Section 2
Neither Dr. Martineau nor the father of the family found the imaginative reconstruction of the Stonehenge rituals quite so exciting as the two principals. The father of the family endured some further particulars with manifest impatience, no longer able, now that Sir Richmond was encouraging the girl, to keep her in check with the slightly derisive smile proper to her sex. Then he proclaimed in a fine loud tenor, “All this is very imaginative, I’m afraid.” And to his family, “Time we were pressing on. Turps, we must go-o. Come, Phoebe!”
As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came floating back. “Talking wanton nonsense… . Any professional archaeologist would laugh, simply laugh… .”
He passed out of the world.
With a faint intimation of dismay Dr. Martineau realized that the two talkative ladies were not to be removed in the family automobile with the rest of the party. Sir Richmond and the younger lady went on very cheerfully to the population, agriculture, housing and general scenery of the surrounding Downland during the later Stone Age. The shorter, less attractive lady, whose accent was distinctly American, came now and stood at the doctor’s elbow. She seemed moved to play the part of chorus to the two upon the stone.
“When V.V. gets going,” she remarked, “she makes things come alive.”
Dr. Martineau hated to be addressed suddenly by strange ladies. He started, and his face assumed the distressed politeness of the moon at its full. “Your friend,” he said, “interested in archaeology? ”
“Interested!” said the stouter lady. “Why! She’s a fiend at it. Ever since we came on Carnac. ”
“You’ve visited Carnac?”
“That’s where the bug bit her.” said the stout lady with a note of querulous humour. “Directly V.V. set eyes on Carnac, she just turned against all her upbringing. ‘Why wasn’t I told of this before?’ she said. ‘What’s Notre Dame to this? This is where we came from. This is the real starting point of the MAYFLOWER. Belinda,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to see all we can of this sort of thing before we go back to America. They’ve been keeping this from us.’ And that’s why we’re here right now instead of being shopping in Paris or London like decent American women.”
The younger lady looked down on her companion with something of the calm expert attention that a plumber gives to a tap that is misbehaving, and like a plumber refrained from precipitate action. She stood with the backs of her hands resting on her hips.
“Well,” she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir Richmond and the rest to the doctor. “it is nearer the beginnings of things than London or Paris.”
“And nearer to us, ” said Sir Richmond.
“I call that just—paradoxical,” said the shorter lady, who appeared to be called Belinda.
“Not paradoxical,” Dr. Martineau contradicted gently. “Life is always beginning again. And this is a time of fresh beginnings.”
“Now that’s after V.V.‘s own heart,” cried the stout lady in grey. “She’ll agree to all that. She’s been saying it right across Europe. Rome, Paris, London; they’re simply just done. They don’t signify any more. They’ve got to be cleared away.”
“You let me tell my own opinions, Belinda,” said the young lady who was called V.V. “I said that if people went on building with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals for two thousand years, it was time they were cleared up and taken away.”
“Corinthian capitals?” Sir Richmond considered it and laughed cheerfully. “I suppose Europe does rather overdo that sort of thing.”
“The way she went on about the Victor Emmanuele Monument! ” said the lady who answered to the name of Belinda. “It gave me cold shivers to think that those Italian officers might understand English. ”
The lady who was called V.V. smiled as if she smiled at herself, and explained herself to Sir Richmond. “When one is travelling about, one gets to think of history and politics in terms of architecture. I do anyhow. And those columns with Corinthian capitals have got to be a sort of symbol for me for everything in Europe that I don’t want and have no sort of use for. It isn’t a bad sort of capital in its way, florid and pretty, but not a patch on the Doric;—and that a whole continent should come up to it and stick at it and never get past it! …”
“It’s the classical tradition.”
“It puzzles me.”
“It’s the Roman Empire. That Corinthian column is a weed spread by the Romans all over western Europe.”
“And it smothers the history of Europe. You can’t see Europe because of it. Europe is obsessed by Rome. Everywhere Marble Arches and ARCS DE TRIOMPHE. You never get away from it. It is like some old gentleman who has lost his way in a speech and keeps on repeating the same thing. And can’t sit down. ‘The empire, gentlemen—the Empire. Empire.’ Rome itself is perfectly frightful. It stares at you with its great round stupid arches as though it couldn’t imagine that you could possibly want anything else for ever. Saint Peter’s and that frightful Monument are just the same stuff as the Baths of Caracalla and the palaces of the Caesars. Just the same. They will make just the same sort of ruins. It goes on and goes on.”
“AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS,” said Dr. Martineau.
