The Secret Places of the Heart

“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.”