The Secret Places of the Heart (15 page)

"That young woman has brains," said Sir Richmond, standing before the
fireplace. There was no doubt whatever which young woman he meant. But
Dr. Martineau grunted.

"I don't like the American type," the doctor pronounced judicially.

"I do," Sir Richmond countered.

The doctor thought for a moment or so. "You are committed to the project
of visiting Avebury?" he said.

"They ought to see Avebury," said Sir Richmond.

"H'm," said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts and
staring at the fire. "Birth Control! I NEVER did."

Sir Richmond smiled down on the top of the doctor's head and said
nothing.

"I think," said the doctor and paused. "I shall leave this Avebury
expedition to you."

"We can be back in the early afternoon," said Sir Richmond. "To give
them a chance of seeing the cathedral. The chapter house here is not one
to miss...."

"And then I suppose we shall go on?

"As you please," said Sir Richmond insincerely.

"I must confess that four people make the car at any rate seem
tremendously overpopulated. And to tell the truth, I do not find this
encounter so amusing as you seem to do.... I shall not be sorry when we
have waved good-bye to those young ladies, and resume our interrupted
conversation."

Sir Richmond considered something mulish in the doctor's averted face.

"I find Miss Grammont an extremely interesting—and stimulating human
being.

"Evidently."

The doctor sighed, stood up and found himself delivering one of the
sentences he had engendered during his solitary meditations in his room
before dinner. He surprised himself by the plainness of his speech. "Let
me be frank," he said, regarding Sir Richmond squarely. "Considering
the general situation of things and your position, I do not care very
greatly for the part of an accessory to what may easily develop, as you
know very well, into a very serious flirtation. An absurd, mischievous,
irrelevant flirtation. You may not like the word. You may pretend it is
a conversation, an ordinary intellectual conversation. That is not
the word. Simply that is not the word. You people eye one another....
Flirtation. I give the affair its proper name. That is all. Merely that.
When I think—But we will not discuss it now.... Good night.... Forgive
me if I put before you, rather bluntly, my particular point of view."

Sir Richmond found himself alone. With his eyebrows raised.

After twenty-four eventful hours our two students of human motives
found themselves together again by the fireplace in the Old George
smoking-room. They had resumed their overnight conversation, in a state
of considerable tension.

"If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said Sir
Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit it is, we can
easily hire a larger car in a place like this.

I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau. "I am not
coming on if these young women are."

"But if you consider it scandalous—and really, Martineau, really! as
one man to another, it does seem to me to be a bit pernickety of you, a
broad and original thinker as you are—"

"Thought is one matter. Rash, inconsiderate action quite another. And
above all, if I spend another day in or near the company of Miss Belinda
Seyffert I shall—I shall be extremely rude to her."

"But," said Sir Richmond and bit his lower lip and considered.

"We might drop Belinda," he suggested turning to his friend and speaking
in low, confidential tones. "She is quite a manageable person. Quite.
She could—for example—be left behind with the luggage and sent on by
train. I do not know if you realize how the land lies in that quarter.
It needs only a word to Miss Grammont."

There was no immediate reply. For a moment he had a wild hope that his
companion would agree, and then he perceived that the doctor's silence
meant only the preparation of an ultimatum.

"I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more than I do to
Miss Seyffert."

Sir Richmond said nothing.

"It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different angle if
I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert has asked me if you were a
married man."

"And of course you told her I was."

"On the second occasion."

Sir Richmond smiled again.

"Frankly," said the doctor, "this adventure is altogether uncongenial
to me. It is the sort of thing that has never happened in my life. This
highway coupling—"

"Don't you think," said Sir Richmond, "that you are attaching rather too
much—what shall I say—romantic?—flirtatious?—meaning to this affair?
I don't mind that after my rather lavish confessions you should
consider me a rather oversexed person, but isn't your attitude rather
unfair,—unjust, indeed, and almost insulting, to this Miss Grammont?
After all, she's a young lady of very good social position indeed.
She doesn't strike you—does she?—as an undignified or helpless human
being. Her manners suggest a person of considerable self-control. And
knowing less of me than you do, she probably regards me as almost as
safe as—a maiden aunt say. I'm twice her age. We are a party of four.
There are conventions, there are considerations.... Aren't you really,
my dear Martineau, overdoing all this side of this very pleasant little
enlargement of our interests."

"AM I?" said Dr. Martineau and brought a scrutinizing eye to bear on Sir
Richmond's face.

"I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so," Sir Richmond
admitted.

"Then I shall prefer to leave your party."

There were some moments of silence.

"I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma," said Sir
Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his voice.

"It is not a dilemma," said Dr. Martineau, with a corresponding loss of
asperity. "I grant you we discover we differ upon a question of taste
and convenience. But before I suggested this trip, I had intended to
spend a little time with my old friend Sir Kenelm Latter at Bournemouth.
Nothing simpler than to go to him now...."

"I shall be sorry all the same."

"I could have wished," said the doctor, "that these ladies had happened
a little later...."

The matter was settled. Nothing more of a practical nature remained to
be said. But neither gentleman wished to break off with a harsh and bare
decision.

"When the New Age is here," said Sir Richmond, "then, surely, a
friendship between a man and a woman will not be subjected to the—the
inconveniences your present code would set about it? They would travel
about together as they chose?"

