The Secret Places of the Heart ...........................................................................................................................1

H. G. Wells..............................................................................................................................................1

The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was accustomed to let in visitors who had this

air of being annoyed and finding one umbrella too numerous for them. It mattered nothing to her that the

gentleman was asking for Dr. Martineau as if he was asking for something with an unpleasant taste. Almost

imperceptibly she relieved him of his umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive mahogany stand.

"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly with its distasteful threeyearold honour, "Sir

The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in undivided possession of the large indifferent

apartment in which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to the

distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase containing bound Victorian magazines

and antiquated medical works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and a

bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the promiscuous

disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost of the three windows and stared out despondently at Harley

For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty jacket on its peg, and then a gust of irritation

He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended not to hear. Then he turned round. "I don't

There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the figure that confronted Sir Richmond. Dr.

Martineau's height wanted at least three inches of Sir Richmond's five feet eleven; he was humanly plump,

his face was round and pink and cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of the full moon, of what the full moon

might be if it could get fresh air and exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short or he had

braced them too high so that he seemed to have grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been

dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric personality; this amiable presence dispelled his

Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been running upstairs, with his hands in his trouser

pockets, seemed intent only on disavowals. "People come here and talk. It does them good, and sometimes I

"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork. Overwork never hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A

man can workgood straightforward work, without internal resistance, until he drops,and never hurt

"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to death. . . . And it's so DAMNED important I

He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering gesture of his upraised clenched hand. "My

temper's in rags. I explode at any little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily for ten minutes and I can't leave

"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond Hardy? In the papers. What is it?"

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly can't afford to have you ill."

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the national fuel supply. And waste it! For

their profits. That's what I'm up against. You don't know the job I have to do. You don't know what a

Commission of that sort is. The moral tangle of it. You don't know how its possibilities and limitations are

canvassed and schemed about, long before a single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole

thing with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as daylight. I might have seen it at first. . . . Three

experts who'd been got at; they thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted

them to do provided you called them 'levelheaded.' Wagstaffe the socialist art critic who could be trusted to

play the fool and make nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers, oil profiteers,

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the days before the war it was different. Then there was

abundance. A little grabbing or cornering was all to the good. All to the good. It prevented things being used

up too fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia was tremendous. You could take all sorts of

liberties. But all this is altered. We're living in a different world. The public won't stand things it used to

stand. It's a new public. It'swild. It'll smash up the show if they go too far. Everything short and running

shorterfood, fuel, material. But these people go on. They go on as though nothing had changed. . . . Strikes,

Russia, nothing will warn them. There are men on that Commission who would steal the brakes off a

mountain railway just before they went down in it. . . . It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles. It's! But I'm

"A social smashup seems to me altogether a possibility. All sorts of people I find think that," said the

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too," he said and seemed to reflect. But he was

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and left his sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered swiftly what line of talk he had best follow.

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor. "It's at the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It

is a new state of mind. Before the war it was abnormala phase of neurasthenia. Now it is almost the normal

state with whole classes of intelligent people. Intelligent, I say. The others always have been casual and

adventurous and always will be. A loss of confidence in the general background of life. So that we seem to

"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in the days of our assurance. There is a discord, a

The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and dreadful sense of responsibility for the universe.

"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond. "Anyhow, what else is there to do? We MAY keep

things together. . . . "I've got to do my bit. And if only I could hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows.

But that's where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous to work well in my life. And never

have I been so slack and weakwilled and inaccurate. ... Sloppy. . . . Indolent. . . . VISCIOUS! . . . "

The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted him. "What's got hold of me? What's got hold

of me? I used to work well enough. It's as if my will had come untwisted and was ravelling out into separate

strands. I've lost my unity. I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to recover my vigour. At any cost."

Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out of his mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr.

Martineau, is this: it's fatigue. It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much effort. On too high a level. And too

austere. One strains and fags. FLAGS! 'Flags' I meant to say. One strains and flags and then the lower stuff in

There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this, and the doctor drew in the corners of his mouth

and gave his head a critical slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond raise his voice and quicken his

speech. "I want," he said, "a good tonic. A pickmeup, a stimulating harmless drug of some sort. That's

indicated anyhow. To begin with. Something to pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to the scratch

The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to disappointment. "But that's not reasonable," he

cried. "That's not reasonable. That's superstition. Call a thing a drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug.

Everything that affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise is a stimulant and quiet an opiate.

What is life but response to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I want food. When I'm

overactive and sleepless I want tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I want pulling together."

Dr. Martineau fixed his eye on a first floor window sill on the opposite side of Harley Street. His manner

"A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs all sorts of drugsand work them in to our

general way of living. I have no prejudice against them at all. A time will come when we shall correct our

moods, get down to our reserves of energy by their help, suspend fatigue, put off sleep during long spells of

exertion. At some sudden crisis for example. When we shall know enough to know just how far to go with

this, that or the other stuff. And how to wash out its after effects . . . . I quite agree with you,in principle . .

. . But that time hasn't come yet. . . . Decades of research yet. . . . If we tried that sort of thing now, we should

be like children playing with poisons and explosives. . . . It's out of the question."

"Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the way. Has it done you any goodany NETT

The doctor turned round again to his patient and looked up into his troubled face.

"Given physiological trouble I don't mind resorting to a drug. Given structural injury I don't mind surgery.

But except for any little mischief your amateur drugging may have done you do not seem to me to be either

sick or injured. You've no trouble either of structure or material. You are worriedill in your mind, and

otherwise perfectly sound. It's the current of your thoughts, fermenting. If the trouble is in the mental sphere,

why go out of the mental sphere for a treatment? Talk and thought; these are your remedies. Cool deliberate

thought. You're unravelled. You say it yourself. Drugs will only make this or that unravelled strand behave

disproportionately. You don't want that. You want to take stock of yourself as a wholefind out where you

The doctor made a little calculation. "Three weeks. . . . It's scarcely time enough to begin."

"Dismiss the idea. Dismiss it." He decided to take a plunge. "I've just been thinking of a little holiday for

myself. But I'd like to see you through this. And if I am to see you through, there ought to be some sort of

"That's that. Still. The country must be getting beautiful again now,after all the rain we have had. I have

a little twoseater. I don't know. . . . The repair people promise to release it before Friday."

"But _I_ have a choice of two very comfortable little cars. Why not be my guest?"

"South and west. We could talk on the road. In the evenings. By the wayside. We might make the beginnings

of a treatment. . . . A simple tour. Nothing elaborate. You wouldn't bring a man?"

"There's something very pleasant, said the doctor, envisaging his own rash proposal, "in travelling along

roads you don't know and seeing houses and parks and villages and towns for which you do not feel in the

slightest degree responsible. They hide all their troubles from the road. Their backyards are tucked away out

of sight, they show a brave face; there's none of the nasty selfbetrayals of the railway approach. And

everything will be fresh still. There will still be a lot of appleblossomand bluebells. . . . And all the while

He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder. "Have you noted how fagged and unstable EVERYBODY is

"It isn't. And it's a frightful strain to get into any new ways. So here we are.

"A man," the doctor expanded, "isn't a creature in vacuo. He's himself and his world. He's a surface of

contact, a system of adaptations, between his essential self and his surroundings. Well, our surroundings have

becomehow shall I put it?a landslide. The war which seemed such a definable catastrophe in 1914 was,

after all, only the first loud crack and smash of the collapse. The war is over andnothing is over. This

peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded phrase. The slide goes on,it goes, if anything, faster, without a

sign of stopping. And all our poor little adaptations! Which we have been elaborating and trusting all our

lives! . . . One after another they fail us. We are stripped. . . . We have to begin all over again. . . . I'm

fiftyseven and I feel at times nowadays like a chicken new hatched in a thunderstorm."

"Everybody is like that...it isn'twhat are you going to do? It isn'twhat am I going to do? It'swhat are

we all going to do! . . Lord! How safe and established everything was in 1910, say. We talked of this great

war that was coming, but nobody thought it would come. We had been born in peace, comparatively

speaking; we had been brought up in peace. There was talk of wars. There were warslittle warsthat

altered nothing material. . . . Consols used to be at 112 and you fed your household on ten shillings a head a

week. You could run over all Europe, barring Turkey and Russia, without even a passport. You could get to

Italy in a day. Never were life and comfort so safefor respectable people. And we WERE respectable

people. . . . That was the world that made us what we are. That was the sheltering and friendly greenhouse in

which we grew. We fitted our minds to that. . . . And here we are with the greenhouse falling in upon us lump

by lump, smash and clatter, the wild winds of heaven tearing in through the gaps."

Upstairs on Dr. Martineau's desk lay the typescript of the opening chapters of a book that was intended to

make a great splash in the world, his PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE. He had his metaphors ready.

"We said: 'This system will always go on. We needn't bother about it.' We just planned our lives accordingly.

It was like a bird building its nest of frozen snakes. My father left me a decent independence. I developed my

position; I have lived between here and the hospital, doing good work, enormously interested, prosperous,

mildly distinguished. I had been born and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed that someone

"And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on. "Nobody had ever steered the ship. It was adrift."

"It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by faithas children do, as the animals do. At the

back of the healthy mind, human or animal, has been this persuasion: 'This is all right. This will go on. If I

keep the rule, if I do so and so, all will be well. I need not trouble further; things are cared for.'"

The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance to the full moon increased. He seemed to gaze

at remote things. "It may very well be that man is no more capable of living out of that atmosphere of

assurance than a tadpole is of living out of water. His mental existence may be conditional on that. Deprived

of it he may become incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically self seekingincoherent

"That's our trouble," the doctor completed. "Our fundamental trouble. All our confidences and our

accustomed adaptations are destroyed. We fit together no longer. We areloose. We don't know where we

are nor what to do. The psychology of the former time fails to give safe responses, and the psychology of the

"That is all very well," said Sir Richmond in the resolute voice of one who will be pent no longer. "That is all

very well as far as it goes. But it does not cover my case. I am not suffering from inadaptation. I HAVE

adapted. I have thought things out. I thinkmuch as you do. Much as you do. So it's not that. But . . .

Mind you, I am perfectly clear where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the breakup of the

entire system. Agreed! We have to make another system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly.

Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted.

We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've muddled about in the old ways

overlong. Some new sort of world, planned and scientific, has to be got going. Civilization renewed.

Rebuilding civilizationwhile the premises are still occupied and busy. It's an immense enterprise, but it is

the only thing to be done. In some ways it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips my

imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work. Working as I do rather in the dark as yet. With

whom I shall presently join up. . . The attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand it

may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin

at that. But here is where my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all that I have

been saying, but The rest of me won't follow. The rest of me refuses to attend, forgets, straggles,

The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all. 'Amazingly,' if you like. . . . I have this unlimited faith

in our present tremendous necessityfor workfor devotion; I believe my share, the work I am doing, is

essential to the whole thingand I work sluggishly. I work reluctantly. I work damnably."

"Exact" The doctor checked himself . "All that is explicable. Indeed it is. Listen for a moment to me!

Consider what you are. Consider what we are. Consider what a man is before you marvel at his ineptitudes of

will. Face the accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not

ten thousand. And that ape again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his forebear. A man's body, his

bodily powers, are just the body and powers of an ape, a little improved, a little adapted to novel needs. That

brings me to my point. CAN HIS MIND AND WILL BE ANYTHING BETTER? For a few generations, a

few hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out on the darknesses of life. . . . But the

substance of man is ape still. He may carry a light in his brain, but his instincts move in the darkness. Out of

"Or fails. . . . And that is where these new methods of treatment come in. We explore that failure. Together.

What the psychoanalyst doesand I will confess that I owe much to the psychoanalystwhat he does is to

direct thwarted, disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of their own nature. Which they have been

accustomed to ignore and forget. They come to us with high ambitions or lovely illusions about themselves,

torn, shredded, spoilt. They are morally denuded. Dreams they hate pursue them; abhorrent desires draw

them; they are the prey of irresistible yet uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs. The first

"The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly unselfish, inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you

are ever anything else. . . . Do you realize that a few million generations ago, everything that stirs in us,

everything that exalts human life, selfdevotions, heroisms, the utmost triumphs of art, the lovefor love it

isthat makes you and me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round world, was latent in the body

of some little lurking beast that crawled and hid among the branches of vanished and forgotten Mesozoic

trees? A petty egglaying, bristlecovered beast it was, with no more of the rudiments of a soul than bare

hunger, weak lust and fear. . . . People always seem to regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance.

It isn't: it's a vital fact of the utmost practical importance. That is what you are made of. Why should you

expectbecause a war and a revolution have shocked youthat you should suddenly be able to reach up

"But is it any good to tell a man that the job he is attempting is above himthat he is just a hairy reptile

"Well, it saves him from hoping too much and being too greatly disappointed. It recalls him to the

proportions of the job. He gets something done by not attempting everything. . . . And it clears him up. We

get him to look into himself, to see directly and in measurable terms what it is that puts him wrong and holds

"You propose that I shall spend my time, until the Commission meets, in thinking about myself. I wanted to

"Like a man who tries to forget that his petrol is running short and a cylinder missing fire. . . . No. Come back

to the question of what you are," said the doctor. "A creature of the darkness with new lights. Lit and

halfblinded by science and the possibilities of controlling the world that it opens out. In that light your will

is all for service; you care more for mankind than for yourself. You begin to understand something of the self

beyond your self. But it is a partial and a shaded light as yet; a little area about you it makes clear, the rest is

still the old darknessof millions of intense and narrow animal generations. . . . You are like someone who

awakens out of an immemorial sleep to find himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a great

and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless mountainsin a sunless universe. You are not alone in it.

You are not lord of all you survey. Your leadership is disputed. The darkness even of the room you are in is

full of ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers and purposes. . . . They thrust ambiguous limbs

and claws suddenly out of the darkness into the light of your attention. They snatch things out of your hand,

they trip your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and cluster behind you. Wherever your shadow falls, they

creep right up to you, creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The souls of apes, monkeys,

reptiles and creeping things haunt the passages and attics and cellars of this living house in which your

The doctor gave this quotation from his unpublished book the advantages of an abrupt break and a pause.

Sir Richmond shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "And you propose a vermin hunt in the old tenement?"

"The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to take stock and know what is there."

"To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself. As an opening. . . . It will take longer than that

"How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be? Anyhowwe can break off at any time. . . .

We'll try it. We'll try it. . . . And so for this journey into the west of England. . . . Andif we can get

The patient left the house with much more self possession than he had shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau

had thrust him back from his intenser prepossessions to a more generalized view of himself, had made his

troubles objective and detached him from them. He could even find something amusing now in his situation.

He liked the immense scope of the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that most of it was

entirely trueand, in some untraceable manner, absurd. There were entertaining possibilities in the prospect

He was a man of extensive reservations. His private life was in some respects exceptionally private.

"I don't confide . . . . Do I even confide in myself? I imagine I do . . . . Is there anything in myself that I

haven't looked squarely in the face? . . . How much are we going into? Even as regards facts?

Such thoughts engaged him until he found himself in his study. His desk and his writing table were piled high

with a heavy burthen of work. Still a little preoccupied with Dr. Martineau's exposition, he began to handle

At half past nine he found himself with three hours of good work behind him. It had seemed like two. He had

not worked like this for many weeks. "This is very cheering," he said. "And unexpected. Can old Moonface

have hypnotized me? Anyhow. . . Perhaps I've only imagined I was ill. . . . Dinner?" He looked at his

watch and was amazed at the time. "Good Lord! I've been at it three hours. What can have happened? Funny I

He went downstairs and found Lady Hardy reading a magazine in a diningroom armchair and finely poised

between devotion and martyrdom. A shadow of vexation fell athwart his mind at the sight of her.

"After you swore so at poor Bradley I ordered that there should be no gongs when we were alone. I did come

up to your door about half past eight. I crept up. But I was afraid I might upset you if I came in."

Lady Hardy was a frail little blueeyed woman with uneven shoulders and a delicate sweet profile. Hers was

that type of face that under even the most pleasant and luxurious circumstances still looks bravely and

patiently enduring. Her refinement threw a tinge of coarseness over his eager consumption of his excellent

When Bradley was out of the room, Sir Richmond remarked: "I saw that nerves man, Dr. Martineau, today.

The quiet patience of the lady's manner intensified. She said nothing. A flash of resentment lit Sir Richmond's

eyes. When he spoke again, he seemed to answer unspoken accusations. "Dr. Martineau's idea is that he

"He seems a good sort of fellow. . . . I'm inclined to like him. He'll be as good company as anyone. . . . This

She smiled and shook her head with the quiet conviction of one who knew her duty better. "Perhaps I'll have

Sir Richmond detested eating alone in an atmosphere of observant criticism. And he did not like talking with

his mouth full to an unembarrassed interlocutor who made no conversational leads of her own. After a few

mouthfuls he pushed his plate away from him. "Then let's have up the ice pudding," he said with a faint note

Lady Hardy sat for a moment, a picture of meek distress. Then, her delicate eyebrows raised, and the corners

No wise man goes out upon a novel expedition without misgivings. And between their first meeting and the

appointed morning both Sir Richmond Hardy and Dr. Martineau were the prey of quite disagreeable doubts

about each other, themselves, and the excursion before them. At the time of their meeting each had been

convinced that he gauged the other sufficiently for the purposes of the proposed tour. Afterwards each found

himself trying to recall the other with greater distinctness and able to recall nothing but queer, ominous and

minatory traits. The doctor's impression of the great fuel specialist grew ever darker, leaner, taller and more

impatient. Sir Richmond took on the likeness of a monster obdurate and hostile, he spread upwards until like

the Djinn out of the bottle, he darkened the heavens. And he talked too much. He talked ever so much too

much. Sir Richmond also thought that the doctor talked too much. In addition, he read into his imperfect

memory of the doctor's face, an expression of protruded curiosity. What was all this problem of motives and

inclinations that they were "going into" so gaily? He had merely consulted the doctor on a simple,

straightforward need for a nervous tonicthat was what he had neededa tonic. Instead he had engaged

himself forhe scarcely knew whatan indiscreet, indelicate, and altogether undesirable experiment in

Both men were considerably reassured when at last they set eyes on each other again. Indeed each was

surprised to find something almost agreeable in the appearance of the other. Dr. Martineau at once perceived

that the fierceness of Sir Richmond was nothing more than the fierceness of an overwrought man, and Sir

Richmond realized at a glance that the curiosity of Dr. Martineau's bearing had in it nothing personal or base;

Sir Richmond had arrived nearly forty minutes late, and it would have been evident to a much less highly

trained observer than Dr. Martineau that some dissension had arisen between the little, ladylike, cream and

black Charmeuse car and its owner. There was a faint air of resentment and protest between them. As if Sir

The cap of the radiator was adorned with a little brass figure of a flying Mercury. Frozen in a sprightly

attitude, its stiff bound and its fixed heavenward stare was highly suggestive of a forced and tactful disregard

Nothing was said, however, to confirm or dispel this suspicion of a disagreement between the man and the

car. Sir Richmond directed and assisted Dr. Martineau's man to adjust the luggage at the back, and Dr.

Martineau watched the proceedings from his dignified front door. He was wearing a suit of fawn tweeds, a

fawn Homburg hat and a light Burberry, with just that effect of special preparation for a holiday which

betrays the habitually busy man. Sir Richmond's brown gauntness was, he noted, greatly set off by his suit of

grey. There had certainly been some sort of quarrel. Sir Richmond was explaining the straps to Dr.

Martineau's butler with the coldness a man betrays when he explains the uncongenial habits of some unloved

intimate. And when the moment came to start and the little engine did not immediately respond to the electric

His voice sank at the last word as though it was an entirely confidential communication to the little car. And

it was an extremely low and disagreeable word. So Dr. Martineau decided that it was not his business to hear

It was speedily apparent that Sir Richmond was an experienced and excellent driver. He took the Charmeuse

out into the traffic of Baker Street and westward through brisk and busy streets and roads to Brentford and

Hounslow smoothly and swiftly, making a score of unhesitating and accurate decisions without apparent

thought. There was very little conversation until they were through Brentford. Near Shepherd's Bush, Sir

Richmond had explained, "This is not my own particular car. That was butted into at the garage this morning

and its radiator cracked. So I had to fall back on this. It's quite a good little car. In its way. My wife drives it

at times. It has one or two constitutional weaknessesincidental to the makegearbox over the back axle

for examplegets all the vibration. Whole machine rather on the flimsy side. Still"

Dr. Martineau said something of no consequence about its being a very comfortable little car.

