The Secret Places of the Heart (14 page)

"I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow," said Sir
Richmond. "These ladies were nearly missing it."

The thing took the doctor's breath away. For the moment he could say
nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An objection formulated
itself very slowly. "But that dicky," he whispered.

His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the completeness
of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had been a cathedral city; it
was essentially and purely that. The church at its best, in the full
tide of its mediaeval ascendancy, had called it into being. He was
making some extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the
buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss Grammont
was countering with equally unsatisfactory qualifications. "Our age
will leave the ruins of hotels," said Sir Richmond. "Railway arches and
hotels."

"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the Empire comes
nearest to it...."

As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant to walk
round and about Salisbury. He foresaw that walk with the utmost
clearness. In front and keeping just a little beyond the range of his
intervention, Sir Richmond would go with Miss Grammont; he himself and
Miss Seyffert would bring up the rear. "If I do," he muttered, "I'll be
damned!" an unusually strong expression for him.

"You said—?" asked Miss Seyffert.

"That I have some writing to do—before the post goes," said the doctor
brightly.

"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with ill-concealed
dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a fashion, not looking at Miss
Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.

"I'm afraid," said the doctor mulishly. "Impossible."

(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first to look
for shops," she said. "There's those things you want to buy, Belinda;
a fountain pen and the little books. We can all go together as far as
that. And while you are shopping, if you wouldn't mind getting one or
two things for me...."

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off
Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also clear to him that
he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert
drifting back alone to the hotel and eager to resume with him....

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He could think
over his notes....

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would
presently make to Sir Richmond about the unwarrantable, the absolutely
unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in
their common programme....

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing
as this frank-minded young woman from America. "Young woman" was how he
thought of her; she didn't correspond to anything so prim and restrained
and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though
he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl" with its
associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas
newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word
"boy." She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life,
as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a
distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no
particular tarnish or injury. He could talk with her as if he talked
with a man like himself—but with a zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first came as the
natural expression of a broad stream of alert thought; they were no mere
display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things
so many clever women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not
talking for effect at all, she was talking because she was tremendously
interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted
to find another person as possessed as she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way
through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the
cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-iron gate of a delightful
garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains,
daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they
came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old
houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some moments
surveying it.

"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir Richmond. "But
why, I wonder, did we build it?"

"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with her
half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp against the blue.
"I've been away for so long-over there-that I forget altogether. Why DID
we build it?"

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking
as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her mind had been
prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. "My friend,
the philosopher," he had said, "will not have it that we are really the
individuals we think we are. You must talk to him—he is a very curious
and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race,
he says, passing thoughts. We are—what does he call it?—Man on his
Planet, taking control of life."

"Man and woman," she had amended.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had failed
altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on the inside
instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss Grammont and Sir
Richmond found very great difficulty in recalling why they had built
Salisbury Cathedral.

"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond. "But the
impulse was losing its force."

She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly quizzical
expression.

But he had his reply ready.

"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were already very
clever engineers. What interested us here wasn't the old religion any
more. We wanted to exercise and display our power over stone. We made
it into reeds and branches. We squirted it up in all these spires and
pinnacles. The priest and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think
people have ever feared and worshipped in this—this artist's lark—as
they did in Stonehenge?"

"I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here," she said.

Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. "The spirit of the Gothic
cathedrals," he said, "is the spirit of the sky-scrapers. It is
architecture in a mood of flaming ambition. The Freemasons on the
building could hardly refrain from jeering at the little priest they had
left down below there, performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his
altar. He was just their excuse for doing it all."

"Sky-scrapers?" she conceded. "An early display of the sky-scraper
spirit.... You are doing your best to make me feel thoroughly at home."

"You are more at home here still than in that new country of ours
over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do begin to remember
building this cathedral and all the other cathedrals we built in
Europe.... It was the fun of building made us do it..."

"H'm," she said. "And my sky-scrapers?"

"Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most about America.
It's still large enough, mentally and materially, to build all sorts of
things.... Over here, the sites are frightfully crowded...."

"And what do you think we are building now? And what do you think you
are building over here?"

"What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up. I believe
it is time we began to build in earnest. For good...."

