The Secret Places of the Heart (22 page)

Her face was flushed with the earnestness of her conviction. Her eyes
were bright with tears. "Don't think I don't love you. It's so hard to
say all this. Somehow it seems like going back on something—something
supreme. Our instincts have got us.... Don't think I'd hold myself from
you, dear. I'd give myself to you with both hands. I love you—When a
woman loves—I at any rate—she loves altogether. But this thing—I am
convinced—cannot be. I must go my own way, the way I have to go. My
father is the man, obstinate, more than half a savage. For me—I know
it—he has the jealousy of ten husbands. If you take me—If our secret
becomes manifest—If you are to take me and keep me, then his life and
your life will become wholly this Feud, nothing but this Feud. You have
to fight him anyhow—that is why I of all people must keep out of
the quarrel. For him, it would be an immense excitement, full of the
possibility of fierce satisfactions; for you, whether you won me or lost
me, it would be utter waste and ruin."

She paused and then went on:—"And for me too, waste and ruin. I shall
be a woman fought over. I shall be fought over as dogs fight over a
bone. I shall sink back to the level of Helen of Troy. I shall cease to
be a free citizen, a responsible free person. Whether you win me or lose
me it will be waste and ruin for us both. Your Fuel Commission will go
to pieces, all the wide, enduring work you have set me dreaming about
will go the same way. We shall just be another romantic story.... No!"

Sir Richmond sat still, a little like a sullen child, she thought. "I
hate all this," he said slowly. "I didn't think of your father before,
and now I think of him it sets me bristling for a fight. It makes
all this harder to give up. And yet, do you know, in the night I was
thinking, I was coming to conclusions, very like yours. For quite other
reasons. I thought we ought not to—We have to keep friends anyhow and
hear of each other?"

"That goes without saying."

"I thought we ought not to go on to be lovers in any way that Would
affect you, touch you too closely.... I was sorry—I had kissed you."

"Not I. No. Don't be sorry for that. I am glad we have fallen in love,
more glad than I have been of anything else in my life, and glad we have
spoken plainly.... Though we have to part. And—"

Her whisper came close to him. "For a whole day yet, all round the clock
twice, you and I have one another."

Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within earshot.

"I don't know the name of a single one of these flowers," she cried,
"except the bluebells. Look at this great handful I've gotten!
Springtime in Italy doesn't compare with it, not for a moment."

Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with her alert
interest in their emotions all too thinly and obviously veiled, it
seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont to talk not
of themselves but of Man and Woman and of that New Age according to the
prophet Martineau, which Sir Richmond had partly described and
mainly invented and ascribed to his departed friend. They talked
anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an absurd
pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the little car,
scarcely glancing at one another, but side by side and touching each
other, and all the while they were filled with tenderness and love and
hunger for one another.

In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in
the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has
left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and
cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those
nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than
an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile imaginations. That
brief journey in the west country had lit up phase after phase in the
long teaching and discipline of man as he had developed depth of memory
and fixity of purpose out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming
childhood of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient
wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now, and how, as
they had followed one another, man's idea of woman and woman's idea of
man had changed with them, until nowadays in the minds of civilized men
brute desire and possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost
completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free mutual
loyalty. "Overlaid," he said. "The older passions are still there like
the fires in an engine." He invented a saying for Dr. Martineau that the
Man in us to-day was still the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his
will, his wrath against the universe increased rather than diminished.
If to-day he ceases to crack his brother's bones and rape and bully his
womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater game and means to
crack this world and feed upon its marrow and wrench their secrets from
the stars.

And furthermore it would seem that the prophet Martineau had declared
that in this New Age that was presently to dawn for mankind, jealousy
was to be disciplined even as we had disciplined lust and anger; instead
of ruling our law it was to be ruled by law and custom. No longer were
the jealousy of strange peoples, the jealousy of ownership and the
jealousy of sex to determine the framework of human life. There was to
be one peace and law throughout the world, one economic scheme and a
universal freedom for men and women to possess and give themselves.

"And how many generations yet must there be before we reach that
Utopia?" Miss Grammont asked.

"I wouldn't put it at a very great distance."

"But think of all the confusions of the world!"

"Confusions merely. The world is just a muddle of states and religions
and theories and stupidities. There are great lumps of disorderly
strength in it, but as a whole it is a weak world. It goes on by habit.
There's no great idea in possession and the only possible great idea is
this one. The New Age may be nearer than we dare to suppose."

"If I could believe that!"

"There are many more people think as we do than you suppose. Are you and
I such very strange and wonderful and exceptional people?"

"No. I don't think so."

"And yet the New World is already completely established in our hearts.
What has been done in our minds can be done in most minds. In a little
while the muddled angry mind of Man upon his Planet will grow clear and
it will be this idea that will have made it clear. And then life will
be very different for everyone. That tyranny of disorder which oppresses
every life on earth now will be lifted. There will be less and less
insecurity, less and less irrational injustice. It will be a better
instructed and a better behaved world. We shall live at our ease, not
perpetually anxious, not resentful and angry. And that will alter all
the rules of love. Then we shall think more of the loveliness of other
people because it will no longer be necessary to think so much of the
dangers and weaknesses and pitifulliesses of other people. We shall not
have to think of those who depend upon us for happiness and selfrespect.
We shall not have to choose between a wasteful fight for a personal end
or the surrender of our heart's desire."

