THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

BY H. G. WELLS

1922

CONTENTS

Chapter

1. THE CONSULTATION

2. LADY HARDY

3. THE DEPARTURE

4. AT MAIDENHEAD

5. IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES

6. THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

7. COMPANIONSHIP

8. FULL MOON

9. THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY



THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART


CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE CONSULTATION

Section 1

The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was
accustomed to let in visitors who had this air of being
annoyed and finding one umbrella too numerous for them. It
mattered nothing to her that the gentleman was asking for Dr.
Martineau as if he was asking for something with an
unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of
his umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive
mahogany stand. "What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the
door of the consulting room.

"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly
with its distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond
Hardy."

The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in
undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in
which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world
eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished
specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase
containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical
works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs,
a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any
collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the
promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost
of the three windows and stared out despondently at Harley
Street.

For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty
jacket on its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.

"Damned fool I was to come here," he said..."DAMNED fool!

"Rush out of the place? . . .

"I've given my name." . . .

He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended
not to hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can
do for me," he said.

"I'm sure _I_ don't," said the doctor. "People come here and
talk."

There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the
figure that confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height
wanted at least three inches of Sir Richmond's five feet
eleven; he was humanly plump, his face was round and pink and
cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of the full moon, of
what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air and
exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short
or he had braced them too high so that he seemed to have
grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been
dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric
personality; this amiable presence dispelled his preconceived
resistances.

Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been
running upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets,
seemed intent only on disavowals. "People come here and talk.
It does them good, and sometimes I am able to offer a
suggestion.

"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded
the idea.

"I'm jangling damnably...overwork.. . . ."

"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork.
Overwork never hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can
work--good straightforward work, without internal resistance,
until he drops,--and never hurt himself. You must be working
against friction."

"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to
death. . . . And it's so DAMNED important I SHOULDN'T break
down. It's VITALLY important."

He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering
gesture of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags.
I explode at any little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily
for ten minutes and I can't leave off working."

"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond
Hardy? In the papers. What is it?"

"Fuel."

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly
can't afford to have you ill."

"I AM ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that
Commission."

"Your technical knowledge--"

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the
national fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's
what I'm up against. You don't know the job I have to do. You
don't know what a Commission of that sort is. The moral
tangle of it. You don't know how its possibilities and
limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long before a
single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole
thing with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as
daylight. I might have seen it at first. . . . Three experts
who'd been got at; they thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour
men who'd do anything you wanted them to do provided you
called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the socialist art
critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway
managers, oil profiteers, financial adventurers. . . . "

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the
days before the war it was different. Then there was
abundance. A little grabbing or cornering was all to the
good. All to the good. It prevented things being used up too
fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia was
tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all
this is altered. We're living in a different world. The
public won't stand things it used to stand. It's a new
public. It's--wild. It'll smash up the show if they go too
far. Everything short and running shorter--food, fuel,
material. But these people go on. They go on as though
nothing had changed. . . . Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn
them. There are men on that Commission who would steal the
brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in
it. . . . It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles. It's--!
But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."

"You think there may be a smash-up?"

"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."

"A social smash-up."

"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"

"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All
sorts of people I find think that," said the doctor. "All
sorts of people lie awake thinking of it."

"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too,"
he said and seemed to reflect. But he was observing his
patient acutely--with his ears.

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and
left his sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered
swiftly what line of talk he had best follow.

Section 2

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor.
"It's at the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new
state of mind. Before the war it was abnormal--a phase of
neurasthenia. Now it is almost the normal state with whole
classes of intelligent people. Intelligent, I say. The others
always have been casual and adventurous and always will be. A
loss of confidence in the general background of life. So that
we seem to float over abysses."

"We do," said Sir Richmond.

"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in
the days of our assurance. There is a discord, a jarring."

The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and
dreadful sense of responsibility for the universe.
Accompanied by a realization that the job is overwhelmingly
too big for us."

"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond.
"Anyhow, what else is there to do? We MAY keep things
together. . . . "I've got to do my bit. And if only I could
hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows. But that's
where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous
to work well in my life. And never have I been so slack and
weak-willed and inaccurate. ... Sloppy. . . . Indolent. . . .
VISCIOUS! . . . "

The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted
him. "What's got hold of me? What's got hold of me? I used to
work well enough. It's as if my will had come untwisted and
was ravelling out into separate strands. I've lost my unity.
I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to recover my vigour. At
any cost."

Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out
of his mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr. Martineau, is
this: it's fatigue. It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much
effort. On too high a level. And too austere. One strains and
fags. FLAGS! 'Flags' I meant to say. One strains and flags
and then the lower stuff in one, the subconscious stuff,
takes control."

There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this,
and the doctor drew in the corners of his mouth and gave his
head a critical slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond
raise his voice and quicken his speech. "I want," he said, "a
good tonic. A pick-me-up, a stimulating harmless drug of some
sort. That's indicated anyhow. To begin with. Something to
pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to the scratch
again."

"I don't like the use of drugs," said the doctor.

The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to
disappointment. "But that's not reasonable," he cried.
"That's not reasonable. That's superstition. Call a thing a
drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug. Everything that
affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise
is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response
to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I
want food. When I'm overactive and sleepless I want
tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I want pulling together."

"But we don't know how to use drugs," the doctor objected.

"But you ought to know."

Dr. Martineau fixed his eye on a first floor window sill on
the opposite side of Harley Street. His manner suggested a
lecturer holding on to his theme.

"A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs--
all sorts of drugs--and work them in to our general way of
living. I have no prejudice against them at all. A time will
come when we shall correct our moods, get down to our
reserves of energy by their help, suspend fatigue, put off
sleep during long spells of exertion. At some sudden crisis
for example. When we shall know enough to know just how far
to go with this, that or the other stuff. And how to wash out
its after effects . . . . I quite agree with you,--in
principle . . . . But that time hasn't come yet. . . .
Decades of research yet. . . . If we tried that sort of thing
now, we should be like children playing with poisons and
explosives. . . . It's out of the question."

"I've been taking a few little things already. Easton Syrup
for example."

"Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the
way. Has it done you any good--any NETT good? It has--I can
see--broken your sleep."

The doctor turned round again to his patient and looked up
into his troubled face.

"Given physiological trouble I don't mind resorting to a
drug. Given structural injury I don't mind surgery. But
except for any little mischief your amateur drugging may have
done you do not seem to me to be either sick or injured.
You've no trouble either of structure or material. You are--
worried--ill in your mind, and otherwise perfectly sound.
It's the current of your thoughts, fermenting. If the trouble
is in the mental sphere, why go out of the mental sphere for
a treatment? Talk and thought; these are your remedies. Cool
deliberate thought. You're unravelled. You say it yourself.
Drugs will only make this or that unravelled strand behave
disproportionately. You don't want that. You want to take
stock of yourself as a whole--find out where you stand.

"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."

Section 3

"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."

Section 4

"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?"

"The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to
take stock and know what is there."

"Three weeks of self vivisection."

"To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself.
As an opening. . . . It will take longer than that if we are
to go through with the job."

It is a considerable--process."

"It is."

"Yet you shrink from simple things like drugs!"

"Self-knowledge--without anaesthetics."

"Has this sort of thing ever done anyone any good at all?"

"It has turned hundreds back to sanity and steady work."

"How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be?
Anyhow--we can break off at any time. . . . We'll try it.
We'll try it. . . . And so for this journey into the west of
England. . . . And--if we can get there--I'm not sure that we
can get there--into the secret places of my heart.



CHAPTER THE SECOND

LADY HARDY

The patient left the house with much more self possession
than he had shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau had thrust
him back from his intenser prepossessions to a more
generalized view of himself, had made his troubles objective
and detached him from them. He could even find something
amusing now in his situation. He liked the immense scope of
the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that
most of it was entirely true--and, in some untraceable
manner, absurd. There were entertaining possibilities in the
prospect of the doctor drawing him out--he himself partly
assisting and partly resisting.

He was a man of extensive reservations. His private life was
in some respects exceptionally private.

"I don't confide . . . . Do I even confide in myself? I
imagine I do . . . . Is there anything in myself that I
haven't looked squarely in the face? . . . How much are we
going into? Even as regards facts?

"Does it really help a man--to see himself?. . ."

Such thoughts engaged him until he found himself in his
study. His desk and his writing table were piled high with a
heavy burthen of work. Still a little preoccupied with Dr.
Martineau's exposition, he began to handle this
confusion. . . .

At half past nine he found himself with three hours of good
work behind him. It had seemed like two. He had not worked
like this for many weeks. "This is very cheering," he said.
"And unexpected. Can old Moon-face have hypnotized me?
Anyhow--. . . Perhaps I've only imagined I was ill. . . .
Dinner?" He looked at his watch and was amazed at the time.
"Good Lord! I've been at it three hours. What can have
happened? Funny I didn't hear the gong."

He went downstairs and found Lady Hardy reading a magazine in
a dining-room armchair and finely poised between devotion and
martyrdom. A shadow of vexation fell athwart his mind at the
sight of her.

"I'd no idea it was so late," he said. "I heard no gong."

"After you swore so at poor Bradley I ordered that there
should be no gongs when we were alone. I did come up to your
door about half past eight. I crept up. But I was afraid I
might upset you if I came in."

"But you've not waited--"

"I've had a mouthful of soup." Lady Hardy rang the bell.

"I've done some work at last," said Sir Richmond, astride on
the hearthrug.

"I'm glad," said Lady Hardy, without gladness. "I waited for
three hours."

Lady Hardy was a frail little blue-eyed woman with uneven
shoulders and a delicate sweet profile. Hers was that type of
face that under even the most pleasant and luxurious
circumstances still looks bravely and patiently enduring. Her
refinement threw a tinge of coarseness over his eager
consumption of his excellent clear soup.

"What's this fish, Bradley?" he asked.

"Turbot, Sir Richmond."

"Don't you have any?" he asked his wife.

"I've had a little fish, " said Lady Hardy.

When Bradley was out of the room, Sir Richmond remarked: "I
saw that nerves man, Dr. Martineau, to-day. He wants me to
take a holiday. "

The quiet patience of the lady's manner intensified. She said
nothing. A flash of resentment lit Sir Richmond's eyes. When
he spoke again, he seemed to answer unspoken accusations.
"Dr. Martineau's idea is that he should come with me."

The lady adjusted herself to a new point of view.

"But won't that be reminding you of your illness and
worries?"

"He seems a good sort of fellow. . . . I'm inclined to like
him. He'll be as good company as anyone. . . . This TOURNEDOS
looks excellent. Have some."

"I had a little bird," said Lady Hardy, "when I found you
weren't coming."

"But I say--don't wait here if you've dined. Bradley can see
to me."

She smiled and shook her head with the quiet conviction of
one who knew her duty better. "Perhaps I'll have a little ice
pudding when it comes," she said.

Sir Richmond detested eating alone in an atmosphere of
observant criticism. And he did not like talking with his
mouth full to an unembarrassed interlocutor who made no
conversational leads of her own. After a few mouthfuls he
pushed his plate away from him. "Then let's have up the ice
pudding," he said with a faint note of bitterness.

"But have you finished--?"

"The ice pudding!" he exploded wrathfully. "The ice pudding!"

Lady Hardy sat for a moment, a picture of meek distress.
Then, her delicate eyebrows raised, and the corners of her
mouth drooping, she touched the button of the silver table-
bell.



CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE DEPARTURE

Section 1

No wise man goes out upon a novel expedition without
misgivings. And between their first meeting and the appointed
morning both Sir Richmond Hardy and Dr. Martineau were the
prey of quite disagreeable doubts about each other,
themselves, and the excursion before them. At the time of
their meeting each had been convinced that he gauged the
other sufficiently for the purposes of the proposed tour.
Afterwards each found himself trying to recall the other with
greater distinctness and able to recall nothing but queer,
ominous and minatory traits. The doctor's impression of the
great fuel specialist grew ever darker, leaner, taller and
more impatient. Sir Richmond took on the likeness of a
monster obdurate and hostile, he spread upwards until like
the Djinn out of the bottle, he darkened the heavens. And he
talked too much. He talked ever so much too much. Sir
Richmond also thought that the doctor talked too much. In
addition, he read into his imperfect memory of the doctor's
face, an expression of protruded curiosity. What was all this
problem of motives and inclinations that they were "going
into" so gaily? He had merely consulted the doctor on a
simple, straightforward need for a nervous tonic--that was
what he had needed--a tonic. Instead he had engaged himself
for--he scarcely knew what--an indiscreet, indelicate, and
altogether undesirable experiment in confidences.

Both men were considerably reassured when at last they set
eyes on each other again. Indeed each was surprised to find
something almost agreeable in the appearance of the other.
Dr. Martineau at once perceived that the fierceness of Sir
Richmond was nothing more than the fierceness of an
overwrought man, and Sir Richmond realized at a glance that
the curiosity of Dr. Martineau's bearing had in it nothing
personal or base; it was just the fine alertness of the
scientific mind.

Sir Richmond had arrived nearly forty minutes late, and it
would have been evident to a much less highly trained
observer than Dr. Martineau that some dissension had arisen
between the little, ladylike, cream and black Charmeuse car
and its owner. There was a faint air of resentment and
protest between them. As if Sir Richmond had been in some way
rude to it.

The cap of the radiator was adorned with a little brass
figure of a flying Mercury. Frozen in a sprightly attitude,
its stiff bound and its fixed heavenward stare was highly
suggestive of a forced and tactful disregard of current
unpleasantness.

Nothing was said, however, to confirm or dispel this
suspicion of a disagreement between the man and the car. Sir
Richmond directed and assisted Dr. Martineau's man to adjust
the luggage at the back, and Dr. Martineau watched the
proceedings from his dignified front door. He was wearing a
suit of fawn tweeds, a fawn Homburg hat and a light Burberry,
with just that effect of special preparation for a holiday
which betrays the habitually busy man. Sir Richmond's brown
gauntness was, he noted, greatly set off by his suit of grey.
There had certainly been some sort of quarrel. Sir Richmond
was explaining the straps to Dr. Martineau's butler with the
coldness a man betrays when he explains the uncongenial
habits of some unloved intimate. And when the moment came to
start and the little engine did not immediately respond to
the electric starter, he said: "Oh! COME up, you--!"

His voice sank at the last word as though it was an entirely
confidential communication to the little car. And it was an
extremely low and disagreeable word. So Dr. Martineau decided
that it was not his business to hear it. . . .

It was speedily apparent that Sir Richmond was an experienced
and excellent driver. He took the Charmeuse out into the
traffic of Baker Street and westward through brisk and busy
streets and roads to Brentford and Hounslow smoothly and
swiftly, making a score of unhesitating and accurate
decisions without apparent thought. There was very little
conversation until they were through Brentford. Near
Shepherd's Bush, Sir Richmond had explained, "This is not my
own particular car. That was butted into at the garage this
morning and its radiator cracked. So I had to fall back on
this. It's quite a good little car. In its way. My wife
drives it at times. It has one or two constitutional
weaknesses--incidental to the make--gear-box over the back
axle for example--gets all the vibration. Whole machine
rather on the flimsy side. Still--"

He left the topic at that.

Dr. Martineau said something of no consequence about its
being a very comfortable little car.

Somewhere between Brentford and Hounslow, Sir Richmond
plunged into the matter between them. "I don't know how deep
we are going into these psychological probings of yours," he
said. "But I doubt very much if we shall get anything out of
them."

"Probably not," said Dr. Martineau.

"After all, what I want is a tonic. I don't see that there is
anything positively wrong with me. A certain lack of energy--
"

"Lack of balance," corrected the doctor. "You are wasting
energy upon internal friction. "But isn't that inevitable? No
machine is perfectly efficient. No man either. There is
always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the individual
idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as
she ought to pull--she never does. She's low in her class. So
with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of
energy waste. Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to
me. (Damn that omnibus! All over the road!)"

"We don't deny the imperfection--" began the doctor.

"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir
Richmond, opening up another line of thought.

"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it.
"These new methods of treatment are based on the idea of
imperfection. We begin with that. I began with that last
Tuesday. . . ."

Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and
for that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of
accumulations. Your psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me,
with a notion of stripping down to something fundamental. The
ape before was a tangle of accumulations, just as we are. So
it was with his forebears. So it has always been. All life is
an endless tangle of accumulations."

"Recognize it," said the doctor.

"And then?" said Sir Richmond, controversially.

"Recognize in particular your own tangle."

"Is my particular tangle very different from the general
tangle? (Oh! Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a
creature of undecided will, urged on by my tangled heredity
to do a score of entirely incompatible things. Mankind, all
life, is that."

"But our concern is the particular score of incompatible
things you are urged to do. We examine and weigh--we weigh--"

The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and
ultimately disastrous struggle began between Sir Richmond and
the little Charmeuse car. The doctor stopped in mid-sentence.

It was near Taplow station that the mutual exasperation of
man and machine was brought to a crisis by the clumsy
emergence of a laundry cart from a side road. Sir Richmond
was obliged to pull up smartly and stopped his engine. It
refused an immediate obedience to the electric starter. Then
it picked up, raced noisily, disengaged great volumes of
bluish smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition
to run on any gear but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought
aloud, unpleasing thoughts. He addressed the little car as a
person; he referred to ancient disputes and temperamental
incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse, ill-bred
man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There
were some moments of hope, dashed by the necessity of going
dead slow behind an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not
notice the outstretched arm of the driver of the van, and
stalled his engine for a second time. The electric starter
refused its office altogether.

For some moments Sir Richmond sat like a man of stone.

"I must wind it up " he said at last in a profound and awful
voice. "I must wind it up."

"I get out, don't I?" asked the doctor, unanswered, and did
so. Sir Richmond, after a grim search and the displacement
and replacement of the luggage, produced a handle from the
locker at the back of the car and prepared to wind.

There was a little difficulty. "Come UP!" he said, and the
small engine roared out like a stage lion.

The two gentlemen resumed their seats. The car started and
then by an unfortunate inadvertency Sir Richmond pulled the
gear lever over from the first speed to the reverse. There
was a metallic clangour beneath the two gentlemen, and the
car slowed down and stopped although the engine was still
throbbing wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke still
streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle
breeze. The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by
a gaunt madman, mouthing vileness, who had only a minute or
so before been a decent British citizen. He made some blind
lunges at the tremulous but obdurate car, but rather as if he
looked for offences and accusations than for displacements to
adjust. Quivering and refusing, the little car was
extraordinarily like some recalcitrant little old
aristocratic lady in the hands of revolutionaries, and this
made the behaviour of Sir Richmond seem even more outrageous
than it would otherwise have done. He stopped the engine, he
went down on his hands and knees in the road to peer up at
the gear-box, then without restoring the spark, he tried to
wind up the engine again. He spun the little handle with an
insane violence, faster and faster for--as it seemed to the
doctor--the better part of a minute. Beads of perspiration
appeared upon his brow and ran together; he bared his teeth
in a snarl; his hat slipped over one eye. He groaned with
rage. Then, using the starting handle as a club, he assailed
the car. He smote the brazen Mercury from its foothold and
sent it and a part of the radiator cap with it flying across
the road. He beat at the wings of the bonnet, until they bent
in under his blows. Finally, he hurled the starting-handle at
the wind-screen and smashed it. The starting-handle rattled
over the bonnet and fell to the ground. . . .

The paroxysm was over. Ten seconds later this cataclysmal
lunatic had reverted to sanity--a rather sheepish sanity.

He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned his
back on the car. He remarked in a voice of melancholy
detachment: "It was a mistake to bring that coupe."

Dr. Martineau had assumed an attitude of trained observation
on the side path. His hands rested on his hips and his hat
was a little on one side. He was inclined to agree with Sir
Richmond. "I don't know," he considered. "You wanted some
such blow-off as this."

"Did I? "

"The energy you have! That car must be somebody's whipping
boy."

"The devil it is!" said Sir Richmond, turning round sharply
and staring at it as if he expected it to display some
surprising and yet familiar features. Then he looked
questioningly and suspiciously at his companion.

"These outbreaks do nothing to amend the originating
grievance," said the doctor. "No. And at times they are even
costly. But they certainly lift a burthen from the nervous
system. . . . And now I suppose we have to get that little
ruin to Maidenhead."

"Little ruin!" repeated Sir Richmond. "No. There's lots of
life in the little beast yet."

He reflected. "She'll have to be towed." He felt in his
breast pocket. "Somewhere I have the R.A.C. order paper, the
Badge that will Get You Home. We shall have to hail some
passing car to take it into Maidenhead."

Dr. Martineau offered and Sir Richmond took and lit a
cigarette.

For a little while conversation hung fire. Then for the first
time Dr. Martineau heard his patient laugh.

"Amazing savage," said Sir Richmond. "Amazing savage!"

He pointed to his handiwork. "The little car looks ruffled.
Well it may."

He became grave again. "I suppose I ought to apologize.

"Dr. Martineau weighed the situation. "As between doctor and
patient," he said. "No."

"Oh!" said Sir Richmond, turned to a new point of view. "But
where the patient ends and the host begins. . . . I'm really
very sorry." He reverted to his original train of thought
which had not concerned Dr. Martineau at all. "After all, the
little car was only doing what she was made to do."

Section 2

The affair of the car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's
mind. Hitherto Dr. Martineau had perceived the possibility
and danger of a defensive silence or of a still more
defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond had once given
himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to an
unlimited extent. He embarked upon an apologetic discussion
of the choleric temperament.

He began as they stood waiting for the relief car from the
Maidenhead garage. "You were talking of the ghosts of apes
and monkeys that suddenly come out from the darkness of the
subconscious . . . ."

"You mean--when we first met at Harley Street?"

"That last apparition of mine seems to have been a gorilla at
least."

The doctor became precise. Gorillaesque. We are not descended
from gorillas."

"Queer thing a fit of rage is!"

"It's one of nature's cruder expedients. Crude, but I doubt
if it is fundamental. There doesn't seem to be rage in the
vegetable world, and even among the animals--? No, it is not
universal." He ran his mind over classes and orders. "Wasps
and bees certainly seem to rage, but if one comes to think,
most of the invertebrata show very few signs of it."

"I'm not so sure," said Sir Richmond. "I've never seen a
snail in a towering passion or an oyster slamming its shell
behind it. But these are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which
is after all a smouldering sort of rage. And take any more
active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not a smashing and
swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a disciplined, cold-
blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will
rage dangerously."

"A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has
ever seen a furious rabbit?"

"Don't the bucks fight?" questioned Sir Richmond.

Dr. Martineau admitted the point.

"I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can
remember. I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I
once threw a fork at my elder brother and it stuck in his
forehead, doing no serious damage--happily. There were whole
days of wrath--days, as I remember them. Perhaps they were
only hours. . . . I've never thought before what a peculiar
thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage? They
used to say it was the devil. If it isn't the devil, then
what the devil is it? "After all," he went on as the doctor
was about to answer his question; "as you pointed out, it
isn't the lowlier things that rage. It's the HIGHER things
and US."

"The devil nowadays," the doctor reflected after a pause, "so
far as man is concerned, is understood to be the ancestral
ape. And more particularly the old male ape."

But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. "Life
itself, flaring out. Brooking no contradiction." He came
round suddenly to the doctor's qualification. "Why male?
Don't little girls smash things just as much?"

"They don't," said Dr. Martineau. "Not nearly as much."

Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. "I suppose you have
watched any number of babies?"'

"Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do.
There's a lot of rage about most of them at first, male or
female. "

"Queer little eddies of fury. . . . Recently--it happens--
I've been seeing one. A spit of red wrath, clenching its
fists and squalling threats at a damned disobedient
universe."

The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and
questioningly at his companion's profile.

"Blind driving force," said Sir Richmond, musing.

"Isn't that after all what we really are?" he asked the
doctor. "Essentially--Rage. A rage in dead matter, making it
alive."

"Schopenhauer," footnoted the doctor. "Boehme."

"Plain fact, "said Sir Richmond. "No Rage--no Go."

"But rage without discipline?"

"Discipline afterwards. The rage first."

"But rage against what? And FOR what?"

"Against the Universe. And for--? That's more difficult. What
IS the little beast squalling itself crimson for? Ultimately?
. . . What is it clutching after? In the long run, what will
it get?"

("Yours the car in distress what sent this?" asked an
unheeded voice.)

"Of course, if you were to say 'desire'," said Dr. Martineau,
"then you would be in line with the psychoanalysts. They talk
of LIBIDO, meaning a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks
of it at times almost as if it were the universal driving
force."

"No," said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. "Not
desire. Desire would have a definite direction, and that is
just what this driving force hasn't. It's rage."

"Yours the car in distress what sent this?" the voice
repeated. It was the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car.
He was holding up the blue request for assistance that Sir
Richmond had recently filled in.

The two philosophers returned to practical matters.

Section 3

For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse
car with Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the brass Mercury
lay unheeded in the dusty roadside grass. Then it caught the
eye of a passing child.

He was a bright little boy of five. From the moment when he
caught the gleam of brass he knew that he had made the find
of his life. But his nurse was a timorous, foolish thing.
"You did ought to of left it there, Masterrarry," she said.

"Findings ain't keepings nowadays, not by no manner of means,
Masterrarry.

"Yew'd look silly if a policeman came along arsting people if
they seen a goldennimage.

"Arst yer 'ow you come by it and look pretty straight at
you."

All of which grumblings Master Harry treated with an
experienced disregard. He knew definitely that he would never
relinquish this bright and lovely possession again. It was
the first beautiful thing he had ever possessed. He was the
darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was
crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic
penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen
and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual
beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a
thing of a different order.

