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 AngloSaxondom, 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 b
ored—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. ”
“It was you who swore,” smiled Miss Grammont.
“It’s the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city typist who really keep me at my work. Any smacking ought to come from them. I couldn’t do less than I do in the face of their helplessness. Nevertheless a day will come—through what we do and what we refrain from doing when there will be no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and no captive typists in the city. And nobody at all to consider.”
“According to the prophet Martineau,” said Miss Grammont.
“And then you and I must contrive to be born again. ”
“Heighho!” cried Miss Grammont. “A thousand years ahead! When fathers are civilized. When all these phanton people who intervene on your side—no! I don’t want to know anything about them, but I know of them by instinct—when they also don’t matter.”
“Then you and I can have things out with each other— THOROUGHLY,” said Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in his voice, charging the little hill before him as though he charged at Time.
Section 6
They had to wait at Nailsworth for a telegram from Mr. Grammont’s agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in the afternoon. They came into the town through unattractive and unworthy outskirts, and only realized the charm of the place after they had garaged their car at the Pulteney Hotel and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon with the Pump Room and the Roman Baths. The Pulteney they found hung with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an astonishing extent; some former proprietor must have had a mania for replicas and the place is eventful with white marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and Queen Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy, amidst which splendours a competent staff administers modern comforts with an old-fashioned civility. But round and about the Pulteney one has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of “presents from Bath”; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine array of the original Bath chairs.
Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek. And they considered a little doubtfully the seventeenth century statue of Bladud, who is said to have been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded the city in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred years before the Romans came.
In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont and was very enthusiastic about everything, but in the evening after dinner it was clear that her role was to remain in the hotel. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out into the moonlit gloaming; they crossed the bridge again and followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey Church, that Lantern of the West. Away in some sunken gardens ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little lights about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down below dancing on the grass. These little lights, these bobbing black heads and the lilting music, this little inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy illumination, made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast and cool and silent. Our visitors began to realize that Bath could be very beautiful. They went to the parapet above the river and stood there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and smoking cigarettes. Miss Grammont was moved to declare the Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch, its effect of height over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses above, more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. Down below was a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along the foaming weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against the rush of the water lower down the stream.
“Dear England!” said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious spectacle. “How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly things!”
“It is the home we come from.”
“You belong to it still.”
“No more than you do. I belong to a big overworking modern place called London which stretches its tentacles all over the world. I am as much a home-coming tourist as you are. Most of this western country I am seeing for the first time.”
She said nothing for a space. “I’ve not a word to say tonight,” she said. “I’m just full of a sort of animal satisfaction in being close to you… . And in being with you among lovely things… . Somewhere—Before we part tonight—… . ”
“Yes?” he said to her pause, and his face came very near to hers.
I want you to kiss me. ”
“Yes,” he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely aware of the promenaders passing close to them.
“It’s a promise?”
“Yes.”
Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and gripped it and pressed it. “My dear!” he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the darkling populous about them with their silent interchanges.
“There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,” she said. “After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to think of them. But now—every rational thing seems dissolved in this moonlight… .”
Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual dignity of their relationship.
“I suppose I ought to be more concerned tonight about the work I have to do in the world and anxious for you to tell me this and that, but indeed I am not concerned at all about it. I seem to have it in outline all perfectly clear. I mean to play a man’s part in the world just as my father wants me to do. I mean to win his confidence and work with him—like a partner. Then some day I shall be a power in the world of fuel. And at the same time I must watch and read and think and learn how to be the servant of the world… . We two have to live like trusted servants who have been made guardians of a helpless minor. We have to put things in order and keep them in order
against the time when Man—Man whom we call in America the Common Man—can take hold of his world—”
“And release his servants,” said Sir Richmond.
“All that is perfectly clear in my mind. That is what I am going to live for; that is what I have to do.”
She stopped abruptly. “All that is about as interesting tonight—in comparison with the touch of your dear fingers—as next month’s railway time-table.”
But later she found a topic that could hold their attention for a time.
“We have never said a word about religion,” she said.
Sir Richmond paused for a moment. “I am a godless man,” he said. “The stars and space and time overwhelm my imagination. I cannot imagine anything above or beyond them.”
She thought that over. “But there are divine things,” she said.
“YOU are divine… . I’m not talking lovers’ nonsense,” he hastened to add. “I mean that there is something about human beings—not just the everyday stuff of them, but something that appears intermittently—as though a light shone through something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it is a divinity revealed to me by other people— And even by myself in my own heart.
“I’m never surprised at the badness of human beings,” said Sir Richmond; “seeing how they have come about and what they are; but I have been surprised time after time by fine things … . Often in people I disliked or thought little of … . I can understand that I find you full of divine quality, because I am in love with you and all alive to you. Necessarily I keep on discovering loveliness in you. But I have seen divine things in dear old Martineau, for example. A vain man, fussy, timid—and yet filled with a passion for truth, ready to make great sacrifices and to toil tremendously for that. And in those men I am always cursing, my Committee, it is astonishing at times to discover what streaks of goodness even the really bad men can show… . But one can’t make use of just anyone’s divinity. I can see the divinity in Martineau but it leaves me cold. He tired me and bored me… . But I live on you. It’s only through love that the God can reach over from one human being to another. All real love is a divine thing, a reassurance, a release of courage. It is wonderful enough that we should take food and drink and turn them into imagination, invention and creative energy; it is still more wonderful that we should take an animal urging and turn it into a light to discover beauty and an impulse towards the utmost achievements of which we are capable. All love is a sacrament and all lovers are priests to each other. You and I—”
The Secret Places of the Heart Page 17