Somewhere between Brentford and Hounslow, Sir Richmond plunged into the matter between them. "I don't

know how deep we are going into these psychological probings of yours," he said. "But I doubt very much if

"After all, what I want is a tonic. I don't see that there is anything positively wrong with me. A certain lack of

"Lack of balance," corrected the doctor. "You are wasting energy upon internal friction. "But isn't that

inevitable? No machine is perfectly efficient. No man either. There is always a waste. Waste of the type;

waste of the individual idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as she ought to pullshe never

does. She's low in her class. So with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of energy waste.

Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to me. (Damn that omnibus! All over the road!)"

"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir Richmond, opening up another line of thought.

"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it. "These new methods of treatment are based on the

idea of imperfection. We begin with that. I began with that last Tuesday. . . ."

Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and for that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle

of accumulations. Your psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me, with a notion of stripping down to something

fundamental. The ape before was a tangle of accumulations, just as we are. So it was with his forebears. So it

"Is my particular tangle very different from the general tangle? (Oh! Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a

creature of undecided will, urged on by my tangled heredity to do a score of entirely incompatible things.

"But our concern is the particular score of incompatible things you are urged to do. We examine and

The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and ultimately disastrous struggle began between Sir

It was near Taplow station that the mutual exasperation of man and machine was brought to a crisis by the

clumsy emergence of a laundry cart from a side road. Sir Richmond was obliged to pull up smartly and

stopped his engine. It refused an immediate obedience to the electric starter. Then it picked up, raced noisily,

disengaged great volumes of bluish smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition to run on any gear

but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought aloud, unpleasing thoughts. He addressed the little car as a person; he

referred to ancient disputes and temperamental incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse, illbred

man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There were some moments of hope, dashed by the

necessity of going dead slow behind an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not notice the outstretched arm of

the driver of the van, and stalled his engine for a second time. The electric starter refused its office altogether.

"I must wind it up " he said at last in a profound and awful voice. "I must wind it up."

"I get out, don't I?" asked the doctor, unanswered, and did so. Sir Richmond, after a grim search and the

displacement and replacement of the luggage, produced a handle from the locker at the back of the car and

There was a little difficulty. "Come UP!" he said, and the small engine roared out like a stage lion.

The two gentlemen resumed their seats. The car started and then by an unfortunate inadvertency Sir

Richmond pulled the gear lever over from the first speed to the reverse. There was a metallic clangour

beneath the two gentlemen, and the car slowed down and stopped although the engine was still throbbing

wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke still streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle

breeze. The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by a gaunt madman, mouthing vileness, who had

only a minute or so before been a decent British citizen. He made some blind lunges at the tremulous but

obdurate car, but rather as if he looked for offences and accusations than for displacements to adjust.

Quivering and refusing, the little car was extraordinarily like some recalcitrant little old aristocratic lady in

the hands of revolutionaries, and this made the behaviour of Sir Richmond seem even more outrageous than it

would otherwise have done. He stopped the engine, he went down on his hands and knees in the road to peer

up at the gearbox, then without restoring the spark, he tried to wind up the engine again. He spun the little

handle with an insane violence, faster and faster foras it seemed to the doctorthe better part of a minute.

Beads of perspiration appeared upon his brow and ran together; he bared his teeth in a snarl; his hat slipped

over one eye. He groaned with rage. Then, using the starting handle as a club, he assailed the car. He smote

the brazen Mercury from its foothold and sent it and a part of the radiator cap with it flying across the road.

He beat at the wings of the bonnet, until they bent in under his blows. Finally, he hurled the startinghandle

at the windscreen and smashed it. The startinghandle rattled over the bonnet and fell to the ground. . . .

The paroxysm was over. Ten seconds later this cataclysmal lunatic had reverted to sanitya rather sheepish

He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and turned his back on the car. He remarked in a voice of

Dr. Martineau had assumed an attitude of trained observation on the side path. His hands rested on his hips

and his hat was a little on one side. He was inclined to agree with Sir Richmond. "I don't know," he

"The devil it is!" said Sir Richmond, turning round sharply and staring at it as if he expected it to display

some surprising and yet familiar features. Then he looked questioningly and suspiciously at his companion.

"These outbreaks do nothing to amend the originating grievance," said the doctor. "No. And at times they are

even costly. But they certainly lift a burthen from the nervous system. . . . And now I suppose we have to get

"Little ruin!" repeated Sir Richmond. "No. There's lots of life in the little beast yet."

He reflected. "She'll have to be towed." He felt in his breast pocket. "Somewhere I have the R.A.C. order

paper, the Badge that will Get You Home. We shall have to hail some passing car to take it into

For a little while conversation hung fire. Then for the first time Dr. Martineau heard his patient laugh.

"Dr. Martineau weighed the situation. "As between doctor and patient," he said. "No."

"Oh!" said Sir Richmond, turned to a new point of view. "But where the patient ends and the host begins. . . .

I'm really very sorry." He reverted to his original train of thought which had not concerned Dr. Martineau at

The affair of the car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's mind. Hitherto Dr. Martineau had perceived the

possibility and danger of a defensive silence or of a still more defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond

had once given himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to an unlimited extent. He embarked

He began as they stood waiting for the relief car from the Maidenhead garage. "You were talking of the

ghosts of apes and monkeys that suddenly come out from the darkness of the subconscious . . . ."

"It's one of nature's cruder expedients. Crude, but I doubt if it is fundamental. There doesn't seem to be rage

in the vegetable world, and even among the animals? No, it is not universal." He ran his mind over classes

and orders. "Wasps and bees certainly seem to rage, but if one comes to think, most of the invertebrata show

"I'm not so sure," said Sir Richmond. "I've never seen a snail in a towering passion or an oyster slamming its

shell behind it. But these are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which is after all a smouldering sort of rage. And

take any more active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not a smashing and swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a

disciplined, cold blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will rage dangerously."

"A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has ever seen a furious rabbit?"

"I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can remember. I was a kicking, screaming child. I

threw things. I once threw a fork at my elder brother and it stuck in his forehead, doing no serious

damagehappily. There were whole days of wrathdays, as I remember them. Perhaps they were only

hours. . . . I've never thought before what a peculiar thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage?

They used to say it was the devil. If it isn't the devil, then what the devil is it? "After all," he went on as the

doctor was about to answer his question; "as you pointed out, it isn't the lowlier things that rage. It's the

"The devil nowadays," the doctor reflected after a pause, "so far as man is concerned, is understood to be the

But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. "Life itself, flaring out. Brooking no contradiction."

He came round suddenly to the doctor's qualification. "Why male? Don't little girls smash things just as

Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. "I suppose you have watched any number of babies?"'

"Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do. There's a lot of rage about most of them at first, male

"Queer little eddies of fury. . . . Recentlyit happens I've been seeing one. A spit of red wrath, clenching

The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and questioningly at his companion's profile.

"Isn't that after all what we really are?" he asked the doctor. "EssentiallyRage. A rage in dead matter,

"Against the Universe. And for? That's more difficult. What IS the little beast squalling itself crimson for?

Ultimately? . . . What is it clutching after? In the long run, what will it get?"

"Of course, if you were to say 'desire'," said Dr. Martineau, "then you would be in line with the

psychoanalysts. They talk of LIBIDO, meaning a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks of it at times almost

"No," said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. "Not desire. Desire would have a definite direction, and

"Yours the car in distress what sent this?" the voice repeated. It was the voice of a mechanic in an Overland

car. He was holding up the blue request for assistance that Sir Richmond had recently filled in.

For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse car with Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the

brass Mercury lay unheeded in the dusty roadside grass. Then it caught the eye of a passing child.

He was a bright little boy of five. From the moment when he caught the gleam of brass he knew that he had

made the find of his life. But his nurse was a timorous, foolish thing. "You did ought to of left it there,

"Yew'd look silly if a policeman came along arsting people if they seen a goldennimage.

All of which grumblings Master Harry treated with an experienced disregard. He knew definitely that he

would never relinquish this bright and lovely possession again. It was the first beautiful thing he had ever

possessed. He was the darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was crowded with hideous rag

and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen and every

variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a

There was to be much conflict and distress, tears and wrath, before the affinity of that cleanlimbed, shining

figure and his small soul was recognized. But he carried his point at last. The Mercury became his

inseparable darling, his symbol, his private god, the one dignified and serious thing in a little life much

congested by the quaint, the burlesque, and all the smiling, dull condescensions of adult love.

The little Charmeuse was towed to hospital and the two psychiatrists took up their quarters at the Radiant

Hotel with its pleasant lawns and graceful landing stage at the bend towards the bridge. Sir Richmond, after

some trying work at the telephone, got into touch with his own proper car. A man would bring the car down

in two days' time at latest, and afterwards the detested coupe could go back to London. The day was still

young, and after lunch and coffee upon a sunny lawn a boat seemed indicated. Sir Richmond astonished the

doctor by going to his room, reappearing dressed in tennis flannels and looking very well in them. It occurred

to the doctor as a thing hitherto unnoted that Sir Richmond was not indifferent to his personal appearance.

The doctor had no flannels, but he had brought a brown holland umbrella lined with green that he had

acquired long ago in Algiers, and this served to give him something of the riverside quality.

The day was full of sunshine and the river had a Maytime animation. Pink geraniums, vivid green lawns, gay

awnings, bright glass, white paint and shining metal set the tone of Maidenhead life. At lunch there had been

five or six small tables with quietly affectionate couples who talked in undertones, a tableful of

brightcoloured Jews who talked in overtones, and a family party from the Midlands, badly smitten with

shyness, who did not talk at all. "A resort, of honeymoon couples," said the doctor, and then rather

"Decidedly temporary," said Sir Richmond, considering the company"in most of the cases anyhow. The

"The last time I was here," he said, returning to the subject, "I was here on a temporary honeymoon."

"I know my Maidenhead fairly well," said Sir Richmond. "Aquatic activities, such as rowing, punting,

messing about with a boathook, tying up, buzzing about in motor launches, fouling other people's boats, are

merely the stage business of the drama. The ruling interests of this place are love largely illicitand

"I shouldn't have thoughtdrinking," said Dr. Martineau, after he had done justice to the bridge over his

"Yes, the place has a floating population of quiet industrious soakers. The incurable river man and the river

"If we are to explore the secret places of the heart," Sir Richmond went on, "we shall have to give some

attention to this Maidenhead side of life. It is very material to my case. I have,as I have saidBEEN

HERE. This place has beauty and charm; these piledup woods behind which my Lords Astor and

Desborough keep their state, this shining mirror of the water, brown and green and sky blue, this fringe of

reeds and scented rushes and forgetmenot and lilies, and these perpetually posing white swans: they make

a picture. A little artificial it is true; one feels the presence of a Conservancy Board, planting the rushes and

industriously nicking the swans; but none the less delightful. And this setting has appealed to a number of

people as an invitation, as, in a way, a promise. They come here, responsive to that promise of beauty and

happiness. They conceive of themselves here, rowing swiftly and gracefully, punting beautifully, brandishing

boathooks with ease and charm. They look to meet, under pleasant or romantic circumstances, other

possessors and worshippers of grace and beauty here. There will be glowing evenings, warm moonlight,

distant voices singing. . . .There is your desire, doctor, the desire you say is the driving force of life. But

reality mocks it. Boats bump and lead to coarse ungracious quarrels; rowing can be curiously fatiguing;

punting involves dreadful indignities. The romance here tarnishes very quickly. Romantic encounters fail to

occur; in our impatience we resort toaccosting. Chilly mists arise from the water and the magic of distant

singing is provided, even excessively, by boatloads of cads with collecting dishes. When the weather keeps

warm there presently arises an extraordinary multitude of gnats, and when it does not there is a need for

stimulants. That is why the dreamers who come here first for a light delicious brush with love, come down at

last to the Thamesside barmaid with her array of spirits and cordials as the quintessence of all desire."

"The real force of life, the rage of life, isn't here," he said. "It's down underneath, sulking and smouldering.

Every now and then it strains and cracks the surface. This stretch of the Thames, this pleasure stretch, has in

fact a curiously quarrelsome atmosphere. People scold and insult one another for the most trivial things, for

passing too close, for taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose. Most of these notice boards on the

bank show a thoroughly nasty spirit. People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats. You hear people

quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk along the towing path. There is remarkably little happy

laughter here. The RAGE, you see, is hostile to this place, the RAGE breaks through. . . . The people who

drift from one pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of

"Isn't it that there is some greater desire at the back of the human mind?" the doctor suggested. "Which

"There is no such greater desire," said Sir Richmond. "You cannot name it. It is just blind drive. I admit its

discontent with pleasure as an endbut has it any end of its own? At the most you can say that the rage in

"Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an afternoon smile under his green umbrella. "Go on."

"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We

"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant motives I am. I do not seem to deserve to be called a

personality. I cannot discover even a general direction. Much more am I like a taxicab in which all sorts of

aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got out. Are we all like that?"

"A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of memory?" said the doctor and

considered. "More than that. More than that. We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities."

"We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from complete dispersal."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "And there is also something, a consistency, that we call character."

"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir Richmond, going off at a tangent. "My sentimental

"Some men are more eventful in these matters than others," said the doctor,it soundedwistfully.

"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I suspect, whether they are eventful or not. The brakes

may be strong or weak but the drive is the same. I can't remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and

"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I

don't remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were

probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall anything of that sort

distinctly now. I had a very lively interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a

certainwhat shall I call it?imaginative slavishnessnot towards actual women but towards something

Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was Britannia as depicted by Tenniel in the

cartoons in PUNCH. I must have been a very little chap at the time of the Britannia affair. I just clung to her

in my imagination and did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little later, a secret abject adoration for the

white goddesses of the Crystal Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can remember,for all of

them. But I don't remember anything very monstrous or incestuous in my childish imaginations, such

things as Freud, I understand, lays stress upon. If there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort in

my case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a child which is brought up in a proper

nursery of its own and sees a lot of pictures of the nude human body, and so on, gets its mind shifted off any

possible concentration upon the domestic aspect of sex. I got to definite knowledge pretty early. By the time I

"What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be forgetting much secret and shameful curiosity. I

got my ideas into definite form out of a little straightforward physiological teaching and some dissecting of

rats and mice. My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of his times and my people believed in

him. I think much of this distorted perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds about sex and develops into

evil vices and still more evil habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things."

"Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes through the stuffy horrors described in James

"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In

"Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that make young people write unclean words in secret

"Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters nowadays. Where nothing is concealed, nothing can

"On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and clean," said Sir Richmond. "What stands out in

my memory now is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely and kind and powerful and

wonderful. That ruled my secret imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my mind as I grew up."

"The mother complex," said Dr. Martineau as a passing botanist might recognize and name a flower.

"It had not the slightest connexion with my mother or any mother or any particular woman at all. Far better to

"There was no connexion," said Sir Richmond. "The women of my adolescent dreams were stripped and

strong and lovely. They were great creatures. They came, it was clearly traceable, from pictures

sculptureand from a definite response in myself to their beauty. My mother had nothing whatever to do

with that. The women and girls about me were fussy bunches of clothes that I am sure I never even linked

"No. But I had a couple of sisters, one older, one younger than myself, and there were plenty of girls in my

circle. I thought some of them prettybut that was a different affair. I know that I didn't connect them with

the idea of the loved and worshipped goddesses at all, because I remember when I first saw the goddess in a

real human being and how amazed I was at the discovery. . . . I was a boy of twelve or thirteen. My people

took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the

Marsh accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent windbitten village

crouching under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as

the skin of a savage brown woman. Shining and with a texturethe very same. And one day as I was

mucking about by myself on the beach, boy fashion,there were some ribs of a wrecked boat buried in the

sand near a groin and I was busy with thema girl ran out from a tent high up on the beach and across the

sands to the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and not in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was

the custom to inflict on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a blue handkerchief. She ran swiftly and

gracefully, intent upon the white line of foam ahead. I can still remember how the sunlight touched her round

neck and cheek as she went past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have ever seento this day.

She lifted up her arms and thrust through the dazzling white and green breakers and plunged into the water

and swam; she swam straight out for a long way as it seemed to me, and presently came in and passed me

again on her way back to her tent, light and swift and sure. The very prints of her feet on the sand were

beautiful. Suddenly I realized that there could be living people in the world as lovely as any goddess. . . . She

"That was my first human love. And I love that girl still. I doubt sometimes whether I have ever loved anyone

else. I kept the thing very secret. I wonder now why I have kept the thing so secret. Until now I have never

told a soul about it. I resorted to all sorts of tortuous devices and excuses to get a chance of seeing her again

"Never. Of course I may have seen her as a dressedup person and not recognized her. A day or so later I was

stabbed to the heart by the discovery that the tent she came out of had been taken away. "

"I was never wholehearted and simple about sexual things," Sir Richmond resumed presently. "Never. I do

not think any man is. We are too much plasteredup things, too much the creatures of a tortuous and

"Thiswhat shall I call it?this Dream of Women, grew up in my mind as I grew upas something

independent of and much more important than the reality of Women. It came only very slowly into relation

with that. That girl on the Dymchurch beach was one of the first links, but she ceased very speedily to be

realshe joined the women of dreamland at last altogether. She became a sort of legendary incarnation. I

thought of these dream women not only as something beautiful but as something exceedingly kind and

"Certainly. A very strong one. It didn't dominate but it was a very powerful undertow."

"Was there any tendency in all this imaginative stuff to concentrate? To group itself about a single figure, the

"Not a bit of it," said Sir Richmond with conviction. "There was always a tremendous lot of variety in my

mind. In fact the thing I liked least in the real world was the way it was obsessed by the idea of pairing off

with one particular set and final person. I liked to dream of a blonde goddess in her own Venusberg one day,

"None at all. I cannot recall a single philoprogenitive moment. These dream women were all conceived of,

and I was conceived of, as being concerned in some tremendous enterprisesomething quite beyond

domesticity. It kept us relatedgave us dignity. . . . Certainly it wasn't babies."

"All this is very interesting, very interesting, from the scientific point of view. A PRIORI it is not what one

might have expected. Reasoning from the idea that all instincts and natural imaginations are adapted to a

biological end and seeing that sex is essentially a method of procreation, one might reasonably expect a

convergence, if not a complete concentration, upon the idea of offspring. It is almost as if there were other

ends to be served. It is clear that Nature has not worked this impulse out to any sight of its end. Has not

perhaps troubled to do so. The instinct of the male for the female isn't primarily for offspringnot even in

the most intelligent and farseeing types. The desire just points to glowing satisfactions and illusions. Quite

equally I think the desire of the female for the male ignores its end. Nature has set about this business in a

CHEAP sort of way. She is like some pushful advertising tradesman. She isn't frank with us; she just

humbugs us into what she wants with us. All very well in the early Stone Agewhen the poor dear things

never realized that their mutual endearments meant all the troubles and responsibilities of parentage. But

He shook his head sideways and twirled the green umbrella like an animated halo around his large

Sir Richmond considered. "Desire has never been the chief incentive of my relations with women. Never. So

far as I can analyze the thing, it has been a craving for a particular sort of life giving companionship."

"That I take it is Nature's device to keep the lovers together in the interest of the more or less unpremeditated

"A poor device, if that is its end. It doesn't keep parents together; more often it tears them apart. The wife or

the mistress, so soon as she is encumbered with children, becomes all too manifestly not the companion

"Throughout my life I have been an exceedingly busy man. I have done a lot of scientific work and some of it

has been very good work. And very laborious work. I've travelled much. I've organized great business

developments. You might think that my time has been fairly well filled without much philandering. And all

the time, all the time, I've been about womenlike a thirsty beast looking for water. . . . Always. Always.

"I was very grave about it at first. I married young. I married very simply and purely. I was not one of those

young men who sow a large crop of wild oats. I was a fairly decent youth. It suddenly appeared to me that a

certain smiling and dainty girl could make herself into all the goddesses of my dreams. I had but to win her

and this miracle would occur. Of course I forget now the exact things I thought and felt then, but surely I had

some such persuasion. Or why should I have married her? My wife was seven years younger than myself,a

girl of twenty. She was charming. She is charming. She is a wonderfully intelligent and understanding

woman. She has made a home for mea delightful home. I am one of those men who have no instinct for

home making. I owe my home and all the comfort and dignity of my life to her ability. I have no excuse for

any misbehaviourso far as she is concerned. None at all. By all the rules I should have been completely

happy. But instead of my marriage satisfying me, it presently released a storm of longcontrolled desires and

imprisoned cravings. A voice within me became more and more urgent. 'This will not do. This is not love.

Where are your goddesses? This is not love.' . . . And I was unfaithful to my wife within four years of my

marriage. It was a sudden overpowering impulse. But I suppose the ground had been preparing for a long

time. I forget now all the emotions of that adventure. I suppose at the time it seemed beautiful and wonderful.