There was to be much conflict and distress, tears and wrath,
before the affinity of that cleanlimbed, shining figure and
his small soul was recognized. But he carried his point at
last. The Mercury became his inseparable darling, his symbol,
his private god, the one dignified and serious thing in a
little life much congested by the quaint, the burlesque, and
all the smiling, dull condescensions of adult love.



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

AT MAIDENHEAD

Section 1

The little Charmeuse was towed to hospital and the two
psychiatrists took up their quarters at the Radiant Hotel
with its pleasant lawns and graceful landing stage at the
bend towards the bridge. Sir Richmond, after some trying work
at the telephone, got into touch with his own proper car. A
man would bring the car down in two days' time at latest, and
afterwards the detested coupe could go back to London. The
day was still young, and after lunch and coffee upon a sunny
lawn a boat seemed indicated. Sir Richmond astonished the
doctor by going to his room, reappearing dressed in tennis
flannels and looking very well in them. It occurred to the
doctor as a thing hitherto unnoted that Sir Richmond was not
indifferent to his personal appearance. The doctor had no
flannels, but he had brought a brown holland umbrella lined
with green that he had acquired long ago in Algiers, and this
served to give him something of the riverside quality.

The day was full of sunshine and the river had a Maytime
animation. Pink geraniums, vivid green lawns, gay awnings,
bright glass, white paint and shining metal set the tone of
Maidenhead life. At lunch there had been five or six small
tables with quietly affectionate couples who talked in
undertones, a tableful of bright-coloured Jews who talked in
overtones, and a family party from the Midlands, badly
smitten with shyness, who did not talk at all. "A resort, of
honeymoon couples," said the doctor, and then rather
knowingly: "Temporary honeymoons, I fancy, in one or two of
the cases."

"Decidedly temporary," said Sir Richmond, considering the
company--"in most of the cases anyhow. The two in the corner
might be married. You never know nowadays."

He became reflective. . . .

After lunch and coffee he rowed the doctor up the river
towards Cliveden.

"The last time I was here," he said, returning to the
subject, "I was here on a temporary honeymoon."

The doctor tried to look as though he had not thought that
could be possible.

"I know my Maidenhead fairly well," said Sir Richmond.
"Aquatic activities, such as rowing, punting, messing about
with a boat-hook, tying up, buzzing about in motor launches,
fouling other people's boats, are merely the stage business
of the drama. The ruling interests of this place are love--
largely illicit--and persistent drinking. . . . Don't you
think the bridge charming from here?"

"I shouldn't have thought--drinking," said Dr. Martineau,
after he had done justice to the bridge over his shoulder.

"Yes, the place has a floating population of quiet
industrious soakers. The incurable river man and the river
girl end at that."

Dr. Martineau encouraged Sir Richmond by an appreciative
silence.

"If we are to explore the secret places of the heart," Sir
Richmond went on, "we shall have to give some attention to
this Maidenhead side of life. It is very material to my case.
I have,--as I have said--BEEN HERE. This place has beauty and
charm; these piled-up woods behind which my Lords Astor and
Desborough keep their state, this shining mirror of the
water, brown and green and sky blue, this fringe of reeds and
scented rushes and forget-me-not and lilies, and these
perpetually posing white swans: they make a picture. A little
artificial it is true; one feels the presence of a
Conservancy Board, planting the rushes and industriously
nicking the swans; but none the less delightful. And this
setting has appealed to a number of people as an invitation,
as, in a way, a promise. They come here, responsive to that
promise of beauty and happiness. They conceive of themselves
here, rowing swiftly and gracefully, punting beautifully,
brandishing boat-hooks with ease and charm. They look to
meet, under pleasant or romantic circumstances, other
possessors and worshippers of grace and beauty here. There
will be glowing evenings, warm moonlight, distant voices
singing. . . .There is your desire, doctor, the desire you
say is the driving force of life. But reality mocks it. Boats
bump and lead to coarse ungracious quarrels; rowing can be
curiously fatiguing; punting involves dreadful indignities.
The romance here tarnishes very quickly. Romantic encounters
fail to occur; in our impatience we resort to--accosting.
Chilly mists arise from the water and the magic of distant
singing is provided, even excessively, by boatloads of cads--
with collecting dishes. When the weather keeps warm there
presently arises an extraordinary multitude of gnats, and
when it does not there is a need for stimulants. That is why
the dreamers who come here first for a light delicious brush
with love, come down at last to the Thamesside barmaid with
her array of spirits and cordials as the quintessence of all
desire."

"I say," said the doctor. "You tear the place to pieces."

"The desires of the place," said Sir Richmond.

"I'm using the place as a symbol."

He held his sculls awash, rippling in the water.

"The real force of life, the rage of life, isn't here," he
said. "It's down underneath, sulking and smouldering. Every
now and then it strains and cracks the surface. This stretch
of the Thames, this pleasure stretch, has in fact a curiously
quarrelsome atmosphere. People scold and insult one another
for the most trivial things, for passing too close, for
taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose. Most
of these notice boards on the bank show a thoroughly nasty
spirit. People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats. You
hear people quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk
along the towing path. There is remarkably little happy
laughter here. The RAGE, you see, is hostile to this place,
the RAGE breaks through. . . . The people who drift from one
pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the
riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of pleasure, trying
to forget the rage. . . ."

"Isn't it that there is some greater desire at the back of
the human mind?" the doctor suggested. "Which refuses to be
content with pleasure as an end?"

"What greater desire?" asked Sir Richmond, disconcertingly.

"Oh! . . . " The doctor cast about.

"There is no such greater desire," said Sir Richmond. "You
cannot name it. It is just blind drive. I admit its
discontent with pleasure as an end--but has it any end of its
own? At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking
its desire and hasn't found it."

"Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an
afternoon smile under his green umbrella. "Go on."

Section 2

"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond,
"I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift
down this backwater.) "

"Big these trees are," said the doctor with infinite
approval.

"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant
motives I am. I do not seem to deserve to be called a
personality. I cannot discover even a general direction. Much
more am I like a taxi-cab in which all sorts of aims and
desires have travelled to their destination and got out. Are
we all like that?"

"A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain
thread of memory?" said the doctor and considered. "More than
that. More than that. We have leading ideas, associations,
possessions, liabilities."

"We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us
from complete dispersal."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a
consistency, that we call character."

"It changes."

"Consistently with itself."

"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir
Richmond, going off at a tangent. "My sentimental education.
I wonder if it differs very widely from yours or most men's."

"Some men are more eventful in these matters than others,"
said the doctor,--it sounded--wistfully.

"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I
suspect, whether they are eventful or not. The brakes may be
strong or weak but the drive is the same. I can't remember
much of the beginnings of curiosity and knowledge in these
matters. Can you?"

"Not much," said the doctor. "No."

"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions,
monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't
remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may
have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy
curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall
anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively
interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy,
and a certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative
slavishness--not towards actual women but towards something
magnificently feminine. My first love--"

Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was
Britannia as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I
must have been a very little chap at the time of the
Britannia affair. I just clung to her in my imagination and
did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little later, a
secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the
Crystal Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can
remember,--for all of them. But I don't remember anything
very monstrous or incestuous in my childish imaginations,--
such things as Freud, I understand, lays stress upon. If
there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort in my
case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a
child which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and
sees a lot of pictures of the nude human body, and so on,
gets its mind shifted off any possible concentration upon the
domestic aspect of sex. I got to definite knowledge pretty
early. By the time I was eleven or twelve."

"Normally? "

"What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be
forgetting much secret and shameful curiosity. I got my ideas
into definite form out of a little straightforward
physiological teaching and some dissecting of rats and mice.
My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of his
times and my people believed in him. I think much of this
distorted perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds
about sex and develops into evil vices and still more evil
habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things."

"Not entirely," said the doctor.

"Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes
through the stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN."

"I've not read it."

"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up
in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of
purity and decency and under threats of hell fire."

"Horrible!"

"Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that
make young people write unclean words in secret places. "

"Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters
nowadays. Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode."

"On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and
clean," said Sir Richmond. "What stands out in my memory now
is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely
and kind and powerful and wonderful. That ruled my secret
imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my mind as I
grew up."

"The mother complex," said Dr. Martineau as a passing
botanist might recognize and name a flower.

Sir Richmond stared at him for a moment.

"It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any
mother or any particular woman at all. Far better to call it
the goddess complex."

"The connexion is not perhaps immediately visible," said the
doctor.

"There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond. "The women of my
adolescent dreams were stripped and strong and lovely. They
were great creatures. They came, it was clearly traceable,
from pictures sculpture--and from a definite response in
myself to their beauty. My mother had nothing whatever to do
with that. The women and girls about me were fussy bunches of
clothes that I am sure I never even linked with that dream
world of love and worship."

"Were you co-educated?"

"No. But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger
than myself, and there were plenty of girls in my circle. I
thought some of them pretty--but that was a different affair.
I know that I didn't connect them with the idea of the loved
and worshipped goddesses at all, because I remember when I
first saw the goddess in a real human being and how amazed I
was at the discovery. . . . I was a boy of twelve or
thirteen. My people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney
Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the Marsh
accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a
little old forgotten silent wind-bitten village crouching
under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water there were
miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage
brown woman. Shining and with a texture--the very same. And
one day as I was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy
fashion,--there were some ribs of a wrecked boat buried in
the sand near a groin and I was busy with them--a girl ran
out from a tent high up on the beach and across the sands to
the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and not
in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to
inflict on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a
blue handkerchief. She ran swiftly and gracefully, intent
upon the white line of foam ahead. I can still remember how
the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as she went
past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have
ever seen--to this day. She lifted up her arms and thrust
through the dazzling white and green breakers and plunged
into the water and swam; she swam straight out for a long way
as it seemed to me, and presently came in and passed me again
on her way back to her tent, light and swift and sure. The
very prints of her feet on the sand were beautiful. Suddenly
I realized that there could be living people in the world as
lovely as any goddess. . . . She wasn't in the least out of
breath.

"That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I
doubt sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone else. I kept
the thing very secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing
so secret. Until now I have never told a soul about it. I
resorted to all sorts of tortuous devices and excuses to get
a chance of seeing her again without betraying what it was I
was after."

Dr. Martineau retained a simple fondness for a story.

"And did you meet her again?"

"Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressed-up person
and not recognized her. A day or so later I was stabbed to
the heart by the discovery that the tent she came out of had
been taken away. "

"She had gone?"

"For ever."

Sir Richmond smiled brightly at the doctor's disappointment.

Section 3

"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things,"
Sir Richmond resumed presently. "Never. I do not think any
man is. We are too much plastered-up things, too much the
creatures of a tortuous and complicated evolution."

Dr. Martineau, under his green umbrella, nodded his conceded
agreement.

"This--what shall I call it?--this Dream of Women, grew up in
my mind as I grew up--as something independent of and much
more important than the reality of Women. It came only very
slowly into relation with that. That girl on the Dymchurch
beach was one of the first links, but she ceased very
speedily to be real--she joined the women of dreamland at
last altogether. She became a sort of legendary incarnation.
I thought of these dream women not only as something
beautiful but as something exceedingly kind and helpful. The
girls and women I met belonged to a different
creation. . . ."

Sir Richmond stopped abruptly and rowed a few long strokes.

Dr. Martineau sought information.

"I suppose," he said, "there was a sensuous element in these
dreamings?"

"Certainly. A very strong one. It didn't dominate but it was
a very powerful undertow."

"Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to
concentrate? To group itself about a single figure, the sort
of thing that Victorians would have called an ideal?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There
was always a tremendous lot of variety in my mind. In fact
the thing I liked least in the real world was the way it was
obsessed by the idea of pairing off with one particular set
and final person. I liked to dream of a blonde goddess in her
own Venusberg one day, and the next I would be off over the
mountains with an armed Brunhild."

"You had little thought of children?"

"As a young man?"

"Yes."

"None at all. I cannot recall a single philoprogenitive
moment. These dream women were all conceived of, and I was
conceived of, as being concerned in some tremendous
enterprise--something quite beyond domesticity. It kept us
related--gave us dignity. . . . Certainly it wasn't babies."

"All this is very interesting, very interesting, from the
scientific point of view. A PRIORI it is not what one might
have expected. Reasoning from the idea that all instincts and
natural imaginations are adapted to a biological end and
seeing that sex is essentially a method of procreation, one
might reasonably expect a convergence, if not a complete
concentration, upon the idea of offspring. It is almost as if
there were other ends to be served. It is clear that Nature
has not worked this impulse out to any sight of its end. Has
not perhaps troubled to do so. The instinct of the male for
the female isn't primarily for offspring--not even in the
most intelligent and farseeing types. The desire just points
to glowing satisfactions and illusions. Quite equally I think
the desire of the female for the male ignores its end. Nature
has set about this business in a CHEAP sort of way. She is
like some pushful advertising tradesman. She isn't frank
with us; she just humbugs us into what she wants with us. All
very well in the early Stone Age--when the poor dear things
never realized that their mutual endearments meant all the
troubles and responsibilities of parentage. But NOW--!"

He shook his head sideways and twirled the green umbrella
like an animated halo around his large broad-minded face.

Sir Richmond considered. "Desire has never been the chief
incentive of my relations with women. Never. So far as I can
analyze the thing, it has been a craving for a particular
sort of life giving companionship."

"That I take it is Nature's device to keep the lovers
together in the interest of the more or less unpremeditated
offspring."

"A poor device, if that is its end. It doesn't keep parents
together; more often it tears them apart. The wife or the
mistress, so soon as she is encumbered with children, becomes
all too manifestly not the companion goddess. . . ."

Sir Richmond brooded over his sculls and thought.

"Throughout my life I have been an exceedingly busy man. I
have done a lot of scientific work and some of it has been
very good work. And very laborious work. I've travelled much.
I've organized great business developments. You might think
that my time has been fairly well filled without much
philandering. And all the time, all the time, I've been--
about women--like a thirsty beast looking for water. . . .
Always. Always. All through my life."

Dr. Martineau waited through another silence.

"I was very grave about it at first. I married young. I
married very simply and purely. I was not one of those young
men who sow a large crop of wild oats. I was a fairly decent
youth. It suddenly appeared to me that a certain smiling and
dainty girl could make herself into all the goddesses of my
dreams. I had but to win her and this miracle would occur. Of
course I forget now the exact things I thought and felt then,
but surely I had some such persuasion. Or why should I have
married her? My wife was seven years younger than myself,--a
girl of twenty. She was charming. She is charming. She is a
wonderfully intelligent and understanding woman. She has made
a home for me--a delightful home. I am one of those men who
have no instinct for home making. I owe my home and all the
comfort and dignity of my life to her ability. I have no
excuse for any misbehaviour--so far as she is concerned. None
at all. By all the rules I should have been completely
happy. But instead of my marriage satisfying me, it presently
released a storm of long-controlled desires and imprisoned
cravings. A voice within me became more and more urgent.
'This will not do. This is not love. Where are your
goddesses? This is not love.' . . . And I was unfaithful to
my wife within four years of my marriage. It was a sudden
overpowering impulse. But I suppose the ground had been
preparing for a long time. I forget now all the emotions of
that adventure. I suppose at the time it seemed beautiful and
wonderful. . . . I do not excuse myself. Still less do I
condemn myself. I put the facts before you. So it was."

"There were no children by your marriage?"

"Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive. We
have had three. My daughter was married two years ago. She is
in America. One little boy died when he was three. The other
is in India, taking up the Mardipore power scheme again now
that he is out of the army. . . . No, it is simply that I was
hopelessly disappointed with everything that a good woman and
a decent marriage had to give me. Pure disappointment and
vexation. The anti-climax to an immense expectation built up
throughout an imaginative boyhood and youth and early
manhood. I was shocked and ashamed at my own disappointment.
I thought it mean and base. Nevertheless this orderly
household into which I had placed my life, these almost
methodical connubialities . . . ."

He broke off in mid-sentence.

Dr. Martineau shook his head disapprovingly.

"No," he said, "it wasn't fair to your wife."

"It was shockingly unfair. I have always realized that. I've
done what I could to make things up to her. . . . Heaven
knows what counter disappointments she has concealed. . . .
But it is no good arguing about rights and wrongs now. This
is not an apology for my life. I am telling you what
happened.

"Not for me to judge," said Dr. Martineau. "Go on."

"By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had
satisfied none but the most transitory desires and I had
incurred a tremendous obligation. That obligation didn't
restrain me from making desperate lunges at something vaguely
beautiful that I felt was necessary to me; but it did cramp
and limit these lunges. So my story flops down into the
comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable,
married man. . .I was still driven by my dream of some
extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought
it like an area sneak. Gods! What a story it is when one
brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and
sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world--somewhere.
Hidden away from me. I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear
lost thing, now in the corners of a smiling mouth, now in
dark eyes beneath a black smoke of hair, now in a slim form
seen against the sky. Often I cared nothing for the woman I
made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding
from me . . . . "

Sir Richmond's voice altered.

"I don't see what possible good it can do to talk over these
things." He began to row and rowed perhaps a score of
strokes. Then he stopped and the boat drove on with a whisper
of water at the bow and over the outstretched oar blades.

"What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried.
"What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She
drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even
get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief.
See what a fantastic thing I am when you take the machine to
pieces! I have been a busy and responsible man throughout my
life. I have handled complicated public and industrial
affairs not unsuccessfully and discharged quite big
obligations fully and faithfully. And all the time, hidden
away from the public eye, my life has been laced by the
thread of these--what can one call them? --love adventures.
How many? you ask. I don't know. Never have I been a whole-
hearted lover; never have I been able to leave love alone. .
. . Never has love left me alone.

"And as I am made, said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence,
"AS I AM MADE--I do not believe that I could go on without
these affairs. I know that you will be disposed to dispute
that.

Dr. Martineau made a reassuring noise.

"These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally
necessary. It is only latterly that I have begun to perceive
this. Women MAKE life for me. Whatever they touch or see or
desire becomes worth while and otherwise it is not worth
while. Whatever is lovely in my world, whatever is
delightful, has been so conveyed to me by some woman. Without
the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in
the world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much,
valuing nothing."

He paused.

"You are, I think, abnormal," considered the doctor.

"Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a
wasting fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no
kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The
world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud,
logical necessity and utter desolation--with nothing whatever
worth fighting for. Whatever justifies effort, whatever
restores energy is hidden in women . . . ."

"An access of sex," said Dr. Martineau. " This is a
phase. . . ."

"It is how I am made," said Sir Richmond.

A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. "It
isn't how you are made. We are getting to something in all
this. It is, I insist, a mood of how you are made. A
distinctive and indicative mood."

Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.

"I would go through it all again. . . . There are times when
the love of women seems the only real thing in the world to
me. And always it remains the most real thing. I do not know
how far I may be a normal man or how far I may not be, so to
speak, abnormally male, but to me life has very little
personal significance and no value or power until it has a
woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say
anything that matters a woman must be present as a medium. I
don't mean that it has no significance mentally and
logically; I mean that irrationally and emotionally it has no
significance. Works of art, for example, bore me, literature
bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores
me, unless I find in it some association with a woman's
feeling. It isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture
is fine or a mountain valley lovely, but that it doesn't
matter a rap to me whether it is or whether it isn't until
there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if you like to
call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness or
pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes
in and breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even
rest until a woman makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I
do without women and that is work, joylessly but effectively,
and latterly for some reason that it is up to you to
discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."

Section 4

"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous
visit here. It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago. We
rowed down this same backwater. I can see my companion's
hand--she had very pretty hands with rosy palms--trailing in
the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly under her
sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected
from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was
one of those people who seem always to be happy and to
radiate happiness.

"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a
thoroughly bad lot. She had about as much morality, in the
narrower sense of the word, as a monkey. And yet she stands
out in my mind as one of the most honest women I have ever
met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of that
effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her
candid blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner. . . .
But--no! She was really honest.

"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet
rushes and crushed them in her hand. She adds a remembered
brightness to this afternoon.

"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman
who was here with me came nearest to being my friend. You
know, what we call virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap
to any real friendliness with a man. Until she gets to an age
when virtue and fidelity are no longer urgent practical
concerns, a good woman, by the very definition of feminine
goodness, isn't truly herself. Over a vast extent of her
being she is RESERVED. She suppresses a vast amount of her
being, holds back, denies, hides. On the other hand, there is
a frankness and honesty in openly bad women arising out of
the admitted fact that they are bad, that they hide no
treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious and
delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal.
Intellectually they seem to be more manly and vigorous
because they are, as people say, unsexed. Many old women,
thoroughly respectable old women, have the same quality.
Because they have gone out of the personal sex business.
Haven't you found that?"

"I have never," said the doctor, known what you call an
openly bad woman,--at least, at all intimately. . . . "

Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion.
"You have avoided them!"

"They don't attract me."
"They repel you?"

"For me," said the doctor, "for any friendliness, a woman
must be modest. . . . My habits of thought are old-fashioned,
I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there
were no barriers, no reservation, that in any fashion she
might more than meet me half way . . . "

His facial expression completed his sentence.

"Now I wonder," whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a
moment before he carried the great research into the
explorer's country. "You are afraid of women?" he said, with
a smile to mitigate the impertinence.

"I respect them."

"An element of fear."

"Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like.
Anyhow I do not let myself go with them. I have never let
myself go."

"You lose something. You lose a reality of insight."

There was a thoughtful interval.

"Having found so excellent a friend," said the doctor, "why
did you ever part from her?"

Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau's
face remained slantingly interrogative. He had found the
effective counterattack and he meant to press it. "I was
jealous of her," Sir Richmond admitted. "I couldn't stand
that side of it."

Section 5

After a meditative silence the doctor became briskly
professional again.

"You care for your wife," he said. "You care very much for
your wife. She is, as you say, your great obligation and you
are a man to respect obligations. I grasp that. Then you tell
me of these women who have come and gone. . . . About them
too you are perfectly frank. . . There remains someone
else." Sir Richmond stared at his physician.

"Well," he said and laughed. "I didn't pretend to have made
my autobiography anything more than a sketch."

"No, but there is a special person, the current person."

"I haven't dilated on my present situation, I admit."

"From some little things that have dropped from you, I should
say there is a child."

"That," said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, "is a good
guess." "Not older than three." "Two years and a half."

"You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated. At
any rate, you can't go to her. That leaves you at loose ends,
because for some time, for two or three years at least, you
have ceased to be--how shall I put it?--an emotional
wanderer." "I begin to respect your psychoanalysis."

"Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine
companionship for weary men. I guess she is a very jolly
companion to be with, amusing, restful--interesting."

"H'm," said Sir Richmond. "I think that is a fair
description. When she cares, that is. When she is in good
form."

"Which she isn't at present," hazarded the doctor. He
exploded a mine of long-pent exasperation.

"She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever
known. Health is a woman's primary duty. But she is incapable
of the most elementary precautions. She is maddeningly
receptive to every infection. At the present moment, when I
am ill, when I am in urgent need of help and happiness, she
has let that wretched child get measles and she herself won't
let me go near her because she has got something disfiguring,
something nobody else could ever have or think of having,
called CARBUNCLE. Carbuncle!"

"It is very painful," said Dr. Martineau. "No doubt it is,"
said Sir Richmond.

"No doubt it is." His voice grew bitter. He spoke with
deliberation. "A perfectly aimless, useless illness,--and as
painful as it CAN be."

He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously. And indeed he had
slammed a door. The doctor realized that for the present
there was no more self-dissection to be got from Sir
Richmond.

For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up
to the foaming weir to the left of the lock by an occasional
stroke. Now with a general air of departure he swung the boat
round and began to row down stream towards the bridge and the
Radiant Hotel.

"Time we had tea," he said,

Section 6

After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the
lawn, brooding darkly--apparently over the crime of the
carbuncle. The doctor went to his room, ostensibly to write
a couple of letters and put on a dinner jacket, but really to
make a few notes of the afternoon's conversation and meditate
over his impressions while they were fresh.

His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he
sank. . . A number of very discrepant things were busy in his
mind. He had experienced a disconcerting personal attack.
There was a whirl of active resentment in the confusion.

"Apologetics of a rake," he tried presently.

"A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing. Every
third manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some
such undertow of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an
imaginative laxity, the temptations of the trip to London--
weakness masquerading as a psychological necessity. The Lady
of the Carbuncle seems to have got rather a hold upon him.
She has kept him in order for three or four years."

The doctor scrutinized his own remarks with a judicious
expression.

"I am not being fair. He ruffled me. Even if it is true, as I
said, that every third manufacturer from the midlands is in
much the same case as he is, that does not dismiss the case.
It makes it a more important one, much more important: it
makes it a type case with the exceptional quality of being
self-expressive. Almost too selfexpressive.

"Sir Richmond does, after all, make out a sort of case for
himself. . . .

"A valid case?"

The doctor sat deep in his chair, frowning judicially with
the fingers of one hand apposed to the fingers of the other.
"He makes me bristle because all his life and ideas challenge
my way of living. But if I eliminate the personal element? "

He pulled a sheet of note-paper towards him and began to jot
down notes with a silver-cased pencil. Soon he discontinued
writing and sat tapping his pencil-case on the table. "The
amazing selfishness of his attitude! I do not think that
once--not once--has he judged any woman except as a
contributor to his energy and peace of mind. . . . Except in
the case of his wife. . . .

"For her his habit of respect was formed before his ideas
developed. . . .

"That I think explains HER. . . .

