The Secret Places of the Heart (9 page)

"They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this creative
undertow—if you like to call it that—we do get along. I am leader or
whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of a bolting flock....I believe
they will report for a permanent world commission; I believe I have got
them up to that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League
of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this League of
Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-tracking arrangement for
all sorts of important world issues. And they will find they have to
report for some sort of control. But there again they will shy. They
will report for it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down
again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They will alter
the composition of the Committee so as to make it innocuous."

"How?"

"Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far as Britain
is concerned with muck of the colonial politician type and tame labour
representatives, balance with shady new adventurer millionaires, get in
still shadier stuff from abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame
experts after their own hearts,—experts who will make merely advisory
reports, which will not be published...."

"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR
Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?"

"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing
right—indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing right—and still
leave things just exactly what they were before. And as I suffer under
the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to
shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee.... But there is a
conscience there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee."

He turned appealingly to the doctor. "Why should I have to be the
conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this exhausting
inhuman job?.... In their hearts these others know.... Only they won't
know.... Why should it fall on me?"

"You have to go through with it," said Dr. Martineau.

"I have to go through with it, but it's a hell of utterly inglorious
squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting the same fight within
themselves that they fight with me. They know exactly where I am, that I
too am doing my job against internal friction. The one thing before all
others that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high
horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of special moral
superiority to men who are on the whole as good men as I am or better.
That shows all the time. You see the sort of man I am. I've a broad
streak of personal vanity. I fag easily. I'm short-tempered. I've other
things, as you perceive. When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore,
I get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable sense of
ill usage. Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be working with me
steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly witty. He gets a laugh round
the table at my expense. Young Dent, the more intelligent of the labour
men, reads me a lecture in committee manners. Old Cassidy sees HIS
opening and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me
spluttering self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down, and as my
stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves
to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will
happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am
just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a
great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt
in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences.
And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not
bother any more about what is to happen to mankind in the long run....
Do you begin to realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin,
that that Committee is for me?"

"You have to go through with it," Dr. Martineau repeated.

"I have. If I can. But I warn you I have been near breaking point. And
if I tumble off the high horse, if I can't keep going regularly there
to ride the moral high horse, that Committee will slump into utter
scoundrelism. It will turn out a long, inconsistent, botched, unreadable
report that will back up all sorts of humbugging bargains and sham
settlements. It will contain some half-baked scheme to pacify the miners
at the expense of the general welfare. It won't even succeed in doing
that. But in the general confusion old Cassidy will get away with
a series of hauls that may run into millions. Which will last his
time—damn him! And that is where we are.... Oh! I know! I know!.... I
must do this job. I don't need any telling that my life will be nothing
and mean nothing unless I bring this thing through....

"But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!"

The doctor watched his friend's resentful black silhouette against the
lights on the steely river, and said nothing for awhile.

"Why did I ever undertake to play it?" Sir Richmond appealed. "Why has
it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am, why am I not a poor
thing altogether?"

"I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the doctor after an
interval.

"I am INTOLERABLE to myself."

"And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as you do. You
want help; you want reassurance. And you feel they can give it."

"I wonder if it has been quite like that," Sir Richmond reflected.

By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the mother complex.
"You want help and reassurance as a child does," he said. "Women and
women alone seem capable of giving that, of telling you that you are
surely right, that notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that
even when you are wrong it doesn't so much matter, you are still in
spirit right. They can show their belief in you as no man can. With all
their being they can do that."

"Yes, I suppose they could."

"They can. You have said already that women are necessary to make things
real for you."

"Not my work," said Sir Richmond. "I admit that it might be like that,
but it isn't like that. It has not worked out like that. The two drives
go on side by side in me. They have no logical connexion. All I can say
is that for me, with my bifid temperament, one makes a rest from the
other, and is so far refreshment and a renewal of energy. But I do not
find women coming into my work in any effectual way."

The doctor reflected further. "I suppose," he began and stopped short.

He heard Sir Richmond move in his chair, creaking an interrogation.

"You have never," said the doctor, "turned to the idea of God?"

Sir Richmond grunted and made no other answer for the better part of a
minute.

As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling star
streaked the deep blue above them.

"I can't believe in a God," said Sir Richmond.

"Something after the fashion of a God," said the doctor insidiously.

"No," said Sir Richmond. "Nothing that reassures."

"But this loneliness, this craving for companionship...."

"We have all been through that," said Sir Richmond. "We have all in our
time lain very still in the darkness with our souls crying out for the
fellowship of God, demanding some sign, some personal response. The
faintest feeling of assurance would have satisfied us."