. . . I do not excuse myself. Still less do I condemn myself. I put the facts before you. So it was."

"Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive. We have had three. My daughter was married two

years ago. She is in America. One little boy died when he was three. The other is in India, taking up the

Mardipore power scheme again now that he is out of the army. . . . No, it is simply that I was hopelessly

disappointed with everything that a good woman and a decent marriage had to give me. Pure disappointment

and vexation. The anticlimax to an immense expectation built up throughout an imaginative boyhood and

youth and early manhood. I was shocked and ashamed at my own disappointment. I thought it mean and base.

Nevertheless this orderly household into which I had placed my life, these almost methodical connubialities .

"It was shockingly unfair. I have always realized that. I've done what I could to make things up to her. . . .

Heaven knows what counter disappointments she has concealed. . . . But it is no good arguing about rights

and wrongs now. This is not an apology for my life. I am telling you what happened.

"By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had satisfied none but the most transitory desires

and I had incurred a tremendous obligation. That obligation didn't restrain me from making desperate lunges

at something vaguely beautiful that I felt was necessary to me; but it did cramp and limit these lunges. So my

story flops down into the comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable, married man. . .I was still

driven by my dream of some extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought it like an area sneak.

Gods! What a story it is when one brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and sweetness I

dreamt of were not in the worldsomewhere. Hidden away from me. I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear

lost thing, now in the corners of a smiling mouth, now in dark eyes beneath a black smoke of hair, now in a

slim form seen against the sky. Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she

"I don't see what possible good it can do to talk over these things." He began to row and rowed perhaps a

score of strokes. Then he stopped and the boat drove on with a whisper of water at the bow and over the

"What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried. "What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has

been! She drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even get the children which are her only

excuse for her mischief. See what a fantastic thing I am when you take the machine to pieces! I have been a

busy and responsible man throughout my life. I have handled complicated public and industrial affairs not

unsuccessfully and discharged quite big obligations fully and faithfully. And all the time, hidden away from

the public eye, my life has been laced by the thread of thesewhat can one call them? love adventures.

How many? you ask. I don't know. Never have I been a whole hearted lover; never have I been able to leave

"And as I am made, said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence, "AS I AM MADEI do not believe that I

could go on without these affairs. I know that you will be disposed to dispute that.

"These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally necessary. It is only latterly that I have begun to perceive

this. Women MAKE life for me. Whatever they touch or see or desire becomes worth while and otherwise it

is not worth while. Whatever is lovely in my world, whatever is delightful, has been so conveyed to me by

some woman. Without the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in the world, a worker ant, a

"Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a wasting fever of distressful toil. Without them

there is no kindness in existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The world is a battlefield, trenches, barbed

wire, rain, mud, logical necessity and utter desolationwith nothing whatever worth fighting for. Whatever

A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. "It isn't how you are made. We are getting to

something in all this. It is, I insist, a mood of how you are made. A distinctive and indicative mood."

"I would go through it all again. . . . There are times when the love of women seems the only real thing in the

world to me. And always it remains the most real thing. I do not know how far I may be a normal man or how

far I may not be, so to speak, abnormally male, but to me life has very little personal significance and no

value or power until it has a woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say anything that matters

a woman must be present as a medium. I don't mean that it has no significance mentally and logically; I mean

that irrationally and emotionally it has no significance. Works of art, for example, bore me, literature bores

me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores me, unless I find in it some association with a

woman's feeling. It isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture is fine or a mountain valley lovely, but that it

doesn't matter a rap to me whether it is or whether it isn't until there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if

you like to call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness or pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until

somehow a woman comes in and breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even rest until a woman makes

holiday for me. Only one thing can I do without women and that is work, joylessly but effectively, and

latterly for some reason that it is up to you to discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."

"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous visit here. It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years

ago. We rowed down this same backwater. I can see my companion's handshe had very pretty hands with

rosy palmstrailing in the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly under her sunshade, with little faint

streaks of sunlight, reflected from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was one of those people

"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a thoroughly bad lot. She had about as much morality,

in the narrower sense of the word, as a monkey. And yet she stands out in my mind as one of the most honest

women I have ever met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of that effect of honesty may have been

due to her open brow, her candid blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner. . . . Butno! She was

"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet rushes and crushed them in her hand. She adds

"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman who was here with me came nearest to being

my friend. You know, what we call virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap to any real friendliness with

a man. Until she gets to an age when virtue and fidelity are no longer urgent practical concerns, a good

woman, by the very definition of feminine goodness, isn't truly herself. Over a vast extent of her being she is

RESERVED. She suppresses a vast amount of her being, holds back, denies, hides. On the other hand, there

is a frankness and honesty in openly bad women arising out of the admitted fact that they are bad, that they

hide no treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious and delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to

conceal. Intellectually they seem to be more manly and vigorous because they are, as people say, unsexed.

Many old women, thoroughly respectable old women, have the same quality. Because they have gone out of

"I have never," said the doctor, known what you call an openly bad woman,at least, at all intimately. . . . "

Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion. "You have avoided them!"

"For me," said the doctor, "for any friendliness, a woman must be modest. . . . My habits of thought are

oldfashioned, I suppose, but the mere suggestion about a woman that there were no barriers, no reservation,

"Now I wonder," whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a moment before he carried the great research

into the explorer's country. "You are afraid of women?" he said, with a smile to mitigate the impertinence.

"Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like. Anyhow I do not let myself go with them. I have

"Having found so excellent a friend," said the doctor, "why did you ever part from her?"

Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau's face remained slantingly interrogative. He

had found the effective counterattack and he meant to press it. "I was jealous of her," Sir Richmond admitted.

"You care for your wife," he said. "You care very much for your wife. She is, as you say, your great

obligation and you are a man to respect obligations. I grasp that. Then you tell me of these women who have

come and gone. . . . About them too you are perfectly frank. . . There remains someone else." Sir Richmond

"Well," he said and laughed. "I didn't pretend to have made my autobiography anything more than a sketch."

"From some little things that have dropped from you, I should say there is a child."

"That," said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, "is a good guess." "Not older than three." "Two years and a

"You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated. At any rate, you can't go to her. That leaves you at

loose ends, because for some time, for two or three years at least, you have ceased to behow shall I put

"Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine companionship for weary men. I guess she is a

"H'm," said Sir Richmond. "I think that is a fair description. When she cares, that is. When she is in good

"Which she isn't at present," hazarded the doctor. He exploded a mine of longpent exasperation.

"She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever known. Health is a woman's primary duty. But she

is incapable of the most elementary precautions. She is maddeningly receptive to every infection. At the

present moment, when I am ill, when I am in urgent need of help and happiness, she has let that wretched

child get measles and she herself won't let me go near her because she has got something disfiguring,

something nobody else could ever have or think of having, called CARBUNCLE. Carbuncle!"

"No doubt it is." His voice grew bitter. He spoke with deliberation. "A perfectly aimless, useless

He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously. And indeed he had slammed a door. The doctor realized that for

For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up to the foaming weir to the left of the lock by

an occasional stroke. Now with a general air of departure he swung the boat round and began to row down

After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the lawn, brooding darklyapparently over the

crime of the carbuncle. The doctor went to his room, ostensibly to write a couple of letters and put on a

dinner jacket, but really to make a few notes of the afternoon's conversation and meditate over his

His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he sank. . . A number of very discrepant things were

busy in his mind. He had experienced a disconcerting personal attack. There was a whirl of active resentment

"A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing. Every third manufacturer from the midlands or the

north has some such undertow of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an imaginative laxity, the temptations

of the trip to London weakness masquerading as a psychological necessity. The Lady of the Carbuncle

seems to have got rather a hold upon him. She has kept him in order for three or four years."

"I am not being fair. He ruffled me. Even if it is true, as I said, that every third manufacturer from the

midlands is in much the same case as he is, that does not dismiss the case. It makes it a more important one,

much more important: it makes it a type case with the exceptional quality of being selfexpressive. Almost

The doctor sat deep in his chair, frowning judicially with the fingers of one hand apposed to the fingers of the

other. "He makes me bristle because all his life and ideas challenge my way of living. But if I eliminate the

He pulled a sheet of notepaper towards him and began to jot down notes with a silvercased pencil. Soon he

discontinued writing and sat tapping his pencilcase on the table. "The amazing selfishness of his attitude! I

do not think that oncenot oncehas he judged any woman except as a contributor to his energy and peace

"What was his phrase about the unfortunate young woman with the carbuncle? . . . 'Totally Useless and

"Now has a man any right by any standards to use women as this man has used them?

The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the corners of his mouth drawn in.

For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing an increasing part in the good doctor's life. He

was writing this book of his, writing it very deliberately and laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW

AGE, but much more was he dreaming and thinking about this book. Its publication was to mark an epoch in

human thought and human affairs generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment in the doctor's

own little world. It was to bring home to people some various aspects of one very startling proposition: that

human society had arrived at a phase when the complete restatement of its fundamental ideas had become

urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate, partial adjustments to two centuries of changing

conditions had to give place to a rapid reconstruction of new fundamental ideas. And it was a fact of great

value in the drama of these secret dreams that the directive force towards this fundamentally reconstructed

world should be the pen of an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected of any great

The written portions of this book were already in a highly polished state. They combined a limitless freedom

of proposal with a smooth urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the thoughts of one intelligent being could

possibly be shocking to another. Upon this the doctor was very insistent. Conduct, he held, could never be

sufficiently discreet, thought could never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat a law or an

institution as a thing as rigidly right as a natural law. That the social wellbeing demands. But as a scientific

man, in one's stated thoughts and in public discussion, the case was altogether different. There was no offence

in any possible hypothesis or in the contemplation of any possibility. Just as when one played a game one

was bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and spirit of the game, but if one was not playing

that game then there was no reason why one should not contemplate the completest reversal of all its methods

and the alteration and abandonment of every rule. Correctness of conduct, the doctor held, was an imperative

concomitant of all really free thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things that must be divorced

absolutely from revolutionary conduct. It was to the neglect of these obvious principles, as the doctor

considered them, that the general muddle in contemporary marital affairs was very largely due. We left

divorcelaw revision to exposed adulterers and marriage reform to hot adolescents and craving spinsters

driven by the furies within them to assertions that established nothing and to practical demonstrations that

only left everybody thoroughly uncomfortable. Far better to leave all these matters to calm, patient men in

easy chairs, weighing typical cases impartially, ready to condone, indisposed to envy.

In return for which restraint on the part of the eager and adventurous, the calm patient man was prepared in

his thoughts to fly high and go far. Without giving any guarantee, of course, that he might not ultimately

In Sir Richmond, Dr. Martineau found the most interesting and encouraging confirmation of the fundamental

idea of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE, the immediate need of new criteria of conduct altogether.

Here was a man whose life was evidently ruled by standards that were at once very high and very generous.

He was overworking himself to the pitch of extreme distress and apparently he was doing this for ends that

were essentially unselfish. Manifestly there were many things that an ordinary industrial or political magnate

would do that Sir Richmond would not dream of doing, and a number of things that such a man would not

feel called upon to do that he would regard as imperative duties. And mixed up with so much fine intention

and fine conduct was this disreputable streak of intrigue and this extraordinary claim that such misconduct

"To energy of thought it is not necessary," said Dr. Martineau, and considered for a time. "YetcertainlyI

"The chapters of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE dealing with women were still undrafted, but they

had already greatly exercised the doctor's mind. He found now that the case of Sir Richmond had stirred his

imagination. He sat with his hands apposed, his head on one side, and an expression of great intellectual

contentment on his face while these emancipated ideas gave a sort of gala performance in his mind.

The good doctor did not dislike women, he had always guarded himself very carefully against misogyny, but

he was very strongly disposed to regard them as much less necessary in the existing scheme of things than

was generally assumed. Women, he conceded, had laid the foundations of social life. Through their

contrivances and sacrifices and patience the fierce and lonely patriarchal familyherd of a male and his

women and off spring had grown into the clan and tribe; the woven tissue of related families that constitute

the human comity had been woven by the subtle, persistent protection of sons and daughters by their mothers

against the intolerant, jealous, possessive Old Man. But that was a thing, of the remote past. Little was left of

those ancient struggles now but a few infantile dreams and nightmares. The greater human community,

human society, was made for good. And being made, it had taken over the ancient tasks of the woman, one

by one, until now in its modern forms it cherished more sedulously than she did, it educated, it housed and

comforted, it clothed and served and nursed, leaving the wife privileged, honoured, protected, for the sake of

tasks she no longer did and of a burthen she no longer bore. "Progress has TRIVIALIZED women," said the

"She has retained her effect of being central, she still makes the social atmosphere, she raises men's

instinctive hopes of help and direction. Except," the doctor stipulated, "for a few highly developed modern

types, most men found the sense of achieving her a necessary condition for sustained exertion. And there is

"She spends," said the doctor, "she just spends. She spends excitingly and competitively for her own pride

Apart from the procreative necessity, was woman an unavoidable evil? The doctor's untrammelled thoughts

began to climb high, spin, nose dive and loop the loop. Nowadays we took a proper care of the young, we had

no need for high birth rates, quite a small proportion of women with a gift in that direction could supply all

the offspring that the world wanted. Given the power of determining sex that science was slowly winning

today, and why should we have so many women about? A drastic elimination of the creatures would be quite

practicable. A fantastic world to a vulgar imagination, no doubt, but to a calmly reasonable mind by no means

fantastic. But this was where the case of Sir Richmond became so interesting. Was it really true that the

companionship of women was necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it the fact that the drive of

life towards action, as distinguished from contemplation, arose out of sex and needed to be refreshed by the

reiteration of that motive? It was a plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor's ideas of natural

selection and of the conditions of a survival that have made us what we are. It was in tune with the Freudian

"SEX NOT ONLY A RENEWAL OF LIFE IN THE SPECIES," noted the doctor's silver pencil; "SEX MAY

"That is practically what he claims, Dr. Martineau said. "In which case we want the completest revision of all

our standards of sexual obligation. We want a new system of restrictions and imperatives altogether."

It was a fixed idea of the doctor's that women were quite incapable of producing ideas in the same way that

men do, but he believed that with suitable encouragement they could be induced to respond quite generously

to such ideas. Suppose therefore we really educated the imaginations of women; suppose we turned their

indubitable capacity for service towards social and political creativeness, not in order to make them the rivals

of men in these fields, but their moral and actual helpers. "A man of this sort wants a mistress mother," said

the doctor. "He wants a sort of woman who cares more for him and his work and honour than she does for

child or home or clothes or personal pride. "But are there such women? Can there be such a woman?"

"His work needs to be very fine to deserve her help. But admitting its fineness? . . .

"The alternative seems to be to teach the sexes to get along without each other.

"A neutralized world. A separated world. How we should jostle in the streets! But the early Christians have

"Very well, then, we have to make women more responsible again. In a new capacity. We have to educate

them far more seriously as sources of energyas guardians and helpers of men. And we have to suppress

them far more rigorously as tempters and dissipaters. Instead of mothering babies they have to mother the

"Is that man working better since you got hold of him? If not, why not? "Or again,Jane Smith was charged

with neglecting her lover to the common danger. . . . The inspector said the man was in a pitiful state, morally

It became evident after dinner that Sir Richmond also had been thinking over the afternoon's conversation.

He and Dr. Martineau sat in widearmed cane chairs on the lawn with a wickerwork table bearing coffee

cups and little glasses between them. A few other diners chatted and whispered about similar tables but not

too close to our talkers to disturb them; the dining room behind them had cleared its tables and depressed its

illumination. The moon, in its first quarter, hung above the sunset, sank after twilight, shone brighter and

brighter among the western trees, and presently had gone, leaving the sky to an increasing multitude of stars.

The Maidenhead river wearing its dusky blue draperies and its jewels of light had recovered all the magic Sir

Richmond had stripped from it in the afternoon. The grave arches of the bridge, made complete circles by the

reflexion of the water, sustained, as if by some unifying and justifying reason, the erratic flat flashes and

streaks and glares of traffic that fretted to and fro overhead. A voice sang intermittently and a banjo tinkled,

"After all," Sir Richmond began abruptly," the search for some sort of sexual modus vivendi is only a means

to an end. One does not want to live for sex but only through sex. The main thing in my life has always been

my work. This afternoon, under the Maidenhead influence, I talked too much of sex. I babbled. Of things one

"No doubt. But a temporary phase. It is the defective bearing talks. . . . Just nowI happen to be irritated."

"The work is the thing," said Sir Richmond. So long as one can keep one's grip on it."

"What," said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and sending wreaths of smoke up towards the stardusted

zenith, "what is your idea of your work? I mean, how do you see it in relation to yourselfand things

"I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It is hard to put something one is always thinking

about in general terms or to think of it as a whole. . . . Now. . . . Fuel? . . .

"I suppose it was my father's business interests that pushed me towards specialization in fuel. He wanted me

to have a thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific training was less easy to get for a boy than it

is today. And much more inspiring when you got it. My mind was framed, so to speak, in geology and

astronomical physics. I grew up to think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in history and law

grows to think on the scale of the Roman empire. I don't know what your pocket map of the universe is, the

map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other general ideas. To me this planet is a little ball of oxides

and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface. And we, the minutest particles in that tarnish. Who can

nevertheless, in some unaccountable way, take in the idea of this universe as one whole, who begin to dream

"That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view. I suppose I have much the same general idea of

"We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something that is only just beginning to be aware of what

He went on eagerly. "That is precisely how I see it. You and I are just particles in the tarnish, as you call it,

who are becoming dimly awake to what we are, to what we have in common. Only a very few of us have got

"Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy solicitudes fill them up. They haven't begun to get out of

The doctor had no doubt. He lay back in his chair, with his hands behind his head and his smoke ascending

vertically to heaven. With the greatest contentment he began quoting himself. "This getting out of one's

individualitythis conscious getting out of one's individualityis one of the most important and interesting

aspects of the psychology of the new age that is now dawning. As compared with any previous age.

Unconsciously, of course, every true artist, every philosopher, every scientific investigator, so far as his art or

thought went, has always got out of himself,has forgotten his personal interests and become Man thinking

for the whole race. And intimations of the same thing have been at the heart of most religions. But now

people are beginning to get this detachment without any distinctively religious feeling or any distinctive

aesthetic or intellectual impulse, as if it were a plain matter of fact. Plain matter of fact, that we are only

incidentally ourselves. That really each one of us is also the whole species, is really indeed all life. "

"An integral partas sight is part of a man . . . with no absolute separation from all the restno more than a

separation of the imagination. The whole so far as his distinctive quality goes. I do not know how this takes

shape in your mind, Sir Richmond, but to me this idea of actually being life itself upon the world, a special

phase of it dependent upon and connected with all other phases, and of being one of a small but growing

number of people who apprehend that, and want to live in the spirit of that, is quite central. It is my

fundamental idea. We,this small but growing minorityconstitute that part of life which knows and wills

and tries to rule its destiny. This new realization, the new psychology arising out of it is a fact of supreme

importance in the history of life. It is like the appearance of selfconsciousness in some creature that has not

hitherto had selfconsciousness. And so far as we are concerned, we are the true kingship of the world.

Necessarily. We who know, are the true king. . . .I wonder how this appeals to you. It is stuff I have thought

out very slowly and carefully and written and approved. It is the very core of my life. . . . And yet when one

comes to say these things to someone else, face to face. . . . It is much more difficult to say than to write."

Sir Richmond noted how the doctor's chair creaked as he rolled to and fro with the uneasiness of these

"I agree," said Sir Richmond presently. "One DOES think in this fashion. Something in this fashion. What

"Which something we become," the doctor urged, "in so far as our work takes hold of us."

Sir Richmond made no answer to this for a little while. "Of course we trail a certain egotism into our work,"

"Could we do otherwise? But it has ceased to be purely egotism. It is no longer, 'I am I' but 'I am part.'. . .

"You think of man upon his planet," the doctor pursued. "I think of life rather as a mind that tries itself over

He was still debating the doctor's generalization. "I suppose it would be true to say that I think of myself as

mankind on his planet, with very considerable possibilities and with only a limited amount of fuel at his

disposal to achieve them. Yes. . . . I agree that I think in that way. . . . I have not thought much before of the

way in which I think about thingsbut I agree that it is in that way. Whatever enterprises mankind attempts

are limited by the sum total of that store of fuel upon the planet. That is very much in my mind. Besides that

"I thought that presently we were to get unlimited energy from atoms," said the doctor.