"What was his phrase about the unfortunate young woman with
the carbuncle? . . . 'Totally Useless and unnecessary
illness,' was it? . . .

"Now has a man any right by any standards to use women as
this man has used them?

"By any standards?"

The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the
corners of his mouth drawn in.

For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing
an increasing part in the good doctor's life. He was writing
this book of his, writing it very deliberately and
laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, but much more was
he dreaming and thinking about this book. Its publication was
to mark an epoch in human thought and human affairs
generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment
in the doctor's own little world. It was to bring home to
people some various aspects of one very startling
proposition: that human society had arrived at a phase when
the complete restatement of its fundamental ideas had become
urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate,
partial adjustments to two centuries of changing conditions
had to give place to a rapid reconstruction of new
fundamental ideas. And it was a fact of great value in the
drama of these secret dreams that the directive force towards
this fundamentally reconstructed world should be the pen of
an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected
of any great excesses of enterprise.

The written portions of this book were already in a highly
polished state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal
with a smooth urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the
thoughts of one intelligent being could possibly be shocking
to another. Upon this the doctor was very insistent. Conduct,
he held, could never be sufficiently discreet, thought could
never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat a
law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a
natural law. That the social well-being demands. But as a
scientific man, in one's stated thoughts and in public
discussion, the case was altogether different. There was no
offence in any possible hypothesis or in the contemplation of
any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was
bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and
spirit of the game, but if one was not playing that game
then there was no reason why one should not contemplate the
completest reversal of all its methods and the alteration and
abandonment of every rule. Correctness of conduct, the doctor
held, was an imperative concomitant of all really free
thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things
that must be divorced absolutely from revolutionary conduct.
It was to the neglect of these obvious principles, as the
doctor considered them, that the general muddle in
contemporary marital affairs was very largely due. We left
divorce-law revision to exposed adulterers and marriage
reform to hot adolescents and craving spinsters driven by the
furies within them to assertions that established nothing and
to practical demonstrations that only left everybody
thoroughly uncomfortable. Far better to leave all these
matters to calm, patient men in easy chairs, weighing typical
cases impartially, ready to condone, indisposed to envy.

In return for which restraint on the part of the eager and
adventurous, the calm patient man was prepared in his
thoughts to fly high and go far. Without giving any
guarantee, of course, that he might not ultimately return to
the comfortable point of inaction from which he started.

In Sir Richmond, Dr. Martineau found the most interesting and
encouraging confirmation of the fundamental idea of THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, the immediate need of new criteria
of conduct altogether. Here was a man whose life was
evidently ruled by standards that were at once very high and
very generous. He was overworking himself to the pitch of
extreme distress and apparently he was doing this for ends
that were essentially unselfish. Manifestly there were many
things that an ordinary industrial or political magnate would
do that Sir Richmond would not dream of doing, and a number
of things that such a man would not feel called upon to do
that he would regard as imperative duties. And mixed up with
so much fine intention and fine conduct was this disreputable
streak of intrigue and this extraordinary claim that such
misconduct was necessary to continued vigour of action.

"To energy of thought it is not necessary," said Dr.
Martineau, and considered for a time. "Yet--certainly--I am
not a man of action. I admit it. I make few decisions.

"The chapters of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE dealing with
women were still undrafted, but they had already greatly
exercised the doctor's mind. He found now that the case of
Sir Richmond had stirred his imagination. He sat with his
hands apposed, his head on one side, and an expression of
great intellectual contentment on his face while these
emancipated ideas gave a sort of gala performance in his
mind.

The good doctor did not dislike women, he had always guarded
himself very carefully against misogyny, but he was very
strongly disposed to regard them as much less necessary in
the existing scheme of things than was generally assumed.
Women, he conceded, had laid the foundations of social life.
Through their contrivances and sacrifices and patience the
fierce and lonely patriarchal family-herd of a male and his
women and off spring had grown into the clan and tribe; the
woven tissue of related families that constitute the human
comity had been woven by the subtle, persistent protection of
sons and daughters by their mothers against the intolerant,
jealous, possessive Old Man. But that was a thing, of the
remote past. Little was left of those ancient struggles now
but a few infantile dreams and nightmares. The greater human
community, human society, was made for good. And being made,
it had taken over the ancient tasks of the woman, one by one,
until now in its modern forms it cherished more sedulously
than she did, it educated, it housed and comforted, it
clothed and served and nursed, leaving the wife privileged,
honoured, protected, for the sake of tasks she no longer did
and of a burthen she no longer bore. "Progress has
TRIVIALIZED women," said the doctor, and made a note of the
word for later consideration.

"And woman has trivialized civilization," the doctor tried.

"She has retained her effect of being central, she still
makes the social atmosphere, she raises men's instinctive
hopes of help and direction. Except," the doctor stipulated,
"for a few highly developed modern types, most men found the
sense of achieving her a necessary condition for sustained
exertion. And there is no direction in her any more.

"She spends," said the doctor, "she just spends. She spends
excitingly and competitively for her own pride and glory, she
drives all the energy of men over the weirs of gain. . . .

"What are we to do with the creature?" whispered the doctor.

Apart from the procreative necessity, was woman an
unavoidable evil? The doctor's untrammelled thoughts began to
climb high, spin, nose dive and loop the loop. Nowadays we
took a proper care of the young, we had no need for high
birth rates, quite a small proportion of women with a gift in
that direction could supply all the offspring that the world
wanted. Given the power of determining sex that science was
slowly winning today, and why should we have so many women
about? A drastic elimination of the creatures would be quite
practicable. A fantastic world to a vulgar imagination, no
doubt, but to a calmly reasonable mind by no means fantastic.
But this was where the case of Sir Richmond became so
interesting. Was it really true that the companionship of
women was necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it
the fact that the drive of life towards action, as
distinguished from contemplation, arose out of sex and needed
to be refreshed by the reiteration of that motive? It was a
plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor's ideas
of natural selection and of the conditions of a survival that
have made us what we are. It was in tune with the Freudian
analyses.

"SEX NOT ONLY A RENEWAL OF LIFE IN THE SPECIES," noted the
doctor's silver pencil; "SEX MAY BE ALSO A RENEWAL OF ENERGY
IN THE INDIVIDUAL."

After some musing he crossed out "sex" and wrote above it
"sexual love."

"That is practically what he claims, Dr. Martineau said. "In
which case we want the completest revision of all our
standards of sexual obligation. We want a new system of
restrictions and imperatives altogether."

It was a fixed idea of the doctor's that women were quite
incapable of producing ideas in the same way that men do, but
he believed that with suitable encouragement they could be
induced to respond quite generously to such ideas. Suppose
therefore we really educated the imaginations of women;
suppose we turned their indubitable capacity for service
towards social and political creativeness, not in order to
make them the rivals of men in these fields, but their moral
and actual helpers. "A man of this sort wants a mistress-
mother," said the doctor. "He wants a sort of woman who cares
more for him and his work and honour than she does for child
or home or clothes or personal pride. "But are there such
women? Can there be such a woman?"

"His work needs to be very fine to deserve her help. But
admitting its fineness? . . .

"The alternative seems to be to teach the sexes to get along
without each other.

"A neutralized world. A separated world. How we should jostle
in the streets! But the early Christians have tried it
already. The thing is impossible.

"Very well, then, we have to make women more responsible
again. In a new capacity. We have to educate them far more
seriously as sources of energy--as guardians and helpers of
men. And we have to suppress them far more rigorously as
tempters and dissipaters. Instead of mothering babies they
have to mother the race. . . . "

A vision of women made responsible floated before his eyes.

"Is that man working better since you got hold of him? If
not, why not? "Or again,--Jane Smith was charged with
neglecting her lover to the common danger. . . . The
inspector said the man was in a pitiful state, morally quite
uncombed and infested with vulgar, showy ideas. . . ."

The doctor laughed, telescoped his pencil and stood up.

Section 7

It became evident after dinner that Sir Richmond also had
been thinking over the afternoon's conversation.

He and Dr. Martineau sat in wide-armed cane chairs on the
lawn with a wickerwork table bearing coffee cups and little
glasses between them. A few other diners chatted and
whispered about similar tables but not too close to our
talkers to disturb them; the dining room behind them had
cleared its tables and depressed its illumination. The moon,
in its first quarter, hung above the sunset, sank after
twilight, shone brighter and brighter among the western
trees, and presently had gone, leaving the sky to an
increasing multitude of stars. The Maidenhead river wearing
its dusky blue draperies and its jewels of light had
recovered all the magic Sir Richmond had stripped from it in
the afternoon. The grave arches of the bridge, made complete
circles by the reflexion of the water, sustained, as if by
some unifying and justifying reason, the erratic flat flashes
and streaks and glares of traffic that fretted to and fro
overhead. A voice sang intermittently and a banjo tinkled,
but remotely enough to be indistinct and agreeable.

"After all," Sir Richmond began abruptly," the search for
some sort of sexual modus vivendi is only a means to an end.
One does not want to live for sex but only through sex. The
main thing in my life has always been my work. This
afternoon, under the Maidenhead influence, I talked too much
of sex. I babbled. Of things one doesn't usually . . . "

"It was very illuminating," said the doctor.

"No doubt. But a temporary phase. It is the defective bearing
talks. . . . Just now--I happen to be irritated."

The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor's face.

"The work is the thing," said Sir Richmond. So long as one
can keep one's grip on it."

"What," said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and
sending wreaths of smoke up towards the star-dusted zenith,
"what is your idea of your work? I mean, how do you see it in
relation to yourself--and things generally?"

"Put in the most general terms?"

"Put in the most general terms."

"I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It
is hard to put something one is always thinking about in
general terms or to think of it as a whole. . . . Now. . . .
Fuel? . . .

"I suppose it was my father's business interests that pushed
me towards specialization in fuel. He wanted me to have a
thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific
training was less easy to get for a boy than it is today. And
much more inspiring when you got it. My mind was framed, so
to speak, in geology and astronomical physics. I grew up to
think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in
history and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman
empire. I don't know what your pocket map of the universe is,
the map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other
general ideas. To me this planet is a little ball of oxides
and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface. And
we, the minutest particles in that tarnish. Who can
nevertheless, in some unaccountable way, take in the idea of
this universe as one whole, who begin to dream of taking
control of it."

"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."

"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?"

Section 8

"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."



CHAPTER THE FIFTH

IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES


Section 1

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.

Section 2

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. . . .

"But there is another set of motives altogether, "Sir
Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the ground for
his real business, "that I didn't go into at all yesterday."

He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before
you realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much
swayed by my affections."

Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine
self-reproach in Sir Richmond's voice.

"I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond
of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration
and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing.
They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and
hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little
and human and suddenly I find they've GOT me. I'm distressed.
I'm filled with something between pity and an impulse of
responsibility. I become tender towards them. I am impelled
to take care of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure
them, to make them stop hurting at any cost. I don't see why
it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people
that grips me most, but it is. I don't know why it should be
their failures that gives them power over me, but it is. I
told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just
now. SHE'S got me in that way; she's got me tremendously."

"You did not speak of her yesterday with any morbid excess of
pity," the doctor was constrained to remark.

"I abused her very probably. I forget exactly what I
said. . . ."

The doctor offered no assistance.

"But the reason why I abuse her is perfectly plain. I abuse
her because she distresses me by her misfortunes and instead
of my getting anything out of her, I go out to her. But I DO
go out to her. All this time at the back of my mind I am
worrying about her. She has that gift of making one feel for
her. I am feeling that damned carbuncle almost as if it had
been my affair instead of hers.

"That carbuncle has made me suffer FRIGHTFULLY. . . . Why
should I? It isn't mine."

He regarded the doctor earnestly. The doctor controlled a
strong desire to laugh.

"I suppose the young lady--" he began.

"Oh! SHE puts in suffering all right. I've no doubt about
that.

"I suppose," Sir Richmond went on, "now that I have told you
so much of this affair, I may as well tell you all. It is a
sort of comedy, a painful comedy, of irrelevant affections."

The doctor was prepared to be a good listener. Facts he would
always listen to; it was only when people told him their
theories that he would interrupt with his "Exactly."

"This young woman is a person of considerable genius. I don't
know if you have seen in the illustrated papers a peculiar
sort of humorous illustrations usually with a considerable
amount of bite in them over the name of Martin Leeds?

"Extremely amusing stuff."

"It is that Martin Leeds. I met her at the beginning of her
career. She talks almost as well as she draws. She amused me
immensely. I'm not the sort of man who waylays and besieges
women and girls. I'm not the pursuing type. But I perceived
that in some odd way I attracted her and I was neither wise
enough nor generous enough not to let the thing develop."

"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.

"I'd never had to do with an intellectually brilliant woman
before. I see now that the more imaginative force a woman
has, the more likely she is to get into a state of extreme
self-abandonment with any male thing upon which her
imagination begins to crystallize. Before I came along she'd
mixed chiefly with a lot of young artists and students, all
doing nothing at all except talk about the things they were
going to do. I suppose I profited by the contrast, being
older and with my hands full of affairs. Perhaps something
had happened that had made her recoil towards my sort of
thing. I don't know. But she just let herself go at me."

"And you?"

"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before.
It was her wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't
my contemporary and as able as I was. As able to take care of
herself. All sorts of considerations that I should have shown
to a sillier woman I never dreamt of showing to her. I had
never met anyone so mentally brilliant before or so helpless
and headlong. And so here we are on each other's hands! "

"But the child?

"It happened to us. For four years now things have just
happened to us. All the time I have been overworking, first
at explosives and now at this fuel business. She too is full
of her work.

"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with
it. And in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably
fond of each other. 'Fond' is the word. But we are both too
busy to look after either ourselves or each other.

"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as
if he delivered a weighed and very important judgment.

"You see very much of each other?"

"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South
Cornwall, and we sometimes snatch a few days together, away
somewhere in Surrey or up the Thames or at such a place as
Southend where one is lost in a crowd of inconspicuous
people. "Then things go well--they usually go well at the
start--we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is
creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of
humour, with a keenness of appreciation . . . . "

"But things do not always go well?"

"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man
who measures his words, "are apt to go wrong. . . . At the
flat there is constant trouble with the servants; they bully
her. A woman is more entangled with servants than a man.
Women in that position seem to resent the work and freedom of
other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as they
would leave a man; they make trouble for her. . . . And when
we have had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in
particular has gone wrong--"

Sir Richmond stopped short.

"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor
sounded.

"Almost always."

"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.

"It is difficult to describe. . . . The essential
incompatibility of the whole thing comes out."

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work
anywhere. All she wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on
the other hand turns back to the Fuel Commission . . . ."

"Then any little thing makes trouble."

"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to
the same discussion; whether we ought really to go on
together."

"It is you begin that?"

"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I
am about. She is as fond of me as I am of her."

"Fonder perhaps."

'I don't know. But she is--adhesive. Emotionally adhesive.
All she wants to do is just to settle down when I am there
and go on with her work. But then, you see, there is MY
work."

"Exactly. . . . After all it seems to me that your great
trouble is not in yourselves but in social institutions.
Which haven't yet fitted themselves to people like you two.
It is the sense of uncertainty makes her, as you say,
adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a new age
Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one--"

"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a
little testily.

"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular
situation, that it is not the individuals to blame but the
misfit of ideas and forms and prejudices."

"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying
suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."

"But how?"

"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to
the peculiarities of our position. . . . She could be
cleverer. Other women are cleverer. Any other woman almost
would be cleverer than she is."

"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is.
She would just be any other woman."

"Perhaps she would," said Sir Richmond darkly and
desperately. "Perhaps she would. Perhaps it would be better
if she was."

Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.

"But here you see that it is that in my case, the fundamental
incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider
conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social
institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change
them to suit an individual case. That would be like
suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano.
As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She
is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my
duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and
treats fuel--and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is
an attack. We quarrel on that. It isn't as though I found it
so easy to stick to my work that I could disregard her
hostility. And I can't bear to part from her. I threaten it,
distress her excessively and then I am overcome by sympathy
for her and I go back to her. . . . In the ordinary course of
things I should be with her now."

"If it were not for the carbuncle?"

"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me
to see her disfigured. She does not understand--" Sir
Richmond was at a loss for a phrase--"that it is not her good
looks."

"She won't let you go to her?"

"It amounts to that. . . . And soon there will be all the
trouble about educating the girl. Whatever happens, she must
have as good a chance as--anyone. . . . "

"Ah! That is worrying you too!"

"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier.
It needs constant tact and dexterity to fix things up.
Neither of us have any. It needs attention. . . . "

Sir Richmond mused darkly.

Dr. Martineau thought aloud. "An incompetent delightful
person with Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of
expression. She must be attractive to many people. She could
probably do without you. If once you parted."

Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.

"You think I ought to part from her? On her account?"

"On her account. It might pain her. But once the thing was
done--"

"I want to part. I believe I ought to part."

"Well?"

"But then my affection comes in."

"That extraordinary--TENDERNESS of yours?"

"I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"Anyone might get hold of her--if I let her down. She hasn't
a tithe of the ordinary coolheaded calculation of an average
woman. . . . I've a duty to her genius. I've got to take care
of her."

To which the doctor made no reply.

"Nevertheless the idea of parting has been very much in my
mind lately."

"Letting her go FREE?"

"You can put it in that way if you like."

"It might not be a fatal operation for either of you."

"And yet there are moods when parting is an intolerable idea.
When one is invaded by a flood of affection.". . . . And old
habits of association."

Dr. Martineau thought. Was that the right word,--affection?
Perhaps it was.

They had come out on the towing path close by the lock and
they found themselves threading their way through a little
crowd of boating people and lookers-on. For a time their
conversation was broken. Sir Richmond resumed it.

"But this is where we cease to be Man on his Planet and all
the rest of it. This is where the idea of a definite task,
fanatically followed to the exclusion of all minor
considerations, breaks down. When the work is good, when we
are sure we are all right, then we may carry off things with
a high hand. But the work isn't always good, we aren't always
sure. We blunder, we make a muddle, we are fatigued. Then the
sacrificed affections come in as accusers. Then it is that we
want to be reassured."

"And then it is that Miss Martin Leeds--?"

"Doesn't," Sir Richmond snapped.

Came a long pause.

"And yet--

"It is extraordinarily difficult to think of parting from
Martin."

Section 3

In the evening after dinner Dr. Martineau sought, rather
unsuccessfully, to go on with the analysis of Sir Richmond.

But Sir Richmond was evidently a creature of moods. Either he
regretted the extent of his confidences or the slight
irrational irritation that he felt at waiting for his car
affected his attitude towards his companion, or Dr.
Martineau's tentatives were ill-chosen. At any rate he would
not rise to any conversational bait that the doctor could
devise. The doctor found this the more regrettable because it
seemed to him that there was much to be worked upon in this
Martin Leeds affair. He was inclined to think that she and
Sir Richmond were unduly obsessed by the idea that they had
to stick together because of the child, because of the look
of the thing and so forth, and that really each might be
struggling against a very strong impulse indeed to break off
the affair. It seemed evident to the doctor that they jarred
upon and annoyed each other extremely. On the whole
separating people appealed to a doctor's mind more strongly
than bringing them together. Accordingly he framed his
enquiries so as to make the revelation of a latent antipathy
as easy as possible.

He made several not very well-devised beginnings. At the
fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he
said, "I can't fiddle about any more with my motives
to-day."

An awkward silence followed. On reflection Sir Richmond
seemed to realize that this sentence needed some apology. "I
admit," he said, "that this expedition has already been a
wonderfully good thing for me. These confessions have made me
look into all sorts of things-squarely. But--

"I'm not used to talking about myself or even thinking
directly about myself. What I say, I afterwards find
disconcerting to recall. I want to alter it. I can feel
myself wallowing into a mess of modifications and
qualifications."

"Yes, but--"

"I want a rest anyhow. . . ."

There was nothing for Dr. Martineau to say to that.

The two gentlemen smoked for some time in a slightly
uncomfortable silence. Dr. Martineau cleared his throat twice
and lit a second cigar. They then agreed to admire the bridge
and think well of Maidenhead. Sir Richmond communicated
hopeful news about his car, which was to arrive the next
morning before ten--he'd just ring the fellow up presently to
make sure--and Dr. Martineau retired early and went rather
thoughtfully to bed. The spate of Sir Richmond's confidences,
it was evident, was over.

Section 4

Sir Richmond's car arrived long before ten, brought down by a
young man in a state of scared alacrity--Sir Richmond had
done some vigorous telephoning before turning in,--the
Charmeuse set off in a repaired and chastened condition to
town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two investigators
into the springs of human conduct were able to resume their
westward journey. They ran through scattered Twyford with its
pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities
of Reading, by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up
long wooded slopes to Savernake forest, where they found the
road heavy and dusty, still in its war-time state, and so
down a steep hill to the wide market street which is
Marlborough. They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the
afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest
artificial mound in Europe. They left the car by the roadside
and clambered to the top and were very learned and
inconclusive about the exact purpose of this vast heap of
chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before the
temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.

Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road
into the wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn
there kept by pleasant people, and they garaged the car in
the cowshed and took two rooms for the night that they might
the better get the atmosphere of the ancient place. Wonderful
indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already two
thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a
great wall of earth with its ditch most strangely on its
inner and not on its outer side; and within this enclosure
gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that,
even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete. A whole
village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for
the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall
is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and
paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre. There
are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when
it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part
the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed.
To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow
creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons
change. Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare
sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow
here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and
hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that
forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of
England, these roads already disused when the Romans made
their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced
for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury
and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the
Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn,
and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.

The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed
the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up
the down to the northward to get a general view of the
village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm
April sunset. The matter of their conversation remained
prehistoric. Both were inclined to find fault with the
archaeological work that had been done on the place. "Clumsy
treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said. "They bore into Silbury
Hill and expect to find a mummified chief or something
sensational of that sort, and they don't, and they report
nothing. They haven't sifted finely enough; they haven't
thought subtly enough. These walls of earth ought to tell
what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods
they used. Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a
cattle land? Were these hills covered by forests? I don't
know. These archaeologists don't know. Or if they do they
haven't told me, which is just as bad. I don't believe they
know.

"What trade came here along these tracks? So far as I know,
they had no beasts of burthen. But suppose one day someone
were to find a potsherd here from early Knossos, or a
fragment of glass from Pepi's Egypt."

The place had stirred up his imagination. He wrestled with
his ignorance as if he thought that by talking he might
presently worry out some picture of this forgotten world,
without metals, without beasts of burthen, without letters,
without any sculpture that has left a trace, and yet with a
sense of astronomical fact clear enough to raise the great
gnomon of Silbury, and with a social system complex enough to
give the large and orderly community to which the size of
Avebury witnesses and the traffic to which the green roads
testify.

The doctor had not realized before the boldness and
liveliness of his companion's mind. Sir Richmond insisted
that the climate must have been moister and milder in those
days; he covered all the downlands with woods, as Savernake
was still covered; beneath the trees he restored a thicker,
richer soil. These people must have done an enormous lot with
wood. This use of stones here was a freak. It was the very
strangeness of stones here that had made them into sacred
things. One thought too much of the stones of the Stone Age.
Who would carve these lumps of quartzite when one could carve
good oak? Or beech--a most carvable wood. Especially when
one's sharpest chisel was a flint. "It's wood we ought to
look for," said Sir Richmond. "Wood and fibre." He declared
that these people had their tools of wood, their homes of
wood, their gods and perhaps their records of wood. "A peat
bog here, even a few feet of clay, might have pickled some
precious memoranda. . . . No such luck. . . . Now in
Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron
age--half way to our own times--quite beautifully pickled."

Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir
Richmond nor the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the
riddle why the ditch was inside and not outside the great
wall.

"And what was our Mind like in those days?" said Sir
Richmond. "That, I suppose, is what interests you. A vivid
childish mind, I guess, with not a suspicion as yet that it
was Man ruling his Planet or anything of that sort."

The doctor pursed his lips. "None," he delivered judicially.
"If one were able to recall one's childhood--at the age of
about twelve or thirteen--when the artistic impulse so often
goes into abeyance and one begins to think in a troubled,
monstrous way about God and Hell, one might get something
like the mind of this place."

"Thirteen. You put them at that already? . . . These people,
you think, were religious?"

"Intensely. In that personal way that gives death a nightmare
terror. And as for the fading of the artistic impulse,
they've left not a trace of the paintings and drawings and
scratchings of the Old Stone people who came before them."

"Adults with the minds of thirteen-year-old children.
Thirteen-year-old children with the strength of adults--and
no one to slap them or tell them not to. . . . After all,
they probably only thought of death now and then. And they
never thought of fuel. They supposed there was no end to
that. So they used up their woods and kept goats to nibble
and kill the new undergrowth. DID these people have goats? "

"I don't know," said the doctor. So little is known."

"Very like children they must have been. The same unending
days. They must have thought that the world went on for ever-
just as they knew it--like my damned Committee does. . . .
With their fuel wasting away and the climate changing
imperceptibly, century by century. . . . Kings and important
men followed one another here for centuries and centuries. .
. . They had lost their past and had no idea of any future. .
. . They had forgotten how they came into the land . . . When
I was a child I believed that my father's garden had been
there for ever. . . .

"This is very like trying to remember some game one played
when one was a child. It is like coming on something that one
built up with bricks and stones in some forgotten part of the
garden. . . . "


"The life we lived here," said the doctor, has left its
traces in traditions, in mental predispositions, in still
unanalyzed fundamental ideas."

