The Secret Places of the Heart (8 page)

"That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view. I
suppose I have much the same general idea of the world. On rather more
psychological lines."

"We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something that is
only just beginning to be aware of what it is—and what it might be."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "Good."

He went on eagerly. "That is precisely how I see it. You and I are just
particles in the tarnish, as you call it, who are becoming dimly awake
to what we are, to what we have in common. Only a very few of us have
got as far even as this. These others here, for example...."

He indicated the rest of Maidenhead by a movement.

"Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy solicitudes fill
them up. They haven't begun to get out of themselves."

"We, I suppose, have," doubted Sir Richmond.

"We have."

The doctor had no doubt. He lay back in his chair, with his hands behind
his head and his smoke ascending vertically to heaven. With the greatest
contentment he began quoting himself. "This getting out of one's
individuality—this conscious getting out of one's individuality—is one
of the most important and interesting aspects of the psychology of
the new age that is now dawning. As compared with any previous age.
Unconsciously, of course, every true artist, every philosopher, every
scientific investigator, so far as his art or thought went, has always
got out of himself,—has forgotten his personal interests and become Man
thinking for the whole race. And intimations of the same thing have been
at the heart of most religions. But now people are beginning to get
this detachment without any distinctively religious feeling or any
distinctive aesthetic or intellectual impulse, as if it were a plain
matter of fact. Plain matter of fact, that we are only incidentally
ourselves. That really each one of us is also the whole species, is
really indeed all life."

"A part of it."

"An integral part-as sight is part of a man... with no absolute
separation from all the rest—no more than a separation of the
imagination. The whole so far as his distinctive quality goes. I do not
know how this takes shape in your mind, Sir Richmond, but to me this
idea of actually being life itself upon the world, a special phase of it
dependent upon and connected with all other phases, and of being one
of a small but growing number of people who apprehend that, and want to
live in the spirit of that, is quite central. It is my fundamental idea.
We,—this small but growing minority—constitute that part of life which
knows and wills and tries to rule its destiny. This new realization, the
new psychology arising out of it is a fact of supreme importance in the
history of life. It is like the appearance of self-consciousness in some
creature that has not hitherto had self-consciousness. And so far as we
are concerned, we are the true kingship of the world. Necessarily. We
who know, are the true king....I wonder how this appeals to you. It
is stuff I have thought out very slowly and carefully and written and
approved. It is the very core of my life.... And yet when one comes
to say these things to someone else, face to face.... It is much more
difficult to say than to write."

Sir Richmond noted how the doctor's chair creaked as he rolled to and
fro with the uneasiness of these intimate utterances.

"I agree," said Sir Richmond presently. "One DOES think in this fashion.
Something in this fashion. What one calls one's work does belong to
something much bigger than ourselves.

"Something much bigger," he expanded.

"Which something we become," the doctor urged, "in so far as our work
takes hold of us."

Sir Richmond made no answer to this for a little while. "Of course we
trail a certain egotism into our work," he said.

"Could we do otherwise? But it has ceased to be purely egotism. It is
no longer, 'I am I' but 'I am part.'... One wants to be an honourable
part."

"You think of man upon his planet," the doctor pursued. "I think of
life rather as a mind that tries itself over in millions and millions of
trials. But it works out to the same thing."

"I think in terms of fuel," said Sir Richmond.

He was still debating the doctor's generalization. "I suppose it would
be true to say that I think of myself as mankind on his planet, with
very considerable possibilities and with only a limited amount of fuel
at his disposal to achieve them. Yes.... I agree that I think in that
way.... I have not thought much before of the way in which I think about
things—but I agree that it is in that way. Whatever enterprises mankind
attempts are limited by the sum total of that store of fuel upon the
planet. That is very much in my mind. Besides that he has nothing but
his annual allowance of energy from the sun."

"I thought that presently we were to get unlimited energy from atoms,"
said the doctor.

"I don't believe in that as a thing immediately practicable. No doubt
getting a supply of energy from atoms is a theoretical possibility,
just as flying was in the time of Daedalus; probably there were actual
attempts at some sort of glider in ancient Crete. But before we get
to the actual utilization of atomic energy there will be ten thousand
difficult corners to turn; we may have to wait three or four thousand
years for it. We cannot count on it. We haven't it in hand. There may be
some impasse. All we have surely is coal and oil,—there is no surplus
of wood now—only an annual growth. And water-power is income also,
doled out day by day. We cannot anticipate it. Coal and oil are our only
capital. They are all we have for great important efforts. They are a
gift to mankind to use to some supreme end or to waste in trivialities.
Coal is the key to metallurgy and oil to transit. When they are done
we shall either have built up such a fabric of apparatus, knowledge and
social organization that we shall be able to manage without them—or
we shall have travelled a long way down the slopes of waste towards
extinction.... To-day, in getting, in distribution, in use we
waste enormously....As we sit here all the world is wasting fuel
fantastically."

"Just as mentally—educationally we waste," the doctor interjected.

"And my job is to stop what I can of that waste, to do what I can to
organize, first of all sane fuel getting and then sane fuel using. And
that second proposition carries us far. Into the whole use we are making
of life.