"I don't believe in that as a thing immediately practicable. No doubt getting a supply of energy from atoms is

a theoretical possibility, just as flying was in the time of Daedalus; probably there were actual attempts at

some sort of glider in ancient Crete. But before we get to the actual utilization of atomic energy there will be

ten thousand difficult corners to turn; we may have to wait three or four thousand years for it. We cannot

count on it. We haven't it in hand. There may be some impasse. All we have surely is coal and oil,there is

no surplus of wood nowonly an annual growth. And waterpower is income also, doled out day by day.

We cannot anticipate it. Coal and oil are our only capital. They are all we have for great important efforts.

They are a gift to mankind to use to some supreme end or to waste in trivialities. Coal is the key to

metallurgy and oil to transit. When they are done we shall either have built up such a fabric of apparatus,

knowledge and social organization that we shall be able to manage without themor we shall have travelled

a long way down the slopes of waste towards extinction. . . . Today, in getting, in distribution, in use we

waste enormously. . . .As we sit here all the world is wasting fuel fantastically."

"And my job is to stop what I can of that waste, to do what I can to organize, first of all sane fuel getting and

then sane fuel using. And that second proposition carries us far. Into the whole use we are making of life.

"First things first," said Sir Richmond. If we set about getting fuel sanely, if we do it as the deliberate,

cooperative act of the whole species, then it follows that we shall look very closely into the use that is being

made of it. When all the fuel getting is brought into one view as a common interest, then it follows that all the

fuel burning will be brought into one view. At present we are getting fuel in a kind of scramble with no

general aim. We waste and lose almost as much as we get. And of what we get, the waste is idiotic.

"I won't trouble you," said Sir Richmond, "with any long discourse on the ways of getting fuel in this country.

But land as you know is owned in patches and stretches that were determined in the first place chiefly by

agricultural necessities. When it was divided up among its present owners nobody was thinking about the

minerals beneath. But the lawyers settled long ago that the landowner owned his land right down to the centre

of the earth. So we have the superficial landlord as coal owner trying to work his coal according to the

superficial divisions, quite irrespective of the lie of the coal underneath. Each man goes for the coal under his

own land in his own fashion. You get three shafts where one would suffice and none of them in the best

possible place. You get the coal coming out of this point when it would be far more convenient to bring it out

at thatmiles away. You get boundary walls of coal between the estates, abandoned, left in the ground for

ever. And each coal owner sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you know of these things. You

know too how we trail the coal all over the country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get it into the

silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful, airpoisoning, fogcreating fireplace.

"And this stuff," said Sir Richmond, bringing his hand down so smartly on the table that the startled coffee

cups cried out upon the tray; "was given to men to give them power over metals, to get knowledge with, to

"There is a sort of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce parenthesis, "that the supplies of oil are

inexhaustible that you can muddle about with oil anyhow. . . . Optimism of knaves and imbeciles. . . . They

"Here I am with some clearness of visionmy only gift; not very clever, with a natural bad temper, and a

strong sexual bias, doing what I can to get a broader handling of the fuel questionas a common interest for

all mankind. And I find myself up against a lot of men, subtle men, sharp men, obstinate men, prejudiced

men, able to get round me, able to get over me, able to blockade me. . . . Clever menyes, and all of them

ultimately damnedoh! utterly damnedfools. Coal owners who think only of themselves, solicitors who

think backwards, politicians who think like a game of cat's cradle, not a gleam of generosity not a gleam."

"I want to get the whole business of the world's fuel discussed and reported upon as one affair so that some

"No, the world. It is all one system now. You can't work it in bits. I want to call in foreign representatives

"No. With powers. These things interlock now internationally both through labour and finance. The sooner

we scrap this nonsense about an autonomous British Empire complete in itself, contra mundum, the better for

"Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond in the tone of one who swears. "Don't I know that

perhaps it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And everybody

says, difficult, difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one

reason or another says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every decent thing is. It's

socialism. Who cares? Along this line of comprehensive scientific control the world has to go or it will

"So I want a report to admit that distinctly. I want it to go further than that. I want to get the beginnings, the

germ, of a world administration. I want to set up a permanent world commission of scientific men and

economistswith powers, just as considerable powers as I can give themthey'll be feeble powers at the

bestbut still some sort of SAY in the whole fuel supply of the world. A saythat may grow at last to a

control. A right to collect reports and receive accounts for example, to begin with. And then the right to make

recommendations. . . . You see? . . . No, the international part is not the most difficult part of it. But my

beastly owners and their beastly lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of what they call their freedom of action.

And my labour men, because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself, sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to

grasp what I am driving at and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a world control

on scientific lines even less than the owners. They try to think that fuel production can carry an unlimited

wages bill and the owners try to think that it can pay unlimited profits, and when I say; 'This business is

something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it's a service and a common interest,' they stare at

me" Sir Richmond was at a loss for an image. "Like a committee in a thieves' kitchen when someone has

"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 oppositionwhich 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

"Creative undertow," said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were. "An increasing force in modern life. In the

"They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this creative undertowif you like to call it thatwe

do get along. I am leader or whipperin, 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

"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

"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR Committee, reduced to a cloak and

"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing rightindeed they do want to have the FEEL

of doing rightand 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

"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 shorttempered. I've other things, as you perceive.

When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore, I get viciously illtempered, 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 selfdefence 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

"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 halfbaked 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 timedamn 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

The doctor watched his friend's resentful black silhouette against the lights on the steely river, and said

"Why did I ever undertake to play it?" Sir Richmond appealed. "Why has it been put upon me? Seeing what a

"I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the doctor after an interval.

"And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as you do. You want help; you want reassurance.

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. 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

As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling star streaked the deep blue above them.

"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

"Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been reading William James on religious experiences and I

"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. . . . "

"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 doafter forty. Our souls were made in the squattingplace 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

"The Great Mother of the Gods," said Dr. Martineaustill 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 Godany

"Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know. Perhaps it lasts as long as life does. How can I

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."

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

They exchanged archaeological facts. The secret places of the heart rested until the afternoon.

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

"In the night," he said, "I was thinking over the account I tried to give you of my motives. A lot of it was

"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the proportions. . . . I don't know if I gave you the effect

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 jerrybuilt

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 refreshedso far, that is, as his

Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the outset counts. The more tired one is the more

"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of my work goes, I think we got something like the

"But there is another set of motives altogether, "Sir Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the

He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before you realize it your affections are involved. I am a

Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine selfreproach 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 responsibility.

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

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

"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

"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," Sir Richmond went on, "now that I have told you so much of this affair, I may as well tell you

The doctor was prepared to be a good listener. Facts he would always listen to; it was only when people told

"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

"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

"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 selfabandonment 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."

"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! "

"It happened to us. For four years now things have just happened to us. All the time I have been overworking,

"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

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

"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 wellthey usually go well at the startwe are glorious

companions. She is happy, she is creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of humour, with a

"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"

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

"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work anywhere. All she wants is just cardboard and ink.

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

"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."

'I don't know. But she isadhesive. Emotionally adhesive. All she wants to do is just to settle down when I

"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

"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular situation, that it is not the individuals to blame but the

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

"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

"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

fueland 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

"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me to see her disfigured. She does not understand"

"It amounts to that. . . . And soon there will be all the trouble about educating the girl. Whatever happens, she

"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier. It needs constant tact and dexterity to fix things up.

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

"Anyone might get hold of herif 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."

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

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 lookerson. For a time their conversation was broken. Sir

"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

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

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 illchosen. 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 welldevised beginnings. At the fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's

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

"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

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 tenhe'd

just ring the fellow up presently to make sureand Dr. Martineau retired early and went rather thoughtfully

Sir Richmond's car arrived long before ten, brought down by a young man in a state of scared alacritySir

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

wartime 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

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 crossroads 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 wartlike 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

"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 beecha 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 agehalf

Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir Richmond nor the doctor could throw a gleam of

"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

The doctor pursed his lips. "None," he delivered judicially. "If one were able to recall one's childhoodat

the age of about twelve or thirteenwhen 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

"Adults with the minds of thirteenyearold children. Thirteenyearold children with the strength of

adultsand 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? "

"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 itlike 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

"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

"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

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

"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

"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 sicknessmeasles, 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

Sir Richmond turned about. "I would like to dig up the bottom of this ditch here foot by footand dry the

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

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

"Today, 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

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 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.

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 dooverdoing, 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

"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

"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for magnanimity. This day particularly has been a

good day. When we stood on this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be standing outside myself in an

immense still sphere of past and future. I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw myself four

thousand years away, and all my distresses as very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in London

the case is altogether different; after three hours or so of the Committee one concentrates into one little

inflamed moment of personality. There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is only the rankling

dispute. For all those three hours, perhaps, I have been thinking of just what I had to say, just how I had to

say it, just how I looked while I said it, just how much I was making myself understood, how I might be

misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented, challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is

used up. At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting, pinpoint of SELF. . . . One

goes back to one's home unable to recover. Fighting it over again. All night sometimes . . . . I get up and walk

about the room and curse . . . . Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of mind to Westminster?"

"When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor, unhelpfully. He added after some seconds,

"Milton knew of these troubles. 'Not without dust and heat' he wrotea great phrase."

He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay beside him on the table. But he did not

open it. He held it in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all that evening. "I do not think

that I shall stir up my motives any more for a time. Better to go on into the west country cooling my poor old

"I can prescribe nothing better," said Dr. Martineau. "Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light

"I don't want to think of them, said Sir Richmond. "Let me get right away from everything. Until my skin has

Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over the downs round Avebury they went by way of

Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now, with Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a

poorer thing than he had remembered it to be. Sir Richmond was frankly disappointed. After the real

greatness and mystery of the older place, it seemed a poor little heap of stones; it did not even dominate the

landscape; it was some way from the crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was further dwarfed

by the colossal airship hangars and clustering offices of the air station that the great war had called into

existence upon the slopes to the southwest. "It looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old giantess had

left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that

The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At

the side of the road stood a travelstained middleclass automobile, with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs

and luncheon things thereina family automobile with father no doubt at the wheel. Sir Richmond left his

They were impeded at the entrance by a difference of opinion between the keeper of the turnstile and a small

but resolute boy of perhaps five or six who proposed to leave the enclosure. The custodian thought that it

"She keeps on looking at it, " said the small boy. "It isunt anything. I want to go and clean the car."

"You won't SEE Stonehenge every day, young man," said the custodian, a little piqued.

"It's only an old beach," said the small boy, with extreme conviction. "It's rocks like the seaside. And there

"I don't see that he can get into any harm here," the doctor advised, and the small boy was released from

He strolled to the family automobile, produced an ENTOUTCAS pockethandkerchief and set himself to

polish the lamps with great assiduity. The two gentlemen lingered at the turnstile for a moment or so to watch

his proceedings. "Modern child," said Sir Richmond. "Old stones are just old stones to him. But motor cars

"You can hardly expect him to understandat his age," said the custodian, jealous for the honor of

"Reminds me of Martin's little girl," said Sir Richmond, as he and Dr. Martineau went on towards the circle.

"When she encountered her first dragonfly she was greatly delighted. '0h, dee' lill' a'eplane,' she said."

As they approached the grey old stones they became aware of a certain agitation among them. A voice, an

authoritative bass voice, was audible, crying, "Anthony!" A nurse appeared remotely going in the direction of

the aeroplane sheds, and her cry of "Master Anthony" came faintly on the breeze. An extremely pretty young

woman of five or six and twenty became visible standing on one of the great prostrate stones in the centre of

the place. She was a blackhaired, sunburnt individual and she stood with her arms akimbo, quite frankly

amused at the disappearance of Master Anthony, and offering no sort of help for his recovery. On the

greensward before her stood the paterfamilias of the family automobile, and he was making a trumpet with

his hands in order to repeat the name of Anthony with greater effect. A short lady in grey emerged from

among the encircling megaliths, and one or two other feminine personalities produced effects of movement

rather than of individuality as they flitted among the stones. "Well," said the lady in grey, with that rising

intonation of humorous conclusion which is so distinctively American, "those Druids have GOT him."

"He's hiding," said the automobilist, in a voice that promised chastisement to a hidden hearer. "That's what he

is doing. He ought not to play tricks like this. A great boy who is almost six."

"If you are looking for a small, resolute boy of six," said Sir Richmond, addressing himself to the lady on the

rock rather than to the angry parent below, "he's perfectly safe and happy. The Druids haven't got him.

Indeed, they've failed altogether to get him. 'Stonehenge,' he says, 'is no good.' So he's gone back to clean the

"Aaoo. So THAT'S it! " said Papa. "Winnie, go and tell Price he's gone back to the car. . . . They oughtn't to

The excitement about Master Anthony collapsed. The rest of the people in the circles crystallized out into the

central space as two apparent sisters and an apparent aunt and the nurse, who was packed off at once to

supervise the lamp cleaning. The head of the family found some difficulty, it would seem, in readjusting his

mind to the comparative innocence of Anthony, and Sir Richmond and the young lady on the rock sought as

if by common impulse to establish a general conversation. There were faint traces of excitement in her

manner, as though there had been some controversial passage between herself and the family gentleman.

"We were discussing the age of this old place," she said, smiling in the frankest and friendliest way. "How

The father of Anthony intervened, also with a shadow of controversy in his manner. "I was explaining to the

young lady that it dates from the early bronze age. Before chronology existed. . . . But she insists on dates."

Sir Richmond sought a recognizable datum. "Bronze got to Britain somewhere between the times of Moses

"But these stones are all shaped," said the father of the family. "It is difficult to see how that could have been

"I don't SEE the place," said the young lady on the stone. "I can't imagine how they did it upnot one bit."

"Did it up!" exclaimed the father of the family in the tone of one accustomed to find a gentle sport in the

"Oh! they had things all right. Skins perhaps. Mats of rushes. Bast cloth. Fibre of all sorts. Wadded stuff."

"Stonehenge draped! It's really a delightful idea;" said the father of the family, enjoying it.

"Or they may have used wicker," the young lady went on, undismayed. She seemed to concede a point.

"But surely," said the father of the family with the expostulatory voice and gesture of one who would recall

erring wits to sanity, "it is far more impressive standing out bare and noble as it does. In lonely splendour."

"But all this country may have been wooded then," said Sir Richmond. "In which case it wouldn't have stood

"You came to it through a grove," said the young lady, eagerly picking up the idea.

"Which may have pointed to the midsummer sunrise," said Dr. Martineau, unheeded.

"These are NOVEL ideas," said the father of the family in the reproving tone of one who never allows a

"Well," said the young lady, "I guess there was some sort of show here anyhow. And no human being ever

had a show yet without trying to shut people out of it in order to make them come in. I guess this was covered

in all right. A dark hunched old place in a wood. Beech stems, smooth, like pillars. And they came to it at

night, in procession, beating drums, and scared half out of their wits. They came in THERE and went round

the inner circle with their torches. And so they were shown. The torches were put out and the priests did their

"But even you can't tell what the show was, V.V." said the lady in grey, who was standing now at Dr.

"Something horrid," said Anthony's younger sister to her elder in a stage whisper.

"BLUGGY," agreed Anthony's elder sister to the younger, in a noiseless voice that certainly did not reach

This young lady who was addressed as "V.V." was perhaps one or two and twenty, Dr. Martineau

thought,he was not very good at feminine ages. She had a clear sunbrowned complexion, with dark hair

and smiling lips. Her features were finely modelled, with just that added touch of breadth in the brow and

softness in the cheek bones, that faint flavour of the Amerindian, one sees at times in American women. Her

voice was a very soft and pleasing voice, and she spoke persuasively and not assertively as so many

American women do. Her determination to make the dry bones of Stonehenge live shamed the doctor's

disappointment with the place. And when she had spoken, Dr. Martineau noted that she looked at Sir

Richmond as if she expected him at least to confirm her vision. Sir Richmond was evidently prepared to

With a queer little twinge of infringed proprietorship, the doctor saw Sir Richmond step up on the prostrate

megalith and stand beside her, the better to appreciate her point of view. He smiled down at her. "Now why

The young lady was not very clear about her directions. She did not know of the roadway running to the

Avon river, nor of the alleged race course to the north, nor had she ever heard that the stones were supposed

to be of two different periods and that some of them might possibly have been brought from a very great

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 goo. Come,

As he led his little flock towards the exit his voice came floating back. "Talking wanton nonsense. . . . Any

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.

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. "

"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

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

"Well," she said slowly, giving most of the remark to Sir Richmond and the rest to the doctor. "it is nearer the

"I call that justparadoxical," 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

"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

"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

"Corinthian capitals?" Sir Richmond considered it and laughed cheerfully. "I suppose Europe does rather

"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 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, gentlementhe 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."

"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 goodtelling 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

"I seem to remember at Washington, something faintly Corinthian, something called the Capitol," Sir

"That is different," said the young lady, so conclusively that it seemed to leave nothing more to be said on

"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

Sir Richmond, with occasional appeals to Dr. Martineau, embarked upon an account of the glory and wonder

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

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 extreme proximity with him and the balance

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.

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

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 tomorrow. 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

"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 sightseeing. It's romantic. It's

picturesque. We stare at the nativeslike 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

"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."

"As much as it does to you." Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. "But if I say that America belongs to me

"You are the most civilized person I've met for weeks and weeks." "Well, you are the first civilized person

"So ours is a lucky meeting. I've wanted a serious talk to an American for some time. I want to know very

"I'm equally anxious to know what England thinks she is doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult

to understand. On any hypothesisthat 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

"It is a cat and a dogand 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."

"You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury.

"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

"I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And seeing Avebury tomorrow. Why not? Perhaps if

we did as the Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate something of the extreme informality of

"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

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

"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

"AndAh!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. . . . "

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 smokingroom. 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 tomorrow," said Sir Richmond. "These ladies were nearly

The thing took the doctor's breath away. For the moment he could say nothing. He stared over his teacup

dourfaced. 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

"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared. "Rome of the Empire comes nearest to it . . . . "

As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant to walk round and about Salisbury. He foresaw

that walk with the utmost clearness. In front and keeping just a little beyond the range of his intervention, Sir

Richmond would go with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring up the rear. "If I do," he

"Oh! come and see the cathedral!" cried Sir Richmond with illconcealed dismay. He was, if one may put it

in such a fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. "We can go first to look for shops," she said. "There's those

things you want to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can all go together as far as that. And

while you are shopping, if you wouldn't mind getting one or two things for me. . . ."

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust.

And it was also clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert drifting

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He could think over his notes. . . .

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about

the unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in their

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frankminded young woman

from America. "Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't correspond to anything so prim and

restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he judged her no older than

five and twenty, the word "girl" with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas

newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word "boy." She had an air of having in

some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a

distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could

talk with her as if he talked with a man like himselfbut with a zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first came as the natural expression of a broad stream of

alert thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things so

many clever women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking for effect at all, she was talking

because she was tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted to find

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way through the bright evening sunlight to

the compact gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought iron gate of a delightful garden of

spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snowuponthemountains, daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them

for a time, and then they came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old houses, on which

"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir Richmond. "But why, I wonder, did we build it? "

"Your memory ought to be better than mine," she said, with her halfclosed eyes blinking up at the sunlit

spire sharp against the blue. "I've been away for so longover therethat I forget altogether. Why DID we

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was

as if her mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. "My friend, the philosopher,"

he had said, "will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are. You must talk to himhe is

a very curious and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he says, passing thoughts.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had failed altogether to remember why the ditch at

Avebury was on the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond

found very great difficulty in recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.

"We built temples by habit and tradition," said Sir Richmond. "But the impulse was losing its force. "

"We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were already very clever engineers. What interested

us here wasn't the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display our power over stone. We made

it into reeds and branches. We squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest and his altar were

just an excuse. Do you think people have ever feared and worshipped in thisthis artist's larkas they did

Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. "The spirit of the Gothic cathedrals," he said, "is the spirit of the

sky scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition. The Freemasons on the building could hardly

refrain from jeering at the little priest they had left down below there, performing antiquated puerile

"Skyscrapers?" she conceded. "An early display of the sky scraper spirit. . . . You are doing your best to

"You are more at home here still than in that new country of ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now

that I do begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other cathedrals we built in Europe. . . . It was

"Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most about America. It's still large enough, mentally and

materially, to build all sorts of things. . . . Over here, the sites are frightfully crowded. . . . "

"And what do you think we are building now? And what do you think you are building over here?"

"What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up. I believe it is time we began to build in

"We're still only at the foundations," said Sir Richmond." Nothing shows as yet."

It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so they strolled to and fro round and about the west

end and along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging their ideas very frankly and freely about

the things that had recently happened to the world and what they thought they ought to be doing in it.