"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond.
"Presently we shall remember a lot more about all this. We
shall remember what it was like to live in this place, and
the long journey hither, age by age out of the south. We
shall remember the sacrifices we made and the crazy reasons
why we made them. We sowed our corn in blood here. We had
strange fancies about the stars. Those we brought with us out
of the south where the stars are brighter. And what like were
those wooden gods of ours? I don't remember. . . . But I
could easily persuade myself that I had been here before."

They stood on the crest of the ancient wall and the setting
sun cast long shadows of them athwart a field of springing
wheat.

"Perhaps we shall come here again," the doctor carried on Sir
Richmond's fancy; "after another four thousand years or so,
with different names and fuller minds. And then I suppose
that this ditch won't be the riddle it is now."

"Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused.
"Our muddles were unconscious. We drifted from mood to mood
and forgot. There was more sunshine then, more laughter
perhaps, and blacker despair. Despair like the despair of
children that can weep itself to sleep. . . . It's
over. . . . Was it battle and massacre that ended that long
afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some
exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine? Or
did strange men bring a sickness--measles, perhaps, or the
black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our
woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into
the land across the southern sea? I can't remember. . . . "

Sir Richmond turned about. "I would like to dig up the bottom
of this ditch here foot by foot--and dry the stuff and sift
it--very carefully. . . . Then I might begin to remember
things."

Section 5

In the evening, after a pleasant supper, they took a turn
about the walls with the moon sinking over beyond Silbury,
and then went in and sat by lamplight before a brightly fussy
wood fire and smoked. There were long intervals of friendly
silence.

"I don't in the least want to go on talking about myself, "
said Sir Richmond abruptly.

"Let it rest then," said the doctor generously.

"To-day, among these ancient memories, has taken me out of
myself wonderfully. I can't tell you how good Avebury has
been for me. This afternoon half my consciousness has seemed
to be a tattooed creature wearing a knife of stone. . . . "

"The healing touch of history."

"And for the first time my damned Committee has mattered
scarcely a rap. "

Sir Richmond stretched himself in his chair and blinked
cheerfully at his cigar smoke.

"Nevertheless," he said, "this confessional business of yours
has been an excellent exercise. It has enabled me to get
outside myself, to look at myself as a Case. Now I can even
see myself as a remote Case. That I needn't bother about
further. . . . So far as that goes, I think we have done all
that there is to be done."

"I shouldn't say that--quite--yet," said the doctor.

"I don't think I'm a subject for real psychoanalysis at all.
I'm not an overlaid sort of person. When I spread myself out
there is not much indication of a suppressed wish or of
anything masked or buried of that sort. What you get is a
quite open and recognized discord of two sets of motives."

The doctor considered. "Yes, I think that is true. Your
LIBIDO is, I should say, exceptionally free. Generally you
are doing what you want to do--overdoing, in fact, what you
want to do and getting simply tired."

"Which is the theory I started with. I am a case of fatigue
under irritating circumstances with very little mental
complication or concealment."

"Yes," said the doctor. "I agree. You are not a case for
psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, at all. You are in open
conflict with yourself, upon moral and social issues.
Practically open. Your problems are problems of conscious
conduct."

"As I said."

"Of what renunciations you have consciously to make."

Sir Richmond did not answer that. . . .

"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for
magnanimity. This day particularly has been a good day. When
we stood on this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be
standing outside myself in an immense still sphere of past
and future. I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw
myself four thousand years away, and all my distresses as
very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in
London the case is altogether different; after three hours or
so of the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed
moment of personality. There is no past any longer, there is
no future, there is only the rankling dispute. For all those
three hours, perhaps, I have been thinking of just what I had
to say, just how I had to say it, just how I looked while I
said it, just how much I was making myself understood, how I
might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented,
challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used
up. At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding,
desperately fighting, pin-point of SELF. . . . One goes back
to one's home unable to recover. Fighting it over again. All
night sometimes . . . . I get up and walk about the room and
curse . . . . Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame
of mind to Westminster?"

"When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor,
unhelpfully. He added after some seconds, "Milton knew of
these troubles. 'Not without dust and heat' he wrote--a great
phrase."

"But the dust chokes me," said Sir Richmond.

He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay
beside him on the table. But he did not open it. He held it
in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all
that evening. "I do not think that I shall stir up my motives
any more for a time. Better to go on into the west country
cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past."

"I can prescribe nothing better," said Dr. Martineau.
"Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on
one or two of your minor entanglements."

"I don't want to think of them, said Sir Richmond. "Let me
get right away from everything. Until my skin has grown
again."



CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

Section 1

Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over
the downs round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and
Netheravon and Amesbury to Stonehenge.

Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now,
with Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a poorer thing
than he had remembered it to be. Sir Richmond was frankly
disappointed. After the real greatness and mystery of the
older place, it seemed a poor little heap of stones; it did
not even dominate the landscape; it was some way from the
crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was
further dwarfed by the colossal air-ship hangars and
clustering offices of the air station that the great war had
called into existence upon the slopes to the south-west. "It
looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old giantess had
left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more
impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that
capped the neighbouring crests.

The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to
pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side
of the road stood a travelstained middle-class automobile,
with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things
therein--a family automobile with father no doubt at the
wheel. Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at its tail.

They were impeded at the entrance by a difference of opinion
between the keeper of the turnstile and a small but resolute
boy of perhaps five or six who proposed to leave the
enclosure. The custodian thought that it would be better if
his nurse or his mother came out with him.

"She keeps on looking at it, " said the small boy. "It isunt
anything. I want to go and clean the car."

"You won't SEE Stonehenge every day, young man," said the
custodian, a little piqued.

"It's only an old beach," said the small boy, with extreme
conviction. "It's rocks like the seaside. And there isunt no
sea."

The man at the turnstile mutely consulted the doctor.

"I don't see that he can get into any harm here," the doctor
advised, and the small boy was released from archaeology.

He strolled to the family automobile, produced an EN-TOUT-CAS
pocket-handkerchief and set himself to polish the lamps with
great assiduity. The two gentlemen lingered at the turnstile
for a moment or so to watch his proceedings. "Modern child,"
said Sir Richmond. "Old stones are just old stones to him.
But motor cars are gods."

"You can hardly expect him to understand--at his age," said
the custodian, jealous for the honor of Stonehenge. . . .

"Reminds me of Martin's little girl," said Sir Richmond, as
he and Dr. Martineau went on towards the circle. "When she
encountered her first dragon-fly she was greatly delighted.
'0h, dee' lill' a'eplane,' she said."

As they approached the grey old stones they became aware of a
certain agitation among them. A voice, an authoritative bass
voice, was audible, crying, "Anthony!" A nurse appeared
remotely going in the direction of the aeroplane sheds, and
her cry of "Master Anthony" came faintly on the breeze. An
extremely pretty young woman of five or six and twenty became
visible standing on one of the great prostrate stones in the
centre of the place. She was a black-haired, sun-burnt
individual and she stood with her arms akimbo, quite frankly
amused at the disappearance of Master Anthony, and offering
no sort of help for his recovery. On the greensward before
her stood the paterfamilias of the family automobile, and he
was making a trumpet with his hands in order to repeat the
name of Anthony with greater effect. A short lady in grey
emerged from among the encircling megaliths, and one or two
other feminine personalities produced effects of movement
rather than of individuality as they flitted among the
stones. "Well," said the lady in grey, with that rising
intonation of humorous conclusion which is so distinctively
American, "those Druids have GOT him."

"He's hiding," said the automobilist, in a voice that
promised chastisement to a hidden hearer. "That's what he is
doing. He ought not to play tricks like this. A great boy who
is almost six."

"If you are looking for a small, resolute boy of six," said
Sir Richmond, addressing himself to the lady on the rock
rather than to the angry parent below, "he's perfectly safe
and happy. The Druids haven't got him. Indeed, they've failed
altogether to get him. 'Stonehenge,' he says, 'is no good.'
So he's gone back to clean the lamps of your car."

"Aa-oo. So THAT'S it! " said Papa. "Winnie, go and tell Price
he's gone back to the car. . . . They oughtn't to have let
him out of the enclosure. . . ."

The excitement about Master Anthony collapsed. The rest of
the people in the circles crystallized out into the central
space as two apparent sisters and an apparent aunt and the
nurse, who was packed off at once to supervise the lamp
cleaning. The head of the family found some difficulty, it
would seem, in readjusting his mind to the comparative
innocence of Anthony, and Sir Richmond and the young lady on
the rock sought as if by common impulse to establish a
general conversation. There were faint traces of excitement
in her manner, as though there had been some controversial
passage between herself and the family gentleman.

"We were discussing the age of this old place," she said,
smiling in the frankest and friendliest way. "How old do YOU
think it is?"

The father of Anthony intervened, also with a shadow of
controversy in his manner. "I was explaining to the young
lady that it dates from the early bronze age. Before
chronology existed. . . . But she insists on dates."

"Nothing of bronze has ever been found here," said Sir
Richmond.

"Well, when was this early bronze age, anyhow?" said the
young lady.

Sir Richmond sought a recognizable datum. "Bronze got to
Britain somewhere between the times of Moses and Solomon."

"Ah! " said the young lady, as who should say, 'This man at
least talks sense.'

"But these stones are all shaped," said the father of the
family. "It is difficult to see how that could have been done
without something harder than stone."

"I don't SEE the place," said the young lady on the stone. "I
can't imagine how they did it up--not one bit."

"Did it up!" exclaimed the father of the family in the tone
of one accustomed to find a gentle sport in the intellectual
frailties of his womenkind.

"It's just the bones of a place. They hung things round it.
They draped it."

"But what things?" asked Sir Richmond.

"Oh! they had things all right. Skins perhaps. Mats of
rushes. Bast cloth. Fibre of all sorts. Wadded stuff."

"Stonehenge draped! It's really a delightful idea;" said the
father of the family, enjoying it.

"It's quite a possible one," said Sir Richmond.

"Or they may have used wicker," the young lady went on,
undismayed. She seemed to concede a point. "Wicker IS
likelier."

"But surely," said the father of the family with the
expostulatory voice and gesture of one who would recall
erring wits to sanity, "it is far more impressive standing
out bare and noble as it does. In lonely splendour."

"But all this country may have been wooded then," said Sir
Richmond. "In which case it wouldn't have stood out. It
doesn't stand out so very much even now."

"You came to it through a grove," said the young lady,
eagerly picking up the idea.

"Probably beech," said Sir Richmond.

"Which may have pointed to the midsummer sunrise," said Dr.
Martineau, unheeded.

"These are NOVEL ideas," said the father of the family in the
reproving tone of one who never allows a novel idea inside
HIS doors if he can prevent it.

"Well," said the young lady, "I guess there was some sort of
show here anyhow. And no human being ever had a show yet
without trying to shut people out of it in order to make them
come in. I guess this was covered in all right. A dark
hunched old place in a wood. Beech stems, smooth, like
pillars. And they came to it at night, in procession, beating
drums, and scared half out of their wits. They came in THERE
and went round the inner circle with their torches. And so
they were shown. The torches were put out and the priests did
their mysteries. Until dawn broke. That is how they worked
it."

"But even you can't tell what the show was, V.V." said the
lady in grey, who was standing now at Dr. Martineau's elbow.

"Something horrid," said Anthony's younger sister to her
elder in a stage whisper.

"BLUGGY," agreed Anthony's elder sister to the younger, in a
noiseless voice that certainly did not reach father.
"SQUEALS! . . . ."

This young lady who was addressed as "V.V." was perhaps one
or two and twenty, Dr. Martineau thought,--he was not very
good at feminine ages. She had a clear sun-browned
complexion, with dark hair and smiling lips. Her features
were finely modelled, with just that added touch of breadth
in the brow and softness in the cheek bones, that faint
flavour of the Amerindian, one sees at times in American
women. Her voice was a very soft and pleasing voice, and she
spoke persuasively and not assertively as so many American
women do. Her determination to make the dry bones of
Stonehenge live shamed the doctor's disappointment with the
place. And when she had spoken, Dr. Martineau noted that she
looked at Sir Richmond as if she expected him at least to
confirm her vision. Sir Richmond was evidently prepared to
confirm it.

With a queer little twinge of infringed proprietorship, the
doctor saw Sir Richmond step up on the prostrate megalith and
stand beside her, the better to appreciate her point of view.
He smiled down at her. "Now why do you think they came in
THERE?" he asked.

The young lady was not very clear about her directions. She
did not know of the roadway running to the Avon river, nor of
the alleged race course to the north, nor had she ever heard
that the stones were supposed to be of two different periods
and that some of them might possibly have been brought from a
very great distance.

Section 2

Neither Dr. Martineau nor the father of the family found the
imaginative reconstruction of the Stonehenge rituals quite so
exciting as the two principals. The father of the family
endured some further particulars with manifest impatience, no
longer able, now that Sir Richmond was encouraging the girl,
to keep her in check with the slightly derisive smile proper
to her sex. Then he proclaimed in a fine loud tenor, "All
this is very imaginative, I'm afraid." And to his family,
"Time we were pressing on. Turps, we must go-o. Come,
Phoebe!"

As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came
floating back. "Talking wanton nonsense. . . . Any
professional archaeologist would laugh, simply laugh. . . ."

He passed out of the world.

With a faint intimation of dismay Dr. Martineau realized that
the two talkative ladies were not to be removed in the family
automobile with the rest of the party. Sir Richmond and the
younger lady went on very cheerfully to the population,
agriculture, housing and general scenery of the surrounding
Downland during the later Stone Age. The shorter, less
attractive lady, whose accent was distinctly American, came
now and stood at the doctor's elbow. She seemed moved to play
the part of chorus to the two upon the stone.

"When V.V. gets going," she remarked, "she makes things come
alive."

Dr. Martineau hated to be addressed suddenly by strange
ladies. He started, and his face assumed the distressed
politeness of the moon at its full. "Your friend," he said,
"interested in archaeology? "

"Interested!" said the stouter lady. "Why! She's a fiend at
it. Ever since we came on Carnac. "

"You've visited Carnac?"

"That's where the bug bit her." said the stout lady with a
note of querulous humour. "Directly V.V. set eyes on Carnac,
she just turned against all her up-bringing. 'Why wasn't I
told of this before?' she said. 'What's Notre Dame to this?
This is where we came from. This is the real starting point
of the MAYFLOWER. Belinda,' she said, 'we've got to see all
we can of this sort of thing before we go back to America.
They've been keeping this from us.' And that's why we're here
right now instead of being shopping in Paris or London like
decent American women."

The younger lady looked down on her companion with something
of the calm expert attention that a plumber gives to a tap
that is misbehaving, and like a plumber refrained from
precipitate action. She stood with the backs of her hands
resting on her hips.

"Well," she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir
Richmond and the rest to the doctor. "it is nearer the
beginnings of things than London or Paris."

"And nearer to us, " said Sir Richmond.

"I call that just--paradoxical," said the shorter lady, who
appeared to be called Belinda.

"Not paradoxical," Dr. Martineau contradicted gently. "Life
is always beginning again. And this is a time of fresh
beginnings."

"Now that's after V.V.'s own heart," cried the stout lady in
grey. "She'll agree to all that. She's been saying it right
across Europe. Rome, Paris, London; they're simply just done.
They don't signify any more. They've got to be cleared away."

"You let me tell my own opinions, Belinda," said the young
lady who was called V.V. "I said that if people went on
building with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals for two
thousand years, it was time they were cleared up and taken
away."

"Corinthian capitals?" Sir Richmond considered it and laughed
cheerfully. "I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of
thing."

"The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument! "
said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. "It gave
me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might
understand English. "

The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at
herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. "When one is
travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics
in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with
Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me
for everything in Europe that I don't want and have no sort
of use for. It isn't a bad sort of capital in its way, florid
and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;--and that a whole
continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get
past it! . . ."

"It's the classical tradition."

"It puzzles me."

"It's the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed
spread by the Romans all over western Europe."

"And it smothers the history of Europe. You can't see Europe
because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble
Arches and ARCS DE TRIOMPHE. You never get away from it. It
is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech
and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can't sit down.
'The empire, gentlemen--the Empire. Empire.' Rome itself is
perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round
stupid arches as though it couldn't imagine that you could
possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter's and that
frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of
Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They
will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes
on."

"AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS," said Dr. Martineau.

"This Roman empire seems to be Europe's first and last idea.
A fixed idea. And such a poor idea! . . . America never came
out of that. It's no good-telling me that it did. It escaped
from it. . . . So I said to Belinda here, 'Let's burrow, if
we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of
people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus
weeds got hold of us.'"

"I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly
Corinthian, something called the Capitol," Sir Richmond
reflected. "And other buildings. A Treasury."

"That is different," said the young lady, so conclusively
that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on that
score.

"A last twinge of Europeanism," she vouchsafed. "We were
young in those days."

"You are well beneath the marble here."

She assented cheerfully.

"A thousand years before it."
"Happy place! Happy people!"

"But even this place isn't the beginning of things here.
Carnac was older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have
you heard in America of Avebury? It may have predated this
place, they think, by another thousand years."

"Avebury?" said the lady who was called Belinda.

"But what is this Avebury?" asked V.V. "I've never heard of
the place."

"I thought it was a lord," said Belinda.

Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau,
embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder of Avebury.
Possibly he exaggerated Avebury. . . .

It was Dr. Martineau who presently brought this disquisition
upon Avebury to a stop by a very remarkable gesture. He
looked at his watch. He drew it out ostentatiously, a thick,
respectable gold watch, for the doctor was not the sort of
man to wear his watch upon his wrist. He clicked it open and
looked at it. Thereby he would have proclaimed his belief
this encounter was an entirely unnecessary interruption of
his healing duologue with Sir Richmond, which must now be
resumed.

But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to
have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking
about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to
light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a
chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too
quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found
himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate
the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where
their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some
way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir
Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The
luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young
lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with
Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr.
Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was
to be thrust into an extreme proximity with him and the
balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.

Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine
historical imagination before, and he was evidently very
greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was
to be got out of this encounter.

Section 3

Sir Richmond displayed a complete disregard of the sufferings
of Dr. Martineau, shamefully compressed behind him. Of these
he was to hear later. He ran his overcrowded little car,
overcrowded so far as the dicky went, over the crest of the
Down and down into Amesbury and on to Salisbury, stopping to
alight and stretch the legs of the party when they came in
sight of Old Sarum.

"Certainly they can do with a little stretching," said Dr.
Martineau grimly.

This charming young woman had seized upon the imagination of
Sir Richmond to the temporary exclusion of all other
considerations. The long Downland gradients, quivering very
slightly with the vibration of the road, came swiftly and
easily to meet and pass the throbbing little car as he sat
beside her and talked to her. He fell into that expository
manner which comes so easily to the native entertaining the
visitor from abroad.

"In England, it seems to me there are four main phases of
history. Four. Avebury, which I would love to take you to see
to-morrow. Stonehenge. Old Sarum, which we shall see in a
moment as a great grassy mound on our right as we come over
one of these crests. Each of them represents about a thousand
years. Old Sarum was Keltic; it, saw the Romans and the
Saxons through, and for a time it was a Norman city. Now it
is pasture for sheep. Latest as yet is Salisbury,--English,
real English. It may last a few centuries still. It is little
more than seven hundred years old. But when I think of those
great hangars back there by Stonehenge, I feel that the next
phase is already beginning. Of a world one will fly to the
ends of, in a week or so. Our world still. Our people, your
people and mine, who are going to take wing so soon now, were
made in all these places. We are visiting the old homes. I am
glad I came back to it just when you were doing the same
thing."

"I'm lucky to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller,"
she said; "with a car."

"You're the first American I've ever met whose interest in
history didn't seem--" He sought for an inoffensive word.

"Silly? Oh! I admit it. It's true of a lot of us. Most of us.
We come over to Europe as if it hadn't anything to do with us
except to supply us with old pictures and curios generally.
We come sight-seeing. It's romantic. It's picturesque. We
stare at the natives--like visitors at a Zoo. We don't
realize that we belong. . . . I know our style. . . . But we
aren't all like that. Some of us are learning a bit better
than that. We have one or two teachers over there to lighten
our darkness. There's Professor Breasted for instance. He
comes sometimes to my father's house. And there's James
Harvey Robinson and Professor Hutton Webster. They've been
trying to restore our memory."

"I've never heard of any of them," said Sir Richmond.

"You hear so little of America over here. It's quite a large
country and all sorts of interesting things happen there
nowadays. And we are waking up to history. Quite fast. We
shan't always be the most ignorant people in the world. We
are beginning to realize that quite a lot of things happened
between Adam and the Mayflower that we ought to be told
about. I allow it's a recent revival. The United States has
been like one of those men you read about in the papers who
go away from home and turn up in some distant place with
their memories gone. They've forgotten what their names were
or where they lived or what they did for a living; they've
forgotten everything that matters. Often they have to begin
again and settle down for a long time before their memories
come back. That's how it has been with us. Our memory is just
coming back to us."

"And what do you find you are?"

"Europeans. Who came away from kings and churches-@-and
Corinthian capitals."

"You feel all this country belongs to you?"

"As much as it does to you."
Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. "But if I say that
America belongs to me as much as it does to you?"

"We are one people," she said.

"We"

"Europe. These parts of Europe anyhow. And ourselves."

"You are the most civilized person I've met for weeks and
weeks." "Well, you are the first civilized person I've met in
Europe for a long time. If I understand you."

"There are multitudes of reasonable, civilized people in
Europe."

"I've heard or seen very little of them.

"They're scattered, I admit."

"And hard to find."

"So ours is a lucky meeting. I've wanted a serious talk to an
American for some time. I want to know very badly what you
think you are up to with the world,--our world. "

"I'm equally anxious to know what England thinks she is
doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult to
understand. On any hypothesis-that is honourable to her."
"H'm," said Sir Richmond.

"I assure you we don't like it. This Irish business. We feel
a sort of ownership in England. It's like finding your
dearest aunt torturing the cat."

"We must talk of that," said Sir Richmond.

"I wish you would."

"It is a cat and a dog--and they have been very naughty
animals. And poor Aunt Britannia almost deliberately lost her
temper. But I admit she hits about in a very nasty fashion."

"And favours the dog."

"She does."

"I want to know all you admit."

"You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the
pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury. If you are
free?"

"We're travelling together, just we two. We are wandering
about the south of England on our way to Falmouth. Where I
join a father in a few days' time, and I go on with him to
Paris. And if you and your friend are coming to the Old
George--"

"We are," said Sir Richmond.

"I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And
seeing Avebury to-morrow. Why not? Perhaps if we did as the
Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate
something of the extreme informality of our behaviour."

"My name is Hardy. I've been a munition manufacturer. I was
slightly wounded by a stray shell near Arras while I was
inspecting some plant I had set up, and also I was hit by a
stray knighthood. So my name is now Sir Richmond Hardy. My
friend is a very distinguished Harley Street physician.
Chiefly nervous and mental cases. His name is Dr. Martineau.
He is quite as civilized as I am. He is also a philosophical
writer. He is really a very wise and learned man indeed. He
is full of ideas. He's stimulated me tremendously. You must
talk to him."

Sir Richmond glanced over his shoulder at the subject of
these commendations. Through the oval window glared an
expression of malignity that made no impression whatever on
his preoccupied mind.

"My name," said the young lady, "is Grammont. The war whirled
me over to Europe on Red Cross work and since the peace I've
been settling up things and travelling about Europe. My
father is rather a big business man in New York."

"The oil Grammont?"

"He is rather deep in oil, I believe. He is coming over to
Europe because he does not like the way your people are
behaving in Mesopotamia. He is on his way to Paris now. Paris
it seems is where everything is to be settled against you.
Belinda is a sort of companion I have acquired for the
purposes of independent travel. She was Red Cross too. I must
have somebody and I cannot bear a maid. Her name is Belinda
Seyffert. From Philadelphia originally. You have that?
Seyffert, Grammont?"

"And Hardy?" "Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau."

"And-Ah!--That great green bank there just coming into sight
must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away
when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop
here for a little while. . . . "

Then it was that Dr. Martineau was grim about the stretching
of his legs.

Section 4

The sudden prospect which now opened out before Sir Richmond
of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming
companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with
this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self-
examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate
possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard
of Dr. Martineau's possible objections to any such
modification of their original programme. When they arrived
in Salisbury, the doctor did make some slight effort to
suggest a different hotel from that in which the two ladies
had engaged their rooms, but on the spur of the moment and in
their presence he could produce no sufficient reason for
refusing the accommodation the Old George had ready for him.
He was reduced to a vague: "We don't want to inflict
ourselves--" He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any
adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert,
before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst
the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And
only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the
engagements to which Sir Richmond had committed himself.

"I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow,"
said Sir Richmond. "These ladies were nearly missing it."

The thing took the doctor's breath away. For the moment he
could say nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An
objection formulated itself very slowly. "But that dicky," he
whispered.

His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the
completeness of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had
been a cathedral city; it was essentially and purely that.
The church at its best, in the full tide of its mediaeval
ascendancy, had called it into being. He was making some
extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the
buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss
Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory
qualifications. "Our age will leave the ruins of hotels,"
said Sir Richmond. "Railway arches and hotels."

"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the
Empire comes nearest to it . . . . "

As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant
to walk round and about Salisbury. He foresaw that walk with
the utmost clearness. In front and keeping just a little
beyond the range of his intervention, Sir Richmond would go
with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring
up the rear. "If I do," he muttered, "I'll be damned!" an
unusually strong expression for him.

"You said--?" asked Miss Seyffert.

"That I have some writing to do--before the post goes," said
the doctor brightly.

"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with
ill-concealed dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a
fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest
fashion when he said this.

