The Secret Places of the Heart

by Herbert George Wells

  “I’ll take all reasonable care.”

  “Is your wife at home!”

  “She is in Wales with her people. But the household is well trained. I can manage.”

  “Go in a closed car from door to door. Wrap up like a mummy. I wish the Committee room wasn’t down those abominable House of Commons corridors… .”

  They parted with an affectionate handshake.

  Section 3

  Death approved of Sir Richmond’s determination to see the Committee through. Our universal creditor gave this particular debtor grace to the very last meeting. Then he brushed a gust of chilly rain across the face of Sir Richmond as he stood waiting for his car outside the strangers’ entrance to the House. For a couple of days Sir Richmond felt almost intolerably tired, but scarcely noted the changed timbre of the wheezy notes in his throat. He rose later each day and with ebbing vigour, jotted down notes and corrections upon the proofs of the Minority Report. He found it increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would correct and alter back and then repeat the correction, perhaps half a dozen times. On the evening of the second day his lungs became painful and his breathing difficult. His head ached and a sense of some great impending evil came upon him. His skin was suddenly a detestable garment to wear. He took his temperature with a little clinical thermometer he kept by him and found it was a hundred and one. He telephoned hastily for Dr. Martineau and without waiting for his arrival took a hot bath and got into bed. He was already thoroughly ill when the doctor arrived.

  “Forgive my sending for you,” he said. “Not your line. I know… . My wife’s G.P.—an exasperating sort of ass. Can’t stand him. No one else.”

  He was lying on a narrow little bed with a hard pillow that the doctor replaced by one from Lady Hardy’s room. He had twisted the bed-clothes into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was on the floor.

  Sir Richmond’s bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep seemed to have been an admitted necessity rather than a principal purpose. On one hand it opened into a business-like dressing and bath room, on the other into the day study. It bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who had long lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated hours and habits. There was a desk and reading lamp for night work near the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at night, a silver biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely intent industry of the small hours. There was a bookcase of bluebooks, books of reference and suchlike material, and some files. Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged photograph of Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar. The desk was littered with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty retreat to bed. And lying among the proofs, as though it had been taken out and looked at quite recently was the photograph of a girl. For a moment Dr. Martineau’s mind hung in doubt and then he knew it for the young American of Stonehenge. How that affair had ended he did not know. And now it was not his business to know.

  These various observations printed themselves on Dr. Martineau’s mind after his first cursory examination of his patient and while he cast about for anything that would give this large industrious apartment a little more of the restfulness and comfort of a sick room. “I must get in a night nurse at once,” he said. “We must find a small table somewhere to put near the bed.

  “I am afraid you are very ill,” he said, returning to the bedside. “This is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will you let me call in another man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to consult?”

  “I’m in your hands, said Sir Richmond. I want to pull through.”

  “He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for the case—and everything.”

  The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of nurse hard on his heels. Sir Richmond submitted almost silently to his expert handling and was sounded and looked to and listened at.

  “H’m,” said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir Richmond: “We’ve got to take care of you.

  “There’s a lot about this I don’t like,” said the second doctor and drew Dr. Martineau by the arm towards the study. For a moment or so Sir Richmond listened to the low murmur of their voices, but he did not feel very deeply interested in what they were saying. He began to think what a decent chap Dr. Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his professional training had made him, how completely he had ignored the smothered incivilities of their parting at Salisbury. All men ought to have some such training, Not a bad idea to put every boy and girl through a year or so of hospital service… . Sir Richmond must have dozed, for his next perception was of Dr. Martineau standing over him and saying “I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill indeed. Much more so than I thought you were at first.”

  Sir Richmond’s raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this fact.

  “I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for.”

  Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.

  “Don’t want her about,” he said, and after a pause, “Don’t want anybody about.”

  “But if anything happens-?”

  “Send then.”

  An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond’s face. He seemed to regard the matter as settled. He closed his eyes.

  For a time Dr. Martineau desisted. He went to the window and turned to look again at the impassive figure on the bed. Did Sir Richmond fully understand? He made a step towards his patient and hesitated. Then he brought a chair and sat down at the bedside.

  Sir Richmond opened his eyes and regarded him with a slight frown.

  “A case of pneumonia,” said the doctor, “after great exertion and fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected turns.”

  Sir Richmond, cheek on pillow, seemed to assent.

  “I think if you want to be sure that Lady Hardy sees you again— … If you don’t want to take risks about that—… One never knows in these cases. Probably there is a night train.”

  Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning. But he stuck to his point. His voice was faint but firm. “Couldn’t make up anything to say to her. Anything she’d like.”

  Dr. Martineau rested on that for a little while. Then he said: “If there is anyone else?”

