The Secret Places of the Heart

“But you ought to know.”

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

“A day will come when we shall be able to manipulate drugs – all sorts of drugs – and 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.”

“I’ve been taking a few little things already. Easton Syrup for example.”

“Strychnine. It carries you for a time and drops you by the way. Has it done you any good – any NETT good? It has – I can see – broken your sleep.”

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 – worried – ill 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 whole – find out where you stand.

“But the Fuel Commission?”

“Is it sitting now?”

“Adjourned till after Whitsuntide. But there’s heaps of work to be done.

“Still,” he added, “this is my one chance of any treatment.”

The doctor made a little calculation. “Three weeks… It’s scarcely time enough to begin.”

“You’re certain that no regimen of carefully planned and chosen tonics – ”

“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 beginning now. In this three weeks. Suppose…”

Sir Richmond leapt to his thought. “I’m free to go anywhere.”

“Golf would drive a man of your composition mad?”

“It would.”

“That’s that. Still – . The country must be getting beautiful again now, – after all the rain we have had. I have a little two-seater. 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?”

“That might be more convenient.”

“I’d prefer my own car.”

“Then what do you say?”

“I agree. Peripatetic treatment.”

“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?”

“I always drive myself.”

Section 3

“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 self-betrayals of the railway approach. And everything will be fresh still. There will still be a lot of apple-blossom – and bluebells… And all the while we can be getting on with your affair.”

He was back at the window now. “I want the holiday myself,” he said.

He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder. “Have you noted how fagged and unstable EVERYBODY is getting? Everybody intelligent, I mean.”

“It’s an infernally worrying time.”

“Exactly. Everybody suffers.”

“It’s no GOOD going on in the old ways – ”

“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 become – how 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 and – nothing 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 fifty-seven and I feel at times nowadays like a chicken new hatched in a thunderstorm.”

The doctor walked towards the bookcase and turned.

“Everybody is like that…it isn’t – what are you going to do? It isn’t – what am I going to do? It’s – what 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 wars – little wars – that 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 safe – for 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 else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I never enquired.”

“Nor did I,” said Sir Richmond, “but – ”

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

“I realized that. I – ”

“It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by faith – as 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.’”

“If we could go on like that!” said Sir Richmond.

“We can’t. That faith is dead. The war – and the peace – have killed it.”

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-seeking – incoherent… a stampede… Human sanity may – DISPERSE.

“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 are – loose. 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 New Age has still to develop.”

Section 4

“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 think – much 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 civilization – while 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, misbehaves.”

“Exactly.”

The word irritated Sir Richmond. “Not ‘exactly’ at all. ‘Amazingly,’ if you like… I have this unlimited faith in our present tremendous necessity – for work – for devotion; I believe my share, the work I am doing, is essential to the whole thing – and I work sluggishly. I work reluctantly. I work damnably.”