“This Roman empire seems to be Europe’s first and last idea. A fixed idea. And such a poor idea! … America never came out of that. It’s no good-telling me that it did. It escaped from it… . So I said to Belinda here, ‘Let’s burrow, if we can, under all this marble and find out what sort of people we were before this Roman empire and its acanthus weeds got hold of us.’”
“I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly Corinthian, something called the Capitol,” Sir Richmond reflected. “And other buildings. A Treasury.”
“That is different,” said the young lady, so conclusively that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on that score.
“A last twinge of Europeanism,” she vouchsafed. “We were young in those days.”
“You are well beneath the marble here.”
She assented cheerfully.
“A thousand years before it.” “Happy place! Happy people!”
“But even this place isn’t the beginning of things here. Carnac was older than this. And older still is Avebury. Have you heard in America of Avebury? It may have predated this place, they think, by another thousand years.”
“Avebury?” said the lady who was called Belinda.
“But what is this Avebury?” asked V.V. “I’ve never heard of the place.”
“I thought it was a lord,” said Belinda.
Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau, embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder of Avebury. Possibly he exaggerated Avebury… .
It was Dr. Martineau who presently brought this disquisition upon Avebury to a stop by a very remarkable gesture. He looked at his watch. He drew it out ostentatiously, a thick, respectable gold watch, for the doctor was not the sort of man to wear his watch upon his wrist. He clicked it open and looked at it. Thereby he would have proclaimed his belief this encounter was an entirely unnecessary interruption of his healing duologue with Sir Richmond, which must now be resumed.
But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr. Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was to be thrust into an ex
treme proximity with him and the balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.
Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine historical imagination before, and he was evidently very greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was to be got out of this encounter.
Section 3
Sir Richmond displayed a complete disregard of the sufferings of Dr. Martineau, shamefully compressed behind him. Of these he was to hear later. He ran his overcrowded little car, overcrowded so far as the dicky went, over the crest of the Down and down into Amesbury and on to Salisbury, stopping to alight and stretch the legs of the party when they came in sight of Old Sarum.
“Certainly they can do with a little stretching,” said Dr. Martineau grimly.
This charming young woman had seized upon the imagination of Sir Richmond to the temporary exclusion of all other considerations. The long Downland gradients, quivering very slightly with the vibration of the road, came swiftly and easily to meet and pass the throbbing little car as he sat beside her and talked to her. He fell into that expository manner which comes so easily to the native entertaining the visitor from abroad.
“In England, it seems to me there are four main phases of history. Four. Avebury, which I would love to take you to see to-morrow. Stonehenge. Old Sarum, which we shall see in a moment as a great grassy mound on our right as we come over one of these crests. Each of them represents about a thousand years. Old Sarum was Keltic; it, saw the Romans and the Saxons through, and for a time it was a Norman city. Now it is pasture for sheep. Latest as yet is Salisbury,—English, real English. It may last a few centuries still. It is little more than seven hundred years old. But when I think of those great hangars back there by Stonehenge, I feel that the next phase is already beginning. Of a world one will fly to the ends of, in a week or so. Our world still. Our people, your people and mine, who are going to take wing so soon now, were made in all these places. We are visiting the old homes. I am glad I came back to it just when you were doing the same thing.”
“I’m lucky to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller,” she said; “with a car.”
“You’re the first American I’ve ever met whose interest in history didn’t seem—” He sought for an inoffensive word.
“Silly? Oh! I admit it. It’s true of a lot of us. Most of us. We come over to Europe as if it hadn’t anything to do with us except to supply us with old pictures and curios generally. We come sight-seeing. It’s romantic. It’s picturesque. We stare at the natives—like visitors at a Zoo. We don’t realize that we belong… . I know our style… . But we aren’t all like that. Some of us are learning a bit better than that. We have one or two teachers over there to lighten our darkness. There’s Professor Breasted for instance. He comes sometimes to my father’s house. And there’s James Harvey Robinson and Professor Hutton Webster. They’ve been trying to restore our memory.”
“I’ve never heard of any of them,” said Sir Richmond.
“You hear so little of America over here. It’s quite a large country and all sorts of interesting things happen there nowadays. And we are waking up to history. Quite fast. We shan’t always be the most ignorant people in the world. We are beginning to realize that quite a lot of things happened between Adam and the Mayflower that we ought to be told about. I allow it’s a recent revival. The United States has been like one of those men you read about in the papers who go away from home and turn up in some distant place with their memories gone. They’ve forgotten what their names were or where they lived or what they did for a living; they’ve forgotten everything that matters. Often they have to begin again and settle down for a long time before their memories come back. That’s how it has been with us. Our memory is just coming back to us.”
