“But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?”
“It can be done. If I can stick it out.”
“But with the whole Committee against you!”
“The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn’t against me. Every individual is … .”
Sir Richmond found it difficult to express. “The psychology of my Committee ought to interest you… . It is probably a fair sample of the way all sorts of things are going nowadays. It’s curious… . There is not a man on that Committee who is quite comfortable within himself about the particular individual end he is there to serve. It’s there I get them. They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately I admit, but they are bitter and obstinate because they pursue them against an internal opposition—which is on my side. They are terrified to think, if once they stopped fighting me, how far they might not have to go with me.”
“A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very closely with my own ideas.”
“A world conscience? World conscience? I don’t know. But I do know that there is this drive in nearly every member of the Committee, some drive anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is the same drive that drives me. But I am the most driven. It has turned me round. It hasn’t turned them. I go East and they go West. And they don’t want to be turned round. Tremendously, they don’t.”
“Creative undertow,” said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were. “An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology of a new age strengthened by education—it may play a directive part.”
“They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this creative undertow—if you like to call it that—we do get along. I am leader or whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of a bolting flock… .I believe they will report for a permanent world commission; I believe I have got them up to that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this League of Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-tracking arrangement for all sorts of important world issues. And they will find they have to report for some sort of control. But there again they will shy. They will report for it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They will alter the composition of the Committee so as to make it innocuous.”
“How?”
“Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far as Britain is concerned with muck of the colonial politician type and tame labour representatives, balance with shady new adventurer millionaires, get in still shadier stuff from abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame experts after their own hearts,—experts who will make merely advisory reports, which will not be published… .”
“They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?”
“That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing right—indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing right—and still leave things just exactly what they were before. And as I suffer under the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee… . But there is a conscience there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee.”
He turned appealingly to the doctor. “Why should I have to be the conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this exhausting inhuman job? … . In their hearts these others know… . Only they won’t know… . Why should it fall on me?”
“You have to go through with it,” said Dr. Martineau.
“I have to go through with it, but it’s a hell of utterly inglorious squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting the same fight within themselves that they fight with me. They know exactly where I am, that I too am doing my job against internal friction. The one thing before all others that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of special moral superiority to men who are on the whole as good men as I am or better. That shows all the time. You see the sort of man I am. I’ve a broad streak of personal vanity. I fag easily. I’m short-tempered. I’ve other things, as you perceive. When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore, I get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable sense of ill usage. Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be working with me steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly witty. He gets a laugh round the table at my expense. Young Dent, the more intelligent of the labour men, reads me a lecture in committee manners. Old Cassidy sees HIS opening and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me spluttering self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down, and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggywigs and not bother any more about what is to happen to mankind in the long run… . Do you begin to realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin, that that Committee is for me?”
“You have to go through with it,” Dr. Martineau repeated.
“I have. If I can. But I warn you I have been near breaking point. And if I tumble off the high horse, if I can’t keep going regularly there to ride the moral high horse, that Committee will slump into utter scoundrelism. It will turn out a long, inconsistent, botched, unreadable report that will back up all sorts of humbugging bargains and sham settlements. It will contain some half-baked scheme to pacify the miners at the expense of the general welfare. It won’t even succeed in doing that. But in the general confusion old Cassidy will get away with a series of hauls that may run into millions. Which will last his time—damn him! And that is where we are… . Oh! I know! I know! … . I must do this job. I don’t need any telling that my life will be nothing and mean nothing unless I bring this thing through… .
“But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!”
The doctor watched his friend’s resentful black silhouette against the lights on the steely river, and said nothing for awhile.
“Why did I ever undertake to play it?” Sir Richmond appealed. “Why has it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am, why am I not a poor thing altogether?”
Section 8
“I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the doctor after an interval.
“I am INTOLERABLE to myself.”
“And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as you do. You want help; you want reassurance. And you feel they can give it.”
“I wonder if it has been quite like that,” Sir Richmond reflected.
By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the mother complex. “You want help and reassurance as a child does,” he said. “Women and women alone seem capable of giving that, of telling you that you are surely right, that notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that even when you are wrong it doesn’t so much matter, you are still in spirit right. They can show their belief in you as no man can. With all their being they can do that.”
“Yes, I suppose they could.”
“They can. You have said already that women are necessary to make things real for you.”
“Not my work,” said Sir Richmond. “I admit that it might be like that, but it isn’t like that. It has not worked out like that. The two drives go on side by side in me. They have no logical connexion. All I can say is that for me, with my bifid temperament, one makes a rest from the other, and is so far refreshment and a renewal of energy. But I do not find women coming into my work in any effectual way. ”
The doctor reflected further. “I suppose,” he began and stopped short.
He heard Sir Richmond move in his chair, creaking an interrogation.
“You have never,” said the doctor, “turned to the idea of Go
d?”
Sir Richmond grunted and made no other answer for the better part of a minute.
As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling star streaked the deep blue above them.
“I can’t believe in a God,” said Sir Richmond.
“Something after the fashion of a God,” said the doctor insidiously.
“No,” said Sir Richmond. “Nothing that reassures.”
“But this loneliness, this craving for companionship… .”
