The Secret Places of the Heart

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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."