After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a corner of the smokingroom. The two ladies had

vanished hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed

from tweedy pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but definitely dressed, pretty alterations had

happened to their coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of Miss Grammont's hair and a

necklace of the same colourings kept the peace between her jolly sunburnt cheek and her soft untanned

neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a

plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr. Martineau thought her evening throat much too

The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of the steady continuity of Sir Richmond's duologue

with Miss Grammont. Miss Seyffert's methods were too discursive and exclamatory. She broke every thread

that appeared. The Old George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss Seyffert laced the entire

evening with her recognition of the fact. "Just look at that old beam!" she would cry suddenly. " To think it

Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she chose. After the animation of the afternoon a

sort of lazy contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat deep in a basket chair and spoke

now and then. Miss Seyffert gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the cabmen of Naples

Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her chair threw out the statement that Italy was

frightfully overpopulated. "In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a cheese. Nobody seems to be living.

"And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the roadside. Who ought to be getting

"Beggingfrom foreignersis just a sport in Italy," said Sir Richmond. "It doesn't imply want. But I agree

that a large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole world is. Don't you think so, Martineau?"

"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added amazingly: "I'm out for Birth Control all the time."

A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold

"The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives," said Sir Richmond. "Which amount to nothing.

Which do not even represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources, the fuel and surplus energy

"I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives," Miss Grammont reflected.

"Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are just vain repetitionsimperfect dreary, blurred

repetitions of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all that they do has been done better before.

Because they are crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as for liking their lives, they

"I'd have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At most. It would be quite enough for this little planet, for

"I don't know," said Dr. Martineau. "Oddly enough, I have never thought about that question before. At least,

"But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million aristocrats?" began Miss Grammont. "My native

"Need not be outraged," said Sir Richmond. "Any two hundred and fifty million would do, They'd be able to

develop fully, all of them. As things are, only a minority can do that. The rest never get a chance."

"A New Age," said Dr. Martineau; "a New World. We may be coming to such a stage, when population, as

much as fuel, will be under a world control. If one thing, why not the other? I admit that the movement of

"I'm for control all the time," Miss Seyffert injected, following up her previous success.

"I admit", the doctor began his broken sentence again with marked patience, "that the movement of thought is

away from haphazard towards controlin things generally. But is the movement of events?"

"I wish I could imagine your world," said Miss Grammont, rising, "of two hundred and fifty millions of fully

developed human beings with room to live and breathe in and no need for wars. Will they live in palaces?

Will they all be healthy? . . . Machines will wait on them. No! I can't imagine it. Perhaps I shall dream of it.

She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they stood hand in hand, appreciatively. . . .

"Well!" said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two Americans, "This is a curious encounter."

"That young woman has brains," said Sir Richmond, standing before the fireplace. There was no doubt

The doctor thought for a moment or so. "You are committed to the project of visiting Avebury?" he said.

"H'm," said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts and staring at the fire. "Birth Control! I

"I think" said the doctor and paused. "I shall leave this Avebury expedition to you."

"We can be back in the early afternoon," said Sir Richmond. "To give them a chance of seeing the cathedral.

"I must confess that four people make the car at any rate seem tremendously overpopulated. And to tell the

truth, I do not find this encounter so amusing as you seem to do. . . . I shall not be sorry when we have waved

The doctor sighed, stood up and found himself delivering one of the sentences he had engendered during his

solitary meditations in his room before dinner. He surprised himself by the plainness of his speech. "Let me

be frank," he said, regarding Sir Richmond squarely. "Considering the general situation of things and your

position, I do not care very greatly for the part of an accessory to what may easily develop, as you know very

well, into a very serious flirtation. An absurd, mischievous, irrelevant flirtation. You may not like the word.

You may pretend it is a conversation, an ordinary intellectual conversation. That is not the word. Simply that

is not the word. You people eye one another. . . . Flirtation. I give the affair its proper name. That is all.

Merely that. When I thinkBut we will not discuss it now. . . . Good night. . . . Forgive me if I put before

After twentyfour eventful hours our two students of human motives found themselves together again by the

fireplace in the Old George smokingroom. They had resumed their overnight conversation, in a state of

"If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme

reasonableness, and I admit it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place like this.

I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau. "I am not coming on if these young women

"But if you consider it scandalousand really, Martineau, really! as one man to another, it does seem to me

"Thought is one matter. Rash, inconsiderate action quite another. And above all, if I spend another day in or

near the company of Miss Belinda Seyffert I shallI shall be extremely rude to her."

"We might drop Belinda," he suggested turning to his friend and speaking in low, confidential tones. "She is

quite a manageable person. Quite. She couldfor examplebe left behind with the luggage and sent on by

train. I do not know if you realize how the land lies in that quarter. It needs only a word to Miss Grammont. "

There was no immediate reply. For a moment he had a wild hope that his companion would agree, and then

he perceived that the doctor's silence meant only the preparation of an ultimatum.

"I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more than I do to Miss Seyffert."

"It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different angle if I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert

"Frankly," said the doctor, "this adventure is altogether uncongenial to me. It is the sort of thing that has

"Don't you think," said Sir Richmond, "that you are attaching rather too muchwhat shall I

sayromantic?flirtatious? meaning to this affair? I don't mind that after my rather lavish confessions

you should consider me a rather oversexed person, but isn't your attitude rather unfair,unjust, indeed, and

almost insulting, to this Miss Grammont? After all, she's a young lady of very good social position indeed.

She doesn't strike youdoes she?as an undignified or helpless human being. Her manners suggest a

person of considerable selfcontrol. And knowing less of me than you do, she probably regards me as almost

as safe asa maiden aunt say. I'm twice her age. We are a party of four. There are conventions, there are

considerations. . . . Aren't you really, my dear Martineau, overdoing all this side of this very pleasant little

"AM I?" said Dr. Martineau and brought a scrutinizing eye to bear on Sir Richmond's face.

"I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so," Sir Richmond admitted.

"I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma," said Sir Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his

"It is not a dilemma," said Dr. Martineau, with a corresponding loss of asperity. "I grant you we discover we

differ upon a question of taste and convenience. But before I suggested this trip, I had intended to spend a

little time with my old friend Sir Kenelm Latter at Bournemouth. Nothing simpler than to go to him now . . .

"I could have wished," said the doctor, "that these ladies had happened a little later. . . ."

The matter was settled. Nothing more of a practical nature remained to be said. But neither gentleman wished

"When the New Age is here," said Sir Richmond, "then, surely, a friendship between a man and a woman will

not be subjected to thethe inconveniences your present code would set about it? They would travel about

"The fundamental principle of the new age," said the doctor, will be Honi soit qui mal y pense. In these

matters. With perhaps Fay ce que vouldras as its next injunction. So long as other lives are not affected. In

matters of personal behaviour the world will probably be much more free and individuals much more open in

their conscience and honour than they have ever been before. In matters of property, economics and public

conduct it will probably be just the reverse. Then, there will be much more collective control and much more

insistence, legal insistence, upon individual responsibility. But we are not living in a new age yet; we are

living in the patchedup ruins of a very old one. And you if you will forgive meare living in the patched

up remains of a life that had already had its complications. This young lady, whose charm and cleverness I

admit, behaves as if the new age were already here. Well, that may be a very dangerous mistake both for her

and for you. . . . This affair, if it goes on for a few days more, may involve very serious consequences indeed,

Sir Richmond, upon the hearthrug, had a curious feeling that he was back in the head master's study at

Dr. Martineau went on with a lucidity that Sir Richmond found rather trying, to give his impression of Miss

"She is," he said, "manifestly a very expensively educated girl. And in many ways interesting. I have been

watching her. I have not been favoured with very much of her attention, but that fact has enabled me to see

her in profile. Miss Seyffert is a fairly crude mixture of frankness, insincerity and self explanatory egotism,

and I have been able to disregard a considerable amount of the conversation she has addressed to me. Now I

"H'm. WellShe impressed me as having the air of a girl who has had to solve many problems for which the

normal mother provides ready made solutions. That is how I inferred that there was no mother. I don't think

there has been any stepmother, either friendly or hostile? There hasn't been. I thought not. She has had

various governesses and companions, ladies of birth and education, engaged to look after her and she has

done exactly what she liked with them. Her manner with Miss Seyffert, an excellent manner for Miss

Seyffert, by the bye, isn't the sort of manner anyone acquires in a day. Or for one person only. She is a very

"I suppose her father adores and neglects her, and whenever she has wanted a companion or governess

butchered, the thing has been done. . . . These business Americans, I am told, neglect their womenkind, give

them money and power, let them loose on the world. . . . It is a sort of moral laziness masquerading as

affection. . . . Still I suppose custom and tradition kept this girl in her place and she was petted, honoured,

amused, talked about but not in a harmful way, and rather bored right up to the time when America came into

"You don't mean?" "No, I don't. Though that is a matter that ought to have no special interest for you. I

mean that she was surrounded by a retinue of men who wanted to marry her or who behaved as though they

wanted to marry her or who made her happiness and her gratifications and her condescensions seem a matter

of very great importance to them. She had the flattery of an extremely uncritical and unexacting admiration.

That is the sort of thing that gratifies a silly woman extremely. Miss Grammont is not silly and all this

homage and facile approval probably bored her more than she realized. To anyone too intelligent to be

steadily excited by buying things and wearing things and dancing and playing games and going to places of

entertainment, and being given flowers, sweets, jewellery, pet animals, and books bound in a special sort of

leather, the prospect of being a rich man's only daughter until such time as it becomes advisable to change

into a rich man's wealthy wife, is probably not nearly so amusing as envious people might suppose. I take it

Miss Grammont had got all she could out of that sort of thing some time before the war, and that she had

already read and thought rather more than most young women in her position. Before she was twenty I guess

she was already looking for something more interesting in the way of men than a rich admirer with an

"What would a rich girl find out there in America? I don't know. I haven't the material to guess with. In

London a girl might find a considerable variety of active, interesting men, rising politicians, university men

of distinction, artists and writers even, men of science, menthere are still such menactive in the creative

"In America I suppose there is at least an equal variety, made up of rather different types. She would find that

life was worth while to such people in a way that made the ordinary entertainments and amusements of her

life a monstrous silly waste of time. With the facility of her sex she would pick up from one of them the idea

that made life worth while for him. I am inclined to think there was someone in her case who did seem to

promise a sort of life that was worth while. And that somehow the war came to alter the look of that promise.

"I don't know. Perhaps I am only romancing. But for this young woman I am convinced this expedition to

Europe has meant experience, harsh educational experience and very profound mental disturbance. There

have been love experiences; experiences that were something more than the treats and attentions and

proposals that made up her life when she was sheltered over there. And something more than that. What it is I

don't know. The war has turned an ugly face to her. She has seen death and suffering and ruin. Perhaps she

has seen people she knew killed. Perhaps the man has been killed. Or she has met with cowardice or cruelty

or treachery where she didn't expect it. She has been shocked out of the first confidence of youth. She has

ceased to take the world for granted. It hasn't broken her but it has matured her. That I think is why history

has become real to her. Which so attracts you in her. History, for her, has ceased to be a fabric of picturesque

incidents; it is the study of a tragic struggle that still goes on. She sees history as you see it and I see it. She is

"It's just that," said Sir Richmond. "It's just that. If you see as much in Miss Grammont as all that, why don't

"I see a lot more than that. You don't know what an advantage it is to be as I am, rather cold and unresponsive

to women and unattractive and negligiblenegligible, that is the exact wordto them. YOU can't look at a

woman for five minutes without losing sight of her in a mist of imaginative excitement. Because she looks

back at you. I have the privilege of the negligiblewhich is a cool head. Miss Grammont has a startled and

matured mind, an original mind. Yes. And there is something more to be said. Her intelligence is better than

"The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than their characters. Goodness in a woman, as we

understand it, seems to imply necessarily a certain imaginative fixity. Miss Grammont has an impulsive and

adventurous character. And as I have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no discipline. . . . You also are

a person of high intelligence and defective controls. She is very much at loose ends. You on account of the

illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss Martin Leeds" "Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the

"This IS the confessional. It closes tomorrow morning but it is the confessional still. Look at the thing

frankly. You, I say, are also at loose ends. Can you deny it? My dear sir, don't we both know that ever since

we left London you have been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in petticoats that seemed to promise

you three ha'porth of kindness. A lost dog looking for a master! You're a stray man looking for a mistress.

Miss Grammont being a woman is a little more selective than that. But if she's at a loose end as I suppose, she

isn't protected by the sense of having made her selection. And she has no preconceptions of what she wants.

You are a very interesting man in many ways. You carry marriage and entanglements lightly. With an air of

being neither married nor entangled. She is quite prepared to fall in love with you."

"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an illconcealed eagerness.

Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond. "These miraclesgrotesquelyhappen," he said. "She

"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the phrase goes, what is to follow?"

Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he took counsel with them and then decided to take

"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous. You talk of falling in love as though it was impossible for a man and

woman to be deeply interested in each other without that. And the gulf in our agesin our quality! From the

Psychologist of a New Age I find this amazing. Are men and women to go on for ever separated by this

possibility into two hardly communicating and yet interpenetrating worlds? Is there never to be friendship

"You ought to know even better than I do that there is not. For such people as you two anyhow. And at

present the world is not prepared to tolerate friendship and companionship WITH that accompaniment. That

A pause fell between the two gentlemen. They had smoothed over the extreme harshness of their separation

"Well," said Sir Richmond in conclusion, "I am very sorry indeed, Martineau, that we have to part like this."

"Well," said Dr. Martineau, extending his hand to Sir Richmond on the Salisbury station platform, "I leave

"Now Sir, please," said the guard respectfully but firmly, and Dr. Martineau got in.

For a little while he thought confusedly of the collapse of his expedition into the secret places of his own

heart with Dr. Martineau, and then his prepossession with Miss Grammont resumed possession of his mind.

For the better part of forty hours, Sir Richmond had either been talking to Miss Grammont, or carrying on

imaginary conversations with her in her absence, or sleeping and dreaming dreams in which she never failed

to play a part, even if at times it was an altogether amazing and incongruous part. And as they were both very

frank and expressive people, they already knew a very great deal about each other.

For an American Miss Grammont was by no means autobiographical. She gave no sketches of her

idiosyncrasies, and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her contemporaries about herself.

She either concealed or she had lost any great interest in her own personality. But she was interested in and

curious about the people she had met in life, and her talk of them reflected a considerable amount of light

upon her own upbringing and experiences. And her liking for Sir Richmond was pleasingly manifest. She

liked his turn of thought, she watched him with a faint smile on her lips as he spoke, and she spread her

opinions before him carefully in that soft voice of hers like a shy child showing its treasures to some

Their ways of thought harmonized. They talked at first chiefly about the history of the world and the

extraordinary situation of aimlessness in a phase of ruin to which the Great War had brought all Europe, if

not all mankind. The world excited them both in the same way; as a crisis in which they were called upon to

do somethingthey did not yet clearly know what. Into this topic they peered as into some deep pool, side

The visit to Avebury had been a great success. It had been a perfect springtime day, and the little inn had

been delighted at the reappearance of Sir Richmond's car so soon after its departure. Its delight was

particularly manifest in the cream and salad it produced for lunch. Both Miss Grammont and Miss Seyffert

displayed an intelligent interest in their food. After lunch they had all gone out to the stones and the wall.

Half a dozen sunburnt children were putting one of the partially overturned megaliths to a happy use by

clambering to the top of it and sliding on their little behinds down its smooth and sloping side amidst much

Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont had walked round the old circumvallation together, but Belinda Seyffert

had strayed away from them, professing an interest in flowers. It was not so much that she felt they had to be

left together that made her do this as her own consciousness of being possessed by a devil who interrupted

When Miss Grammont was keenly interested in a conversation, then Belinda had learnt from experience that

it was wiser to go off with her devil out of the range of any temptation to interrupt.

"You really think," said Miss Grammont, "that it would be possible to take this confused old world and

reshape it, set it marching towards that new world of yoursof two hundred and fifty million fully

"Why not? Nobody is doing anything with the world except muddle about. Why not give it a direction? "

Her imagination glowed in her eyes and warmed her voice. "I believe what you say is possible. If people

"I am tired of following little motives that are like flames that go out when you get to them. I am tired of

seeing all the world doing the same. I am tired of a world in which there is nothing great but great disasters.

"I believe that as Mankind grows up this is the business Man has to settle down to and will settle down to."

"I've been getting to believe something like this. But . . . it frightens me. I suppose most of us have this

"So we just live like pigs. Sensible little piggywiggys. I've got a Committee full of that sort of thing. We live

like little modest pigs. And let the world go hang. And pride ourselves upon our freedom from the sin of

"We are afraid," she said. "It's too vast. We want bright little lives of our own. "

"First," said Sir Richmond, "as much right as a pig has to food. But whether we get life and happiness or fail

to get them we human beings who have imaginations want something more nowadays. . . . Of course we want

bright lives, of course we want happiness. Just as we want food, just as we want sleep. But when we have

eaten, when we have slept, when we have jolly things about usit is nothing. We have been made an

exception ofand got our rations. The big thing confronts us still. It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it is the

thing we have to think about. I do not know why it should be so, but I am compelled by something in my

nature to want to serve this idea of a new age for mankind. I want it as my culminating want. I want a world

"I've been talking of this sort of thing with my friend Dr. Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as

"I don't complain that you are clear and positive. I've been coming along the same way. . . . It's refreshing to

"I found it refreshing to meet Martineau." A twinge of conscience about Dr. Martineau turned Sir Richmond

into a new channel. "He's a most interesting man," he said. "Rather shy in some respects. Devoted to his

work. And he's writing a book which has saturated him in these ideas. Only two nights ago we stood here and

talked about it. The Psychology of a New Age. The world, he believes, is entering upon a new phase in its

history, the adolescence, so to speak, of mankind. It is an idea that seizes the imagination. There is a flow of

new ideas abroad, he thinks, widening realizations, unprecedented hopes and fears. There is a consciousness

of new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing the adolescence of our race. It is giving history a new

and more intimate meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer relation with public affairs,making them

matter as formerly they didn't seem to matter. That idea of the bright little private life has to go by the board."

"I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had been thinking over some such question before.

"So that I go about," she added, like someone who is looking for something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbing

Sir Richmond considered. "Incidentally," he smiled, " I want to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible

and barbaric person, your father. I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a scientific world control of

fuel production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commission in London with rather wide powers of enquiry

into the whole world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington presently with proposals. "

Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. "I suppose," she said, "poor father IS rather like an unbroken mule

in business affairs. So many of our big business men in America are. He'll lash out at you."

"Tell me what you want to do to him. You find out so many things for me that I seem to have been thinking

about in a sort of almost invisible halfconscious way. I've been suspecting for a long time that Civilization

wasn't much good unless it got people like my father under some sort of control. But controlling fatheras

distinguished from managing him!" She reviewed some private and amusing memories. "He is a most

They had gone on to talk of her father and of the types of men who controlled international business. She had

had plentiful opportunities for observation in their homes and her own. Gunter Lake, the big banker, she

knew particularly well, because, it seemed, she had been engaged or was engaged to marry him. "All these

people," she said, "are pushing things about, affecting millions of lives, hurting and disordering hundreds of

thousands of people. They don't seem to know what they are doing. They have no plans in particular. . . . And

you are getting something going that will be a plan and a direction and a conscience and a control for them?

You will find my father extremely difficult, but some of our younger men would love it.

"And," she went on; "there are American women who'd love it too. We're petted. We're kept out of things.

We aren't placed. We don't get enough to do. We're spenders and wasters not always from choice. While

these fathers and brothers and husbands of ours play about with the fuel and power and life and hope of the

world as though it was a game of poker. With all the empty unspeakable solemnity of the male. And treat us

Her eyes went back to the long, low, undulating skyline of the downs. She spoke as though she took up the

thread of some controversy that had played a large part in her life. "That isn't going on," she said with an

Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned from Salisbury station to the Old George after his

farewell to Martineau. He recalled too the soft firmness of her profile and the delicate line of her lifted chin.

He felt that this time at any rate he was not being deceived by the outward shows of a charming human being.