"I'm afraid," said the doctor mulishly. "Impossible."

(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first
to look for shops," she said. "There's those things you want
to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can
all go together as far as that. And while you are shopping,
if you wouldn't mind getting one or two things
for me. . . ."

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be
let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also
clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he
might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and
eager to resume with him. . . .

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He
could think over his notes. . . .

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little
speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the
unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that
were being made without his consent in their common
programme. . . .

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting
and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America.
"Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't
correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively
reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he
judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl"
with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible
purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less
appropriate for her than the word "boy." She had an air of
having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far
she had lived each several year of her existence in a
distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental
profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could talk
with her as if he talked with a man like himself--but with a
zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first
came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert
thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of
those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever
women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking
for effect at all, she was talking because she was
tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of
history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as
she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made
their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact
gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-
iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum,
aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and
the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon
the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old
houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some
moments surveying it.

"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir
Richmond. "But why, I wonder, did we build it? "

"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with
her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp
against the blue. "I've been away for so long-over there-that
I forget altogether. Why DID we build it?"

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and
thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her
mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in
Europe. "My friend, the philosopher," he had said, "will not
have it that we are really the individuals we think we are.
You must talk to him--he is a very curious and subtle
thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he
says, passing thoughts. We are--what does he call it? --Man
on his Planet, taking control of life."

"Man and woman," she had amended.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had
failed altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on
the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss
Grammont and Sir Richmond found very great difficulty in
recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.

"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond.
"But the impulse was losing its force. "

She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly
quizzical expression.

But he had his reply ready.

"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were
already very clever engineers. What interested us here wasn't
the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display
our power over stone. We made it into reeds and branches. We
squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest
and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think people have
ever feared and worshipped in this--this artist's lark--as
they did in Stonehenge?"

"I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here,"
she said.

Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. "The spirit of the
Gothic cathedrals," he said, "is the spirit of the sky-
scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition.
The Freemasons on the building could hardly refrain from
jeering at the little priest they had left down below there,
performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his altar. He was
just their excuse for doing it all."

"Sky-scrapers?" she conceded. "An early display of the sky-
scraper spirit. . . . You are doing your best to make me feel
thoroughly at home."

"You are more at home here still than in that new country of
ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do
begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other
cathedrals we built in Europe. . . . It was the fun of
building made us do it. . . "

"H'm," she said. "And my sky-scrapers?"

"Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most
about America. It's still large enough, mentally and
materially, to build all sorts of things. . . . Over here,
the sites are frightfully crowded. . . . "

"And what do you think we are building now? And what do you
think you are building over here?"

"What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up.
I believe it is time we began to build in earnest. For
good. . . ."

"But are we building anything at all?"

"A new world."

"Show it me," she said.

"We're still only at the foundations," said Sir Richmond."
Nothing shows as yet."

"I wish I could believe they were foundations."

"But can you doubt we are scrapping the old? . . ."

It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so
they strolled to and fro round and about the west end and
along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging
their ideas very frankly and freely about the things that had
recently happened to the world and what they thought they
ought to be doing in it.

Section 5

After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a
corner of the smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished
hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the
second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed from tweedy
pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but
definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their
coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of
Miss Grammont's hair and a necklace of the same colourings
kept the peace between her jolly sun-burnt cheek and her soft
untanned neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included
a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a
plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr.
Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.

The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of
the steady continuity of Sir Richmond's duologue with Miss
Grammont. Miss Seyffert's methods were too discursive and
exclamatory. She broke every thread that appeared. The Old
George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss
Seyffert laced the entire evening with her recognition of the
fact. "Just look at that old beam!" she would cry suddenly. "
To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot
in America!"

Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she
chose. After the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy
contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat
deep in a basket chair and spoke now and then. Miss Seyffert
gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the
cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.

Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her
chair threw out the statement that Italy was frightfully
overpopulated. "In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a
cheese. Nobody seems to be living. Everyone is too busy
keeping alive."

"Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules," said
Miss Seyffert.

"Little children working like slaves," said Miss Grammont.

"And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the
roadside. Who ought to be getting wages--sufficient. . . ."

"Begging--from foreigners--is just a sport in Italy," said
Sir Richmond. "It doesn't imply want. But I agree that a
large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole
world is. Don't you think so, Martineau?"

"Well--yes--for its present social organization. "

"For any social organization," said Sir Richmond.

"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added
amazingly: "I'm out for Birth Control all the time."

A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of
sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty
coffee cup.

"The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives," said
Sir Richmond. "Which amount to nothing. Which do not even
represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources,
the fuel and surplus energy of the world."

"I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives," Miss
Grammont reflected.

"Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are
just vain repetitions--imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions
of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all
that they do has been done better before. Because they are
crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as
for liking their lives, they need never have had the chance."

"How many people are there in the world?" she asked abruptly.

"I don't know. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions
perhaps."

"And in your world?"

"I'd have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At
most. It would be quite enough for this little planet, for a
time, at any rate. Don't you think so, doctor?"

"I don't know," said Dr. Martineau. "Oddly enough, I have
never thought about that question before. At least, not from
this angle."

"But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million
aristocrats?" began Miss Grammont. "My native instinctive
democracy--"

"Need not be outraged," said Sir Richmond. "Any two hundred
and fifty million would do, They'd be able to develop fully,
all of them. As things are, only a minority can do that. The
rest never get a chance."

"That's what I always say," said Miss Seyffert.

"A New Age," said Dr. Martineau; "a New World. We may be
coming to such a stage, when population, as much as fuel,
will be under a world control. If one thing, why not the
other? I admit that the movement of thought is away from
haphazard towards control--"

"I'm for control all the time," Miss Seyffert injected,
following up her previous success.

"I admit", the doctor began his broken sentence again with
marked patience, "that the movement of thought is away from
haphazard towards control--in things generally. But is the
movement of events?"

"The eternal problem of man," said Sir Richmond. "Can our
wills prevail?"

There came a little pause.

Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert. "If YOU
are," said Belinda.

"I wish I could imagine your world," said Miss Grammont,
rising, "of two hundred and fifty millions of fully developed
human beings with room to live and breathe in and no need for
wars. Will they live in palaces? Will they all be healthy? .
. . Machines will wait on them. No! I can't imagine it.
Perhaps I shall dream of it. My dreaming self may be
cleverer."

She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they
stood hand in hand, appreciatively. . . .

"Well!" said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two
Americans, "This is a curious encounter."

"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.

Section 6

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."

"I don't quite see what you are driving at."

"The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than
their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we understand it,
seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss
Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character. And as I
have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no
discipline. . . . You also are a person of high intelligence
and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You--
on account of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss
Martin Leeds--"
"Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?"

"This IS the confessional. It closes to-morrow morning but it
is the confessional still. Look at the thing frankly. You, I
say, are also at loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir,
don't we both know that ever since we left London you have
been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in
petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha'porth of
kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You're a stray man
looking for a mistress. Miss Grammont being a woman is a
little more selective than that. But if she's at a loose end
as I suppose, she isn't protected by the sense of having made
her selection. And she has no preconceptions of what she
wants. You are a very interesting man in many ways. You carry
marriage and entanglements lightly. With an air of being
neither married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall
in love with you."

"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an
ill-concealed eagerness.

Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. "These
miracles--grotesquely--happen," he said. "She knows nothing
of Martin Leeds. . . . You must remember that. . . .

"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the
phrase goes, what is to follow?"

There was a pause.

Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he
took counsel with them and then decided to take offence.

"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous. You talk of falling
in love as though it was impossible for a man and woman to be
deeply interested in each other without that. And the gulf in
our ages--in our quality! From the Psychologist of a New Age
I find this amazing. Are men and women to go on for ever--
separated by this possibility into two hardly communicating
and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be
friendship and companionship between men and women without
passion?"

"You ought to know even better than I do that there is not.
For such people as you two anyhow. And at present the world
is not prepared to tolerate friendship and companionship WITH
that accompaniment. That is the core of this situation."

A pause fell between the two gentlemen. They had smoothed
over the extreme harshness of their separation and there was
very little more to be said.

"Well," said Sir Richmond in conclusion, "I am very sorry
indeed, Martineau, that we have to part like this."



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

COMPANIONSHIP

Section 1

"Well," said Dr. Martineau, extending his hand to Sir
Richmond on the Salisbury station platform, "I leave you to
it."

His round face betrayed little or no vestiges of his
overnight irritation.

"Ought you to leave me to it?" smiled Sir Richmond.

"I shall be interested to learn what happens."

"But if you won't stay to see!"

"Now Sir, please," said the guard respectfully but firmly,
and Dr. Martineau got in.

Sir Richmond walked thoughtfully down the platform towards
the exit.

"What else could I do?" he asked aloud to nobody in
particular.

For a little while he thought confusedly of the collapse of
his expedition into the secret places of his own heart with
Dr. Martineau, and then his prepossession with Miss Grammont
resumed possession of his mind. Dr. Martineau was forgotten.

Section 2

For the better part of forty hours, Sir Richmond had either
been talking to Miss Grammont, or carrying on imaginary
conversations with her in her absence, or sleeping and
dreaming dreams in which she never failed to play a part,
even if at times it was an altogether amazing and incongruous
part. And as they were both very frank and expressive people,
they already knew a very great deal about each other.

For an American Miss Grammont was by no means
autobiographical. She gave no sketches of her idiosyncrasies,
and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her
contemporaries about herself. She either concealed or she had
lost any great interest in her own personality. But she was
interested in and curious about the people she had met in
life, and her talk of them reflected a considerable amount of
light upon her own upbringing and experiences. And her liking
for Sir Richmond was pleasingly manifest. She liked his turn
of thought, she watched him with a faint smile on her lips as
he spoke, and she spread her opinions before him carefully in
that soft voice of hers like a shy child showing its
treasures to some suddenly trusted and favoured visitor.

Their ways of thought harmonized. They talked at first
chiefly about the history of the world and the extraordinary
situation of aimlessness in a phase of ruin to which the
Great War had brought all Europe, if not all mankind. The
world excited them both in the same way; as a crisis in which
they were called upon to do something--they did not yet
clearly know what. Into this topic they peered as into some
deep pool, side by side, and in it they saw each other
reflected.

The visit to Avebury had been a great success. It had been a
perfect springtime day, and the little inn had been delighted
at the reappearance of Sir Richmond's car so soon after its
departure. Its delight was particularly manifest in the cream
and salad it produced for lunch. Both Miss Grammont and Miss
Seyffert displayed an intelligent interest in their food.
After lunch they had all gone out to the stones and the wall.
Half a dozen sunburnt children were putting one of the
partially overturned megaliths to a happy use by clambering
to the top of it and sliding on their little behinds down its
smooth and sloping side amidst much mirthful squealing.

Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont had walked round the old
circumvallation together, but Belinda Seyffert had strayed
away from them, professing an interest in flowers. It was not
so much that she felt they had to be left together that made
her do this as her own consciousness of being possessed by a
devil who interrupted conversations.

When Miss Grammont was keenly interested in a conversation,
then Belinda had learnt from experience that it was wiser to
go off with her devil out of the range of any temptation to
interrupt.

"You really think," said Miss Grammont, "that it would be
possible to take this confused old world and reshape it, set
it marching towards that new world of yours--of two hundred
and fifty million fully developed, beautiful and happy
people?"

"Why not? Nobody is doing anything with the world except
muddle about. Why not give it a direction? "

"You'd take it in your hands like clay?"

"Obdurate clay with a sort of recalcitrant, unintelligent
life of its own."

Her imagination glowed in her eyes and warmed her voice. "I
believe what you say is possible. If people dare."

"I am tired of following little motives that are like flames
that go out when you get to them. I am tired of seeing all
the world doing the same. I am tired of a world in which
there is nothing great but great disasters. Here is something
mankind can attempt, that we can attempt."

"And will? "

"I believe that as Mankind grows up this is the business Man
has to settle down to and will settle down to."

She considered that.

"I've been getting to believe something like this.
But-- . . . it frightens me. I suppose most of us have this
same sort of dread of taking too much upon ourselves."

"So we just live like pigs. Sensible little piggywiggys. I've
got a Committee full of that sort of thing. We live like
little modest pigs. And let the world go hang. And pride
ourselves upon our freedom from the sin of presumption.

"Not quite that!"

"Well! How do you put it?"

"We are afraid," she said. "It's too vast. We want bright
little lives of our own. "

"Exactly--sensible little piggy-wiggys."

"We have a right to life--and happiness.

"First," said Sir Richmond, "as much right as a pig has to
food. But whether we get life and happiness or fail to get
them we human beings who have imaginations want something
more nowadays. . . . Of course we want bright lives, of
course we want happiness. Just as we want food, just as we
want sleep. But when we have eaten, when we have slept, when
we have jolly things about us--it is nothing. We have been
made an exception of--and got our rations. The big thing
confronts us still. It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it
is the thing we have to think about. I do not know why it
should be so, but I am compelled by something in my nature to
want to serve this idea of a new age for mankind. I want it
as my culminating want. I want a world in order, a
disciplined mankind going on to greater things. Don't you?"

"Now you tell me of it," she said with a smile, "I do."

"But before--?"

"No. You've made it clear. It wasn't clear before."

"I've been talking of this sort of thing with my friend Dr.
Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as talking. That
perhaps is why I'm so clear and positive."

"I don't complain that you are clear and positive. I've been
coming along the same way. . . . It's refreshing to meet
you."

"I found it refreshing to meet Martineau." A twinge of
conscience about Dr. Martineau turned Sir Richmond into a new
channel. "He's a most interesting man," he said. "Rather shy
in some respects. Devoted to his work. And he's writing a
book which has saturated him in these ideas. Only two nights
ago we stood here and talked about it. The Psychology of a
New Age. The world, he believes, is entering upon a new phase
in its history, the adolescence, so to speak, of mankind. It
is an idea that seizes the imagination. There is a flow of
new ideas abroad, he thinks, widening realizations,
unprecedented hopes and fears. There is a consciousness of
new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing the
adolescence of our race. It is giving history a new and more
intimate meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer
relation with public affairs,--making them matter as formerly
they didn't seem to matter. That idea of the bright little
private life has to go by the board."

"I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had
been thinking over some such question before.

"The private life," she said, "has a way of coming aboard
again."

Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of
him.

"You have some sort of work cut out for you," she said
abruptly.

"Yes. Yes, I have."

"I haven't," she said.

"So that I go about," she added, like someone who is looking
for something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbing too
searching a question at you--what you have found."

Sir Richmond considered. "Incidentally," he smiled, " I want
to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and
barbaric person, your father. I am doing my best to help lay
the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel
production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commission in
London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole
world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington
presently with proposals. "

Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. "I suppose," she said,
"poor father IS rather like an unbroken mule in business
affairs. So many of our big business men in America are.
He'll lash out at you."

"I don't mind if only he lashes out openly in the sight of
all men."

She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely.

"Tell me what you want to do to him. You find out so many
things for me that I seem to have been thinking about in a
sort of almost invisible half-conscious way. I've been
suspecting for a long time that Civilization wasn't much good
unless it got people like my father under some sort of
control. But controlling father--as distinguished from
managing him!" She reviewed some private and amusing
memories. "He is a most intractable man."

Section 3

They had gone on to talk of her father and of the types of
men who controlled international business. She had had
plentiful opportunities for observation in their homes and
her own. Gunter Lake, the big banker, she knew particularly
well, because, it seemed, she had been engaged or was engaged
to marry him. "All these people," she said, "are pushing
things about, affecting millions of lives, hurting and
disordering hundreds of thousands of people. They don't seem
to know what they are doing. They have no plans in
particular. . . . And you are getting something going that
will be a plan and a direction and a conscience and a control
for them? You will find my father extremely difficult, but
some of our younger men would love it.

"And," she went on; "there are American women who'd love it
too. We're petted. We're kept out of things. We aren't
placed. We don't get enough to do. We're spenders and wasters
--not always from choice. While these fathers and brothers
and husbands of ours play about with the fuel and power and
life and hope of the world as though it was a game of poker.
With all the empty unspeakable solemnity of the male. And
treat us as though we ought to be satisfied if they bring
home part of the winnings.

"That can't go on," she said.

Her eyes went back to the long, low, undulating skyline of
the downs. She spoke as though she took up the thread of some
controversy that had played a large part in her life. "That
isn't going on," she said with an effect of conclusive
decision.

Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned
from Salisbury station to the Old George after his farewell
to Martineau. He recalled too the soft firmness of her
profile and the delicate line of her lifted chin. He felt
that this time at any rate he was not being deceived by the
outward shows of a charming human being. This young woman had
real firmness of character to back up her free and
independent judgments. He smiled at the idea of any facile
passion in the composition of so sure and gallant a
personality. Martineau was very fine-minded in many respects,
but he was an old maid; and like all old maids he saw man and
woman in every encounter. But passion was a thing men and
women fell back upon when they had nothing else in common.
When they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark
seemed to weave a fresh thread of common interest, then it
wasn't so necessary. It might happen, but it wasn't so
necessary. . . . If it did it would be a secondary thing to
companionship. That's what she was,--a companion.

But a very lovely and wonderful companion, the companion one
would not relinquish until the very last moment one could
keep with her.

Her views about America and about her own place in the world
seemed equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.

"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen,"
she had said. That didn't mean that she attached very much
importance to her recently acquired vote. She evidently
classified voters into the irresponsible who just had votes
and the responsible who also had a considerable amount of
property as well. She had no illusions about the power of the
former class. It didn't exist. They were steered to their
decisions by people employed, directed or stimulated by
"father" and his friends and associates, the owners of
America, the real "responsible citizens." Or they fell a prey
to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries." But
anyhow they were steered. She herself, it was clear, was
bound to become a very responsible citizen indeed. She would
some day, she laughed, be swimming in oil and such like
property. Her interest in Sir Richmond's schemes for a
scientific world management of fuel was therefore, she
realized, a very direct one. But it was remarkable to find a
young woman seeing it like that.

Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards
her. He despised and distrusted women generally, and it was
evident he had made it quite clear to her how grave an error
it was on her part to persist in being a daughter and not a
son. At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was
disposed to agree with father upon that. When Mr. Grammont's
sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he
gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up
against the machinations of adventurers by means of trustees,
partners, lawyers, advisers, agreements and suchlike
complications, or for acquiring a workable son by marriage.
To this last idea it would seem the importance in her life of
the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed. But
another mood of the old man's was distrust of anything that
could not be spoken of as his "own flesh and blood," and then
he would direct his attention to a kind of masculinization of
his daughter and to schemes for giving her the completest
control of all he had to leave her provided she never married
nor fell under masculine sway. "After all," he would reflect
as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's ideal,
"there was Hetty Green."

This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of
seventeen from the educational care of an English gentlewoman
warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe,
and thrust her for the mornings and a moiety of the
afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but
competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down
town. She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern
independent of Mr. Grammont, because he feared his own people
wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages
and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned
casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a
trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent
of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical
Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a
commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had
really done responsible work.

But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even
for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party
he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an
improper familiarity with socialist ideas. This had produced
a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of
a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake. Gunter Lake, Sir
Richmond gathered, wasn't half a bad fellow. Generally it
would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of
speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake
had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his
behaviour under bad treatment. There was some story, however,
connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss
Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell. About that story
Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after
his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely
guessing.

So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated
up in fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond's
mind in the course of a day and a half. The fragments came up
as allusions or by way of illustration. The sustaining topic
was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under
scientific control, the Utopia of fully developed people
fully developing the resources of the earth. For a number of
trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the
project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and
presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was
justified in doing. It was true that Dr. Martineau had not
said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but
also it was true that they had not crystallized out in Sir
Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea
of a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh
rules of conduct and of different relationships between human
beings. And it throws those who talk about it into the
companionship of a common enterprise. To-morrow the New Age
will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure
of only a few human beings.

So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to
ask: "What are we to do with such types as father?" and to
fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise. They had
agreed by a tacit consent to a common conception of the world
they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense
organization of mature commonsense, healthy and secure,
gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet
beyond dreaming. They were prepared to think of the makers of
the Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age
savages as a phase, in their late childhood, and of this
great world order Sir Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn
was already at hand. And in such long perspectives, the
states, governments and institutions of to-day became very
temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed. Both
these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion
with an unwonted courage and freedom because the other one
had been disposed to think in this fashion before. Sir
Richmond was still turning over in his mind the happy mutual
release of the imagination this chance companionship had
brought about when he found himself back again at the
threshold of the Old George.

Section 4

Sir Richmond Hardy was not the only man who was thinking
intently about Miss Grammont at that particular moment. Two
gentlemen were coming towards her across the Atlantic whose
minds, it chanced, were very busily occupied by her affairs.
One of these was her father, who was lying in his brass bed
in his commodious cabin on the Hollandia, regretting his
diminishing ability to sleep in the early morning now, even
when he was in the strong and soothing air of mid-Atlantic,
and thinking of V.V. because she had a way of coming into his
mind when it was undefended; and the other was Mr. Gunter
Lake on the Megantic, one day out from Sandy Hook, who found
himself equally sleepless and preoccupied. And although Mr.
Lake was a man of vast activities and complicated engagements
he was coming now to Europe for the express purpose of seeing
V.V. and having things out with her fully and completely
because, in spite of all that had happened, she made such an
endless series of delays in coming to America.

Old Grammont as he appeared upon the pillow of his bed by the
light of a rose-shaded bedside lamp, was a small-headed,
grey-haired gentleman with a wrinkled face and sunken brown
eyes. Years of business experience, mitigated only by such
exercise as the game of poker affords, had intensified an
instinctive inexpressiveness. Under the most solitary
circumstances old Grammont was still inexpressive, and the
face that stared at the, ceiling of his cabin and the problem
of his daughter might have been the face of a pickled head in
a museum, for any indication it betrayed of the flow of
thought within. He lay on his back and his bent knees lifted
the bed-clothes into a sharp mountain. He was not even trying
to sleep.

Why, he meditated, had V.V. stayed on in Europe so much
longer than she need have done? And why had Gunter Lake
suddenly got into a state of mind about her? Why didn't the
girl confide in her father at least about these things? What
was afoot? She had thrown over Lake once and it seemed she
was going to turn him down again. Well, if she was an
ordinary female person that was a silly sort of thing to do.
With her fortune and his--you could buy the world. But
suppose she was not all ordinary female person. . . . Her
mother hadn't been ordinary anyhow, whatever else you called
her, and no one could call Grammont blood all ordinary fluid.
. . . Old Grammont had never had any delusions about Lake. If
Lake's father hadn't been a big man Lake would never have
counted for anything at all. Suppose she did turn him down.
In itself that wasn't a thing to break her father's heart.

What did matter was not whether she threw Lake over but what
she threw him over for. If it was because he wasn't man
enough, well and good. But if it was for some other lover,
some good-looking, worthless impostor, some European title or
suchlike folly--!

At the thought of a lover for V.V. a sudden flood of anger
poured across the old man's mind, behind the still mask of
his face. It infuriated him even to think of V.V., his little
V.V., his own girl, entertaining a lover, being possibly--
most shameful thought--IN LOVE! Like some ordinary silly
female, sinking to kisses, to the deeds one could buy and pay
for. His V.V.! The idea infuriated and disgusted him. He
fought against it as a possibility. Once some woman in New
York had ventured to hint something to him of some fellow,
some affair with an artist, Caston; she had linked this
Caston with V.V.'s red cross nursing in Europe. . . . Old
Grammont had made that woman sorry she spoke. Afterwards he
had caused enquiries to be made about this Caston, careful
enquiries. It seems that he and V.V. had known each other,
there had been something. But nothing that V.V. need be
ashamed of. When old Grammont's enquiry man had come back
with his report, old Grammont had been very particular about
that. At first the fellow had not been very clear, rather
muddled indeed as to how things were--no doubt he had wanted
to make out there was something just to seem to earn his
money. Old Grammont had struck the table sharply and the eyes
that looked out of his mask had blazed. "What have you found
out against her?" he had asked in a low even voice.
"Absolutely nothing, Sir," said the agent, suddenly white to
the lips. . . .

Old Grammont stared at his memory of that moment for a while.
That affair was all right, quite all right. Of course it was
all right. And also, happily, Caston was among the dead. But
it was well her broken engagement with Lake had been resumed
as though it had never been broken off. If there had been any
talk that fact answered it. And now that Lake had served his
purpose old Grammont did not care in the least if he was
shelved. V.V. could stand alone.

Old Grammont had got a phrase in his mind that looked like
dominating the situation. He dreamt of saying to V.V.: "V.V.,
I'm going to make a man of you--if you're man enough." That
was a large proposition; it implied--oh! it implied all sorts
of things. It meant that she would care as little for
philandering as an able young business man. Perhaps some day,
a long time ahead, she might marry. There wasn't much reason
for it, but it might be she would not wish to be called a
spinster. "Take a husband," thought old Grammont, "when I am
gone, as one takes a butler, to make the household complete."
In previous meditations on his daughter's outlook old
Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the
precedent of Queen Victoria. She had had no husband of the
lord and master type, so to speak, but only a Prince Consort,
well in hand. Why shouldn't the Grammont heiress dominate her
male belonging, if it came to that, in the same fashion? Why
shouldn't one tie her up and tie the whole thing up, so far
as any male belonging was concerned, leaving V.V. in all
other respects free? How could one do it?

The speculative calm of the sunken brown eyes deepened.

