The Secret Places of the Heart (2 page)

"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."

"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."

"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?"