The Secret Places of the Heart

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"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 Anglo-Saxondom, 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."