"First things first," said Sir Richmond. If we set about getting fuel
sanely, if we do it as the deliberate, co-operative act of the whole
species, then it follows that we shall look very closely into the use
that is being made of it. When all the fuel getting is brought into one
view as a common interest, then it follows that all the fuel burning
will be brought into one view. At present we are getting fuel in a kind
of scramble with no general aim. We waste and lose almost as much as we
get. And of what we get, the waste is idiotic.

"I won't trouble you," said Sir Richmond, "with any long discourse on
the ways of getting fuel in this country. But land as you know is owned
in patches and stretches that were determined in the first place chiefly
by agricultural necessities. When it was divided up among its present
owners nobody was thinking about the minerals beneath. But the lawyers
settled long ago that the landowner owned his land right down to the
centre of the earth. So we have the superficial landlord as coal owner
trying to work his coal according to the superficial divisions, quite
irrespective of the lie of the coal underneath. Each man goes for the
coal under his own land in his own fashion. You get three shafts where
one would suffice and none of them in the best possible place. You get
the coal coming out of this point when it would be far more convenient
to bring it out at that—miles away. You get boundary walls of coal
between the estates, abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each
coal owner sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you
know of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over the
country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get it into
the silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful, airpoisoning,
fog-creating fireplace.

"And this stuff," said Sir Richmond, bringing his hand down so smartly
on the table that the startled coffee cups cried out upon the tray; "was
given to men to give them power over metals, to get knowledge with, to
get more power with."

"The oil story, I suppose, is as bad."

"The oil story is worse....

"There is a sort of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce parenthesis,
"that the supplies of oil are inexhaustible—that you can muddle about
with oil anyhow.... Optimism of knaves and imbeciles.... They don't want
to be pulled up by any sane considerations...."

For some moments he kept silence—as if in unspeakable commination.

"Here I am with some clearness of vision—my only gift; not very clever,
with a natural bad temper, and a strong sexual bias, doing what I can
to get a broader handling of the fuel question—as a common interest
for all mankind. And I find myself up against a lot of men, subtle men,
sharp men, obstinate men, prejudiced men, able to get round me, able to
get over me, able to blockade me.... Clever men—yes, and all of them
ultimately damned—oh! utterly damned—fools. Coal owners who think only
of themselves, solicitors who think backwards, politicians who think
like a game of cat's-cradle, not a gleam of generosity not a gleam."

"What particularly are you working for?" asked the doctor.

"I want to get the whole business of the world's fuel discussed and
reported upon as one affair so that some day it may be handled as one
affair in the general interest."

"The world, did you say? You meant the empire?"

"No, the world. It is all one system now. You can't work it in bits. I
want to call in foreign representatives from the beginning."

"Advisory—consultative?"

"No. With powers. These things interlock now internationally both
through labour and finance. The sooner we scrap this nonsense about an
autonomous British Empire complete in itself, contra mundum, the better
for us. A world control is fifty years overdue. Hence these disorders."

"Still—it's rather a difficult proposition, as things are."

"Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond in the tone
of one who swears. "Don't I know that perhaps it's impossible! But it's
the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And
everybody says, difficult, difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try.
And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another
says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every
decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares? Along this line of
comprehensive scientific control the world has to go or it will
retrogress, it will muddle and rot...."

"I agree," said Dr. Martineau.

"So I want a report to admit that distinctly. I want it to go
further than that. I want to get the beginnings, the germ, of a world
administration. I want to set up a permanent world commission of
scientific men and economists—with powers, just as considerable powers
as I can give them—they'll be feeble powers at the best—but still some
sort of SAY in the whole fuel supply of the world. A say—that may grow
at last to a control. A right to collect reports and receive
accounts for example, to begin with. And then the right to make
recommendations.... You see?... No, the international part is not the
most difficult part of it. But my beastly owners and their beastly
lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of what they call their freedom of
action. And my labour men, because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself,
sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at
and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a world
control on scientific lines even less than the owners. They try to think
that fuel production can carry an unlimited wages bill and the owners
try to think that it can pay unlimited profits, and when I say; 'This
business is something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it's a
service and a common interest,' they stare at me—" Sir Richmond was
at a loss for an image. "Like a committee in a thieves' kitchen when
someone has casually mentioned the law."

"But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?"

"It can be done. If I can stick it out."

"But with the whole Committee against you!"

"The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn't against me. Every
individual is...."

Sir Richmond found it difficult to express. "The psychology of my
Committee ought to interest you.... It is probably a fair sample of the
way all sorts of things are going nowadays. It's curious.... There is
not a man on that Committee who is quite comfortable within himself
about the particular individual end he is there to serve. It's there I
get them. They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately I admit,
but they are bitter and obstinate because they pursue them against an
internal opposition—which is on my side. They are terrified to think,
if once they stopped fighting me, how far they might not have to go with
me."

"A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very closely with
my own ideas."

"A world conscience? World conscience? I don't know. But I do know that
there is this drive in nearly every member of the Committee, some drive
anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is the same drive that drives me.
But I am the most driven. It has turned me round. It hasn't turned them.
I go East and they go West. And they don't want to be turned round.
Tremendously, they don't."

"Creative undertow," said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were.
"An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology of a new age
strengthened by education—it may play a directive part."