This young woman had real firmness of character to back up her free and independent judgments. He smiled

at the idea of any facile passion in the composition of so sure and gallant a personality. Martineau was very

fineminded in many respects, but he was an old maid; and like all old maids he saw man and woman in

every encounter. But passion was a thing men and women fell back upon when they had nothing else in

common. When they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark seemed to weave a fresh thread of

common interest, then it wasn't so necessary. It might happen, but it wasn't so necessary. . . . If it did it would

But a very lovely and wonderful companion, the companion one would not relinquish until the very last

Her views about America and about her own place in the world seemed equally fresh and original to Sir

"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen," she had said. That didn't mean that she attached very

much importance to her recently acquired vote. She evidently classified voters into the irresponsible who just

had votes and the responsible who also had a considerable amount of property as well. She had no illusions

about the power of the former class. It didn't exist. They were steered to their decisions by people employed,

directed or stimulated by "father" and his friends and associates, the owners of America, the real "responsible

citizens." Or they fell a prey to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries." But anyhow they were

steered. She herself, it was clear, was bound to become a very responsible citizen indeed. She would some

day, she laughed, be swimming in oil and such like property. Her interest in Sir Richmond's schemes for a

scientific world management of fuel was therefore, she realized, a very direct one. But it was remarkable to

Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards her. He despised and distrusted women generally,

and it was evident he had made it quite clear to her how grave an error it was on her part to persist in being a

daughter and not a son. At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was disposed to agree with father

upon that. When Mr. Grammont's sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he gave his

intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up against the machinations of adventurers by means of trustees,

partners, lawyers, advisers, agreements and suchlike complications, or for acquiring a workable son by

marriage. To this last idea it would seem the importance in her life of the rather heavily named Gunter Lake

was to be ascribed. But another mood of the old man's was distrust of anything that could not be spoken of as

his "own flesh and blood," and then he would direct his attention to a kind of masculinization of his daughter

and to schemes for giving her the completest control of all he had to leave her provided she never married nor

fell under masculine sway. "After all," he would reflect as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's

This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of seventeen from the educational care of an English

gentlewoman warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe, and thrust her for the mornings and

a moiety of the afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but competent training, into a shirt waist

and an office down town. She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern independent of Mr.

Grammont, because he feared his own people wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages

and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two

menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that

poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of

But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even for an American business man, and one

night at a dinner party he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an improper familiarity with

socialist ideas. This had produced a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of a

matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake. Gunter Lake, Sir Richmond gathered, wasn't half a bad fellow.

Generally it would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of speaking about him that suggested

that in some way Mr. Lake had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his behaviour under bad

treatment. There was some story, however, connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss

Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell. About that story Sir Richmond was left at the end of his

Avebury day and after his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely guessing.

So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated up in fragments and pieced itself together

in Sir Richmond's mind in the course of a day and a half. The fragments came up as allusions or by way of

illustration. The sustaining topic was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under scientific

control, the Utopia of fully developed people fully developing the resources of the earth. For a number of

trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr.

Martineau, and presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was justified in doing. It was true that Dr.

Martineau had not said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but also it was true that they had

not crystallized out in Sir Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea of a New Age

necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh rules of conduct and of different relationships between human

beings. And it throws those who talk about it into the companionship of a common enterprise. Tomorrow

the New Age will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure of only a few human beings.

So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to ask: "What are we to do with such types as

father?" and to fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise. They had agreed by a tacit consent to a

common conception of the world they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense organization of

mature commonsense, healthy and secure, gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet

beyond dreaming. They were prepared to think of the makers of the Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves,

of the stone age savages as a phase, in their late childhood, and of this great world order Sir Richmond

foresaw as a day where dawn was already at hand. And in such long perspectives, the states, governments and

institutions of today became very temporarylooking and replaceable structures indeed. Both these two

people found themselves thinking in this fashion with an unwonted courage and freedom because the other

one had been disposed to think in this fashion before. Sir Richmond was still turning over in his mind the

happy mutual release of the imagination this chance companionship had brought about when he found

Sir Richmond Hardy was not the only man who was thinking intently about Miss Grammont at that particular

moment. Two gentlemen were coming towards her across the Atlantic whose minds, it chanced, were very

busily occupied by her affairs. One of these was her father, who was lying in his brass bed in his commodious

cabin on the Hollandia, regretting his diminishing ability to sleep in the early morning now, even when he

was in the strong and soothing air of midAtlantic, and thinking of V.V. because she had a way of coming

into his mind when it was undefended; and the other was Mr. Gunter Lake on the Megantic, one day out from

Sandy Hook, who found himself equally sleepless and preoccupied. And although Mr. Lake was a man of

vast activities and complicated engagements he was coming now to Europe for the express purpose of seeing

V.V. and having things out with her fully and completely because, in spite of all that had happened, she made

Old Grammont as he appeared upon the pillow of his bed by the light of a roseshaded bedside lamp, was a

smallheaded, greyhaired gentleman with a wrinkled face and sunken brown eyes. Years of business

experience, mitigated only by such exercise as the game of poker affords, had intensified an instinctive

inexpressiveness. Under the most solitary circumstances old Grammont was still inexpressive, and the face

that stared at the, ceiling of his cabin and the problem of his daughter might have been the face of a pickled

head in a museum, for any indication it betrayed of the flow of thought within. He lay on his back and his

bent knees lifted the bedclothes into a sharp mountain. He was not even trying to sleep.

Why, he meditated, had V.V. stayed on in Europe so much longer than she need have done? And why had

Gunter Lake suddenly got into a state of mind about her? Why didn't the girl confide in her father at least

about these things? What was afoot? She had thrown over Lake once and it seemed she was going to turn him

down again. Well, if she was an ordinary female person that was a silly sort of thing to do. With her fortune

and hisyou could buy the world. But suppose she was not all ordinary female person. . . . Her mother

hadn't been ordinary anyhow, whatever else you called her, and no one could call Grammont blood all

ordinary fluid. . . . Old Grammont had never had any delusions about Lake. If Lake's father hadn't been a big

man Lake would never have counted for anything at all. Suppose she did turn him down. In itself that wasn't

What did matter was not whether she threw Lake over but what she threw him over for. If it was because he

wasn't man enough, well and good. But if it was for some other lover, some goodlooking, worthless

At the thought of a lover for V.V. a sudden flood of anger poured across the old man's mind, behind the still

mask of his face. It infuriated him even to think of V.V., his little V.V., his own girl, entertaining a lover,

being possibly most shameful thoughtIN LOVE! Like some ordinary silly female, sinking to kisses, to

the deeds one could buy and pay for. His V.V.! The idea infuriated and disgusted him. He fought against it as

a possibility. Once some woman in New York had ventured to hint something to him of some fellow, some

affair with an artist, Caston; she had linked this Caston with V.V.'s red cross nursing in Europe. . . . Old

Grammont had made that woman sorry she spoke. Afterwards he had caused enquiries to be made about this

Caston, careful enquiries. It seems that he and V.V. had known each other, there had been something. But

nothing that V.V. need be ashamed of. When old Grammont's enquiry man had come back with his report,

old Grammont had been very particular about that. At first the fellow had not been very clear, rather muddled

indeed as to how things wereno doubt he had wanted to make out there was something just to seem to earn

his money. Old Grammont had struck the table sharply and the eyes that looked out of his mask had blazed.

"What have you found out against her?" he had asked in a low even voice. "Absolutely nothing, Sir," said the

Old Grammont stared at his memory of that moment for a while. That affair was all right, quite all right. Of

course it was all right. And also, happily, Caston was among the dead. But it was well her broken engagement

with Lake had been resumed as though it had never been broken off. If there had been any talk that fact

answered it. And now that Lake had served his purpose old Grammont did not care in the least if he was

Old Grammont had got a phrase in his mind that looked like dominating the situation. He dreamt of saying to

V.V.: "V.V., I'm going to make a man of youif you're man enough." That was a large proposition; it

impliedoh! it implied all sorts of things. It meant that she would care as little for philandering as an able

young business man. Perhaps some day, a long time ahead, she might marry. There wasn't much reason for it,

but it might be she would not wish to be called a spinster. "Take a husband," thought old Grammont, "when I

am gone, as one takes a butler, to make the household complete." In previous meditations on his daughter's

outlook old Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the precedent of Queen Victoria. She had

had no husband of the lord and master type, so to speak, but only a Prince Consort, well in hand. Why

shouldn't the Grammont heiress dominate her male belonging, if it came to that, in the same fashion? Why

shouldn't one tie her up and tie the whole thing up, so far as any male belonging was concerned, leaving V.V.

His thoughts went back to the white face of the private enquiry agent. "Absolutely nothing, Sir." What had

the fellow thought of hinting? Nothing of that kind in V.V.'s composition, never fear. Yet it was a curious

anomaly that while one had a thousand ways of defending one's daughter and one's property against that

daughter's husband, there was no power on earth by which a father could stretch his dead hand between that

daughter and the undue influence of a lover. Unless you tied her up for good and all, lover or none. . . .

"I ought to see more of her," he thought. "She gets away from me. Just as her mother did." A man need not

suspect his womenkind but he should know what they are doing. It is duty, his protective duty to them. These

companions, these Seyffert women and so forth, were all very well in their way; there wasn't much they kept

from you if you got them cornered and asked them intently. But a father's eye is better. He must go about

with the girl for a time, watch her with other men, give her chances to talk business with him and see if she

took them. "V.V., I'm going to make a man of you," the phrase ran through his brain. The deep instinctive

jealousy of the primordial father was still strong in old Grammont's blood. It would be pleasant to go about

with her on his right hand in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and unapproachable,above that

His mind grew calmer. Whatever she wanted in Paris should be hers. He'd just let her rip. They'd be like

The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr. Grammont upon the Atlantic, were of a gentler,

more romantic character. In them V.V. was no longer a daughter in the fierce focus of a father's jealousy, but

the goddess enshrined in a good man's heart. Indeed the figure that the limelight of the reverie fell upon was

not V.V. at all but Mr. Gunter Lake himself, in his favourite role of the perfect lover.

An interminable speech unfolded itself. "I ask for nothing in return. I've never worried you about that Caston

business and I never will. Married to me you shall be as free as if you were unmarried. Don't I know, my dear

girl, that you don't love me yet. Let that be as you wish. I want nothing you are not willing to give me,

nothing at all. All I ask is the privilege of making life happyand it shall be happyfor you. . . . All I ask.

For to Mr. Gunter Lake it seemed there could be no lovelier thing in life than a wife "in name only" slowly

warmed into a glow of passion by the steadfast devotion and the strength and wisdom of a mate at first

"My darling!" Mr. Gunter Lake whispered to the darkness. "My little guurl. IT HAS BEEN WORTH THE

Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old George with a telegram in her hand. "My father

reported his latitude and longitude by wireless last night. The London people think he will be off Falmouth in

four days' time. He wants me to join his liner there and go on to Cherbourg and Paris. He's arranged that. He

is the sort of man who can arrange things like that. There'll be someone at Falmouth to look after us and put

His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old

Wessex town that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury, perched on a hill, a Saxon town,

where Alfred had gathered his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled over all

Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a

little sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views. They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk

round it. Then they would go in the afternoon through the pleasant west country where the Celts had

prevailed against the old folk of the Stonehenge temple and the Romans against the Celts and the Saxons

against the Romanized Britons and the Danes against the Saxons, a warscarred landscape, abounding in

dykes and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to Glastonbury to see what there

was to see of a marsh village the Celts had made for themselves three or four hundred years before the

Romans came. And at Glastonbury also there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey that had

once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and

sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of Europe right up to Reformation times.

"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will be like turning over the pages of the history of

our family, to and fro. There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be something from

almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge. Rome will be poorly represented, but that may come the

day after at Bath. And the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn. We will come

right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from

which the tobacco comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set sail thitherwas it yesterday or the day

before? You will understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming landto

Africa and America and the whole wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with their trade

from Africa to America, who gave you your colour problem. Bristol we may go through tomorrow and

Gloucester, mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath we'll get in somehow. And then as

an AngloAmerican showman I shall be tempted to run you northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to

go into a church here and there and show you monuments bearing little shields with the stars and stripes upon

"But England takes an American memory back most easily and most fullyto Avebury and the Baltic

Northmen, past the emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe. . . . For you and me

anyhow this is our past, this was our childhood, and this is our land." He interrupted laughing as she was

about to reply. "Well, anyhow," he said, "it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with the ripest

history in every grain of its soil. So we'll send a wire to your London people and tell them to send their

As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details of his excellent programme and revised

their impressions of the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime sunlight of Wiltshire and

Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was inevitable that

their conversation should become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They kept up the

pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet

considering its Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their position. They might profess

to be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but

old Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon the Fuel Commission became

more and more important. "What shall we do with this planet of ours? " gave way by the easiest transitions to

"What are you and I doing and what have we got to do? How do you feel about it all? What do you desire and

It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to a young woman whose interests in

fuel were even greater than his own. He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent

literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas.

He thought her attitude towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as socialism

involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources as a common property administered in the

common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of expression

for the merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a

formula for class jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she had had any illusions about the

working class possessing as a class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public impulses than

any other class, those illusions had long since departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every

He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure

of motives he found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau and with a surer confidence of

understanding. Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made them more readily

expressible than they would have been otherwise. He argued against the belief that any class could be good as

a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the conflict of motives he found in all the members of his

Committee and most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that

there was not a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable drive towards doing the right

thing about fuel, and not one who had a singleminded, unencumbered drive towards the right thing. "That,"

said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life so interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic disappointments, so

hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every man is a feeble man and every man is a good man. My motives come

and go. Yours do the same. We vary in response to the circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere,

most men will be publicspirited, rightliving, generous. Given perplexities and darkness, most of us can be

cowardly and vile. People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps that is true, but you can change

its responses endlessly. The other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with Benes, and I went to

see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols. Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a great bank

of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks.

Suddenly the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi

shirts and became one solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until one understood what had

happened. Yet nothing material had changed but the sunshine. And given a change in laws and prevailing

ideas, and the very same people who are greedy traders, grasping owners and revolting workers today will

all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working together cheerfully, even generously, for a

common end. They aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any inner necessity. Those are just

the ugly parts they play in the present drama. Which is nearly at the end of its run."

"That's a hopeful view," said Miss Grammont. "I don't see the flaw in itif there is a flaw."

"There isn't one, " said Sir Richmond. "It is my chief discovery about life. I began with the question of fuel

and the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my generalization applies to all human affairs.

Human beings are fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate idiots,I grant you. That is the brown cloak side of

them, so to speak. But they are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty well materially if once we

hammer out a sane collective method of getting and using fuel. Which people generally will understandin

the place of our present methods of snatch and wrangle. Of that I am absolutely convinced. Some work, some

help, some willingness you can get out of everybody. That's the red. And the same principle applies to most

labour and property problems, to health, to education, to population, social relationships and war and peace.

We haven't got the right system, we have inefficient halfbaked systems, or no system at all, and a wild

confusion and war of ideas in all these respects. But there is a right system possible none the less. Let us only

hammer our way through to the sane and reasonable organization in this and that and the other human affairs,

and once we have got it, we shall have got it for good. We may not live to see even the beginnings of success,

but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced organized science, if only there are a few faithful,

persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run certainly save mankind and make human life clean

"We have to find our fun in the building and in our confidence that we do really build."

"So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship," said Sir Richmond.

"Ah!" cried Sir Richmond. "There it is! So long as our confidence lasts! So long as one keeps one's mind

steady. That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss. I went to him for advice. I haven't known

him for more than a month. It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to you. It was just faith I had lost.

Suddenly I had lost my power of work. My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated. My

will failed me. I don't know if you will understand what that means. It wasn't that my reason didn't assure me

just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow that seemed

a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had gone out of it. . . . "

"I began to think now that what took the go out of me as my work went on was the lack of any real fellowship

in what I was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day afterday. It was being up

against men who didn't reason against me but who just showed by everything they did that the things I

wanted to achieve didn't matter to them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading

papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream of is

tacitly denied. I don't know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady refusal

of the majority of my Committee to come into co operation with me has beaten meor at any rate has

come very near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can FEEL their knowledge

and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more immediate things, that

seemed more real to them than this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end I have set for myself. . . ."

"If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red

when all the others still kept them selves cloakedif he was a normal sensitive manhe might have felt

something of a fool. He might have felt premature and presumptuous. Red he was and the others he knew

were red also, but why show it? That is the peculiar distress of people like ourselves, who have some sense of

history and some sense of a larger life within us than our merely personal life. We don't want to go on with

the old story merely. We want to live somehow in that larger life and to live for its greater ends and lose

something unbearable of ourselves, and in wanting to do that we are only wanting to do what nearly

everybody perhaps is ripe to do and will presently want to do. When the New Age Martineau talks about

begins to come it may come very quicklyas the red came at Prague. But for the present everyone hesitates

"I came upon this holiday in the queerest state. I thought I was ill. I thought I was overworked. But the real

trouble was a loneliness that robbed me of all driving force. Nobody seemed thinking and feeling with me. . .

. I have never realized until now what a gregarious beast man is. It needed only a day or so with Martineau, in

the atmosphere of ideas and beliefs like my own, to begin my restoration. Now as I talk to youThat is why

I have clutched at your company. Because here you are, coming from thousands of miles away, and you talk

my ideas, you fall into my ways of thought as though we had gone to the same school."

"Disappointment. Disillusionment. Having to find something better in life than the first things it promised

"But you? Disappointed? I thought that in America people might be educating already on different

Glastonbury in the afternoon was wonderful; they talked of Avalon and of that vanished legendary world of

King Arthur and his knights, and in the early evening they came to Wells and a pleasant inn, with a quaint

little garden before its front door that gave directly upon the cathedral. The three tourists devoted a golden

half hour before dinner to the sculptures on the western face. The great screen of wrought stone rose up

warmly, grey and clear and distinct against a clear blue sky in which the moon hung, round and already

bright. That western facade with its hundreds of little figures tells the whole story of God and Man from

Adam to the Last Judgment, as the mediaeval mind conceived it. It is an even fuller exposition than the

carved Bible history that goes round the chapter house at Salisbury. It presented the universe, said Sir

Richmond, as a complete crystal globe. It explained everything in life in a simple and natural manner, hope,

heaven, devil and despair. Generations had lived and died mentally within that crystal globe, convinced that it

"And now," said Miss Grammont, "we are in limitless space and time. The crystal globe is broken."

"And?" said Belinda amazinglyfor she had been silent for some time, "the goldfish are on the floor, V.V.

It was one of those sudden rhetorical triumphs that are best left alone. "I trow not," said Belinda, giving the

After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont walked round the cathedral and along by the moat of the

bishop's palace, and Miss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to her friends, a duty she had

neglected for some days. The evening was warm and still and the moon was approaching its full and very

At first the two companions talked very little. Sir Richmond was well content with this tacit friendliness and

Miss Grammont was preoccupied because she was very strongly moved to tell him things about herself that

hitherto she had told to no one. It was not merely that she wanted to tell him these things but also that for

reasons she did not put as yet very clearly to herself she thought they were things he ought to know. She

talked of herself at first in general terms. "Life comes on anyone with a rush, childhood seems lasting for ever

and then suddenly one tears into life," she said. It was even more so for women than it was for men. You are

shown life, a crowded vast spectacle full of what seems to be intensely interesting activities and endless

delightful and frightful and tragic possibilities, and you have hardly had time to look at it before you are

called upon to make decisions. And there is something in your blood that urges you to decisive acts. Your

mind, your reason resists. "Give me time," it says. "They clamour at you with treats, crowds, shows, theatres,

all sorts of things; lovers buzz at you, each trying to fix you part of his life when you are trying to get clear to

live a little of your own." Her father had had one merit at any rate. He had been jealous of her lovers and very

"I wanted a lover to love," she said. "Every girl of course wants that. I wanted to be tremendously excited. . . .

"I wasn't temperamentally a cold girl. Men interested and excited me, but there were a lot of men about and

they clashed with each other. Perhaps way down in some out of the way place I should have fallen in love

quite easily with the one man who came along. But no man fixed his image. After a year or so I think I began

to lose the power which is natural to a young girl of falling very easily into love. I became critical of the

youths and men who were attracted to me and I became analytical about myself. . . .

"I suppose it is because you and I are going to part so soon that I can speak so freely to you. . . . But there are

things about myself that I have never had out even with myself. I can talk to myself in you"

"In my composition I perceive there have always been two ruling strains. I was a spoilt child at home, a rather

reserved girl at school, keen on my dignity. I liked respect. I didn't give myself away. I suppose one would

call that personal pride. Anyhow it was that streak made me value the position of being a rich married woman

in New York. That was why I became engaged to Lake. He seemed to be as good a man as there was about.

He said he adored me and wanted me to crown his life. He wasn't illlooking or illmannered. The second

"Oh!Love of beauty, love of romance. I want to give things their proper names; I don't want to pretend to

you. . . . It was more or less than that. . . . It wasimaginative sensuousness. Why should I pretend it wasn't

"I tried to devote that streak to Lake," she said. "I did my best for him. But Lake was much too much of a

gentleman or an idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business as a lover. And that side of me

fell in love, the rest of me protesting, with a man named Caston. It was a notorious affair. Everybody in New

York couples my name with Caston. Except when my father is about. His jealousy has blasted an area of

silencein that matterall round him. He will not know of that story. And they dare not tell him. I should

Miss Grammont seemed to consider. She did not look at Sir Richmond; she kept her profile to him.

