The Secret Places of the Heart (7 page)

"Sir Richmond does, after all, make out a sort of case for himself....

"A valid case?"

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 personal element?"

He pulled a sheet of note-paper towards him and began to jot down notes
with a silver-cased pencil. Soon he discontinued writing and sat tapping
his pencil-case on the table. "The amazing selfishness of his attitude!
I do not think that once—not once—has he judged any woman except as
a contributor to his energy and peace of mind.... Except in the case of
his wife....

"For her his habit of respect was formed before his ideas developed....

"That I think explains HER....

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

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

"By any standards?"

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 excesses of enterprise.

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 well-being 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 divorce-law 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 return to the comfortable point of inaction from which he
started.

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 was necessary to continued vigour of action.

"To energy of thought it is not necessary," said Dr. Martineau, and
considered for a time. "Yet—certainly—I am not a man of action. I
admit it. I make few decisions."

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 family-herd 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 doctor, and made a note of the word for later consideration.

"And woman has trivialized civilization," the doctor tried.

"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 no direction in her any
more.

"She spends," said the doctor, "she just spends. She spends excitingly
and competitively for her own pride and glory, she drives all the energy
of men over the weirs of gain....

"What are we to do with the creature?" whispered the doctor.

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 analyses.

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

After some musing he crossed out "sex" and wrote above it "sexual love."

"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 tried it already. The thing is
impossible."

"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
energy—as 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 race...."

A vision of women made responsible floated before his eyes.

"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 quite uncombed and infested with vulgar, showy ideas...."

The doctor laughed, telescoped his pencil and stood up.

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

He and Dr. Martineau sat in wide-armed 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, but remotely enough to be indistinct and agreeable.

"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 doesn't usually..."

"It was very illuminating," said the doctor.

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

The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor's face.

"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 star-dusted zenith, "what is your idea of your
work? I mean, how do you see it in relation to yourself—and things
generally?"

"Put in the most general terms?"

"Put in the most general terms."

"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 of taking control of it."