His thoughts went back to the white face of the private
enquiry agent. "Absolutely nothing, Sir." What had the fellow
thought of hinting? Nothing of that kind in V.V.'s
composition, never fear. Yet it was a curious anomaly that
while one had a thousand ways of defending one's daughter and
one's property against that daughter's husband, there was no
power on earth by which a father could stretch his dead hand
between that daughter and the undue influence of a lover.
Unless you tied her up for good and all, lover or none. . . .

One was left at the mercy of V.V.'s character. . . .

"I ought to see more of her," he thought. "She gets away from
me. Just as her mother did." A man need not suspect his
womenkind but he should know what they are doing. It is duty,
his protective duty to them. These companions, these Seyffert
women and so forth, were all very well in their way; there
wasn't much they kept from you if you got them cornered and
asked them intently. But a father's eye is better. He must go
about with the girl for a time, watch her with other men,
give her chances to talk business with him and see if she
took them. "V.V., I'm going to make a man of you," the phrase
ran through his brain. The deep instinctive jealousy of the
primordial father was still strong in old Grammont's blood.
It would be pleasant to go about with her on his right hand
in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and
unapproachable,--above that sort of nonsense, above all other
masculine subjugation.

"V.V., I'm going to make a man of you. . . ."

His mind grew calmer. Whatever she wanted in Paris should be
hers. He'd just let her rip. They'd be like sweethearts
together, he and his girl.

Old Grammont dozed off into dreamland.

Section 5

The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr.
Grammont upon the Atlantic, were of a gentler, more romantic
character. In them V.V. was no longer a daughter in the
fierce focus of a father's jealousy, but the goddess
enshrined in a good man's heart. Indeed the figure that the
limelight of the reverie fell upon was not V.V. at all but
Mr. Gunter Lake himself, in his favourite role of the perfect
lover.

An interminable speech unfolded itself. "I ask for nothing in
return. I've never worried you about that Caston business and
I never will. Married to me you shall be as free as if you
were unmarried. Don't I know, my dear girl, that you don't
love me yet. Let that be as you wish. I want nothing you are
not willing to give me, nothing at all. All I ask is the
privilege of making life happy--and it shall be happy--for
you. . . . All I ask. All I ask. Protect, guard,
cherish. . . ."

For to Mr. Gunter Lake it seemed there could be no lovelier
thing in life than a wife "in name only" slowly warmed into a
glow of passion by the steadfast devotion and the strength
and wisdom of a mate at first despised. Until at last a day
would come. . . .

"My darling!" Mr. Gunter Lake whispered to the darkness. "My
little guurl. IT HAS BEEN WORTH THE WAITING. . . ."

Section 6

Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old
George with a telegram in her hand. "My father reported his
latitude and longitude by wireless last night. The London
people think he will be off Falmouth in four days' time. He
wants me to join his liner there and go on to Cherbourg and
Paris. He's arranged that. He is the sort of man who can
arrange things like that. There'll be someone at Falmouth to
look after us and put us aboard the liner. I must wire them
where I can pick up a telegram to-morrow."

"Wells in Somerset," said Sir :Richmond.

His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he
wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town
that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury,
perched on a hill, a Saxon town, where Alfred had gathered
his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled
over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come
near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a little
sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views.
They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they
would go in the afternoon through the pleasant west country
where the Celts had prevailed against the old folk of the
Stonehenge temple and the Romans against the Celts and the
Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the Danes against
the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes and
entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace,
to Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh
village the Celts had made for themselves three or four
hundred years before the Romans came. And at Glastonbury also
there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey
that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to
Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and
sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the
story of Europe right up to Reformation times.

"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will
be like turning over the pages of the history of our family,
to and fro. There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in
it, but there will be something from almost every chapter
that comes after Stonehenge. Rome will be poorly represented,
but that may come the day after at Bath. And the next day too
I want to show you something of our old River Severn. We will
come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There
we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which
the tobacco comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set
sail thither--was it yesterday or the day before? You will
understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out
of this dreaming land--to Africa and America and the whole
wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with
their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour
problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester,
mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath
we'll get in somehow. And then as an Anglo-American showman I
shall be tempted to run you northward a little way past
Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here and there and show
you monuments bearing little shields with the stars and
stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the
Washington family monuments."

"It was not only from England that America came," said Miss
Grammont.

"But England takes an American memory back most easily and
most fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the
emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin
Europe. . . . For you and me anyhow this is our past, this
was our childhood, and this is our land." He interrupted
laughing as she was about to reply. "Well, anyhow," he said,
"it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with
the ripest history in every grain of its soil. So we'll send
a wire to your London people and tell them to send their
instructions to Wells."

"I'll tell Belinda," she said, "to be quick with her
packing."

Section 7

As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details
of his excellent programme and revised their impressions of
the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime
sunlight of Wiltshire and Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting
the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was
inevitable that their conversation should become, by
imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They
kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr.
Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their
Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed
the idiosyncrasies of their position. They might profess to
be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts
that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old Grammont
and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon
the Fuel Commission became more and more important. "What
shall we do with this planet of ours? " gave way by the
easiest transitions to "What are you and I doing and what
have we got to do? How do you feel about it all? What do you
desire and what do you dare?"

It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel
Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even
greater than his own. He found that she was very much better
read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and
that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp
of economic ideas. He thought her attitude towards socialism
a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as
socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of
natural resources as a common property administered in the
common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by
it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the
merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few,
under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class
jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she
had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a
class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public
impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since
departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every
class; there was no stratification of either rightness or
righteousness.

He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the
Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he
found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau
and with a surer confidence of understanding. Perhaps his
talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made
them more readily expressible than they would have been
otherwise. He argued against the belief that any class could
be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the
conflict of motives he found in all the members of his
Committee and most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion
he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that there was not
a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable
drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one
who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive towards the right
thing. "That," said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life so
interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic
disappointments, so hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every
man is a feeble man and every man is a good man. My motives
come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in response to the
circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most men
will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given
perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and
vile. People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps
that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly. The
other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with
Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a
great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken
brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly
the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back
their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became one
solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until
one understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had
changed but the sunshine. And given a change in laws and
prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy
traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will
all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working
together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end. They
aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any
inner necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in
the present drama. Which is nearly at the end of its run."

"That's a hopeful view," said Miss Grammont. "I don't see the
flaw in it--if there is a flaw."

"There isn't one, " said Sir Richmond. "It is my chief
discovery about life. I began with the question of fuel and
the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my
generalization applies to all human affairs. Human beings are
fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate idiots,--I grant you.
That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak. But they
are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty
well materially if once we hammer out a sane collective
method of getting and using fuel. Which people generally will
understand--in the place of our present methods of snatch and
wrangle. Of that I am absolutely convinced. Some work, some
help, some willingness you can get out of everybody. That's
the red. And the same principle applies to most labour and
property problems, to health, to education, to population,
social relationships and war and peace. We haven't got the
right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no
system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all
these respects. But there is a right system possible none the
less. Let us only hammer our way through to the sane and
reasonable organization in this and that and the other human
affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for
good. We may not live to see even the beginnings of success,
but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced
organized science, if only there are a few faithful,
persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run
certainly save mankind and make human life clean and
splendid, happy work in a clear mind. If I could live to see
it!"

"And as for us--in our time?"

"Measured by the end we serve, we don't matter. You know we
don't matter."

"We have to find our fun in the building and in our
confidence that we do really build."

"So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship,"
said Sir Richmond.

"So long as our confidence lasts," she repeated after him.

"Ah!" cried Sir Richmond. "There it is! So long as our
confidence lasts! So long as one keeps one's mind steady.
That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss. I
went to him for advice. I haven't known him for more than a
month. It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to you. It
was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of
work. My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing
evaporated. My will failed me. I don't know if you will
understand what that means. It wasn't that my reason didn't
assure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to
do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow that seemed
a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had
gone out of it. . . . "

He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.

"I don't know why I tell you these things," he said.

"You tell them me," she said.

"It's a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his
ailments."

"No. No. Go on."

"I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my
work went on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I
was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the
Committee, day afterday. It was being up against men who
didn't reason against me but who just showed by everything
they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn't matter to
them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs,
reading papers, going about a world in which all the
organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream
of is tacitly denied. I don't know if it seems an
extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady
refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-
operation with me has beaten me--or at any rate has come very
near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men.
You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense. They, and
everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more
immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this
remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for
myself. . . ."

He paused.

"Go on," said Miss Grammont. "I think I understand this. "

"And yet I know I am right."

"I know you are right. I'm certain. Go on.

"If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society
had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the
others still kept them selves cloaked--if he was a normal
sensitive man--he might have felt something of a fool. He
might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red he was and
the others he knew were red also, but why show it? That is
the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some
sense of history and some sense of a larger life within us
than our merely personal life. We don't want to go on with
the old story merely. We want to live somehow in that larger
life and to live for its greater ends and lose something
unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are
only wanting to do what nearly everybody perhaps is ripe to
do and will presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau
talks about begins to come it may come very quickly--as the
red came at Prague. But for the present everyone hesitates
about throwing back the cloak."

"Until the cloak becomes unbearable," she said, repeating his
word.

"I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I
was ill. I thought I was overworked. But the real trouble was
a loneliness that robbed me of all driving force. Nobody
seemed thinking and feeling with me. . . . I have never
realized until now what a gregarious beast man is. It needed
only a day or so with Martineau, in the atmosphere of ideas
and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I
talk to you--That is why I have clutched at your company.
Because here you are, coming from thousands of miles away,
and you talk my ideas, you fall into my ways of thought as
though we had gone to the same school."

"Perhaps we HAVE gone to the same school," she said.

"You mean?"

"Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something
better in life than the first things it promised us."

"But you--? Disappointed? I thought that in America people
might be educating already on different lines--"

"Even in America," Miss Grammont said, "crops only grow on
the ploughed land."

Section 8

Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of
Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of King Arthur
and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells
and a pleasant inn, with a quaint little garden before its
front door that gave directly upon the cathedral. The three
tourists devoted a golden half hour before dinner to the
sculptures on the western face. The great screen of wrought
stone rose up warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a
clear blue sky in which the moon hung, round and already
bright. That western facade with its hundreds of little
figures tells the whole story of God and Man from Adam to the
Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it. It is an
even fuller exposition than the carved Bible history that
goes round the chapter house at Salisbury. It presented the
universe, said Sir Richmond, as a complete crystal globe. It
explained everything in life in a simple and natural manner,
hope, heaven, devil and despair. Generations had lived and
died mentally within that crystal globe, convinced that it
was all and complete.

"And now," said Miss Grammont, "we are in limitless space and
time. The crystal globe is broken."

"And?" said Belinda amazingly--for she had been silent for
some time, "the goldfish are on the floor, V.V. Free to flop
about. Are they any happier?"

It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best
left alone. "I trow not," said Belinda, giving the last touch
to it.

After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the
cathedral and along by the moat of the bishop's palace, and
Miss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to
her friends, a duty she had neglected for some days. The
evening was warm and still and the moon was approaching its
full and very bright. Insensibly the soft afterglow passed
into moonlight.

At first the two companions talked very little. Sir Richmond
was well content with this tacit friendliness and Miss
Grammont was preoccupied because she was very strongly moved
to tell him things about herself that hitherto she had told
to no one. It was not merely that she wanted to tell him
these things but also that for reasons she did not put as yet
very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought
to know. She talked of herself at first in general terms.
"Life comes on anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting
for ever and then suddenly one tears into life," she said. It
was even more so for women than it was for men. You are shown
life, a crowded vast spectacle full of what seems to be
intensely interesting activities and endless delightful and
frightful and tragic possibilities, and you have hardly had
time to look at it before you are called upon to make
decisions. And there is something in your blood that urges
you to decisive acts. Your mind, your reason resists. "Give
me time," it says. "They clamour at you with treats, crowds,
shows, theatres, all sorts of things; lovers buzz at you,
each trying to fix you part of his life when you are trying
to get clear to live a little of your own." Her father had
had one merit at any rate. He had been jealous of her lovers
and very ready to interfere.

"I wanted a lover to love," she said. "Every girl of course
wants that. I wanted to be tremendously excited. . . . And at
the same time I dreaded the enormous interference. . . .

"I wasn't temperamentally a cold girl. Men interested and
excited me, but there were a lot of men about and they
clashed with each other. Perhaps way down in some out of the
way place I should have fallen in love quite easily with the
one man who came along. But no man fixed his image. After a
year or so I think I began to lose the power which is natural
to a young girl of falling very easily into love. I became
critical of the youths and men who were attracted to me and I
became analytical about myself. . . .

"I suppose it is because you and I are going to part so soon
that I can speak so freely to you. . . . But there are things
about myself that I have never had out even with myself. I
can talk to myself in you--"

She paused baffled. "I know exactly," said Sir Richmond.

"In my composition I perceive there have always been two
ruling strains. I was a spoilt child at home, a rather
reserved girl at school, keen on my dignity. I liked respect.
I didn't give myself away. I suppose one would call that
personal pride. Anyhow it was that streak made me value the
position of being a rich married woman in New York. That was
why I became engaged to Lake. He seemed to be as good a man
as there was about. He said he adored me and wanted me to
crown his life. He wasn't ill-looking or ill-mannered. The
second main streak in my nature wouldn't however fit in with
that."

She stopped short.

"The second streak, " said Sir Richmond.

"Oh!--Love of beauty, love of romance. I want to give things
their proper names; I don't want to pretend to you. . . . It
was more or less than that. . . . It was--imaginative
sensuousness. Why should I pretend it wasn't in me? I believe
that streak is in all women."

"I believe so too. In all properly constituted women."

"I tried to devote that streak to Lake," she said. "I did my
best for him. But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an
idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business
as a lover. And that side of me fell in love, the rest of me
protesting, with a man named Caston. It was a notorious
affair. Everybody in New York couples my name with Caston.
Except when my father is about. His jealousy has blasted an
area of silence--in that matter--all round him. He will not
know of that story. And they dare not tell him. I should pity
anyone who tried to tell it him."

"What sort of man was this Caston?"

Miss Grammont seemed to consider. She did not look at Sir
Richmond; she kept her profile to him.

"He was," she said deliberately, "a very rotten sort of man."

She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial. "I
believe I always knew he wasn't right. But he was very
handsome. And ten years younger than Lake. And nobody else
seemed to be all right, so I swallowed that. He was an
artist, a painter. Perhaps you know his work." Sir Richmond
shook his head. "He could make American business men look
like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and
he was beginning to be popular. He made love to me. In
exactly the way Lake didn't. If I shut my eyes to one or two
things, it was delightful. I liked it. But my father would
have stood a painter as my husband almost as cheerfully as he
would a man of colour. I made a fool of myself, as people
say, about Caston. Well--when the war came, he talked in a
way that irritated me. He talked like an East Side Annunzio,
about art and war. It made me furious to know it was all talk
and that he didn't mean business. . . . I made him go."

She paused for a moment. "He hated to go."

"Then I relented. Or I missed him and I wanted to be made
love to. Or I really wanted to go on my own account. I
forget. I forget my motives altogether now. That early war
time was a queer time for everyone. A kind of wildness got
into the blood. . . . I threw over Lake. All the time things
had been going on in New York I had still been engaged to
Lake. I went to France. I did good work. I did do good work.
And also things were possible that would have seemed
fantastic in America. You know something of the war-time
atmosphere. There was death everywhere and people snatched at
gratifications. Caston made 'To-morrow we die' his text. We
contrived three days in Paris together--not very cleverly.
All sorts of people know about it. . . . We went very far."

She stopped short. "Well?" said Sir Richmond.

"He did die. . . ."

Another long pause. "They told me Caston had been killed. But
someone hinted--or I guessed--that there was more in it than
an ordinary casualty.

"Nobody, I think, realizes that I know. This is the first
time I have ever confessed that I do know. He was--shot. He
was shot for cowardice."

"That might happen to any man," said Sir Richmond presently.
"No man is a hero all round the twenty-four hours. Perhaps he
was caught by circumstances, unprepared. He may have been
taken by surprise."

"It was the most calculated, cold-blooded cowardice
imaginable. He let three other men go on and get killed. . ."


"No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know
nothing about. It was vile, contemptible cowardice and
meanness. It fitted in with a score of ugly little things I
remembered. It explained them all. I know the evidence and
the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because
they were exactly in character. . . . And that, you see, was
my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to
whom I had given myself with both hands."

Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed
in the same even tones of careful statement. "I wasn't
disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly
sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a
life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself,
I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest realization
that what you and I have been calling the bright little
personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over
and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot.
And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and
nothing particular to do with them."

"That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.

"It didn't seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of
something or go to pieces. I couldn't turn to religion. I had
no religion. And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that. I
had a kind of revelation one night. 'Either I find out what
all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost
myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of something
bigger than myself. And becoming that. That's why I have been
making a sort of historical pilgrimage. . . . That's my
story, Sir Richmond. That's my education. . . . Somehow
though your troubles are different, it seems to me that my
little muddle makes me understand how it is with you. What
you've got, this idea of a scientific ordering of the world,
is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been
feeling my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold
of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a
still greater economic and educational control of which it is
a part. I want to make that idea a part of myself. Rather I
want to make myself a part of it. When you talk of it I
believe in it altogether."

"And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you."

Section 9

Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's
confidences. His dispute with Dr. Martineau was present in
his mind, so that he did not want to make love to her. But he
was extremely anxious to express his vivid sense of the value
of her friendship. And while he hesitated over this difficult
and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself, and
in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's
thoughts.

"Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself," she
said; "now that I have told you so much. I did a thing that
still puzzles me. I was filled with a sense of hopeless
disaster in France and I suppose I had some sort of desperate
idea of saving something out of the situation. . . . I
renewed my correspondence with Gunter Lake. He made the
suggestion I knew he would make, and I renewed our
engagement."

"To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?"

"Yes."

"But you don't love him?"

"That's always been plain to me. But what I didn't realize,
until I had given my promise over again, was that I dislike
him acutely."

"You hadn't realized that before?"

"I hadn't thought about him sufficiently. But now I had to
think about him a lot. The other affair had given me an idea
perhaps of what it means to be married to a man. And here I
am drifting back to him. The horrible thing about him is the
steady ENVELOPING way in which he has always come at me.
Without fellowship. Without any community of ideas. Ready to
make the most extraordinary bargains. So long as he can in
any way fix me and get me. What does it mean? What is there
behind those watching, soliciting eyes of his? I don't in the
least love him, and this desire and service and all the rest
of it he offers me--it's not love. It's not even such love as
Caston gave me. It's a game he plays with his imagination."

She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond's mind.
"This is illuminating," he said. "You dislike Lake acutely.
You always have disliked him."

"I suppose I have. But it's only now I admit it to myself."

"Yes. And you might, for example, have married him in New
York before the war."

"It came very near to that."

"And then probably you wouldn't have discovered you disliked
him. You wouldn't have admitted it to yourself."

"I suppose I shouldn't. I suppose I should have tried to
believe I loved him."

"Women do this sort of thing. Odd! I never realized it
before. And there are endless wives suppressing an acute
dislike. My wife does. I see now quite clearly that she
detests me. Reasonably enough. From her angle I'm entirely
detestable. But she won't admit it, won't know of it. She
never will. To the end of my life, always, she will keep that
detestation unconfessed. She puts a face on the matter. We
both do. And this affair of yours. . . . Have you thought how
unjust it is to Lake?"

"Not nearly so much as I might have done."

"It is unfair to him. Atrociously unfair. He's not my sort of
man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the
peculiar laws of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of
lover with an immense self-conceit at the back of his
crawlingness."

"He has," she endorsed.

"He backs himself to crawl--until he crawls triumphantly
right over you . . . . I don't like to think of the dream he
has . . . . I take it he will lose. Is it fair to go into
this game with him?"

"In the interests of Lake," she said, smiling softly at Sir
Richmond in the moonlight. "But you are perfectly right."

"And suppose he doesn't lose!"

Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.

"There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a
civilized woman may approach one another. Passionate desire
is not enough. What is called love is not enough. Pledges,
rational considerations, all these things are worthless. All
these things are compatible with hate. The primary essential
is friendship, clear understanding, absolute confidence. Then
within that condition, in that elect relationship, love is
permissible, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will--
all things are permissible. . . ."

Came a long pause between them.

"Dear old cathedral," said Miss Grammont, a little
irrelevantly. She had an air of having concluded something
that to Sir Richmond seemed scarcely to have begun. She stood
looking at the great dark facade edged with moonlight for
some moments, and then turned towards the hotel, which showed
a pink-lit window.

"I wonder," she said, "if Belinda is still up, And what she
will think when I tell her of the final extinction of Mr.
Lake. I think she rather looked forward to being the intimate
friend, secrets and everything, of Mrs. Gunter Lake."

Section 10

Sir Richmond woke up at dawn and he woke out of an
extraordinary dream. He was saying to Miss Grammont:
"There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds.
There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds."
He saw her as he had seen her the evening before, light and
cool, coming towards him in the moonlight from the hotel. But
also in the inconsistent way of dreams he was very close to
her kind, faintly smiling face, and his eyes were wet with
tears and he was kissing her hand. "My dear wife and mate,"
he was saying, and suddenly he was kissing her cool lips.

He woke up and stared at his dream, which faded out only very
slowly before the fresh sun rise upon the red tiles and tree
boughs outside the open window, and before the first stir and
clamour of the birds.

He felt like a court in which some overwhelmingly
revolutionary piece of evidence had been tendered. All the
elaborate defence had broken down at one blow. He sat up on
the edge of his bed, facing the new fact.

"This is monstrous and ridiculous," he said, "and Martineau
judged me exactly. I am in love with her. . . . I am head
over heels in love with her. I have never been so much in
love or so truly in love with anyone before."

Section 11

That was the dawn of a long day of tension for Sir Richmond
and Miss Grammont. Because each was now vividly aware of
being in love with the other and so neither was able to see
how things were with the other. They were afraid of each
other. A restraint had come upon them both, a restraint that
was greatly enhanced by their sense of Belinda, acutely
observant, ostentatiously tactful and self-effacing, and
prepared at the slightest encouragement to be overwhelmingly
romantic and sympathetic. Their talk waned, and was revived
to an artificial activity and waned again. The historical
interest had evaporated from the west of England and left
only an urgent and embarrassing present.

But the loveliness of the weather did not fail, and the whole
day was set in Severn landscapes. They first saw the great
river like a sea with the Welsh mountains hanging in the sky
behind as they came over the Mendip crest above Shipham. They
saw it again as they crossed the hill before Clifton Bridge,
and so they continued, climbing to hill crests for views at
Alveston and near Dursley, and so to Gloucester and the
lowest bridge and thence back down stream again through fat
meadow lands at first and much apple-blossom and then over
gentle hills through wide, pale Nownham and Lidney and
Alvington and Woolaston to old Chepstow and its brown castle,
always with the widening estuary to the left of them and its
foaming shoals and shining sand banks. From Chepstow they
turned back north along the steep Wye gorge to Tintern, and
there at the snug little Beaufort Arms with its prim lawn and
flower garden they ended the day's journey.

Tintern Abbey they thought a poor graceless mass of ruin down
beside the river, and it was fenced about jealously and
locked up from their invasion. After dinner Sir Richmond and
Miss Grammont went for a walk in the mingled twilight and
moonlight up the hill towards Chepstow. Both of them were
absurdly and nervously pressing to Belinda to come with them,
but she was far too wise to take this sudden desire for her
company seriously. Her dinner shoes, she said, were too thin.
Perhaps she would change and come out a little later. "Yes,
come later," said Miss Grammont and led the way to the door.

They passed through the garden. "I think we go up the hill? "
said Sir Richmond.

"Yes," she agreed, "up the hill."

Followed a silence.

Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and
disconnected talk about Tintern Abbey, concerning, which she
had no history ready, and then, still lamer, about whether
Monmouthshire is in England or Wales, silence fell again. The
silence lengthened, assumed a significance, a dignity that no
common words might break.

Then Sir Richmond spoke. "I love, you, he said, "with all my
heart."

Her soft voice came back after a stillness. "I love you," she
said, "with all myself."

"I had long ceased to hope, " said Sir -Richmond, that I
should ever find a friend . . . a lover . . . perfect
companionship . . . . "

They went on walking side by side, without touching each
other or turning to each other.

"All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive
in me," she said. . . .

"Cool and sweet," said Sir Richmond. "Such happiness as I
could not have imagined."

The light of a silent bicycle appeared above them up the hill
and swept down upon them, lit their two still faces brightly
and passed.

"My dear," she whispered in the darkness between the high
hedges.

They stopped short and stood quite still, trembling. He saw
her face, dim and tender, looking up to his.

Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had
desired in his dream. . . .

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat
explanations of why she had not followed them, and enlarged
upon the moonlight effect of the Abbey ruins from the inn
lawn. But the scared congratulations in her eyes betrayed her
recognition that momentous things had happened between the
two.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

FULL MOON

Section 1

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of
having found such happiness as he could not have imagined.
But when he awoke in the night that happiness had evaporated.
He awoke suddenly out of this love dream that had lasted now
for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of astonishment
and dismay.

He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had
parted also from that process of self-exploration that they
had started together, but now he awakened to find it
established and in full activity in his mind. Something or
someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an
abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he
thought he was doing with Miss Grammont and whither he
thought he was taking her, how he proposed to reconcile the
close relationship with her that he was now embarked upon
with, in the first place, his work upon and engagements with
the Fuel Commission, and, in the second place, Martin Leeds.
Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn't come into the case at all.
He had done his utmost to keep Martin Leeds out of his head
throughout the development of this affair. Now in an unruly
and determined way that was extremely characteristic of her
she seemed resolute to break in.