She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial. "I believe I always knew he wasn't right. But he was

very handsome. And ten years younger than Lake. And nobody else seemed to be all right, so I swallowed

that. He was an artist, a painter. Perhaps you know his work." Sir Richmond shook his head. "He could make

American business men look like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and he was beginning to

be popular. He made love to me. In exactly the way Lake didn't. If I shut my eyes to one or two things, it was

delightful. I liked it. But my father would have stood a painter as my husband almost as cheerfully as he

would a man of colour. I made a fool of myself, as people say, about Caston. Wellwhen the war came, he

talked in a way that irritated me. He talked like an East Side Annunzio, about art and war. It made me furious

"Then I relented. Or I missed him and I wanted to be made love to. Or I really wanted to go on my own

account. I forget. I forget my motives altogether now. That early war time was a queer time for everyone. A

kind of wildness got into the blood. . . . I threw over Lake. All the time things had been going on in New

York I had still been engaged to Lake. I went to France. I did good work. I did do good work. And also things

were possible that would have seemed fantastic in America. You know something of the wartime

atmosphere. There was death everywhere and people snatched at gratifications. Caston made 'Tomorrow we

die' his text. We contrived three days in Paris togethernot very cleverly. All sorts of people know about it. .

Another long pause. "They told me Caston had been killed. But someone hintedor I guessedthat there

"Nobody, I think, realizes that I know. This is the first time I have ever confessed that I do know. He

"That might happen to any man," said Sir Richmond presently. "No man is a hero all round the twentyfour

hours. Perhaps he was caught by circumstances, unprepared. He may have been taken by surprise."

"It was the most calculated, coldblooded cowardice imaginable. He let three other men go on and get killed.

"No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know nothing about. It was vile, contemptible

cowardice and meanness. It fitted in with a score of ugly little things I remembered. It explained them all. I

know the evidence and the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because they were exactly in

character. . . . And that, you see, was my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to whom I

Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed in the same even tones of careful statement. "I

wasn't disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made

him come out of a life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself, I was stunned and perplexed. I

had the clearest realization that what you and I have been calling the bright little personal life had broken off

short and was spoilt and over and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot. And there I was,

"It didn't seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of something or go to pieces. I couldn't turn to religion. I

had no religion. And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that. I had a kind of revelation one night. 'Either I

find out what all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost myself and I must forget myself by getting

hold of something bigger than myself. And becoming that. That's why I have been making a sort of historical

pilgrimage. . . . That's my story, Sir Richmond. That's my education. . . . Somehow though your troubles are

different, it seems to me that my little muddle makes me understand how it is with you. What you've got, this

idea of a scientific ordering of the world, is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been feeling

my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a

still greater economic and educational control of which it is a part. I want to make that idea a part of myself.

Rather I want to make myself a part of it. When you talk of it I believe in it altogether."

Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's confidences. His dispute with Dr. Martineau was

present in his mind, so that he did not want to make love to her. But he was extremely anxious to express his

vivid sense of the value of her friendship. And while he hesitated over this difficult and unfamiliar task she

began to talk again of herself, and in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's thoughts.

"Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself," she said; "now that I have told you so much. I did a

thing that still puzzles me. I was filled with a sense of hopeless disaster in France and I suppose I had some

sort of desperate idea of saving something out of the situation. . . . I renewed my correspondence with Gunter

Lake. He made the suggestion I knew he would make, and I renewed our engagement."

"That's always been plain to me. But what I didn't realize, until I had given my promise over again, was that I

"I hadn't thought about him sufficiently. But now I had to think about him a lot. The other affair had given me

an idea perhaps of what it means to be married to a man. And here I am drifting back to him. The horrible

thing about him is the steady ENVELOPING way in which he has always come at me. Without fellowship.

Without any community of ideas. Ready to make the most extraordinary bargains. So long as he can in any

way fix me and get me. What does it mean? What is there behind those watching, soliciting eyes of his? I

don't in the least love him, and this desire and service and all the rest of it he offers meit's not love. It's not

She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond's mind. "This is illuminating," he said. "You dislike

"And then probably you wouldn't have discovered you disliked him. You wouldn't have admitted it to

"Women do this sort of thing. Odd! I never realized it before. And there are endless wives suppressing an

acute dislike. My wife does. I see now quite clearly that she detests me. Reasonably enough. From her angle

I'm entirely detestable. But she won't admit it, won't know of it. She never will. To the end of my life, always,

she will keep that detestation unconfessed. She puts a face on the matter. We both do. And this affair of

"It is unfair to him. Atrociously unfair. He's not my sort of man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly

according to the peculiar laws of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of lover with an immense

"He backs himself to crawluntil he crawls triumphantly right over you . . . . I don't like to think of the

dream he has . . . . I take it he will lose. Is it fair to go into this game with him?"

"In the interests of Lake," she said, smiling softly at Sir Richmond in the moonlight. "But you are perfectly

"There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a civilized woman may approach one another.

Passionate desire is not enough. What is called love is not enough. Pledges, rational considerations, all these

things are worthless. All these things are compatible with hate. The primary essential is friendship, clear

understanding, absolute confidence. Then within that condition, in that elect relationship, love is permissible,

"Dear old cathedral," said Miss Grammont, a little irrelevantly. She had an air of having concluded something

that to Sir Richmond seemed scarcely to have begun. She stood looking at the great dark facade edged with

moonlight for some moments, and then turned towards the hotel, which showed a pinklit window.

"I wonder," she said, "if Belinda is still up, And what she will think when I tell her of the final extinction of

Mr. Lake. I think she rather looked forward to being the intimate friend, secrets and everything, of Mrs.

Sir Richmond woke up at dawn and he woke out of an extraordinary dream. He was saying to Miss

Grammont: "There is no other marriage than the marriage of true minds. There is no other marriage than the

marriage of true minds." He saw her as he had seen her the evening before, light and cool, coming towards

him in the moonlight from the hotel. But also in the inconsistent way of dreams he was very close to her kind,

faintly smiling face, and his eyes were wet with tears and he was kissing her hand. "My dear wife and mate,"

He woke up and stared at his dream, which faded out only very slowly before the fresh sun rise upon the red

tiles and tree boughs outside the open window, and before the first stir and clamour of the birds.

He felt like a court in which some overwhelmingly revolutionary piece of evidence had been tendered. All

the elaborate defence had broken down at one blow. He sat up on the edge of his bed, facing the new fact.

"This is monstrous and ridiculous," he said, "and Martineau judged me exactly. I am in love with her. . . . I

am head over heels in love with her. I have never been so much in love or so truly in love with anyone

That was the dawn of a long day of tension for Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont. Because each was now

vividly aware of being in love with the other and so neither was able to see how things were with the other.

They were afraid of each other. A restraint had come upon them both, a restraint that was greatly enhanced by

their sense of Belinda, acutely observant, ostentatiously tactful and selfeffacing, and prepared at the

slightest encouragement to be overwhelmingly romantic and sympathetic. Their talk waned, and was revived

to an artificial activity and waned again. The historical interest had evaporated from the west of England and

But the loveliness of the weather did not fail, and the whole day was set in Severn landscapes. They first saw

the great river like a sea with the Welsh mountains hanging in the sky behind as they came over the Mendip

crest above Shipham. They saw it again as they crossed the hill before Clifton Bridge, and so they continued,

climbing to hill crests for views at Alveston and near Dursley, and so to Gloucester and the lowest bridge and

thence back down stream again through fat meadow lands at first and much appleblossom and then over

gentle hills through wide, pale Nownham and Lidney and Alvington and Woolaston to old Chepstow and its

brown castle, always with the widening estuary to the left of them and its foaming shoals and shining sand

banks. From Chepstow they turned back north along the steep Wye gorge to Tintern, and there at the snug

little Beaufort Arms with its prim lawn and flower garden they ended the day's journey.

Tintern Abbey they thought a poor graceless mass of ruin down beside the river, and it was fenced about

jealously and locked up from their invasion. After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went for a walk

in the mingled twilight and moonlight up the hill towards Chepstow. Both of them were absurdly and

nervously pressing to Belinda to come with them, but she was far too wise to take this sudden desire for her

company seriously. Her dinner shoes, she said, were too thin. Perhaps she would change and come out a little

They passed through the garden. "I think we go up the hill? " said Sir Richmond.

Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and disconnected talk about Tintern Abbey,

concerning, which she had no history ready, and then, still lamer, about whether Monmouthshire is in

England or Wales, silence fell again. The silence lengthened, assumed a significance, a dignity that no

Her soft voice came back after a stillness. "I love you," she said, "with all myself."

"I had long ceased to hope, " said Sir Richmond, that I should ever find a friend . . . a lover . . . perfect

They went on walking side by side, without touching each other or turning to each other.

"All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive in me," she said. . . .

"Cool and sweet," said Sir Richmond. "Such happiness as I could not have imagined."

The light of a silent bicycle appeared above them up the hill and swept down upon them, lit their two still

They stopped short and stood quite still, trembling. He saw her face, dim and tender, looking up to his.

Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had desired in his dream. . . .

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat explanations of why she had not followed them,

and enlarged upon the moonlight effect of the Abbey ruins from the inn lawn. But the scared congratulations

in her eyes betrayed her recognition that momentous things had happened between the two.

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of having found such happiness as he could not have

imagined. But when he awoke in the night that happiness had evaporated. He awoke suddenly out of this love

dream that had lasted now for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of astonishment and dismay.

He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had parted also from that process of

selfexploration that they had started together, but now he awakened to find it established and in full activity

in his mind. Something or someone, a sort of etherealized MartineauHardy, an abstracted intellectual

conscience, was demanding what he thought he was doing with Miss Grammont and whither he thought he

was taking her, how he proposed to reconcile the close relationship with her that he was now embarked upon

with, in the first place, his work upon and engagements with the Fuel Commission, and, in the second place,

Martin Leeds. Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn't come into the case at all. He had done his utmost to keep

Martin Leeds out of his head throughout the development of this affair. Now in an unruly and determined

She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client but without any hostility, of the claims of Miss

Grammont to be let alone. The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had maintained to himself that he had

not made love to Miss Grammont, that their mutual attraction had been irresistible and had achieved its end

in spite of their resolute and complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind. He admitted to

himself that driven by a kind of instinctive necessity he had led their conversation step by step to a realization

and declaration of love, and that it did not exonerate him in the least that Miss Grammont had been quite

ready and willing to help him and meet him half way. She wanted love as a woman does, more than a man

does, and he had steadily presented himself as a man free to love, able to love and loving.

"She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship, and you have made her that tremendous

It was as if Martin spoke; it was her voice; it was the very quality of her thought.

"You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be interrupted or abandoned if you take her. Whatever

is not mortgaged to your work is mortgaged to me. For the strange thing in all this is that you and I love one

"You have nothing to give her but stolen goods," said the shadow of Martin. "You have nothing to give

"Think of the love that she desires and think of this love that you can give. . . .

"Is there any new thing in you that you can give her that you haven't given me? You and I know each other

very well; perhaps I know YOU too well. Haven't you loved me as much as you can love anyone? Think of

all that there has been between us that you are ready now, eager now to set aside and forget as though it had

never been. For four days you have kept me out of your mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known I

was therefor all you would not know. No one else will ever be so intimate with you as I am. We have

quarrelled together, wept together, jested happily and jested bitterly. You have spared me not at all. Pitiless

and cruel you have been to me. You have reckoned up all my faults against me as though they were sins. You

have treated me at times unlovinglynever was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes treated

me. And yet I have your loveas no other woman can ever have it. Even now when you are wildly in love

with this girl's freshness and boldness and cleverness I come into your mind by right and necessity."

"But you are the same," said the shadow of Martin with Martin's unsparing return. "Your love has never been

a steadfast thing. It comes and goes like the wind. You are an extravagantly imperfect lover. But I have learnt

to accept you, as people accept the English weather. . . . Never in all your life have you loved, wholly, fully,

steadfastlyas people deserve to be loved,not your mother nor your father, not your wife nor your

children, nor me, nor our child, nor any living thing. Pleasant to all of us at timesat times bitterly

disappointing. You do not even love this work of yours steadfastly, this work to which you sacrifice us all in

turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have these moods and changes, that is why you have these

"And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so much simpler and braver than your own, and

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and unforeseeing his treatment of Miss Grammont had

"But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a perfect love, my dear Martin, with its insatiable

jealousy, its ruthless criticism? Has the world ever seen a perfect lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection that

brings us together in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all, likely to get a more perfect love in all her

life than this poor love of mine? And isn't it good for her that she should love?"

Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the immediate question. "Perfect love," the phrase

was his point of departure. Was it true that he could not love passionately and completely? Was that

fundamentally what was the matter with him? Was that perhaps what was the matter with the whole world of

mankind? It had not yet come to that power of loving which makes action full and simple and direct and

unhesitating. Man upon his planet has not grown up to love, is still an eager, egotistical and fluctuating

adolescent. He lacks the courage to love and the wisdom to love. Love is here. But it comes and goes, it is

mixed with greeds and jealousies and cowardice and cowardly reservations. One hears it only in snatches and

single notes. It is like something tuning up before the Music begins. . . . The metaphor altogether ran away

with Sir Richmond's half dreaming mind. Some day perhaps all life would go to music.

Love was music and power. If he had loved. enough he need never have drifted away from his wife. Love

would have created love, would have tolerated and taught and inspired. Where there is perfect love there is

neither greed nor impatience. He would have done his work calmly. He would have won his way with his

"Flimsy creatures," he whispered. "Uncertain health. Uncertain strength. A will that comes and goes. Moods

of baseness. Moods of utter beastliness. . . . Love like April sunshine. April? . .."

He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high summer sunshine, into a continuing music, of

love. He thought of a world like some great playhouse in which players and orchestra and audience all

cooperate in a noble production without dissent or conflict. He thought he was the savage of thirty thousand

years ago dreaming of the great world that is still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead. His effort to see more

of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy pinnacles and to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his

The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable. He had to release Miss Grammont from the adventure into

which he had drawn her. This decision stood out sternand inevitable in his mind with no conceivable

As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its difficulty. He was profoundly in love with her, he

was still only learning how deeply, and she was not going to play a merely passive part in this affair. She was

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He could not bear to think of her

disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To

turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me. . . . It would be like playing a practical joke

upon her. It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her. . . . It would scar

Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter tomorrow and contrive by some sudden arrival of telegrams that he

had to go from her suddenly? But a mere sudden parting would not end things between them now unless he

went off abruptly without explanations or any arrangements for further communications. At the outset of this

escapade there had been a tacit but evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her father at

Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that Sir Richmond realized that now it could not end in that

fashion, that with the whisper of love and the touching of lips, something had been started that would go on,

that would develop. To break off now and go away without a word would leave a raw and torn end, would

leave her perplexed and perhaps even more humiliated with an aching mystery to distress her. "Why did he

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this problem. She and he had got into each other's lives to

stay: the real problem was the terms upon which they were to stay in each other's lives. Close association had

brought them to the point of being, in the completest sense, lovers; that could not be; and the real problem

was the transmutation of their relationship to some form compatible with his honour and her happiness. A

word, an idea, from some recent reading floated into Sir Richmond's head. "Sublimate," he whispered. "We

have to sublimate this affair. We have to put this relationship upon a Higher Plane.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart. "God! How I loathe the Higher Plane! . . . .

"God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some poor little kid who has to wear irons on its legs.

As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and Miss GrammontMiss Seyffert had probably

fallen out traversing Europe and Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit beach in the South Seas. . . .

His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and fantastic interruptions had not occurred.

"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Planeand keep it there. We two love one anotherthat

has to be admitted now. (I ought never to have touched her. I ought never to have thought of touching her.)

But we two are too high, our aims and work and obligations are too high for any ordinary love making. That

"Spoil everything," he repeated, rather like a small boy who learns an unpalatable lesson.

For a time Sir Richmond, exhausted by moral effort, lay staring at the darkness.

"It has to be done. I believe I can carry her through with it if I can carry myself. She's a finer thing than I am.

. . . On the whole I am glad it's only one more day. Belinda will be about. . . . Afterwards we can write to

each other. . . . If we can get over the next day it will be all right. Then we can write about fuel and

politicsand there won't be her voice and her presence. We shall really SUBLIMATE. . . . First class idea

sublimate! . . . . And I will go back to dear old Martin who's all alone there and miserable; I'll be kind to her

and play my part and tell her her Carbuncle scar rather becomes her. . . . And in a little while I shall be

He thought still more profoundly. "By the time the Committee meets again I shall have been tremendously

He repeated:"Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them there. Then go back to Martin. And so to the

Nothing so pacifies the mind as a clearcut purpose. Sir Richmond fell asleep during the fourth recapitulation

When Miss Grammont appeared at breakfast Sir Richmond saw at once that she too had had a restless night.

When she came into the little long breakfast room of the inn with its brown screens and its neat white tables it

seemed to him that the Miss Grammont of his nocturnal speculations, the beautiful young lady who had to be

protected and managed and loved unselfishly, vanished like some exorcised intruder. Instead was this real

dear young woman, who had been completely forgotten during the reign of her simulacrum and who now

returned completely remembered, familiar, friendly, intimate. She touched his hand for a moment, she met

She had been preparing them, poor Transatlantic exile, after the fashion in which grape fruits are prepared

upon liners and in the civilized world of the west. "He's getting us tea spoons," said Belinda, as they sat

"This is realler England than ever," she said. "I've been up an hour. I found a little path down to the river

"That's lady's smock," said Sir Richmond. "It's not really a flower; it's a quotation from Shakespeare."

Belinda, having distributed these, resumed her discourse of enthusiasm for England. She asked a score of

questions about Gloucester and Chepstow, the Severn and the Romans and the Welsh, and did not wait for

the answers. She did not want answers; she talked to keep things going. Her talk masked a certain constraint

Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin maps. "Today," he said," we will run back

to Bathfrom which it will be easy for you to train to Falmouth. We will go by Monmouth and then turn

back through the Forest of Dean, where you will get glimpses of primitive coal mines still worked by two

men and a boy with a windlass and a pail. Perhaps we will go through Cirencester. I don't know. Perhaps it is

better to go straight to Bath. In the very heart of Bath you will find yourselves in just the same world you

He paused for a moment. "We can wire to your agents from here before we start and we can pick up their

reply at Gloucester or Nailsworth or even Bath itself. So that if your father is nearer than we supposeBut I

They started, but presently they came to high banks that showed such masses of bluebells, ragged Robin,

great stitchwort and the like that Belinda was not to be restrained. She clamoured to stop the car and go up

the bank and pick her hands full, and so they drew up by the roadside and Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont

sat down near the car while Belinda carried her enthusiastic onslaught on the flowers up the steep bank and

The two lovers said unheeded things about the flowers to each other and then fell silent. Then Miss

Grammont turned her head and seemed deliberately to measure her companion's distance. Evidently she

"Well, said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. "We love one another. Is that so still?"

He looked her in the eyes. "I have been thinking of that all night," he said at last.

"That we must part. Just as we arranged it when was it? Three days or three ages ago? There is nothing else

in the world to do except for us to go our ways. . . . I love you. That means for a womanIt means that I

want to be with you. But that is impossible. . . . Don't doubt whether I love you because I sayimpossible. . .

Sir Richmond, faced with his own nocturnal decision, was now moved to oppose it flatly. "Nothing that one

She glanced again at Belinda and bent down towards him." Suppose," she said, "you got back into that car

with me; suppose that instead of going on as we have planned, you took me away. How much of us would

"And this work of yours? And your honour? For the honour of a man in this New Age of yours will be first of

all in the work he does for the world. And you will leave your work to be just a lover. And the work that I

might do because of my father's wealth; all that would vanish too. We should leave all of that, all of our

usefulness, all that much of ourselves. But what has made me love you? Just your breadth of vision, just the

sense that you mattered. What has made you love me? Just that I have understood the dream of your work.

All that we should have to leave behind. We should specialize, in our own scandal. We should run away just

for one thing. To think, by sharing the oldest, simplest, dearest indulgences in the world, that we had got each

Her face was flushed with the earnestness of her conviction. Her eyes were bright with tears. "Don't think I

don't love you. It's so hard to say all this. Somehow it seems like going back on somethingsomething

supreme. Our instincts have got us. . . . Don't think I'd hold myself from you, dear. I'd give myself to you with

both hands. I love you When a woman lovesI at any rateshe loves altogether. But this thingI am

convincedcannot be. I must go my own way, the way I have to go. My father is the man, obstinate, more

than half a savage. For meI know ithe has the jealousy of ten husbands. If you take meIf our secret

becomes manifestIf you are to take me and keep me, then his life and your life will become wholly this

Feud, nothing but this Feud. You have to fight him anyhowthat is why I of all people must keep out of the

quarrel. For him, it would be an immense excitement, full of the possibility of fierce satisfactions; for you,

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

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 toWe have to keep friends anyhow and hear of each other?"