"The fundamental principle of the new age," said the doctor, "will be
Honi soit qui mal y pense. In these matters. With perhaps Fay ce
que vouldras as its next injunction. So long as other lives are not
affected. In matters of personal behaviour the world will probably be
much more free and individuals much more open in their conscience
and honour than they have ever been before. In matters of property,
economics and public conduct it will probably be just the reverse. Then,
there will be much more collective control and much more insistence,
legal insistence, upon individual responsibility. But we are not living
in a new age yet; we are living in the patched-up ruins of a very old
one. And you—if you will forgive me—are living in the patched up
remains of a life that had already had its complications. This young
lady, whose charm and cleverness I admit, behaves as if the new age were
already here. Well, that may be a very dangerous mistake both for her
and for you.... This affair, if it goes on for a few days more, may
involve very serious consequences indeed, with which I, for one, do not
wish to be involved."

Sir Richmond, upon the hearthrug, had a curious feeling that he was back
in the head master's study at Caxton.

Dr. Martineau went on with a lucidity that Sir Richmond found rather
trying, to give his impression of Miss Grammont and her position in
life.

"She is," he said, "manifestly a very expensively educated girl. And
in many ways interesting. I have been watching her. I have not been
favoured with very much of her attention, but that fact has enabled
me to see her in profile. Miss Seyffert is a fairly crude mixture of
frankness, insincerity and self-explanatory egotism, and I have been
able to disregard a considerable amount of the conversation she has
addressed to me. Now I guess this Miss Grammont has had no mother since
she was quite little."

"Your guesses, doctor, are apt to be pretty good," said Sir Richmond.

"You know that?"

"She has told me as much."

"H'm. Well—She impressed me as having the air of a girl who has had
to solve many problems for which the normal mother provides ready made
solutions. That is how I inferred that there was no mother. I don't
think there has been any stepmother, either friendly or hostile?
There hasn't been. I thought not. She has had various governesses and
companions, ladies of birth and education, engaged to look after her
and she has done exactly what she liked with them. Her manner with Miss
Seyffert, an excellent manner for Miss Seyffert, by the bye, isn't the
sort of manner anyone acquires in a day. Or for one person only. She is
a very sure and commanding young woman."

Sir Richmond nodded.

"I suppose her father adores and neglects her, and whenever she has
wanted a companion or governess butchered, the thing has been done....
These business Americans, I am told, neglect their womenkind, give them
money and power, let them loose on the world.... It is a sort of moral
laziness masquerading as affection.... Still I suppose custom and
tradition kept this girl in her place and she was petted, honoured,
amused, talked about but not in a harmful way, and rather bored right
up to the time when America came into the war. Theoretically she had a
tremendously good time."

"I think this must be near the truth of her biography," said Sir
Richmond.

"I suppose she has lovers."

"You don't mean—?"

"No, I don't. Though that is a matter that ought to have no special
interest for you. I mean that she was surrounded by a retinue of men who
wanted to marry her or who behaved as though they wanted to marry her or
who made her happiness and her gratifications and her condescensions
seem a matter of very great importance to them. She had the flattery of
an extremely uncritical and unexacting admiration. That is the sort of
thing that gratifies a silly woman extremely. Miss Grammont is not silly
and all this homage and facile approval probably bored her more than she
realized. To anyone too intelligent to be steadily excited by buying
things and wearing things and dancing and playing games and going to
places of entertainment, and being given flowers, sweets, jewellery, pet
animals, and books bound in a special sort of leather, the prospect of
being a rich man's only daughter until such time as it becomes advisable
to change into a rich man's wealthy wife, is probably not nearly so
amusing as envious people might suppose. I take it Miss Grammont had got
all she could out of that sort of thing some time before the war, and
that she had already read and thought rather more than most young women
in her position. Before she was twenty I guess she was already looking
for something more interesting in the way of men than a rich admirer
with an automobile full of presents. Those who seek find."

"What do you think she found?"

"What would a rich girl find out there in America? I don't know. I
haven't the material to guess with. In London a girl might find a
considerable variety of active, interesting men, rising politicians,
university men of distinction, artists and writers even, men of science,
men—there are still such men—active in the creative work of the
empire.

"In America I suppose there is at least an equal variety, made up of
rather different types. She would find that life was worth while to such
people in a way that made the ordinary entertainments and amusements of
her life a monstrous silly waste of time. With the facility of her sex
she would pick up from one of them the idea that made life worth while
for him. I am inclined to think there was someone in her case who did
seem to promise a sort of life that was worth while. And that somehow
the war came to alter the look of that promise.

"How?"

"I don't know. Perhaps I am only romancing. But for this young woman
I am convinced this expedition to Europe has meant experience, harsh
educational experience and very profound mental disturbance. There have
been love experiences; experiences that were something more than the
treats and attentions and proposals that made up her life when she was
sheltered over there. And something more than that. What it is I don't
know. The war has turned an ugly face to her. She has seen death and
suffering and ruin. Perhaps she has seen people she knew killed. Perhaps
the man has been killed. Or she has met with cowardice or cruelty or
treachery where she didn't expect it. She has been shocked out of the
first confidence of youth. She has ceased to take the world for granted.
It hasn't broken her but it has matured her. That I think is why history
has become real to her. Which so attracts you in her. History, for her,
has ceased to be a fabric of picturesque incidents; it is the study of a
tragic struggle that still goes on. She sees history as you see it and I
see it. She is a very grown-up young woman.

"It's just that," said Sir Richmond. "It's just that. If you see as much
in Miss Grammont as all that, why don't you want to come on with us? You
see the interest of her."

"I see a lot more than that. You don't know what an advantage it is to
be as I am, rather cold and unresponsive to women and unattractive and
negligible—negligible, that is the exact word—to them. YOU can't look
at a woman for five minutes without losing sight of her in a mist
of imaginative excitement. Because she looks back at you. I have the
privilege of the negligible—which is a cool head. Miss Grammont has a
startled and matured mind, an original mind. Yes. And there is something
more to be said. Her intelligence is better than her character."