The Secret Places of the Heart

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

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

The doctor offered no assistance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Extremely amusing stuff."

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

"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.

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

"And you?"

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

"But the child?

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

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

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

"You see very much of each other?"

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

"But things do not always go well?"

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

Sir Richmond stopped short.

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

"Almost always."

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

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

The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.

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

"Then any little thing makes trouble."

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

"It is you begin that?"

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

"Fonder perhaps."

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

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

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

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

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

"But how?"

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

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

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

Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.

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

"If it were not for the carbuncle?"

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

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

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

"Ah! That is worrying you too!"

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

Sir Richmond mused darkly.

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

Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.

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

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

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

"Well?"

"But then my affection comes in."

"That extraordinary--TENDERNESS of yours?"

"I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

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

To which the doctor made no reply.

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

"Letting her go FREE?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Doesn't," Sir Richmond snapped.

Came a long pause.

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

Section 3

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

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

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

An awkward silence followed. On reflection Sir Richmond seemed to
realize that this sentence needed some apology. "I admit," he said,
"that this expedition has already been a wonderfully good thing for me.
These confessions have made me look into all sorts of things--squarely.
But--I'm not used to talking about myself or even thinking directly
about myself. What I say, I afterwards find disconcerting to recall.
I want to alter it. I can feel myself wallowing into a mess of
modifications and qualifications."

"Yes, but--"

"I want a rest anyhow...."

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

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

Section 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Section 5

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

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

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

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

"The healing touch of history."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"As I said."