She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client
but without any hostility, of the claims of Miss Grammont to
be let alone. The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had
maintained to himself that he had not made love to Miss
Grammont, that their mutual attraction had been irresistible
and had achieved its end in spite of their resolute and
complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind. He
admitted to himself that driven by a kind of instinctive
necessity he had led their conversation step by step to a
realization and declaration of love, and that it did not
exonerate him in the least that Miss Grammont had been quite
ready and willing to help him and meet him half way. She
wanted love as a woman does, more than a man does, and he had
steadily presented himself as a man free to love, able to
love and loving.

"She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship,
and you have made her that tremendous promise. That was
implicit in your embrace. And how can you keep that promise?"

It was as if Martin spoke; it was her voice; it was the very
quality of her thought.

"You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be
interrupted or abandoned if you take her. Whatever is not
mortgaged to your work is mortgaged to me. For the strange
thing in all this is that you and I love one another--and
have no power to do otherwise. In spite of all this.

"You have nothing to give her but stolen goods," said the
shadow of Martin. "You have nothing to give anyone personally
any more. . . .

"Think of the love that she desires and think of this love
that you can give. . . .

"Is there any new thing in you that you can give her that you
haven't given me? You and I know each other very well;
perhaps I know YOU too well. Haven't you loved me as much as
you can love anyone? Think of all that there has been between
us that you are ready now, eager now to set aside and forget
as though it had never been. For four days you have kept me
out of your mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known
I was there--for all you would not know. No one else will
ever be so intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled
together, wept together, jested happily and jested bitterly.
You have spared me not at all. Pitiless and cruel you have
been to me. You have reckoned up all my faults against me as
though they were sins. You have treated me at times
unlovingly--never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have
sometimes treated me. And yet I have your love--as no other
woman can ever have it. Even now when you are wildly in love
with this girl's freshness and boldness and cleverness I come
into your mind by right and necessity."

"She is different," argued Sir Richmond.

"But you are the same," said the shadow of Martin with
Martin's unsparing return. "Your love has never been a
steadfast thing. It comes and goes like the wind. You are an
extravagantly imperfect lover. But I have learnt to accept
you, as people accept the English weather. . . . Never in all
your life have you loved, wholly, fully, steadfastly--as
people deserve to be loved--,not your mother nor your father,
not your wife nor your children, nor me, nor our child, nor
any living thing. Pleasant to all of us at times--at times
bitterly disappointing. You do not even love this work of
yours steadfastly, this work to which you sacrifice us all in
turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have these
moods and changes, that is why you have these lassitudes. So
it is you are made. . . .

"And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so
much simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it--as you
can do--and then fail it, as you will do. . . . "

Sir Richmond's mind and body lay very still for a time.

"Should I fail her? . . ."

For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his
mind.

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and
unforeseeing his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had
been just a blind drive to get hold of her and possess
her. . . .

Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence
again.

"But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a
perfect love, my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy,
its ruthless criticism? Has the world ever seen a perfect
lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection that brings us together
in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all, likely to get
a more perfect love in all her life than this poor love of
mine? And isn't it good for her that she should love?"

"Perfect love cherishes. Perfect love foregoes."

Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the
immediate question. "Perfect love," the phrase was his point
of departure. Was it true that he could not love passionately
and completely? Was that fundamentally what was the matter
with him? Was that perhaps what was the matter with the whole
world of mankind? It had not yet come to that power of loving
which makes action full and simple and direct and
unhesitating. Man upon his planet has not grown up to love,
is still an eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent. He
lacks the courage to love and the wisdom to love. Love is
here. But it comes and goes, it is mixed with greeds and
jealousies and cowardice and cowardly reservations. One hears
it only in snatches and single notes. It is like something
tuning up before the Music begins. . . . The metaphor
altogether ran away with Sir Richmond's half dreaming mind.
Some day perhaps all life would go to music.

Love was music and power. If he had loved. enough he need
never have drifted away from his wife. Love would have
created love, would have tolerated and taught and inspired.
Where there is perfect love there is neither greed nor
impatience. He would have done his work calmly. He would have
won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and
quarrelling with it perpetually. . . .

"Flimsy creatures," he whispered. "Uncertain health.
Uncertain strength. A will that comes and goes. Moods of
baseness. Moods of utter beastliness. . . . Love like April
sunshine. April? . .."

He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high
summer sunshine, into a continuing music, of love. He thought
of a world like some great playhouse in which players and
orchestra and audience all co-operate in a noble production
without dissent or conflict. He thought he was the savage of
thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great world that is
still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead. His effort to see
more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy
pinnacles and to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his
dream and left him awake again and wrestling with the problem
of Miss Grammont.

Section 2

The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable. He had to
release Miss Grammont from the adventure into which he had
drawn her. This decision stood out stern-and inevitable in
his mind with no conceivable alternative.

As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its
difficulty. He was profoundly in love with her, he was still
only learning how deeply, and she was not going to play a
merely passive part in this affair. She was perhaps as deeply
in love with him. . . .

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and
disavowals. He could not bear to think of her
disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to
disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To
turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in
me. . . . It would be like playing a practical joke upon her.
It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making
a grimace at her. . . . It would scar her with a second
humiliation. . . ."

Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow and
contrive by some sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to
go from her suddenly? But a mere sudden parting would not end
things between them now unless he went off abruptly without
explanations or any arrangements for further communications.
At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit but
evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her
father at Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that
Sir Richmond realized that now it could not end in that
fashion, that with the whisper of love and the touching of
lips, something had been started that would go on, that would
develop. To break off now and go away without a word would
leave a raw and torn end, would leave her perplexed and
perhaps even more humiliated with an aching mystery to
distress her. "Why did he go? Was it something I said?--
something he found out or imagined? "

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this
problem. She and he had got into each other's lives to stay:
the real problem was the terms upon which they were to stay
in each other's lives. Close association had brought them to
the point of being, in the completest sense, lovers; that
could not be; and the real problem was the transmutation of
their relationship to some form compatible with his honour
and her happiness. A word, an idea, from some recent reading
floated into Sir Richmond's head. "Sublimate," he whispered.
"We have to sublimate this affair. We have to put this
relationship upon a Higher Plane.

His mind stopped short at that.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart.
"God! How I loathe the Higher Plane! . . . .

"God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some
poor little kid who has to wear irons on its legs.

"I WANT her. . . . Do you hear, Martin? I want her. "

As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and
Miss Grammont--Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out--
traversing Europe and Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit
beach in the South Seas. . . .

His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and
fantastic interruptions had not occurred.

"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane--and
keep it there. We two love one another--that has to be
admitted now. (I ought never to have touched her. I ought
never to have thought of touching her.) But we two are too
high, our aims and work and obligations are too high for any
ordinary love making. That sort of thing would embarrass us,
would spoil everything.

"Spoil everything," he repeated, rather like a small boy who
learns an unpalatable lesson.

For a time Sir Richmond, exhausted by moral effort, lay
staring at the darkness.

"It has to be done. I believe I can carry her through with it
if I can carry myself. She's a finer thing than I am. . . .
On the whole I am glad it's only one more day. Belinda will
be about. . . . Afterwards we can write to each other. . . .
If we can get over the next day it will be all right. Then we
can write about fuel and politics--and there won't be her
voice and her presence. We shall really SUBLIMATE. . . .
First class idea-- sublimate! . . . . And I will go back to
dear old Martin who's all alone there and miserable; I'll be
kind to her and play my part and tell her her Carbuncle scar
rather becomes her. . . . And in a little while I shall be
altogether in love with her again.

"Queer what a brute I've always been to Martin."

"Queer that Martin can come in a dream to me and take the
upper hand with me.

"Queer that NOW--I love Martin."

He thought still more profoundly. "By the time the Committee
meets again I shall have been tremendously refreshed."

He repeated:--"Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them
there. Then go back to Martin. And so to the work. That's
it. . . ."

Nothing so pacifies the mind as a clear-cut purpose. Sir
Richmond fell asleep during the fourth recapitulation of this
programme.

Section 3

When Miss Grammont appeared at breakfast Sir Richmond saw at
once that she too had had a restless night. When she came
into the little long breakfast room of the inn with its brown
screens and its neat white tables it seemed to him that the
Miss Grammont of his nocturnal speculations, the beautiful
young lady who had to be protected and managed and loved
unselfishly, vanished like some exorcised intruder. Instead
was this real dear young woman, who had been completely
forgotten during the reign of her simulacrum and who now
returned completely remembered, familiar, friendly, intimate.
She touched his hand for a moment, she met his eyes with the
shadow of a smile in her own.

"Oranges!" said Belinda from the table by the window.
"Beautiful oranges."

She had been preparing them, poor Trans-atlantic exile, after
the fashion in which grape fruits are prepared upon liners
and in the civilized world of the west. "He's getting us tea
spoons," said Belinda, as they sat down.

"This is realler England than ever," she said. "I've been up
an hour. I found a little path down to the river bank. It's
the greenest morning world and full of wild flowers. Look at
these."

"That's lady's smock," said Sir Richmond. "It's not really a
flower; it's a quotation from Shakespeare."

"And there are cowslips!"

"CUCKOO BUDS OF YELLOW HUE. DO PAINT THE MEADOWS WITH
DELIGHT. All the English flowers come out of Shakespeare. I
don't know what we did before his time."

The waiter arrived with the tea spoons for the oranges.

Belinda, having distributed these, resumed her discourse of
enthusiasm for England. She asked a score of questions about
Gloucester and Chepstow, the Severn and the Romans and the
Welsh, and did not wait for the answers. She did not want
answers; she talked to keep things going. Her talk masked a
certain constraint that came upon her companions after the
first morning's greetings were over.

Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin
maps. "To-day," he said," we will run back to Bath--from
which it will be easy for you to train to Falmouth. We will
go by Monmouth and then turn back through the Forest of Dean,
where you will get glimpses of primitive coal mines still
worked by two men and a boy with a windlass and a pail.
Perhaps we will go through Cirencester. I don't know. Perhaps
it is better to go straight to Bath. In the very heart of
Bath you will find yourselves in just the same world you
visited at Pompeii. Bath is Pompeii overlaid by Jane Austen's
England."

He paused for a moment. "We can wire to your agents from here
before we start and we can pick up their reply at Gloucester
or Nailsworth or even Bath itself. So that if your father is
nearer than we suppose--But I think to-morrow afternoon will
be soon enough for Falmouth, anyhow."

He stopped interrogatively.

Miss Grammont's face was white. "That will do very well," she
said.

Section 4,

They started, but presently they came to high banks that
showed such masses of bluebells, ragged Robin, great
stitchwort and the like that Belinda was not to be
restrained. She clamoured to stop the car and go up the bank
and pick her hands full, and so they drew up by the roadside
and Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont sat down near the car
while Belinda carried her enthusiastic onslaught on the
flowers up the steep bank and presently out of earshot.

The two lovers said unheeded things about the flowers to each
other and then fell silent. Then Miss Grammont turned her
head and seemed deliberately to measure her companion's
distance. Evidently she judged her out of earshot.

"Well, said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. "We love
one another. Is that so still?"

"I could not love you more."

"It wasn't a dream?"

"No."

"And to-morrow we part?"

He looked her in the eyes. "I have been thinking of that all
night," he said at last.

"I too."

"And you think--?"

"That we must part. Just as we arranged it when was it? Three
days or three ages ago? There is nothing else in the world to
do except for us to go our ways. . . . I love you. That means
for a woman--It means that I want to be with you. But that is
impossible. . . . Don't doubt whether I love you because I
say--impossible. . . . "

Sir Richmond, faced with his own nocturnal decision, was now
moved to oppose it flatly. "Nothing that one can do is
impossible."

She glanced again at Belinda and bent down towards him."
Suppose," she said, "you got back into that car with me;
suppose that instead of going on as we have planned, you took
me away. How much of us would go?"

"You would go," said Sir Richmond, "and my heart."

"And this work of yours? And your honour? For the honour of a
man in this New Age of yours will be first of all in the work
he does for the world. And you will leave your work to be
just a lover. And the work that I might do because of my
father's wealth; all that would vanish too. We should leave
all of that, all of our usefulness, all that much of
ourselves. But what has made me love you? Just your breadth
of vision, just the sense that you mattered. What has made
you love me? Just that I have understood the dream of your
work. All that we should have to leave behind. We should
specialize, in our own scandal. We should run away just for
one thing. To think, by sharing the oldest, simplest, dearest
indulgences in the world, that we had got each other. When
really we had lost each other, lost all that mattered. . . ."

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."

Section 5

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 AngloSaxondom, 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.

Section 6

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.

In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and
Miss Grammont and was very enthusiastic about everything, but
in the evening after dinner it was clear that her role was to
remain in the hotel. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out
into the moonlit gloaming; they crossed the bridge again and
followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey
Church, that Lantern of the West. Away in some sunken gardens
ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little
lights about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down
below dancing on the grass. These little lights, these
bobbing black heads and the lilting music, this little
inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy illumination,
made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast
and cool and silent. Our visitors began to realize that Bath
could be very beautiful. They went to the parapet above the
river and stood there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and
smoking cigarettes. Miss Grammont was moved to declare the
Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch, its effect of height
over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses above,
more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. Down below
was a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along
the foaming weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against
the rush of the water lower down the stream.

"Dear England!" said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious
spectacle. "How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly
things!"

"It is the home we come from."

"You belong to it still."

"No more than you do. I belong to a big overworking modern
place called London which stretches its tentacles all over
the world. I am as much a home-coming tourist as you are.
Most of this western country I am seeing for the first time."

She said nothing for a space. "I've not a word to say to-
night," she said. "I'm just full of a sort of animal
satisfaction in being close to you. . . . And in being with
you among lovely things. . . . Somewhere--Before we part to-
night--. . . . "

"Yes?" he said to her pause, and his face came very near to
hers.

I want you to kiss me. "

"Yes," he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely
aware of the promenaders passing close to them.

"It's a promise?"

"Yes."

Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and
gripped it and pressed it. "My dear!" he whispered, tritest
and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man
and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the
shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the
darkling populous about them with their silent interchanges.

"There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,"
she said. "After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to
think of them. But now--every rational thing seems dissolved
in this moonlight. . . ."

Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual
dignity of their relationship.

"I suppose I ought to be more concerned tonight about the
work I have to do in the world and anxious for you to tell me
this and that, but indeed I am not concerned at all about it.
I seem to have it in outline all perfectly clear. I mean to
play a man's part in the world just as my father wants me to
do. I mean to win his confidence and work with him--like a
partner. Then some day I shall be a power in the world of
fuel. And at the same time I must watch and read and think
and learn how to be the servant of the world. . . . We two
have to live like trusted servants who have been made
guardians of a helpless minor. We have to put things in order
and keep them in order against the time when Man--Man whom we
call in America the Common Man--can take hold of his world--"

"And release his servants," said Sir Richmond.

"All that is perfectly clear in my mind. That is what I am
going to live for; that is what I have to do."

She stopped abruptly. "All that is about as interesting to-
night--in comparison with the touch of your dear fingers--as
next month's railway time-table."

But later she found a topic that could hold their attention
for a time.

"We have never said a word about religion," she said.

Sir Richmond paused for a moment. "I am a godless man," he
said. "The stars and space and time overwhelm my imagination.
I cannot imagine anything above or beyond them."

She thought that over. "But there are divine things," she
said.

"YOU are divine. . . . I'm not talking lovers' nonsense," he
hastened to add. "I mean that there is something about human
beings--not just the everyday stuff of them, but something
that appears intermittently--as though a light shone through
something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it
is a divinity revealed to me by other people-- And even by
myself in my own heart.

"I'm never surprised at the badness of human beings," said
Sir Richmond; "seeing how they have come about and what they
are; but I have been surprised time after time by fine
things . . . . Often in people I disliked or thought little
of . . . . I can understand that I find you full of divine
quality, because I am in love with you and all alive to you.
Necessarily I keep on discovering loveliness in you. But I
have seen divine things in dear old Martineau, for example. A
vain man, fussy, timid--and yet filled with a passion for
truth, ready to make great sacrifices and to toil
tremendously for that. And in those men I am always cursing,
my Committee, it is astonishing at times to discover what
streaks of goodness even the really bad men can show. . . .
But one can't make use of just anyone's divinity. I can see
the divinity in Martineau but it leaves me cold. He tired me
and bored me. . . . But I live on you. It's only through love
that the God can reach over from one human being to another.
All real love is a divine thing, a reassurance, a release of
courage. It is wonderful enough that we should take food and
drink and turn them into imagination, invention and creative
energy; it is still more wonderful that we should take an
animal urging and turn it into a light to discover beauty and
an impulse towards the utmost achievements of which we are
capable. All love is a sacrament and all lovers are priests
to each other. You and I--"

Sir Richmond broke off abruptly. "I spent three days trying
to tell this to Dr. Martineau. But he wasn't the priest I had
to confess to and the words wouldn't come. I can confess it
to you readily enough . . . ."

"I cannot tell," said Miss Grammont, "whether this is the
last wisdom in life or moonshine. I cannot tell whether I am
thinking or feeling; but the noise of the water going over
the weir below is like the stir in my heart. And I am
swimming in love and happiness. Am I awake or am I dreaming
you, and are we dreaming one another? Hold my hand--hold it
hard and tight. I'm trembling with love for you and all the
world. . . . If I say more I shall be weeping."

For a long time they stood side by side saying not a word to
one another.

Presently the band down below and the dancing ceased and the
little lights were extinguished. The silent moon seemed to
grow brighter and larger and the whisper of the waters
louder. A crowd of young people flowed out of the gardens and
passed by on their way home. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont
strolled through the dispersing crowd and over the Toll
Bridge and went exploring down a little staircase that went
down from the end of the bridge to the dark river, and then
came back to their old position at the parapet looking upon
the weir and the Pulteney Bridge. The gardens that had been
so gay were already dark and silent as they returned, and the
streets echoed emptily to the few people who were still
abroad.

"It's the most beautiful bridge in the world," said Miss
Grammont, and gave him her hand again.

Some deep-toned clock close by proclaimed the hour eleven.

The silence healed again.

"Well?" said Sir Richmond.

"Well?" said Miss Grammont smiling very faintly.

"I suppose we must go out of all this beauty now, back to the
lights of the hotel and the watchful eyes of your dragon. "

"She has not been a very exacting dragon so far, has she?"

"She is a miracle of tact."

"She does not really watch. But she is curious--and very
sympathetic. "

"She is wonderful." . . . .

"That man is still fishing," said Miss Grammont.

For a time she peered down at the dark figure wading in the
foam below as though it was the only thing of interest in the
world. Then she turned to Sir Richmond.

"I would trust Belinda with my life, she said. "And anyhow-
now--we need not worry about Belinda."

Section 7

At the breakfast table it was Belinda who was the most
nervous of the three, the most moved, the most disposed to
throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her
companions had passed beyond the idea of separation; it was
as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the high
dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they
had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers;
they seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their
bearing. It would have pleased Belinda better, seeing how
soon they were to be torn apart, if they had not made quite
such excellent breakfasts. She even suspected them of having
slept well. Yet yesterday they had been deeply stirred. They
had stayed out late last night, so late that she had not
heard them come in. Perhaps then they had passed the climax
of their emotions. Sir Richmond, she learnt, was to take the
party to Exeter, where there would be a train for Falmouth a
little after two. If they started from Bath about nine that
would give them an ample margin of time in which to deal with
a puncture or any such misadventure.

They crested the Mendips above Shepton Mallet, ran through
Tilchester and Ilminster into the lovely hill country about
Up-Ottery and so to Honiton and the broad level road to
Exeter. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont were in a state of
happy gravity; they sat contentedly side by side, talking
very little. They had already made their arrangements for
writing to one another. There was to be no stream of love-
letters or protestations. That might prove a mutual torment.
Their love was to be implicit. They were to write at
intervals about political matters and their common interests,
and to keep each other informed of their movements about the
world.

"We shall be working together," she said, speaking suddenly
out of a train of thought she had been following, "we shall
be closer together than many a couple who have never spent a
day apart for twenty years."

Then presently she said: "In the New Age all lovers will have
to be accustomed to meeting and parting. We women will not be
tied very much by domestic needs. Unless we see fit to have
children. We shall be going about our business like men; we
shall have world-wide businesses--many of us--just as men
will. . . .

"It will be a world full of lovers' meetings."

Some day--somewhere--we two will certainly meet again."

"Even you have to force circumstances a little," said Sir
Richmond.

"We shall meet, she said, "without doing that."

"But where?" he asked unanswered. . . .

"Meetings and partings," she said. "Women will be used to
seeing their lovers go away. Even to seeing them go away to
other women who have borne them children and who have a
closer claim on them."

"No one-" began Sir Richmond, startled.

"But I don't mind very much. It's how things are. If I were a
perfectly civilized woman I shouldn't mind at all. If men and
women are not to be tied to each other there must needs be
such things as this."

"But you," said Sir Richmond. I at any rate am not like that.
I cannot bear the thought that YOU--"

"You need not bear it, my dear. I was just trying to imagine
this world that is to be. Women I think are different from
men in their jealousy. Men are jealous of the other man;
women are jealous for their man--and careless about the other
woman. What I love in you I am sure about. My mind was empty
when it came to you and now it is full to overflowing. I
shall feel you moving about in the same world with me. I'm
not likely to think of anyone else for a very long
time. . . . Later on, who knows? I may marry. I make no vows.
But I think until I know certainly that you do not want me
any more it will be impossible for me to marry or to have a
lover. I don't know, but that is how I believe it will be
with me. And my mind feels beautifully clear now and settled.
I've got your idea and made it my own, your idea that we
matter scarcely at all, but that the work we do matters
supremely. I'll find my rope and tug it, never fear. Half way
round the world perhaps some day you will feel me tugging."

"I shall feel you're there," he said, "whether you tug or
not. . . ."

"Three miles left to Exeter," he reported presently.

She glanced back at Belinda.

"It is good that we have loved, my dear," she whispered. "Say
it is good."

"The best thing in all my life," he said, and lowered his
head and voice to say: "My dearest dear."

"Heart's desire--still--?"

"Heart's delight. . . . Priestess of life. . . . Divinity."

She smiled and nodded and suddenly Belinda, up above their
lowered heads, accidentally and irrelevantly, no doubt,
coughed.

At Exeter Station there was not very much time to spare after
all. Hardly had Sir Richmond secured a luncheon basket for
the two travellers before the train came into the station. He
parted from Miss Grammont with a hand clasp. Belinda was
flushed and distressed at the last but her friend was quiet
and still. "Au revoir," said Belinda without conviction when
Sir Richmond shook her hand.

Section 8.

Sir Richmond stood quite still on the platform as the train
ran out of the station. He did not move until it had
disappeared round the bend. Then he turned, lost in a brown
study, and walked very slowly towards the station exit.

"The most wonderful thing in my life," he thought. "And
already--it is unreal.

"She will go on to her father whom she knows ten thousand
times more thoroughly than she knows me; she will go on to
Paris, she will pick up all the threads of her old story, be
reminded of endless things in her life, but never except in
the most casual way of these days: they will be cut off from
everything else that will serve to keep them real; and as for
me--this connects with nothing else in my life at all. . . .
It is as disconnected as a dream. . . . Already it is hardly
more substantial than a dream. . . .

"We shall write letters. Do letters breathe faster or slower
as you read them?

"We may meet.

"Where are we likely to meet again? ... I never realized
before how improbable it is that we shall meet again. And if
we meet? . . .

"Never in all our lives shall we be really TOGETHER again.
It's over--With a completeness. . . .

"Like death."

He came opposite the bookstalls and stopped short and stared
with unseeing eyes at the display of popular literature. He
was wondering now whether after all he ought to have let her
go. He experienced something of the blank amazement of a
child who has burst its toy balloon. His golden globe of
satisfaction in an instant had gone. An irrational sense of
loss was flooding every other feeling about V.V. If she had
loved him truly and altogether could she have left him like
this? Neither of them surely had intended so complete a
separation. He wanted to go back and recall that train.

A few seconds more, he realized, and he would give way to
anger. Whatever happened that must not happen. He pulled
himself together. What was it he had to do now? He had not to
be angry, he had not even to be sorry. They had done the
right thing. Outside the station his car was waiting.

He went outside the station and stared at his car. He had to
go somewhere. Of course! down into Cornwall to Martin's
cottage. He had to go down to her and be kind and comforting
about that carbuncle. To be kind? . . . If this thwarted
feeling broke out into anger he might be tempted to take it
out of Martin. That at any rate he must not do. He had always
for some inexplicable cause treated Martin badly. Nagged her
and blamed her and threatened her. That must stop now. No
shadow of this affair must lie on Martin. . . . And Martin
must never have a suspicion of any of this. . . .

The image of Martin became very vivid in his mind. He thought
of her as he had seen her many times, with the tears close,
fighting with her back to the wall, with all her wit and
vigour gone, because she loved him more steadfastly than he
did her. Whatever happened he must not take it out of Martin.
It was astonishing how real she had become now--as V.V.
became a dream. Yes, Martin was astonishingly real. And if
only he could go now and talk to Martin--and face all the
facts of life with her, even as he had done with that phantom
Martin in his dream. . . .

But things were not like that.

He looked to see if his car was short of water or petrol;
both needed replenishing, and so he would have to go up the
hill into Exeter town again. He got into his car and sat with
his fingers on the electric starter.

Martin! Old Friend! Eight days were still left before the
Committee met again, eight days for golden kindness. He would
distress Martin by no clumsy confession. He would just make
her happy as she loved to be made happy. . . . Nevertheless.
Nevertheless. . . .

