The Secret Places of the Heart

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"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."