"And there has never been a response?"

"Have YOU ever had a response?"

"Once I seemed to have a feeling of exaltation and security."

"Well?"

"Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been reading
William James on religious experiences and I was thinking very much of
Conversion. I tried to experience Conversion...."

"Yes?"

"It faded."

"It always fades," said Sir Richmond with anger in his voice. "I wonder
how many people there are nowadays who have passed through this last
experience of ineffectual invocation, this appeal to the fading shadow
of a vanished God. In the night. In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak
to me! Does he answer? In the silence you hear the little blood vessels
whisper in your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on the darkness...."

Dr. Martineau sat without a word.

"I can believe that over all things Righteousness rules. I can believe
that. But Righteousness is not friendliness nor mercy nor comfort nor
any such dear and intimate things. This cuddling up to Righteousness! It
is a dream, a delusion and a phase. I've tried all that long ago. I've
given it up long ago. I've grown out of it. Men do—after forty. Our
souls were made in the squatting-place of the submen of ancient times.
They are made out of primitive needs and they die before our bodies as
those needs are satisfied. Only young people have souls, complete. The
need for a personal God, feared but reassuring, is a youth's need. I no
longer fear the Old Man nor want to propitiate the Old Man nor believe
he matters any more. I'm a bit of an Old Man myself I discover. Yes. But
the other thing still remains."

"The Great Mother of the Gods," said Dr. Martineau—still clinging to
his theories.

"The need of the woman," said Sir Richmond. "I want mating because it is
my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I am a social animal and I
want it from another social animal. Not from any God—any inconceivable
God. Who fades and disappears. No....

"Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know. Perhaps it
lasts as long as life does. How can I tell?"

He was silent for a little while. Then his voice sounded in the night,
as if he spoke to himself. "But as for the God of All Things consoling
and helping! Imagine it! That up there—having fellowship with me! I
would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking
hands with those stars."

A gust of confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually
reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil. At breakfast
next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and
Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite
impossible excess of intimacy. They discussed the weather, which seemed
to be settling down to the utmost serenity of which the English spring
is capable, they talked of Sir Richmond's coming car and of the possible
routes before them. Sir Richmond produced the Michelin maps which he
had taken out of the pockets of the little Charmeuse. The Bath Road lay
before them, he explained, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough,
Silbury Hill which overhangs Avebury. Both travellers discovered a
common excitement at the mention of Avebury and Silbury Hill. Both took
an intelligent interest in archaeology. Both had been greatly stimulated
by the recent work of Elliot Smith and Rivers upon what was then known
as the Heliolithic culture. It had revived their interest in Avebury and
Stonehenge. The doctor moreover had been reading Hippisley Cox's GREEN
ROADS OF ENGLAND.

Neither gentleman had ever seen Avebury, but Dr. Martineau had once
visited Stonehenge.

"Avebury is much the oldest," said the doctor. "They must have made
Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C. It may be five thousand years old
or even more. It is the most important historical relic in the British
Isles. And the most neglected."

They exchanged archaeological facts. The secret places of the heart
rested until the afternoon.

Then Sir Richmond saw fit to amplify his confessions in one particular.

The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise as the
morning advanced. They had walked by the road to Marlow and had lunched
at a riverside inn, returning after a restful hour in an arbour on the
lawn of this place to tea at Maidenhead. It was as they returned that
Sir Richmond took up the thread of their overnight conversation again.

"In the night," he said, "I was thinking over the account I tried to
give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out of drawing."

"Facts?" asked the doctor.

"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the
proportions.... I don't know if I gave you the effect of something Don
Juanesque?..."

"Vulgar poem," said the doctor remarkably. "I discounted that."

"Vulgar!"

"Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a kitchen."

Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing that used to
be called a pet aversion.

"I don't want you to think that I run about after women in an habitual
and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt them in the interests
of my work and energy. Your questions had set me theorizing about
myself. And I did my best to improvise a scheme of motives yesterday.
It was, I perceive, a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My
nocturnal reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things
that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the wanderings of
desire have no single drive. All sorts of motives come in, high and low,
down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true
in it all was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue
phase falls naturally into these complications because they are more
attractive to his type and far easier and more refreshing to the mind,
at the outset, than anything else. And they do work a sort of recovery
in him, They send him back to his work refreshed—so far, that is, as
his work is concerned."

"At the OUTSET they are easier," said the doctor.

Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the outset counts.
The more tired one is the more readily one moves along the line of least
resistance....

"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of my work
goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it. What I said about
that was near the truth of things....