Was it Martin who failed him or he who failed Martin?

Incessant and insoluble dispute. Well, the thing now was to
go to Martin. . . . And then the work!

He laughed suddenly.

"I'll take it out of the damned Commission. I'll make old
Rumford Brown sit up."

He was astonished to find himself thinking of the affairs of
the Commission with a lively interest and no trace of
fatigue. He had had his change; he had taken his rest; he was
equal to his task again already. He started his engine and
steered his way past a van and a waiting cab.

"Fuel," he said.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY

Section 1

The Majority and Minority Reports of the Fuel Commission were
received on their first publication with much heat and
disputation, but there is already a fairly general agreement
that they are great and significant documents, broadly
conceived and historically important. They do lift the
questions of fuel supply and distribution high above the
level of parochial jealousies and above the petty and
destructive profiteering of private owners and traders, to a
view of a general human welfare. They form an important link
in a series of private and public documents that are slowly
opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods
conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may
yet arrest the drift of our western civilization towards
financial and commercial squalor and the social collapse that
must ensue inevitably on that. In view of the composition of
the Committee, the Majority Report is in itself an amazing
triumph of Sir Richmond's views; it is astonishing that he
was able to drive his opponents so far  and then leave them
there securely advanced while he carried on the adherents he
had altogether won, including, of course, the labour
representatives, to the further altitudes of the Minority
Report.

After the Summer recess the Majority Report was discussed and
adopted. Sir Richmond had shown signs of flagging energy in
June, but he had come back in September in a state of
exceptional vigour; for a time he completely dominated the
Committee by the passionate force of his convictions and the
illuminating scorn he brought to bear on the various
subterfuges and weakening amendments by which the meaner
interests sought to save themselves in whole or in part from
the common duty of sacrifice. But toward the end he fell ill.
He had worked to the pitch of exhaustion. He neglected a cold
that settled on his chest. He began to cough persistently and
betray an increasingly irritable temper. In the last fights
in the Committee his face was bright with fever and he spoke
in a voiceless whisper, often a vast angry whisper. His place
at table was marked with scattered lozenges and scraps of
paper torn to the minutest shreds. Such good manners as had
hitherto mitigated his behaviour on the Committee departed
from him, He carried his last points, gesticulating and
coughing and wheezing rather than speaking. But he had so
hammered his ideas into the Committee that they took the
effect of what he was trying to say.

He died of pneumonia at his own house three days after the
passing of the Majority Report. The Minority Report, his own
especial creation, he never signed. It was completed by Wast
and Carmichael. . . .

After their parting at Salisbury station Dr. Martineau heard
very little of Sir Richmond for a time except through the
newspapers, which contained frequent allusions to the
Committee. Someone told him that Sir Richmond had been
staying at Ruan in Cornwall where Martin Leeds had a cottage,
and someone else had met him at Bath on his way, he said, in
his car from Cornwall to a conference with Sir Peter Davies
in Glamorganshire.

But in the interim Dr. Martineau had the pleasure of meeting
Lady Hardy at a luncheon party. He was seated next to her and
he found her a very pleasing and sympathetic person indeed.
She talked to him freely and simply of her husband and of the
journey the two men had taken together. Either she knew
nothing of the circumstances of their parting or if she did
she did not betray her knowledge. "That holiday did him a
world of good," she said. "He came back to his work like a
giant. I feel very grateful to you."

Dr. Martineau said it was a pleasure to have helped Sir
Richmond's work in any way. He believed in him thoroughly.
Sir Richmond was inspired by great modern creative ideas.

"Forgive me if I keep you talking about him," said Lady
Hardy. "I wish I could feel as sure that I had been of use to
him."

Dr. Martineau insisted. "I know very well that you are."

"I do what I can to help him carry his enormous burthen of
toil" she said. "I try to smooth his path. But he is a
strange silent creature at times. "

Her eyes scrutinized the doctor's face.

It was not the doctor's business to supplement Sir Richmond's
silences. Yet he wished to meet the requirements of this lady
if he could. "He is one of those men," he said, "who are
driven by forces they do not fully understand. A man of
genius."

"Yes," she said in an undertone of intimacy. Genius. . . . A
great irresponsible genius. . . . Difficult to help. . . . I
wish I could do more for him."

A very sweet and charming lady. It was with great regret that
the doctor found the time had come to turn to his left-hand
neighbour.

Section 2

It was with some surprise that Dr. Martineau received a fresh
appeal for aid from Sir Richmond. It was late in October and
Sir Richmond was already seriously ill. But he was still
going about his business as though he was perfectly well. He
had not mistaken his man. Dr. Martineau received him as
though there had never been a shadow of offence between them.

He came straight to the point. "Martineau," he said, "I must
have those drugs I asked you for when first I came to you
now. I must be bolstered up. I can't last out unless I am.
I'm at the end of my energy. I come to you because you will
understand. The Commission can't go on now for more than
another three weeks. Whatever happens afterwards I must keep
going until then."

The doctor did understand. He made no vain objections. He did
what he could to patch up his friend for his last struggles
with the opposition in the Committee. "Pro forma," he said,
stethoscope in hand, "I must order you to bed. You won't go.
But I order you. You must know that what you are doing is
risking your life. Your lungs are congested, the bronchial
tubes already. That may spread at any time. If this open
weather lasts you may go about and still pull through. But at
any time this may pass into pneumonia. And there's not much
in you just now to stand up against pneumonia. . . ."

"I'll take all reasonable care."

"Is your wife at home!"

"She is in Wales with her people. But the household is well
trained. I can manage."

"Go in a closed car from door to door. Wrap up like a mummy.
I wish the Committee room wasn't down those abominable House
of Commons corridors. . . ."

They parted with an affectionate handshake.

Section 3

Death approved of Sir Richmond's determination to see the
Committee through. Our universal creditor gave this
particular debtor grace to the very last meeting. Then he
brushed a gust of chilly rain across the face of Sir Richmond
as he stood waiting for his car outside the strangers'
entrance to the House. For a couple of days Sir Richmond felt
almost intolerably tired, but scarcely noted the changed
timbre of the wheezy notes in his throat. He rose later each
day and with ebbing vigour, jotted down notes and corrections
upon the proofs of the Minority Report. He found it
increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would correct
and alter back and then repeat the correction, perhaps half a
dozen times. On the evening of the second day his lungs
became painful and his breathing difficult. His head ached
and a sense of some great impending evil came upon him. His
skin was suddenly a detestable garment to wear. He took his
temperature with a little clinical thermometer he kept by him
and found it was a hundred and one. He telephoned hastily for
Dr. Martineau and without waiting for his arrival took a hot
bath and got into bed. He was already thoroughly ill when the
doctor arrived.

"Forgive my sending for you," he said. "Not your line. I
know. . . . My wife's G.P.--an exasperating sort of ass.
Can't stand him. No one else."

He was lying on a narrow little bed with a hard pillow that
the doctor replaced by one from Lady Hardy's room. He had
twisted the bed-clothes into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was
on the floor.

Sir Richmond's bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep
seemed to have been an admitted necessity rather than a
principal purpose. On one hand it opened into a business-like
dressing and bath room, on the other into the day study. It
bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who had long
lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated
hours and habits. There was a desk and reading lamp for night
work near the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at
night, a silver biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely
intent industry of the small hours. There was a bookcase of
bluebooks, books of reference and suchlike material, and some
files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged photograph of
Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was littered
with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir
Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty
retreat to bed. And lying among the proofs, as though it had
been taken out and looked at quite recently was the
photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr. Martineau's mind hung
in doubt and then he knew it for the young American of
Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And
now it was not his business to know.

These various observations printed themselves on Dr.
Martineau's mind after his first cursory examination of his
patient and while he cast about for anything that would give
this large industrious apartment a little more of the
restfulness and comfort of a sick room. "I must get in a
night nurse at once," he said. "We must find a small table
somewhere to put near the bed.

"I am afraid you are very ill," he said, returning to the
bedside. "This is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will you
let me call in another man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to
consult?"

"I'm in your hands, said Sir Richmond. I want to pull
through."

"He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for
the case--and everything."

The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of
nurse hard on his heels. Sir Richmond submitted almost
silently to his expert handling and was sounded and looked to
and listened at.

"H'm," said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir
Richmond: "We've got to take care of you.

"There's a lot about this I don't like," said the second
doctor and drew Dr. Martineau by the arm towards the study.
For a moment or so Sir Richmond listened to the low murmur of
their voices, but he did not feel very deeply interested in
what they were saying. He began to think what a decent chap
Dr. Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his
professional training had made him, how completely he had
ignored the smothered incivilities of their parting at
Salisbury. All men ought to have some such training, Not a
bad idea to put every boy and girl through a year or so of
hospital service. . . . Sir Richmond must have dozed, for his
next perception was of Dr. Martineau standing over him and
saying "I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill
indeed. Much more so than I thought you were at first."

Sir Richmond's raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this
fact.

"I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for."

Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.

"Don't want her about," he said, and after a pause, "Don't
want anybody about."

"But if anything happens-?"

"Send then."

An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond's
face. He seemed to regard the matter as settled. He closed
his eyes.

For a time Dr. Martineau desisted. He went to the window and
turned to look again at the impassive figure on the bed. Did
Sir Richmond fully understand? He made a step towards his
patient and hesitated. Then he brought a chair and sat down
at the bedside.

Sir Richmond opened his eyes and regarded him with a slight
frown.

"A case of pneumonia," said the doctor, "after great exertion
and fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected turns."

Sir Richmond, cheek on pillow, seemed to assent.

"I think if you want to be sure that Lady Hardy sees you
again-- . . . If you don't want to take risks about
that--. . . One never knows in these cases. Probably there is
a night train."

Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning. But he
stuck to his point. His voice was faint but firm. "Couldn't
make up anything to say to her. Anything she'd like."

Dr. Martineau rested on that for a little while. Then he
said: "If there is anyone else?"

"Not possible," said Sir Richmond, with his eyes on the
ceiling.

"But to see?"

Sir Richmond turned his head to Dr. Martineau. His face
puckered like a peevish child's. "They'd want things said to
them...Things to remember...I CAN'T. I'm tired out."

"Don't trouble," whispered Dr. Martineau, suddenly
remorseful.

But Sir Richmond was also remorseful. "Give them my love," he
said. "Best love...Old Martin. Love."

Dr. Martineau was turning away when Sir Richmond spoke again
in a whisper. "Best love...Poor at the best. . . ."
He dozed for a time. Then he made a great effort. "I can't
see them, Martineau, until I've something to say. It's like
that. Perhaps I shall think of some kind things to say--after
a sleep. But if they came now...I'd say something wrong. Be
cross perhaps. Hurt someone. I've hurt so many. People
exaggerate...People exaggerate--importance these occasions."

"Yes, yes," whispered Dr. Martineau. "I quite understand."

Section 4

For a time Sir Richmond dozed. Then he stirred and muttered.
"Second rate. . . Poor at the best. . . Love. . . Work.
All. . ."

"It had been splendid work," said Dr. Martineau, and was not
sure that Sir Richmond heard.

"Those last few days. . . lost my grip. . . Always lose my
damned grip.

"Ragged them. . . . Put their backs up . . . .Silly....

"Never.... Never done anything--WELL ....

"It's done. Done. Well or ill....

"Done."

His voice sank to the faintest whisper. "Done for ever and
ever ... and ever . . . and ever."

Again he seemed to doze.

Dr. Martineau stood up softly. Something beyond reason told
him that this was certainly a dying man. He was reluctant to
go and he had an absurd desire that someone, someone for whom
Sir Richmond cared, should come and say good-bye to him, and
for Sir Richmond to say good-bye to someone. He hated this
lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had
sought intimacy so persistently and vainly. It was
extraordinary--he saw it now for the first time--he loved
this man. If it had been in his power, he would at that
moment have anointed him with kindness.

The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy
writing desk, littered like a recent battlefield. The
photograph of the American girl drew his eyes. What had
happened? Was there not perhaps some word for her? He turned
about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir
Richmond's eyes open and regarding him. In them he saw an
expression he had seen there once or twice before, a faint
but excessively irritating gleam of amusement.

"Oh!--WELL!" said Dr. Martineau and turned away. He went to
the window and stared out as his habit was.

Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor's back
until his eyes closed again.

It was their last exchange. Sir Richmond died that night in
the small hours, so quietly that for some time the night
nurse did not observe what had happened. She was indeed
roused to that realization by the ringing of the telephone
bell in the adjacent study.

Section 5

For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake
unable to sleep. He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond
lying on his uncomfortable little bed in his big bedroom and
by the curious effect of loneliness produced by the nocturnal
desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir Richmond of any
death-bed partings. He realized how much this man, who had
once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back
upon himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely
he had taken counsel with anyone in his later years. His mind
now dwelt apart. Even if people came about him he would still
be facing death alone.

And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might
slip out of a crowded assembly, unobserved. Even now he might
be going. The doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had
talked of the rage of life in a young baby, how we drove into
life in a sort of fury, how that rage impelled us to do this
and that, how we fought and struggled until the rage spent
itself and was gone. That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond
was now perhaps very near its end. Presently it would fade
and cease, and the stream that had made it and borne it would
know it no more.

Dr. Martineau's thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture
land of dreams. He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as
it were away from him along a narrow path, a path that
followed the crest of a ridge, between great darknesses,
enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and below. He was going
along this path without looking back, without a thought for
those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him on
his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him
walking, without haste or avidity, walking as a man might
along some great picture gallery with which he was perhaps
even over familiar. His hands would be in his pockets, his
indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him. And as he
strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him.
His figure became dim and dimmer.

Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide
the beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just
dissolve that figure into itself?

Was that indeed the end?

Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can
neither imagine nor disbelieve in immortality. Dimmer and
dimmer grew the figure but still it remained visible. As one
can continue to see a star at dawn until one turns away. Or
one blinks or nods and it is gone.

Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless
generations. Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so
clearly, faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic
peoples believed from Avebury to Polynesia? Not always have
we had to go alone and unprepared into uncharted darknesses.
For a time the dream artist used a palette of the doctor's
vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a new roll of
the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been
looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked
figure, crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific
monsters, ferrying a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the
scales of judgment before the very throne of Osiris and stood
waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed his conscience and
that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead, crouched ready
if the judgment went against him. The doctor's attention
concentrated upon the scales. A memory of Swedengorg's Heaven
and Hell mingled with the Egyptian fantasy. Now at last it
was possible to know something real about this man's soul,
now at last one could look into the Secret Places of his
Heart. Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis head, were
reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it
to the supreme judge.

Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams. His
anxiety to plead for his friend had brought him in. He too
had become a little painted figure and he was bearing a book
in his hand. He wanted to show that the laws of the new world
could not be the same as those of the old, and the book he
was bringing as evidence was his own Psychology of a New Age.

The clear thought of that book broke up his dream by
releasing a train of waking troubles. . . . You have been six
months on Chapter Ten; will it ever be ready for
Osiris? . . . will it ever be ready for print? . . .

Dream and waking thoughts were mingled like sky and cloud
upon a windy day in April. Suddenly he saw again that lonely
figure on the narrow way with darknesses above and darknesses
below and darknesses on every hand. But this time it was not
Sir Richmond. . . . Who was it? Surely it was Everyman.
Everyman had to travel at last along that selfsame road,
leaving love, leaving every task and every desire. But was it
Everyman? . . . A great fear and horror came upon the doctor.
That little figure was himself! And the book which was his
particular task in life was still undone. He himself stood in
his turn upon that lonely path with the engulfing darknesses
about him. . . .

He seemed to wrench himself awake.

He lay very still for some moments and then he sat up in bed.
An overwhelming conviction had arisen--in his mind that Sir
Richmond was dead. He felt he must know for certain. He
switched on his electric light, mutely interrogated his round
face reflected in the looking glass, got out of bed, shuffled
on his slippers and went along the passage to the telephone.
He hesitated for some seconds and then lifted the receiver.
It was his call which aroused the nurse to the fact of Sir
Richmond's death.

Section 6

Lady Hardy arrived home in response to Dr. Martineau's
telegram late on the following evening. He was with her next
morning, comforting and sympathetic. Her big blue eyes,
bright with tears, met his very wistfully; her little body
seemed very small and pathetic in its simple black dress. And
yet there was a sort of bravery about her. When he came into
the drawing-room she was in one of the window recesses
talking to a serious-looking woman of the dressmaker type.
She left her business at once to come to him. "Why did I not
know in time?" she cried.

"No one, dear lady, had any idea until late last night," he
said, taking both her hands in his for a long friendly
sympathetic pressure.

"I might have known that if it had been possible you would
have told me," she said.

"You know," she added, "I don't believe it yet. I don't
realize it. I go about these formalities--"

"I think I can understand that."

"He was always, you know, not quite here . . . . It is as if
he were a little more not quite here . . . . I can't believe
it is over. . . . "

She asked a number of questions and took the doctor's advice
upon various details of the arrangements. "My daughter Helen
comes home to-morrow afternoon," she explained. "She is in
Paris. But our son is far, far away in the Punjab. I have
sent him a telegram. . . . It is so kind of you to come in to
me."

Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy's
disposition to treat him as a friend of the family. He had
conceived a curious, half maternal affection for Sir Richmond
that had survived even the trying incident of the Salisbury
parting and revived very rapidly during the last few weeks.
This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy. Hers was a
type that had always appealed to him. He could understand so
well the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting
herself to gather together some preservative and reassuring
evidences of this man who had always been; as she put it,
"never quite here." It was as if she felt that now it was at
last possible to make a definite reality of him. He could be
fixed. And as he was fixed he would stay. Never more would he
be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance
wither the interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was
finding much comfort in this task of reconstruction. She had
gathered together in the drawingroom every presentable
portrait she had been able to find of him. He had never, she
said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil sketch
done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a
number of photographs, several of which--she wanted the
doctor's advice upon this point--she thought might be
enlarged; there was a statuette done by some woman artist who
had once beguiled him into a sitting. There was also a
painting she had had worked up from a photograph and some
notes. She flitted among these memorials, going from one to
the other, undecided which to make the standard portrait. "
That painting, I think, is most like," she said: "as he was
before the war. But the war and the Commission changed him,--
worried him and aged him. . . . I grudged him to that
Commission. He let it worry him frightfully."

"It meant very much to him," said Dr. Martineau.

"It meant too much to him. But of course his ideas were
splendid. You know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of
book done, explaining his ideas. He would never write. He
despised it--unreasonably. A real thing done, he said, was
better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he said, but
women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And
I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary
official biography. . . . I have thought of young Leighton,
the secretary of the Commission. He seems thoroughly
intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile
Richmond's views with those of the big business men on the
Committee. He might do. . . . Or perhaps I might be able to
persuade two or three people to write down their impressions
of him. A sort of memorial volume. . . . But he was shy of
friends. There was no man he talked to very intimately about
his ideas unless it was to you . . . I wish I had the
writer's gift, doctor."

Section 7

It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr.
Martineau by telephone. "Something rather disagreeable," she
said. "If you could spare the time. If you could come round.

"It is frightfully distressing," she said when he got round
to her, and for a time she could tell him nothing more. She
was having tea and she gave him some. She fussed about with
cream and cakes and biscuits. He noted a crumpled letter
thrust under the edge of the silver tray.

"He talked, I know, very intimately with you," she said,
coming to it at last. "He probably went into things with you
that he never talked about with anyone else. Usually he was
very reserved, Even with me there were things about which he
said nothing."

"We did," said Dr. Martineau with discretion, "deal a little
with his private life.

"There was someone--"

Dr. Martineau nodded and then, not to be too portentous, took
and bit a biscuit.

"Did he by any chance ever mention someone called Martin
Leeds?"

Dr. Martineau seemed to reflect. Then realizing that this was
a mistake, he said: "He told me the essential facts."

The poor lady breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm glad," she said
simply. She repeated, "Yes, I'm glad. It makes things easier
now."

Dr. Martineau looked his enquiry.

"She wants to come and see him."

"Here?"

"Here! And Helen here! And the servants noticing everything!
I've never met her. Never set eyes on her. For all I know she
may want to make a scene." There was infinite dismay in her
voice.

Dr. Martineau was grave. "You would rather not receive her?"

"I don't want to refuse her. I don't want even to seem
heartless. I understand, of course, she has a sort of claim.
" She sobbed her reluctant admission. "I know it. I
know. . . . There was much between them."

Dr. Martineau pressed the limp hand upon the little tea
table. "I understand, dear lady," he said. "I understand. Now
. . . suppose _I_ were to write to her and arrange--I do not
see that you need be put to the pain of meeting her. Suppose
I were to meet her here myself?

"If you COULD!"

The doctor was quite prepared to save the lady any further
distresses, no matter at what trouble to himself. "You are so
good to me," she said, letting the tears have their way with
her.

"I am silly to cry," she said, dabbing her eyes.

"We will get it over to-morrow," he reassured her. "You need
not think of it again."

He took over Martin's brief note to Lady Hardy and set to
work by telegram to arrange for her visit. She was in London
at her Chelsea flat and easily accessible. She was to come to
the house at mid-day on the morrow, and to ask not for Lady
Hardy but for him. He would stay by her while she was in the
house, and it would be quite easy for Lady Hardy to keep
herself and her daughter out of the way. They could, for
example, go out quietly to the dressmakers in the closed car,
for many little things about the mourning still remained to
be seen to.

Section 8

Miss Martin Leeds arrived punctually, but the doctor was well
ahead of his time and ready to receive her. She was ushered
into the drawing room where he awaited her. As she came
forward the doctor first perceived that she had a very sad
and handsome face, the face of a sensitive youth rather than
the face of a woman. She had fine grey eyes under very fine
brows; they were eyes that at other times might have laughed
very agreeably, but which were now full of an unrestrained
sadness. Her brown hair was very untidy and parted at the
side like a man's. Then he noted that she seemed to be very
untidily dressed as if she was that rare and, to him, very
offensive thing, a woman careless of her beauty. She was
short in proportion to her broad figure and her broad
forehead.

"You are Dr. Martineau?" she said. "He talked of you." As she
spoke her glance went from him to the pictures that stood
about the room. She walked up to the painting and stood in
front of it with her distressed gaze wandering about her.
"Horrible!" she said. "Absolutely horrible! . . . Did SHE do
this?"

Her question disconcerted the doctor very much. "You mean
Lady Hardy?" he asked. "She doesn't paint."

"No, no. I mean, did she get all these things together? "

"Naturally," said Dr. Martineau.

"None of them are a bit like him. They are like blows aimed
at his memory. Not one has his life in it. How could she do
it? Look at that idiot statuette! . . . He was
extraordinarily difficult to get. I have burnt every
photograph I had of him. For fear that this would happen;
that he would go stiff and formal--just as you have got him
here. I have been trying to sketch him almost all the time
since he died. But I can't get him back. He's gone."

She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if
she expected him to understand her, but because she had to
say these things which burthened her mind to someone. "I have
done hundreds of sketches. My room is littered with them.
When you turn them over he seems to be lurking among them.
But not one of them is like him."

She was trying to express something beyond her power. "It is
as if someone had suddenly turned out the light."

She followed the doctor upstairs. "This was his study," the
doctor explained.

"I know it. I came here once," she said.

They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay.
Dr. Martineau, struck by a sudden memory, glanced nervously
at the desk, but someone had made it quite tidy and the
portrait of Aliss Grammont had disappeared. Miss Leeds walked
straight across to the coffin and stood looking down on the
waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir Richmond's brows
and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than they had
ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane
smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she
sighed deeply.

She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as
though she talked at that silent presence in the coffin. "I
think he loved," she said. "Sometimes I think he loved me.
But it is hard to tell. He was kind. He could be intensely
kind and yet he didn't seem to care for you. He could be
intensely selfish and yet he certainly did not care for
himself. . . . Anyhow, I loved HIM. . . . There is nothing
left in me now to love anyone else--for ever. . . ."

She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man
with her head a little on one side. "Too kind," she said very
softly.

"There was a sort of dishonesty in his kindness. He would not
let you have the bitter truth. He would not say he did not
love you. . . .

"He was too kind to life ever to call it the foolish thing it
is. He took it seriously because it takes itself seriously.
He worked for it and killed himself with work for
it . . . . "

She turned to Dr. Martineau and her face was streaming with
tears. "And life, you know, isn't to be taken seriously. It
is a joke--a bad joke--made by some cruel little god who has
caught a neglected planet. . . . Like torturing a stray
cat. . . . But he took it seriously and he gave up his life
for it.

"There was much happiness he might have had. He was very
capable of happiness. But he never seemed happy. This work of
his came before it. He overworked and fretted our happiness
away. He sacrificed his happiness and mine."

She held out her hands towards the doctor. "What am I to do
now with the rest of my life? Who is there to laugh with me
now and jest?

"I don't complain of him. I don't blame him. He did his
best--to be kind.

"But all my days now I shall mourn for him and long for
him. . . . "

She turned back to the coffin. Suddenly she lost every
vestige of self-control. She sank down on her knees beside
the trestle. "Why have you left me!" she cried.

"Oh! Speak to me, my darling! Speak to me, I TELL YOU! Speak
to me!"

It was a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful.
She beat her hands upon the coffin. She wept loudly and
fiercely as a child does....

Dr. Martineau drifted feebly to the window.

He wished he had locked the door. The servants might hear and
wonder what it was all about. Always he had feared love for
the cruel thing it was, but now it seemed to him for the
first time that he realized its monstrous cruelty.

THE END