Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Secret Places of the Heart
“It was the most calculated, cold-blooded 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 had given myself with both hands.”
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, with fifty years of life left in me and nothing particular to do with them.”
“That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.
“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.”
“And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you.”
Section 9
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.”
“To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t love him?”
“That’s always been plain to me. But what I didn’t realize, until I had given my promise over again, was that I dislike him acutely.”
“You hadn’t realized that before?”
“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 me – it’s not love. It’s not even such love as Caston gave me. It’s a game he plays with his imagination.”
She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond’s mind. “This is illuminating,” he said. “You dislike Lake acutely. You always have disliked him.”
“I suppose I have. But it’s only now I admit it to myself.”
“Yes. And you might, for example, have married him in New York before the war.”
“It came very near to that.”
“And then probably you wouldn’t have discovered you disliked him. You wouldn’t have admitted it to yourself.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t. I suppose I should have tried to believe I loved him.”
“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 yours… Have you thought how unjust it is to Lake?”
“Not nearly so much as I might have done.”
“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 self-conceit at the back of his crawlingness.”
“He has,” she endorsed.
“He backs himself to crawl – until 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 right.”
“And suppose he doesn’t lose!”
Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.
“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, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will – all things are permissible…”
Came a long pause between them.
“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 pink-lit 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. Gunter Lake.”
Section 10
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 was saying, and suddenly he was kissing her cool lips.
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 before.”
Section 11
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 self-effacing, 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 left only an urgent and embarrassing present.
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 apple-blossom 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 later. “Yes, come later,” said Miss Grammont and led the way to the door.
They passed through the garden. “I think we go up the hill? “ said Sir Richmond.
“Yes,” she agreed, “up the hill.”
Followed a silence.
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 common words might break.
Then Sir Richmond spoke. “I love, you,” he said, “with all my heart.”
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 companionship…”
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 faces brightly and passed.
“My dear,” she whispered in the darkness between the high hedges.
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.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
FULL MOON
Section 1
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.
Section 2
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.
Section 3
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.
Section 4
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…”