"Heart's desire," she whispered. "Am I indeed your heart's desire?"

Sir Richmond sank his head and voice in response.

"You are the best of all things. And I have to let you go."

Sir Richmond suddenly remembered Miss Seyffert and half turned his face
towards her. Her forehead was just visible over the hood of the open
coupe. She appeared to be intelligently intent upon the scenery. Then he
broke out suddenly into a tirade against the world. "But I am bored
by this jostling unreasonable world. At the bottom of my heart I am
bitterly resentful to-day. This is a world of fools and brutes in which
we live, a world of idiotic traditions, imbecile limitations, cowardice,
habit, greed and mean cruelty. It is a slum of a world, a congested
district, an insanitary jumble of souls and bodies. Every good thing,
every sweet desire is thwarted—every one. I have to lead the life of a
slum missionary, a sanitary inspector, an underpaid teacher. I am bored.
Oh God! how I am bored! I am bored by our laws and customs. I am bored
by our rotten empire and its empty monarchy. I am bored by its parades
and its flags and its sham enthusiasms. I am bored by London and its
life, by its smart life and by its servile life alike. I am bored
by theatres and by books and by every sort of thing that people call
pleasure. I am bored by the brag of people and the claims of people and
the feelings of people. Damn people! I am bored by profiteers and by the
snatching they call business enterprise. Damn every business man! I am
bored by politics and the universal mismanagement of everything. I am
bored by France, by Anglo-Saxondom, by German self-pity, by Bolshevik
fanaticism. I am bored by these fools' squabbles that devastate the
world. I am bored by Ireland, Orange and Green. Curse the Irish—north
and south together! Lord! how I HATE the Irish from Carson to the last
Sinn Feiner! And I am bored by India and by Egypt. I am bored by Poland
and by Islam. I am bored by anyone who professes to have rights. Damn
their rights! Curse their rights! I am bored to death by this year and
by last year and by the prospect of next year. I am bored—I am horribly
bored—by my work. I am bored by every sort of renunciation. I want to
live with the woman I love and I want to work within the limits of my
capacity. Curse all Hullo! Damn his eyes!—Steady, ah! The spark!...
Good! No skid."

He had come round a corner at five and twenty miles an hour and had
stopped his spark and pulled up neatly within a yard of the fore-wheel
of a waggon that was turning in the road so as to block the way
completely.

"That almost had me....

"And now you feel better?" said Miss Grammont.

"Ever so much," said Sir Richmond and chuckled.

The waggoner cleared the road and the car started up again.

For a minute or so neither spoke.

"You ought to be smacked hard for that outbreak,—my dear," said Miss
Grammont.

"I ought—MY dear. I have no right to be ill-tempered. We two are
among the supremely fortunate ones of our time. We have no excuse for
misbehaviour. Got nothing to grumble at. Always I am lucky. THAT—with
the waggon—was a very near thing. God spoils us.

"We two," he went on, after a pause, "are among the most fortunate
people alive. We are both rich and easily rich. That gives us freedoms
few people have. We have a vision of the whole world in which we live.
It's in a mess—but that is by the way. The mass of mankind never gets
enough education to have even a glimpse of the world as a whole. They
never get a chance to get the hang of it. It is really possible for us
to do things that will matter in the world. All our time is our own;
all our abilities we are free to use. Most people, most intelligent and
educated people, are caught in cages of pecuniary necessity; they
are tied to tasks they can't leave, they are driven and compelled and
limited by circumstances they can never master. But we, if we have
tasks, have tasks of our own choosing. We may not like the world, but
anyhow we are free to do our best to alter it. If I were a clerk in
Hoxton and you were a city typist, then we MIGHT swear."

"It was you who swore," smiled Miss Grammont.

"It's the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city typist who
really keep me at my work. Any smacking ought to come from them.
I couldn't do less than I do in the face of their helplessness.
Nevertheless a day will come—through what we do and what we refrain
from doing when there will be no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and
no captive typists in the city. And nobody at all to consider."

"According to the prophet Martineau," said Miss Grammont.

"And then you and I must contrive to be born again."

"Heighho!" cried Miss Grammont. "A thousand years ahead! When fathers
are civilized. When all these phanton people who intervene on your
side—no! I don't want to know anything about them, but I know of them
by instinct—when they also don't matter."

"Then you and I can have things out with each other—THOROUGHLY," said
Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in his voice, charging the
little hill before him as though he charged at Time.

They had to wait at Nailsworth for a telegram from Mr. Grammont's
agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in the afternoon. They
came into the town through unattractive and unworthy outskirts, and only
realized the charm of the place after they had garaged their car at the
Pulteney Hotel and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon
with the Pump Room and the Roman Baths. The Pulteney they found hung
with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an astonishing extent; some
former proprietor must have had a mania for replicas and the place is
eventful with white marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and
Queen Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of Rome,
Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy,
amidst which splendours a competent staff administers modern comforts
with an old-fashioned civility. But round and about the Pulteney one
has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical
terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and
Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of
"presents from Bath"; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine
array of the original Bath chairs.

Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of
the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the
Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek. And they
considered a little doubtfully the seventeenth century statue of Bladud,
who is said to have been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded
the city in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred
years before the Romans came.