"I thought we ought not to go on to be lovers in any way that Would affect you, touch you too closely. . . . I

"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."

"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."

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

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 today 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 how many generations yet must there be before we reach that Utopia?" Miss Grammont asked.

"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

"There are many more people think as we do than you suppose. Are you and I such very strange and

"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

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 today. 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

thwartedevery 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 selfpity, by Bolshevik fanaticism. I am

bored by these fools' squabbles that devastate the world. I am bored by Ireland, Orange and Green. Curse the

Irishnorth 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 boredI am horribly boredby 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

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 forewheel of a waggon that was turning in the road so as to block the way completely.

"I oughtMY dear. I have no right to be illtempered. 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. THATwith

"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

messbut 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'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

comethrough what we do and what we refrain from doing when there will be no bound and limited clerks

"Heighho!" cried Miss Grammont. "A thousand years ahead! When fathers are civilized. When all these

phanton people who intervene on your sideno! I don't want to know anything about them, but I know of

"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.

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 oldfashioned 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

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

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 fishingrod going to and fro along the foaming weir, and a couple of boys

"Dear England!" said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious spectacle. "How full it is of homely and lovely

"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 homecoming tourist as you are. Most of this western country I

She said nothing for a space. "I've not a word to say to night," 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. . . . SomewhereBefore

"Yes," he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely aware of the promenaders passing close to

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

"There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you," she said. "After we have parted tomorrow I shall

begin to think of them. But nowevery 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 himlike 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 ManMan whom we call in America the Common Mancan

"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 to nightin comparison with the touch of your dear

Sir Richmond paused for a moment. "I am a godless man," he said. "The stars and space and time overwhelm

"YOU are divine. . . . I'm not talking lovers' nonsense," he hastened to add. "I mean that there is something

about human beingsnot just the everyday stuff of them, but something that appears intermittentlyas

though a light shone through something translucent. If I believe in any divinity at all it is a divinity revealed

"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, timidand 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

Sir Richmond broke off abruptly. "I spent three days trying to tell this to Dr. Martineau. But he wasn't the

priest I had to confess to and the words wouldn't come. I can confess it to you readily enough . . . ."

"I cannot tell," said Miss Grammont, "whether this is the last wisdom in life or moonshine. I cannot tell

whether I am thinking or feeling; but the noise of the water going over the weir below is like the stir in my

heart. And I am swimming in love and happiness. Am I awake or am I dreaming you, and are we dreaming

one another? Hold my handhold it hard and tight. I'm trembling with love for you and all the world. . . . If I

Presently the band down below and the dancing ceased and the little lights were extinguished. The silent

moon seemed to grow brighter and larger and the whisper of the waters louder. A crowd of young people

flowed out of the gardens and passed by on their way home. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont strolled

through the dispersing crowd and over the Toll Bridge and went exploring down a little staircase that went

down from the end of the bridge to the dark river, and then came back to their old position at the parapet

looking upon the weir and the Pulteney Bridge. The gardens that had been so gay were already dark and

silent as they returned, and the streets echoed emptily to the few people who were still abroad.

"It's the most beautiful bridge in the world," said Miss Grammont, and gave him her hand again.

"I suppose we must go out of all this beauty now, back to the lights of the hotel and the watchful eyes of your

For a time she peered down at the dark figure wading in the foam below as though it was the only thing of

"I would trust Belinda with my life, she said. "And anyhow nowwe need not worry about Belinda."

At the breakfast table it was Belinda who was the most nervous of the three, the most moved, the most

disposed to throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her companions had passed beyond the idea

of separation; it was as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the high dignity of their parting. Belinda

in some way perceived they had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers; they seemed sure

of one another and with a new pride in their bearing. It would have pleased Belinda better, seeing how soon

they were to be torn apart, if they had not made quite such excellent breakfasts. She even suspected them of

having slept well. Yet yesterday they had been deeply stirred. They had stayed out late last night, so late that

she had not heard them come in. Perhaps then they had passed the climax of their emotions. Sir Richmond,

she learnt, was to take the party to Exeter, where there would be a train for Falmouth a little after two. If they

started from Bath about nine that would give them an ample margin of time in which to deal with a puncture

They crested the Mendips above Shepton Mallet, ran through Tilchester and Ilminster into the lovely hill

country about UpOttery and so to Honiton and the broad level road to Exeter. Sir Richmond and Miss

Grammont were in a state of happy gravity; they sat contentedly side by side, talking very little. They had

already made their arrangements for writing to one another. There was to be no stream of love letters or

protestations. That might prove a mutual torment. Their love was to be implicit. They were to write at

intervals about political matters and their common interests, and to keep each other informed of their

"We shall be working together," she said, speaking suddenly out of a train of thought she had been following,

"we shall be closer together than many a couple who have never spent a day apart for twenty years."

Then presently she said: "In the New Age all lovers will have to be accustomed to meeting and parting. We

women will not be tied very much by domestic needs. Unless we see fit to have children. We shall be going

about our business like men; we shall have worldwide businessesmany of usjust as men will. . . .

"Meetings and partings," she said. "Women will be used to seeing their lovers go away. Even to seeing them

go away to other women who have borne them children and who have a closer claim on them."

"But I don't mind very much. It's how things are. If I were a perfectly civilized woman I shouldn't mind at all.

If men and women are not to be tied to each other there must needs be such things as this."

"But you," said Sir Richmond. I at any rate am not like that. I cannot bear the thought that YOU"

"You need not bear it, my dear. I was just trying to imagine this world that is to be. Women I think are

different from men in their jealousy. Men are jealous of the other man; women are jealous for their

manand careless about the other woman. What I love in you I am sure about. My mind was empty when it

came to you and now it is full to overflowing. I shall feel you moving about in the same world with me. I'm

not likely to think of anyone else for a very long time. . . . Later on, who knows? I may marry. I make no

vows. But I think until I know certainly that you do not want me any more it will be impossible for me to

marry or to have a lover. I don't know, but that is how I believe it will be with me. And my mind feels

beautifully clear now and settled. I've got your idea and made it my own, your idea that we matter scarcely at

all, but that the work we do matters supremely. I'll find my rope and tug it, never fear. Half way round the

"The best thing in all my life," he said, and lowered his head and voice to say: "My dearest dear."

She smiled and nodded and suddenly Belinda, up above their lowered heads, accidentally and irrelevantly, no

At Exeter Station there was not very much time to spare after all. Hardly had Sir Richmond secured a

luncheon basket for the two travellers before the train came into the station. He parted from Miss Grammont

with a hand clasp. Belinda was flushed and distressed at the last but her friend was quiet and still. "Au

Sir Richmond stood quite still on the platform as the train ran out of the station. He did not move until it had

disappeared round the bend. Then he turned, lost in a brown study, and walked very slowly towards the

"She will go on to her father whom she knows ten thousand times more thoroughly than she knows me; she

will go on to Paris, she will pick up all the threads of her old story, be reminded of endless things in her life,

but never except in the most casual way of these days: they will be cut off from everything else that will serve

to keep them real; and as for methis connects with nothing else in my life at all. . . . It is as disconnected as

"Where are we likely to meet again? ... I never realized before how improbable it is that we shall meet again.

"Never in all our lives shall we be really TOGETHER again. It's overWith a completeness. . . .

He came opposite the bookstalls and stopped short and stared with unseeing eyes at the display of popular

literature. He was wondering now whether after all he ought to have let her go. He experienced something of

the blank amazement of a child who has burst its toy balloon. His golden globe of satisfaction in an instant

had gone. An irrational sense of loss was flooding every other feeling about V.V. If she had loved him truly

and altogether could she have left him like this? Neither of them surely had intended so complete a

A few seconds more, he realized, and he would give way to anger. Whatever happened that must not happen.

He pulled himself together. What was it he had to do now? He had not to be angry, he had not even to be

He went outside the station and stared at his car. He had to go somewhere. Of course! down into Cornwall to

Martin's cottage. He had to go down to her and be kind and comforting about that carbuncle. To be kind? . . .

If this thwarted feeling broke out into anger he might be tempted to take it out of Martin. That at any rate he

must not do. He had always for some inexplicable cause treated Martin badly. Nagged her and blamed her

and threatened her. That must stop now. No shadow of this affair must lie on Martin. . . . And Martin must

The image of Martin became very vivid in his mind. He thought of her as he had seen her many times, with

the tears close, fighting with her back to the wall, with all her wit and vigour gone, because she loved him

more steadfastly than he did her. Whatever happened he must not take it out of Martin. It was astonishing

how real she had become nowas V.V. became a dream. Yes, Martin was astonishingly real. And if only he

could go now and talk to Martinand face all the facts of life with her, even as he had done with that

He looked to see if his car was short of water or petrol; both needed replenishing, and so he would have to go

up the hill into Exeter town again. He got into his car and sat with his fingers on the electric starter.

Martin! Old Friend! Eight days were still left before the Committee met again, eight days for golden

kindness. He would distress Martin by no clumsy confession. He would just make her happy as she loved to

Incessant and insoluble dispute. Well, the thing now was to go to Martin. . . . And then the work!

"I'll take it out of the damned Commission. I'll make old Rumford Brown sit up."

He was astonished to find himself thinking of the affairs of the Commission with a lively interest and no trace

of fatigue. He had had his change; he had taken his rest; he was equal to his task again already. He started his

The Majority and Minority Reports of the Fuel Commission were received on their first publication with

much heat and disputation, but there is already a fairly general agreement that they are great and significant

documents, broadly conceived and historically important. They do lift the questions of fuel supply and

distribution high above the level of parochial jealousies and above the petty and destructive profiteering of

private owners and traders, to a view of a general human welfare. They form an important link in a series of

private and public documents that are slowly opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods

conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may yet arrest the drift of our western civilization

towards financial and commercial squalor and the social collapse that must ensue inevitably on that. In view

of the composition of the Committee, the Majority Report is in itself an amazing triumph of Sir Richmond's

views; it is astonishing that he was able to drive his opponents so far and then leave them there securely

advanced while he carried on the adherents he had altogether won, including, of course, the labour

After the Summer recess the Majority Report was discussed and adopted. Sir Richmond had shown signs of

flagging energy in June, but he had come back in September in a state of exceptional vigour; for a time he

completely dominated the Committee by the passionate force of his convictions and the illuminating scorn he

brought to bear on the various subterfuges and weakening amendments by which the meaner interests sought

to save themselves in whole or in part from the common duty of sacrifice. But toward the end he fell ill. He

had worked to the pitch of exhaustion. He neglected a cold that settled on his chest. He began to cough

persistently and betray an increasingly irritable temper. In the last fights in the Committee his face was bright

with fever and he spoke in a voiceless whisper, often a vast angry whisper. His place at table was marked

with scattered lozenges and scraps of paper torn to the minutest shreds. Such good manners as had hitherto

mitigated his behaviour on the Committee departed from him, He carried his last points, gesticulating and

coughing and wheezing rather than speaking. But he had so hammered his ideas into the Committee that they

He died of pneumonia at his own house three days after the passing of the Majority Report. The Minority

Report, his own especial creation, he never signed. It was completed by Wast and Carmichael. . . .

After their parting at Salisbury station Dr. Martineau heard very little of Sir Richmond for a time except

through the newspapers, which contained frequent allusions to the Committee. Someone told him that Sir

Richmond had been staying at Ruan in Cornwall where Martin Leeds had a cottage, and someone else had

met him at Bath on his way, he said, in his car from Cornwall to a conference with Sir Peter Davies in

But in the interim Dr. Martineau had the pleasure of meeting Lady Hardy at a luncheon party. He was seated

next to her and he found her a very pleasing and sympathetic person indeed. She talked to him freely and

simply of her husband and of the journey the two men had taken together. Either she knew nothing of the

circumstances of their parting or if she did she did not betray her knowledge. "That holiday did him a world

of good," she said. "He came back to his work like a giant. I feel very grateful to you."

Dr. Martineau said it was a pleasure to have helped Sir Richmond's work in any way. He believed in him

"Forgive me if I keep you talking about him," said Lady Hardy. "I wish I could feel as sure that I had been of

"I do what I can to help him carry his enormous burthen of toil" she said. "I try to smooth his path. But he is a

It was not the doctor's business to supplement Sir Richmond's silences. Yet he wished to meet the

requirements of this lady if he could. "He is one of those men," he said, "who are driven by forces they do not

"Yes," she said in an undertone of intimacy. Genius. . . . A great irresponsible genius. . . . Difficult to help. . .

A very sweet and charming lady. It was with great regret that the doctor found the time had come to turn to

It was with some surprise that Dr. Martineau received a fresh appeal for aid from Sir Richmond. It was late in

October and Sir Richmond was already seriously ill. But he was still going about his business as though he

was perfectly well. He had not mistaken his man. Dr. Martineau received him as though there had never been

He came straight to the point. "Martineau," he said, "I must have those drugs I asked you for when first I

came to you now. I must be bolstered up. I can't last out unless I am. I'm at the end of my energy. I come to

you because you will understand. The Commission can't go on now for more than another three weeks.

The doctor did understand. He made no vain objections. He did what he could to patch up his friend for his

last struggles with the opposition in the Committee. "Pro forma," he said, stethoscope in hand, "I must order

you to bed. You won't go. But I order you. You must know that what you are doing is risking your life. Your

lungs are congested, the bronchial tubes already. That may spread at any time. If this open weather lasts you

may go about and still pull through. But at any time this may pass into pneumonia. And there's not much in

"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

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

"Forgive my sending for you," he said. "Not your line. I know. . . . My wife's G.P.an exasperating sort of

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 bedclothes 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 businesslike 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

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

"I am afraid you are very ill," he said, returning to the bedside. "This is not, as you say, my sort of work. Will

"He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for the caseand 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

An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond's face. He seemed to regard the matter as settled.

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

"A case of pneumonia," said the doctor, "after great exertion and fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected

"I think if you want to be sure that Lady Hardy sees you again . . . If you don't want to take risks about

Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning. But he stuck to his point. His voice was faint but firm.

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

Sir Richmond turned his head to Dr. Martineau. His face puckered like a peevish child's. "They'd want things

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 sayafter 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

For a time Sir Richmond dozed. Then he stirred and muttered. "Second rate. . . Poor at the best. . . Love. . .

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

His voice sank to the faintest whisper. "Done for ever and ever ... and ever . . . and ever."

Dr. Martineau stood up softly. Something beyond reason told him 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 goodbye to him, and for Sir Richmond to say goodbye to someone. He hated this

lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had sought intimacy so persistently and vainly. It was

extraordinaryhe saw it now for the first timehe loved this man. If it had been in his power, he would at

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

"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

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 deathbed 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

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

Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide the beginnings of some strange long journey or

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

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

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

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

He lay very still for some moments and then he sat up in bed. An overwhelming conviction had arisenin

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

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

seriouslooking woman of the dressmaker type. She left her business at once to come to him. "Why did I not

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

"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"

"He was always, you know, not quite here . . . . It is as if he were a little more not quite here . . . . I can't

She asked a number of questions and took the doctor's advice upon various details of the arrangements. "My

daughter Helen comes home tomorrow 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 affection 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 whichshe wanted the doctor's advice upon this

pointshe 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

"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 itunreasonably. 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."

It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr. Martineau by telephone. "Something rather

"It is frightfully distressing," she said when he got round to her, and for a time she could tell him nothing

more. She was having tea and she gave him some. She fussed about with cream and cakes and biscuits. He

"He talked, I know, very intimately with you," she said, coming to it at last. "He probably went into things

with you that he never talked about with anyone else. Usually he was very reserved, Even with me there were

"We did," said Dr. Martineau with discretion, "deal a little with his private life.

Dr. Martineau nodded and then, not to be too portentous, took and bit a biscuit.

Dr. Martineau seemed to reflect. Then realizing that this was a mistake, he said: "He told me the essential

The poor lady breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm glad," she said simply. She repeated, "Yes, I'm glad. It makes

"Here! And Helen here! And the servants noticing everything! I've never met her. Never set eyes on her. For

all I know she may want to make a scene." There was infinite dismay in her voice.

"I don't want to refuse her. I don't want even to seem heartless. I understand, of course, she has a sort of

claim. " She sobbed her reluctant admission. "I know it. I know. . . . There was much between them."

Dr. Martineau pressed the limp hand upon the little tea table. "I understand, dear lady," he said. "I understand.

Now . . . suppose _I_ were to write to her and arrangeI do not see that you need be put to the pain of

The doctor was quite prepared to save the lady any further distresses, no matter at what trouble to himself.

"We will get it over tomorrow," he reassured her. "You need not think of it again."

He took over Martin's brief note to Lady Hardy and set to work by telegram to arrange for her visit. She was

in London at her Chelsea flat and easily accessible. She was to come to the house at midday on the morrow,

and to ask not for Lady Hardy but for him. He would stay by her while she was in the house, and it would be

quite easy for Lady Hardy to keep herself and her daughter out of the way. They could, for example, go out

quietly to the dressmakers in the closed car, for many little things about the mourning still remained to be

Miss Martin Leeds arrived punctually, but the doctor was well ahead of his time and ready to receive her. She

was ushered into the drawing room where he awaited her. As she came forward the doctor first perceived that

she had a very sad and handsome face, the face of a sensitive youth rather than the face of a woman. She had

fine grey eyes under very fine brows; they were eyes that at other times might have laughed very agreeably,

but which were now full of an unrestrained sadness. Her brown hair was very untidy and parted at the side

like a man's. Then he noted that she seemed to be very untidily dressed as if she was that rare and, to him,

very offensive thing, a woman careless of her beauty. She was short in proportion to her broad figure and her

"You are Dr. Martineau?" she said. "He talked of you." As she spoke her glance went from him to the

pictures that stood about the room. She walked up to the painting and stood in front of it with her distressed

gaze wandering about her. "Horrible!" she said. "Absolutely horrible! . . . Did SHE do this?"

Her question disconcerted the doctor very much. "You mean Lady Hardy?" he asked. "She doesn't paint."

"None of them are a bit like him. They are like blows aimed at his memory. Not one has his life in it. How

could she do it? Look at that idiot statuette! . . . He was extraordinarily difficult to get. I have burnt every

photograph I had of him. For fear that this would happen; that he would go stiff and formaljust as you have

got him here. I have been trying to sketch him almost all the time since he died. But I can't get him back. He's

She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if she expected him to understand her, but because

she had to say these things which burthened her mind to someone. "I have done hundreds of sketches. My

room is littered with them. When you turn them over he seems to be lurking among them. But not one of

She was trying to express something beyond her power. "It is as if someone had suddenly turned out the

They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay. Dr. Martineau, struck by a sudden memory,

glanced nervously at the desk, but someone had made it quite tidy and the portrait of Aliss Grammont had

disappeared. Miss Leeds walked straight across to the coffin and stood looking down on the waxen

inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir Richmond's brows and nose had become sharper and more clearcut

than they had ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane smile. She stood quite still for a long

She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as though she talked at that silent presence in the

coffin. "I think he loved," she said. "Sometimes I think he loved me. But it is hard to tell. He was kind. He

could be intensely kind and yet he didn't seem to care for you. He could be intensely selfish and yet he

certainly did not care for himself. . . . Anyhow, I loved HIM. . . . There is nothing left in me now to love

She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man with her head a little on one side. "Too kind,"

"There was a sort of dishonesty in his kindness. He would not let you have the bitter truth. He would not say

"He was too kind to life ever to call it the foolish thing it is. He took it seriously because it takes itself

She turned to Dr. Martineau and her face was streaming with tears. "And life, you know, isn't to be taken

seriously. It is a jokea bad jokemade by some cruel little god who has caught a neglected planet. . . .

Like torturing a stray cat. . . . But he took it seriously and he gave up his life for it.

"There was much happiness he might have had. He was very capable of happiness. But he never seemed

happy. This work of his came before it. He overworked and fretted our happiness away. He sacrificed his

She held out her hands towards the doctor. "What am I to do now with the rest of my life? Who is there to

She turned back to the coffin. Suddenly she lost every vestige of selfcontrol. She sank down on her knees

It was a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful. She beat her hands upon the coffin. She wept

He wished he had locked the door. The servants might hear and wonder what it was all about. Always he had

feared love for the cruel thing it was, but now it seemed to him for the first time that he realized its monstrous