"But are we building anything at all?"

"A new world."

"Show it me," she said.

"We're still only at the foundations," said Sir Richmond. "Nothing shows
as yet."

"I wish I could believe they were foundations."

"But can you doubt we are scrapping the old?..."

It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so they
strolled to and fro round and about the west end and along the path
under the trees towards the river, exchanging their ideas very frankly
and freely about the things that had recently happened to the world and
what they thought they ought to be doing in it.

After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a corner of the
smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished hastily at the first dinner
gong and reappeared at the second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed
from tweedy pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but
definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their coiffure, a
silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of Miss Grammont's hair
and a necklace of the same colourings kept the peace between her jolly
sun-burnt cheek and her soft untanned neck. It was evident her recent
uniform had included a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had
revealed a plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr.
Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.

The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of the
steady continuity of Sir Richmond's duologue with Miss Grammont. Miss
Seyffert's methods were too discursive and exclamatory. She broke every
thread that appeared. The Old George at Salisbury is really old;
it shows it, and Miss Seyffert laced the entire evening with her
recognition of the fact. "Just look at that old beam!" she would cry
suddenly. "To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot
in America!"

Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she chose. After
the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy contentment had taken
possession of the younger lady. She sat deep in a basket chair and spoke
now and then. Miss Seyffert gave her impressions of France and Italy.
She talked of the cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.

Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her chair threw out
the statement that Italy was frightfully overpopulated. "In some parts
of Italy it is like mites on a cheese. Nobody seems to be living.
Everyone is too busy keeping alive."

"Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules," said Miss
Seyffert.

"Little children working like slaves," said Miss Grammont.

"And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the roadside. Who
ought to be getting wages—sufficient...."

"Begging—from foreigners—is just a sport in Italy," said Sir Richmond.
"It doesn't imply want. But I agree that a large part of Italy is
frightfully overpopulated. The whole world is. Don't you think so,
Martineau?"

"Well—yes—for its present social organization."

"For any social organization," said Sir Richmond.

"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added amazingly: "I'm out
for Birth Control all the time."

A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of sudden
distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty coffee cup.

"The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives," said Sir
Richmond. "Which amount to nothing. Which do not even represent
happiness. And which help to use up the resources, the fuel and surplus
energy of the world."

"I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives," Miss Grammont
reflected.

"Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are just vain
repetitions—imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions of one common life.
All that they feel has been felt, all that they do has been done
better before. Because they are crowded and hurried and underfed and
undereducated. And as for liking their lives, they need never have had
the chance."

"How many people are there in the world?" she asked abruptly.

"I don't know. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions perhaps."

"And in your world?"

"I'd have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At most. It would
be quite enough for this little planet, for a time, at any rate. Don't
you think so, doctor?"

"I don't know," said Dr. Martineau. "Oddly enough, I have never thought
about that question before. At least, not from this angle."

"But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million aristocrats?"
began Miss Grammont. "My native instinctive democracy—"

"Need not be outraged," said Sir Richmond. "Any two hundred and fifty
million would do, They'd be able to develop fully, all of them. As
things are, only a minority can do that. The rest never get a chance."

"That's what I always say," said Miss Seyffert.

"A New Age," said Dr. Martineau; "a New World. We may be coming to
such a stage, when population, as much as fuel, will be under a world
control. If one thing, why not the other? I admit that the movement of
thought is away from haphazard towards control—"

"I'm for control all the time," Miss Seyffert injected, following up her
previous success.

"I admit," the doctor began his broken sentence again with marked
patience, "that the movement of thought is away from haphazard towards
control—in things generally. But is the movement of events?"

"The eternal problem of man," said Sir Richmond. "Can our wills
prevail?"

There came a little pause.

Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert. "If YOU are," said
Belinda.

"I wish I could imagine your world," said Miss Grammont, rising, "of two
hundred and fifty millions of fully developed human beings with room
to live and breathe in and no need for wars. Will they live in palaces?
Will they all be healthy?... Machines will wait on them. No! I can't
imagine it. Perhaps I shall dream of it. My dreaming self may be
cleverer."

She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they stood hand
in hand, appreciatively....

"Well!" said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two Americans,
"This is a curious encounter."