  “Not possible,” said Sir Richmond, with his eyes on the ceiling.

  “But to see?”

  Sir Richmond turned his head to Dr. Martineau. His face puckered like a peevish child’s. “They’d want things said to them…Things to remember…I CAN’T. I’m tired out.”

  “Don’t trouble,” whispered Dr. Martineau, suddenly remorseful.

  But Sir Richmond was also remorseful. “Give them my love,” he said. “Best love…Old Martin. Love.”

  Dr. Martineau was turning away when Sir Richmond spoke again in a whisper. “Best love…Poor at the best… .” He dozed for a time. Then he made a great effort. “I can’t see them, Martineau, until I’ve something to say. It’s like that. Perhaps I shall think of some kind things to say—after a sleep. But if they came now…I’d say something wrong. Be cross perhaps. Hurt someone. I’ve hurt so many. People exaggerate…People exaggerate—importance these occasions.”

  “Yes, yes,” whispered Dr. Martineau. “I quite understand.”

  Section 4

  For a time Sir Richmond dozed. Then he stirred and muttered. “Second rate… Poor at the best… Love… Work. All…”

  “It had been splendid work,” said Dr. Martineau, and was not sure that Sir Richmond heard.

  “Those last few days… lost my grip… Always lose my damned grip.

  “Ragged them… . Put their backs up … .Silly….

  “Never…. Never done anything—WELL ….

  “It’s done. Done. Well or ill….

  “Done.”

  His voice sank to the faintest whisper. “Done for ever and ever … and ever … and ever.”

  Again he seemed to doze.

  Dr. Martineau stood up softly. Something beyond reason told hi
m that this was certainly a dying man. He was reluctant to go and he had an absurd desire that someone, someone for whom Sir Richmond cared, should come and say good-bye to him, and for Sir Richmond to say good-bye to someone. He hated this lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had sought intimacy so persistently and vainly. It was extraordinary—he saw it now for the first time—he loved this man. If it had been in his power, he would at that moment have anointed him with kindness.

  The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy writing desk, littered like a recent battlefield. The photograph of the American girl drew his eyes. What had happened? Was there not perhaps some word for her? He turned about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir Richmond’s eyes open and regarding him. In them he saw an expression he had seen there once or twice before, a faint but excessively irritating gleam of amusement.

  “Oh!—WELL!” said Dr. Martineau and turned away. He went to the window and stared out as his habit was.

  Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor’s back until his eyes closed again.

  It was their last exchange. Sir Richmond died that night in the small hours, so quietly that for some time the night nurse did not observe what had happened. She was indeed roused to that realization by the ringing of the telephone bell in the adjacent study.

  Section 5

  For a long time that night Dr. Martineau had lain awake unable to sleep. He was haunted by the figure of Sir Richmond lying on his uncomfortable little bed in his big bedroom and by the curious effect of loneliness produced by the nocturnal desk and by the evident dread felt by Sir Richmond of any death-bed partings. He realized how much this man, who had once sought so feverishly for intimacies, had shrunken back upon himself, how solitary his motives had become, how rarely he had taken counsel with anyone in his later years. His mind now dwelt apart. Even if people came about him he would still be facing death alone.

  And so it seemed he meant to slip out of life, as a man might slip out of a crowded assembly, unobserved. Even now he might be going. The doctor recalled how he and Sir Richmond had talked of the rage of life in a young baby, how we drove into life in a sort of fury, how that rage impelled us to do this and that, how we fought and struggled until the rage spent itself and was gone. That eddy of rage that was Sir Richmond was now perhaps very near its end. Presently it would fade and cease, and the stream that had made it and borne it would know it no more.

  Dr. Martineau’s thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture land of dreams. He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as it were away from him along a narrow path, a path that followed the crest of a ridge, between great darknesses, enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and below. He was going along this path without looking back, without a thought for those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him on his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him walking, without haste or avidity, walking as a man might along some great picture gallery with which he was perhaps even over familiar. His hands would be in his pockets, his indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him. And as he strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him. His figure became dim and dimmer.

  Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide the beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just dissolve that figure into itself?

  Was that indeed the end?

  Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can neither imagine nor disbelieve in immortality. Dimmer and dimmer grew the figure but still it remained visible. As one can continue to see a star at dawn until one turns away. Or one blinks or nods and it is gone.

  Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless generations. Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so clearly, faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic peoples believed from Avebury to Polynesia? Not always have we had to go alone and unprepared into uncharted darknesses. For a time the dream artist used a palette of the doctor’s vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a new roll of the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked figure, crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific monsters, ferrying a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the scales of judgment before the very throne of Osiris and stood waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed his conscience and that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead, crouched ready if the judgment went against him. The doctor’s attention concentrated upon the scales. A memory of Swedengorg’s Heaven and Hell mingled with the Egyptian fantasy. Now at last it was possible to know something real about this man’s soul, now at last one could look into the Secret Places of his Heart. Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis head, were reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it to the supreme judge.

  Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams. His anxiety to plead for his friend had brought him in. He too had become a little painted figure and he was bearing a book in his hand. He wanted to show that the laws of the new world could not be the same as those of the old, and the book he was bringing as evidence was his own Psychology of a New Age.

  The clear thought of that book broke up his dream by releasing a train of waking troubles… . You have been six months on Chapter Ten; will it ever be ready for Osiris? … will it ever be ready for print? …

  Dream and waking thoughts were mingled like sky and cloud upon a windy day in April. Suddenly he saw again that lonely figure on the narrow way with darknesses above and darknesses below and darknesses on every hand. But this time it was not Sir Richmond… . Who was it? Surely it was Everyman. Everyman had to travel at last along that selfsame road, leaving love, leaving every task and every desire. But was it Everyman? … A great fear and horror came upon the doctor. That little figure was himself! And the book which was his particular task in life was still undone. He himself stood in his turn upon that lonely path with the engulfing darknesses about him… .

  He seemed to wrench himself awake.

  He lay very still for some moments and then he sat up in bed. An overwhelming conviction had arisen—in his mind that Sir Richmond was dead. He felt he must know for certain. He switched on his electric light, mutely interrogated his round face reflected in the looking glass, got out of bed, shuffled on his slippers and went along the passage to the telephone. He hesitated for some seconds and then lifted the receiver. It was his call which aroused the nurse to the fact of Sir Richmond’s death.

  Section 6

  Lady Hardy arrived home in response to Dr. Martineau’s telegram late on the following evening. He was with her next morning, comforting and sympathetic. Her big blue eyes, bright with tears, met his very wistfully; her little body seemed very small and pathetic in its simple black dress. And yet there was a sort of bravery about her. When he came into the drawingroom she was in one of the window recesses talking to a serious-looking woman of the dressmaker type. She left her business at once to come to him. “Why did I not know in time?” she cried.

  “No one, dear lady, had any idea until late last night,” he said, taking both her hands in his for a long friendly sympathetic pressure.

  “I might have known that if it had been possible you would have told me,” she said.

  “You know,” she added, “I don’t believe it yet. I don’t realize it. I go about these formalities—”

  “I think I can understand that.”

  “He was always, you know, not quite here … . It is as if he were a little more not quite here … . I can’t believe it is over… . ”

  She asked a number of questions and took the doctor’s advice upon various details of the arrangements. “My daughter Helen comes home to-morrow afternoon,” she explained. “She is in Paris. But our son is far, far away in the Punjab. I have sent him a telegram… . It is so kind of you to come in to me.”

  Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy’s disposition to treat him as a friend of the family. He had conceived a curious, half maternal affe
ction for Sir Richmond that had survived even the trying incident of the Salisbury parting and revived very rapidly during the last few weeks. This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy. Hers was a type that had always appealed to him. He could understand so well the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting herself to gather together some preservative and reassuring evidences of this man who had always been; as she put it, “never quite here.” It was as if she felt that now it was at last possible to make a definite reality of him. He could be fixed. And as he was fixed he would stay. Never more would he be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance wither the interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was finding much comfort in this task of reconstruction. She had gathered together in the drawingroom every presentable portrait she had been able to find of him. He had never, she said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil sketch done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a number of photographs, several of which—she wanted the doctor’s advice upon this point—she thought might be enlarged; there was a statuette done by some woman artist who had once beguiled him into a sitting. There was also a painting she had had worked up from a photograph and some notes. She flitted among these memorials, going from one to the other, undecided which to make the standard portrait. ” That painting, I think, is most like,” she said: “as he was before the war. But the war and the Commission changed him,— worried him and aged him… . I grudged him to that Commission. He let it worry him frightfully.”

  “It meant very much to him,” said Dr. Martineau.

  “It meant too much to him. But of course his ideas were splendid. You know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of book done, explaining his ideas. He would never write. He despised it—unreasonably. A real thing done, he said, was better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he said, but women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary official biography… . I have thought of young Leighton, the secretary of the Commission. He seems thoroughly intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile Richmond’s views with those of the big business men on the Committee. He might do… . Or perhaps I might be able to persuade two or three people to write down their impressions of him. A sort of memorial volume… . But he was shy of friends. There was no man he talked to very intimately about his ideas unless it was to you … I wish I had the writer’s gift, doctor.”