“And what do you find you are?”
“Europeans. Who came away from kings and churches-@-and Corinthian capitals.”
“You feel all this country belongs to you?”
“As much as it does to you.” Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. “But if I say that America belongs to me as much as it does to you?”
“We are one people,” she said.
“We”
“Europe. These parts of Europe anyhow. And ourselves.”
“You are the most civilized person I’ve met for weeks and weeks.” “Well, you are the first civilized person I’ve met in Europe for a long time. If I understand you.”
“There are multitudes of reasonable, civilized people in Europe.”
“I’ve heard or seen very little of them.
“They’re scattered, I admit.”
“And hard to find.”
“So ours is a lucky meeting. I’ve wanted a serious talk to an American for some time. I want to know very badly what you think you are up to with the world,—our world. ”
“I’m equally anxious to know what England thinks she is doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult to understand. On any hypothesis-that is honourable to her.” “H’m,” said Sir Richmond.
“I assure you we don’t like it. This Irish business. We feel a sort of ownership in England. It’s like finding your dearest aunt torturing the cat.”
“We must talk of that,” said Sir Richmond.
“I wish you would.”
“It is a cat and a dog—and they have been very naughty animals. And poor Aunt Britannia almost deliberately lost her temper. But I admit she hits about in a very nasty fashion.”
“And favours the dog.”
“She does.”
“I want to know all you admit.”
“You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury. If you are free?”
“We’re travelling together, just we two. We are wandering about the south of England on our way to Falmouth. Where I join a father in a few days’ time, and I go on with him to Paris. And if you and your friend are coming to the Old George—”
“We are,” said Sir Richmond.
“I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And seeing Avebury to-morrow. Why not? Perhaps if we did as the Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate something of the extreme informality of our behaviour.”
“My name is Hardy. I’ve been a munition manufacturer. I was slightly wounded by a stray shell near Arras while I was inspecting some plant I had set up, and also I was hit by a stray knighthood. So my name is now Sir Richmond Hardy. My friend is a very distinguished Harley Street physician. Chiefly nervous and mental cases. His name is Dr. Martineau. He is quite as civilized as I am. He is also a philosophical writer. He is really a very wise and learned man indeed. He is full of ideas. He’s stimulated me tremendously. You must talk to him.”
Sir Richmond glanced over his shoulder at the subject of these commendations. Through the oval window glared an expression of malignity that made no impression whatever on his preoccupied mind.
“My name,” said the young lady, “is Grammont. The war whirled me over to Europe on Red Cross work and since the peace I’ve been settling up things and travelling about Europe. My father is rather a big business man in New York.”
“The oil Grammont?”
“He is rather deep in oil, I believe. He is coming over to Europe because he does not like the way your people are behaving in Mesopotamia. He is on his way to Paris now. Paris it seems is where everything is to be settled against you. Belinda is a sort of companion I have acquired for the purposes of independent travel. She was Red Cross too. I must have somebody and I cannot bear a maid. Her name is Belinda Seyffert. From Philadelphia originally. You have that? Seyffert, Grammont?”
“And Hardy?” “Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau.”
“And-Ah!—That great green bank there just coming into sight must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop here for a little while… . ”
Then it was that Dr. Martineau was grim about the stretching of his legs.
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Section 4
The sudden prospect which now opened out before Sir Richmond of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self-examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard of Dr. Martineau’s possible objections to any such modification of their original programme. When they arrived in Salisbury, the doctor did make some slight effort to suggest a different hotel from that in which the two ladies had engaged their rooms, but on the spur of the moment and in their presence he could produce no sufficient reason for refusing the accommodation the Old George had ready for him. He was reduced to a vague: “We don’t want to inflict ourselves—” He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert, before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the engagements to which Sir Richmond had committed himself.
“I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow,” said Sir Richmond. “These ladies were nearly missing it.”
The thing took the doctor’s breath away. For the moment he could say nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An objection formulated itself very slowly. “But that dicky,” he whispered.
His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the completeness of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had been a cathedral city; it was essentially and purely that. The church at its best, in the full tide of its mediaeval ascendancy, had called it into being. He was making some extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory qualifications. “Our age will leave the ruins of hotels,” said Sir Richmond. “Railway arches and hotels.”
The Secret Places of the Heart Page 10