“We have all been through that,” said Sir Richmond. “We have all in our time lain very still in the darkness with our souls crying out for the fellowship of God, demanding some sign, some personal response. The faintest feeling of assurance would have satisfied us.”
“And there has never been a response?”
“Have YOU ever had a response?”
“Once I seemed to have a feeling of exaltation and security.”
“Well?”
“Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been reading William James on religious experiences and I was thinking very much of Conversion. I tried to experience Conversion… .”
“Yes? ”
“It faded.”
“It always fades,” said Sir Richmond with anger in his voice. “I wonder how many people there are nowadays who have passed through this last experience of ineffectual invocation, this appeal to the fading shadow of a vanished God. In the night. In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak to me! Does he answer? In the silence you hear the little blood vessels whisper in your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on the darkness… . ”
Dr. Martineau sat without a word.
“I can believe that over all things Righteousness rules. I can believe that. But Righteousness is not friendliness nor mercy nor comfort nor any such dear and intimate things. This cuddling up to Righteousness! It is a dream, a delusion and a phase. I’ve tried all that long ago. I’ve given it up long ago. I’ve grown out of it. Men do—after forty. Our souls were made in the squatting-place of the submen of ancient times. They are made out of primitive needs and they die before our bodies as those needs are satisfied. Only young people have souls, complete. The need for a personal God, feared but reassuring, is a youth’s need. I no longer fear the Old Man nor want to propitiate the Old Man nor believe he matters any more. I’m a bit of an Old Man myself I discover. Yes. But the other thing still remains. ”
“The Great Mother of the Gods,” said Dr. Martineau—still clinging to his theories.
“The need of the woman,” said Sir Richmond. “I want mating because it is my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I am a social animal and I want it from another social animal. Not from any God—any inconceivable God. Who fades and disappears. No… .
“Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know. Perhaps it lasts as long as life does. How can I tell?”
He was silent for a little while. Then his voice sounded in the night, as if he spoke to himself. “But as for the God of All Things consoling and helping! Imagine it! That up there— having fellowship with me! I would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with those stars.”
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES
Section 1
A gust of confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil. At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of intimacy. They discussed the weather, which seemed to be settling down to the utmost serenity of which the English spring is capable, they talked of Sir Richmond’s coming car and of the possible routes before them. Sir Richmond produced the Michelin maps which he had taken out of the pockets of the little Charmeuse. The Bath Road lay before them, he explained, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Silbury Hill which overhangs Avebury. Both travellers discovered a common excitement at the mention of Avebury and Silbury Hill. Both took an intelligent interest in archaeology. Both had been greatly stimulated by the recent work of Elliot Smith and Rivers upon what was then known as the Heliolithic culture. It had revived their interest in Avebury and Stonehenge. The doctor moreover had been reading Hippisley Cox’s GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND.
Neither gentleman had ever seen Avebury, but Dr. Martineau had once visited Stonehenge.
“Avebury is much the oldest,” said the doctor. They must have made Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C. It may be five thousand years old or even more. It is the most important historical relic in the British Isles. And the most neglected. ”
They exchanged archaeological facts. The secret places of the heart rested until the afternoon.
Then Sir Richmond saw fit to amplify his confessions in one particular.
Section 2
The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise as the morning advanced. They had walked by the road to Marlow and had lunched at a riverside inn, returning after a restful hour in an arbour on the lawn of this place to tea at Maidenhead. It was as they returned that Sir Richmond took up the thread of their overnight conversation again.
“In the night,” he said, “I was thinking over the account I tried to give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out of drawing.”
“Facts?” asked the doctor.
“No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the proportions… . I don’t know if I gave you the effect of something Don Juanesque? …”
“Vulgar poem,” said the doctor remarkably.” I discounted that.”
“Vulgar!”
“Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a kitchen.”
Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing that used to be called a pet aversion.
“I don’t want you to think that I run about after women in an habitual and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt them in the interests of my work and energy. Your questions had set me theorizing about myself. And I did my best to improvise a scheme of motives yesterday. It was, I perceive, a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My nocturnal reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the wanderings of desire have no single drive. All sorts of motives come in, high and low, down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true in it all was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue phase falls naturally into these complications because they are more attractive to his type and far easier and more refreshing to the mind, at the outset, than anything else. And they do work a sort of recovery in him, They send him back to his work refreshed—so far, that is, as his work is concerned.”
“At the OUTSET they are easier,” said the doctor.
Sir Richmond laughed. “When one is fagged it is only the outset counts. The more tired one is the more readily one moves along the line of least resistance… .
“That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of my work goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it. What I said about that was near the truth of things… .
“But there is another set of motives altogether, “Sir Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the ground for his real business, “that I didn’t go into at all yesterday.”
He considered. “It arises out of these other affairs. Before you realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much swayed by my affections.”
Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine self-reproach in Sir Richmond’s voice.
“I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing. They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little and human and suddenly I find they’ve GOT me. I’m distressed. I’m filled with something between pity and an impulse of responsibi
lity. I become tender towards them. I am impelled to take care of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure them, to make them stop hurting at any cost. I don’t see why it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people that grips me most, but it is. I don’t know why it should be their failures that gives them power over me, but it is. I told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just now. SHE’S got me in that way; she’s got me tremendously.”
“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.
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