The Secret Places of the Heart

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is hand to Sir Richmond on the Salisbur

little or no vestiges of

ve me to it?" smi

erested to lear

u won't st

guard respectfully but firml

oughtfully down the pl

?" he asked aloud to

the secret places of his own heart with Dr. Martineau, and then his prepossessio

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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 ama

n 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 manife

n 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 t

rly 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

yed away from them, professing an interest in flowers. It was not so much that she felt they had to be left tog

n Belinda had learnt from experience that it was wiser to go of

confused old world and reshape it, set it marching towards that new world of you

g with the world except muddle ab

t in your han

t of recalcitrant, uninte

nd warmed her voice. "I believe what

. I am tired of seeing all the world doing the same. I am tired of a world in which there is

d w

this is the business Man has to sett

nsider

--... it frightens me. I suppose most of us have this

full of that sort of thing. We live like little modest pigs. And let the wor

quite

ow do yo

"It's too vast. We want bri

sible little

ght to life--

ood, just as we want sleep. But when we have eaten, when we have slept, when we have jolly things about us--it is nothing. We have been made an exception of--and got our rations. The big thing confronts us still. It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it is the thing we h

f it," she said wi

befor

it clear. It wasn

nd Dr. Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as t

positive. I've been coming along the sa

bout 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 p

atively, as though she had been thi

he said, "has a way o

led fast and broke out

f work cut out for yo

Yes, I

n't," s

oking for something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbin

er. I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commissio

father IS rather like an unbroken mule in business affairs. So ma

he lashes out openly i

nd turned on Sir

-conscious 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 con

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se, 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 ar

nd 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

't go on,

s though she took up the thread of some controversy that had played a large part

oman 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 fine-minded 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 m

he companion one would not relinquish until

own place in the world seemed equall

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 herse

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

g, 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 au

ea 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 beha

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

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 to-day became very temporary-looking and replace

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ndia, regretting his diminishing ability to sleep in the early morning now, even when he was in the strong and soothing air of mid-Atlantic, 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 equa

ercise 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 dau

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 his--you 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, a

If it was because he wasn't man enough, well and good. But if it was for some other l

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 re

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 a

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. Sh

lm of the sunken b

tion, 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 p

the mercy of V.V

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

ng to make a m

ris should be hers. He'd just let her rip. They

dozed off i

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.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 figur

ll 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

"in name only" slowly warmed into a glow of passion by the steadfast devotion and th

red to the darkness. "My little guur

tio

on 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

erset," said

amily 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 war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to

e 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 thither--was it yesterday or the day before? You will understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming land--to 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

ngland that America cam

. 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 beautifu

she said, "to be qu

tio

rceptible 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 d

ause 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 c

cumbered 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 public-spirited, right-living, 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 me

iss Grammont. "I don't see the

stand--in 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 half-baked 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 t

or us--in

serve, we don't matter.

he building and in our confid

lasts there is no great h

fidence lasts," she

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 tha

arrested by a

I tell you these

them me,

atient in a hydropath r

No. G

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-o

pau

Grammont. "I think

I know I

e right. I'm c

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 un

es unbearable," she sa

ith 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

gone to the same

u m

ing to find something better in life

that in America people might be ed

ammont said, "crops only g

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es 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 expo

we are in limitless space and ti

ilent for some time, "the goldfish are on the flo

phs that are best left alone. "I trow not,"

ss Seyffert stayed in the hotel to send off postcards to her friends, a duty she had neglected for some days. The evening w

elf 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 d

se wants that. I wanted to be tremendously excited.... An

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

an speak so freely to you.... But there are things about myself that

. "I know exactly,

y. 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 b

opped

treak," said

t want to pretend to you.... It was more or less than that.... It was--imaginative sens

In all properly c

ver. 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

of man was

. She did not look at Sir Richmo

eliberately, "a very

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 a

a moment. "He

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

rt. "Well?" sai

id di

n killed. But someone hinted--or I guessed--that

the first time I have ever confessed that I do

an is a hero all round the twenty-four hours. Perhaps he was caugh

oded cowardice imaginable. He let thr

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 we

ad 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 perso

prelude to life,

igger 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 y

n it, when I tal

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ot 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 o

e. 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 th

wealth and dign

es

don't l

didn't realize, until I had given my promise

realized t

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 be

ond's mind. "This is illuminating," he said. "You

But it's only now I

xample, have married him i

very near

discovered you disliked him. You wo

suppose I should have trie

t 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, alwa

much as I mig

ill hurt him cruelly according to the peculiar laws of his being. He seems to me a c

," she

over you.... I don't like to think of the dream he has.... I

miling softly at Sir Richmond in the mo

se he does

und himself utt

Pledges, rational considerations, all these things are worthless. All these things are compatible with hate. The primary essential is friendship, clear understanding, abso

g pause be

ething that to Sir Richmond seemed scarcely to have begun. She stood looking at the great dark facade e

tell her of the final extinction of Mr. Lake. I think she rather looked forw

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an 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 h

before the fresh sun rise upon the red tiles and tree boughs outsid

of evidence had been tendered. All the elaborate defence had broken do

actly. I am in love with her.... I am head over heels in love with her.

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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 ov

hey 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

or 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 sud

rden. "I think we go up th

agreed, "up

ed a s

which she had no history ready, and then, still lamer, about whether Monmouthshire is in England or Wales, s

. "I love, you," he sai

er a stillness. "I love you,

chmond, "that I should ever find a frien

side, without touching each o

o think I believe have com

Richmond. "Such happiness a

them up the hill and swept down upon them,

red in the darkness b

still, trembling. He saw her face

s and kissed her lips as he

them, and enlarged upon the moonlight effect of the Abbey ruins from the inn lawn. But the scared con