The Secret Places of the Heart

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

FULL MOON

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 self-exploration 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 Martineau-Hardy, 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 way that was extremely characteristic of her she seemed resolute to break in.

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 promise. That was implicit in your embrace. And how can you keep that promise?”

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 another – and have no power to do otherwise. In spite of all this.

“You have nothing to give her but stolen goods,” said the shadow of Martin. “You have nothing to give anyone personally any more…

“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 there – for 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 unlovingly – never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes treated me. And yet I have your love – as 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.”

“She is different,” argued Sir Richmond.

“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, steadfastly – as 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 times – at 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 lassitudes. So it is you are made…

“And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so much simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it – as you can do – and then fail it, as you will do…”

Sir Richmond’s mind and body lay very still for a time.

“Should I fail her?..”

For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his mind.

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and unforeseeing his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had been just a blind drive to get hold of her and possess her…

Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence again.

“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?”

“Perfect love cherishes. Perfect love foregoes.”

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 Committee instead of fighting and quarrelling with it perpetually…

“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 co-operate 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 dream and left him awake again and wrestling with the problem of Miss Grammont.

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 stern-and inevitable in his mind with no conceivable alternative.

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 perhaps as deeply in love with him…

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 her with a second humiliation…”

Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow 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 go? Was it something I said? – something he found out or imagined?”

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.”

His mind stopped short at that.

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.”

“I WANT her… Do you hear, Martin? I want her.”

As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and Miss Grammont – Miss 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 Plane – and keep it there. We two love one another – that 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 sort of thing would embarrass us, would spoil everything.

“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 politics – and 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 altogether in love with her again.

“Queer what a brute I’ve always been to Martin.”

“Queer that Martin can come in a dream to me and take the upper hand with me.

“Queer that NOW – I love Martin.”

He thought still more profoundly. “By the time the Committee meets again I shall have been tremendously refreshed.”

He repeated: – “Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them there. Then go back to Martin. And so to the work. That’s it…”

Nothing so pacifies the mind as a clear-cut purpose. Sir Richmond fell asleep during the fourth recapitulation of this programme.

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 his eyes with the shadow of a smile in her own.

“Oranges!” said Belinda from the table by the window. “Beautiful oranges.”

She had been preparing them, poor Trans-atlantic 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 down.

“This is realler England than ever,” she said. “I’ve been up an hour. I found a little path down to the river bank. It’s the greenest morning world and full of wild flowers. Look at these.”

“That’s lady’s smock,” said Sir Richmond. “It’s not really a flower; it’s a quotation from Shakespeare.”

“And there are cowslips!”

“CUCKOO BUDS OF YELLOW HUE. DO PAINT THE MEADOWS WITH DELIGHT. All the English flowers come out of Shakespeare. I don’t know what we did before his time.”

The waiter arrived with the tea spoons for the oranges.

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 that came upon her companions after the first morning’s greetings were over.

Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin maps. “To-day,” he said, “we will run back to Bath – from 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 visited at Pompeii. Bath is Pompeii overlaid by Jane Austen’s England.”

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 suppose – But I think to-morrow afternoon will be soon enough for Falmouth, anyhow.”

He stopped interrogatively.

Miss Grammont’s face was white. “That will do very well,” she said.

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 presently out of earshot.

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 judged her out of earshot.

“Well,” said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. “We love one another. Is that so still?”

“I could not love you more.”

“It wasn’t a dream?”

“No.”

“And to-morrow we part?”

He looked her in the eyes. “I have been thinking of that all night,” he said at last.

“I too.”

“And you think – ?”

“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 woman – It means that I want to be with you. But that is impossible… Don’t doubt whether I love you because I say – impossible…”

Sir Richmond, faced with his own nocturnal decision, was now moved to oppose it flatly. “Nothing that one can do is impossible.”

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 go?”

“You would go,” said Sir Richmond, “and my heart.”

“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 other. When really we had lost each other, lost all that mattered…”

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 something – something 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 loves – I at any rate – she loves altogether. But this thing – I am convinced – cannot 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 me – I know it – he has the jealousy of ten husbands. If you take me – If our secret becomes manifest – If 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 anyhow – that 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, whether you won me or lost me, it would be utter waste and ruin.”

She paused and then went on: – “And for me too, waste and ruin. I shall be a woman fought over. I shall be fought over as dogs fight over a bone. I shall sink back to the level of Helen of Troy. I shall cease to be a free citizen, a responsible free person. Whether you win me or lose me it will be waste and ruin for us both. Your Fuel Commission will go to pieces, all the wide, enduring work you have set me dreaming about will go the same way. We shall just be another romantic story… No!”

Sir Richmond sat still, a little like a sullen child, she thought. “I hate all this,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think of your father before, and now I think of him it sets me bristling for a fight. It makes all this harder to give up. And yet, do you know, in the night I was thinking, I was coming to conclusions, very like yours. For quite other reasons. I thought we ought not to – We have to keep friends anyhow and hear of each other?”

“That goes without saying.”

“I thought we ought not to go on to be lovers in any way that Would affect you, touch you too closely… I was sorry – I had kissed you.”

“Not I. No. Don’t be sorry for that. I am glad we have fallen in love, more glad than I have been of anything else in my life, and glad we have spoken plainly… Though we have to part. And – ”

Her whisper came close to him. “For a whole day yet, all round the clock twice, you and I have one another.”

Miss Seyffert began speaking as soon as she was well within earshot.

“I don’t know the name of a single one of these flowers,” she cried, “except the bluebells. Look at this great handful I’ve gotten! Springtime in Italy doesn’t compare with it, not for a moment.”

Because Belinda Seyffert was in the dicky behind them with her alert interest in their emotions all too thinly and obviously veiled, it seemed more convenient to Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont to talk not of themselves but of Man and Woman and of that New Age according to the prophet Martineau, which Sir Richmond had partly described and mainly invented and ascribed to his departed friend. They talked anthropologically, philosophically, speculatively, with an absurd pretence of detachment, they sat side by side in the little car, scarcely glancing at one another, but side by side and touching each other, and all the while they were filled with tenderness and love and hunger for one another.

In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile imaginations. That brief journey in the west country had lit up phase after phase in the long teaching and discipline of man as he had developed depth of memory and fixity of purpose out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming childhood of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now, and how, as they had followed one another, man’s idea of woman and woman’s idea of man had changed with them, until nowadays in the minds of civilized men brute desire and possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free mutual loyalty. “Overlaid,” he said. “The older passions are still there like the fires in an engine.” He invented a saying for Dr. Martineau that the Man in us to-day was still the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his will, his wrath against the universe increased rather than diminished. If to-day he ceases to crack his brother’s bones and rape and bully his womenkind, it is because he has grown up to a greater game and means to crack this world and feed upon its marrow and wrench their secrets from the stars.

And furthermore it would seem that the prophet Martineau had declared that in this New Age that was presently to dawn for mankind, jealousy was to be disciplined even as we had disciplined lust and anger; instead of ruling our law it was to be ruled by law and custom. No longer were the jealousy of strange peoples, the jealousy of ownership and the jealousy of sex to determine the framework of human life. There was to be one peace and law throughout the world, one economic scheme and a universal freedom for men and women to possess and give themselves.

“And how many generations yet must there be before we reach that Utopia?” Miss Grammont asked.

“I wouldn’t put it at a very great distance.”

“But think of all the confusions of the world!”

“Confusions merely. The world is just a muddle of states and religions and theories and stupidities. There are great lumps of disorderly strength in it, but as a whole it is a weak world. It goes on by habit. There’s no great idea in possession and the only possible great idea is this one. The New Age may be nearer than we dare to suppose.”