sir Richmond
resumed it.

"But this is where we cease to be Man on his Planet and all the rest of
it. This is where the idea of a definite task, fanatically followed to
the exclusion of all minor considerations, breaks down. When the work
is good, when we are sure we are all right, then we may carry off things
with a high hand. But the work isn't always good, we aren't always
sure. We blunder, we make a muddle, we are fatigued. Then the
sacrificed affections come in as accusers. Then it is that we want to be
reassured."

"And then it is that Miss Martin Leeds—?"

"Doesn't," Sir Richmond snapped.

Came a long pause.

"And yet—It is extraordinarily difficult to think of parting from
Martin."

In the evening after dinner Dr. Martineau sought, rather unsuccessfully,
to go on with the analysis of Sir Richmond.

But Sir Richmond was evidently a creature of moods. Either he regretted
the extent of his confidences or the slight irrational irritation
that he felt at waiting for his car affected his attitude towards his
companion, or Dr. Martineau's tentatives were ill-chosen. At any rate he
would not rise to any conversational bait that the doctor could devise.
The doctor found this the more regrettable because it seemed to him that
there was much to be worked upon in this Martin Leeds affair. He was
inclined to think that she and Sir Richmond were unduly obsessed by the
idea that they had to stick together because of the child, because
of the look of the thing and so forth, and that really each might be
struggling against a very strong impulse indeed to break off the affair.
It seemed evident to the doctor that they jarred upon and annoyed each
other extremely. On the whole separating people appealed to a doctor's
mind more strongly than bringing them together. Accordingly he framed
his enquiries so as to make the revelation of a latent antipathy as easy
as possible.

He made several not very well-devised beginnings. At the fifth Sir
Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he said, "I can't
fiddle about any more with my motives to-day."

An awkward silence followed. On reflection Sir Richmond seemed to
realize that this sentence needed some apology. "I admit," he said,
"that this expedition has already been a wonderfully good thing for me.
These confessions have made me look into all sorts of things—squarely.
But—I'm not used to talking about myself or even thinking directly
about myself. What I say, I afterwards find disconcerting to recall.
I want to alter it. I can feel myself wallowing into a mess of
modifications and qualifications."