The Secret Places of the Heart

“A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very closely with my own ideas.”

“A world conscience? World conscience? I don’t know. But I do know that there is this drive in nearly every member of the Committee, some drive anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is the same drive that drives me. But I am the most driven. It has turned me round. It hasn’t turned them. I go East and they go West. And they don’t want to be turned round. Tremendously, they don’t.”

“Creative undertow,” said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were. “An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology of a new age strengthened by education – it may play a directive part.”

“They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this creative undertow – if you like to call it that – we do get along. I am leader or whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of a bolting flock…I believe they will report for a permanent world commission; I believe I have got them up to that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this League of Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-tracking arrangement for all sorts of important world issues. And they will find they have to report for some sort of control. But there again they will shy. They will report for it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They will alter the composition of the Committee so as to make it innocuous.”

“How?”

“Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far as Britain is concerned with muck of the colonial politician type and tame labour representatives, balance with shady new adventurer millionaires, get in still shadier stuff from abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame experts after their own hearts, – experts who will make merely advisory reports, which will not be published…”

“They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?”

“That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing right – indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing right – and still leave things just exactly what they were before. And as I suffer under the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee… But there is a conscience there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee.”

He turned appealingly to the doctor. “Why should I have to be the conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this exhausting inhuman job?.. In their hearts these others know… Only they won’t know… Why should it fall on me?”

“You have to go through with it,” said Dr. Martineau.

“I have to go through with it, but it’s a hell of utterly inglorious squabbling. They bait me. They have been fighting the same fight within themselves that they fight with me. They know exactly where I am, that I too am doing my job against internal friction. The one thing before all others that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high horse. And I loathe the high horse. I am in a position of special moral superiority to men who are on the whole as good men as I am or better. That shows all the time. You see the sort of man I am. I’ve a broad streak of personal vanity. I fag easily. I’m short-tempered. I’ve other things, as you perceive. When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore, I get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable sense of ill usage. Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be working with me steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly witty. He gets a laugh round the table at my expense. Young Dent, the more intelligent of the labour men, reads me a lecture in committee manners. Old Cassidy sees HIS opening and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me spluttering self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down, and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not bother any more about what is to happen to mankind in the long run… Do you begin to realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin, that that Committee is for me?”

“You have to go through with it,” Dr. Martineau repeated.

“I have. If I can. But I warn you I have been near breaking point. And if I tumble off the high horse, if I can’t keep going regularly there to ride the moral high horse, that Committee will slump into utter scoundrelism. It will turn out a long, inconsistent, botched, unreadable report that will back up all sorts of humbugging bargains and sham settlements. It will contain some half-baked scheme to pacify the miners at the expense of the general welfare. It won’t even succeed in doing that. But in the general confusion old Cassidy will get away with a series of hauls that may run into millions. Which will last his time – damn him! And that is where we are… Oh! I know! I know!.. I must do this job. I don’t need any telling that my life will be nothing and mean nothing unless I bring this thing through…

“But the thanklessness of playing this lone hand!”

The doctor watched his friend’s resentful black silhouette against the lights on the steely river, and said nothing for awhile.

“Why did I ever undertake to play it?” Sir Richmond appealed. “Why has it been put upon me? Seeing what a poor thing I am, why am I not a poor thing altogether?”

Section 8

“I think I understand that loneliness of yours, said the doctor after an interval.

“I am INTOLERABLE to myself.”

“And I think it explains why it is that you turn to women as you do. You want help; you want reassurance. And you feel they can give it.”

“I wonder if it has been quite like that,” Sir Richmond reflected.

By an effort Dr. Martineau refrained from mentioning the mother complex. “You want help and reassurance as a child does,” he said. “Women and women alone seem capable of giving that, of telling you that you are surely right, that notwithstanding your blunders you are right; that even when you are wrong it doesn’t so much matter, you are still in spirit right. They can show their belief in you as no man can. With all their being they can do that.”

“Yes, I suppose they could.”

“They can. You have said already that women are necessary to make things real for you.”

“Not my work,” said Sir Richmond. “I admit that it might be like that, but it isn’t like that. It has not worked out like that. The two drives go on side by side in me. They have no logical connexion. All I can say is that for me, with my bifid temperament, one makes a rest from the other, and is so far refreshment and a renewal of energy. But I do not find women coming into my work in any effectual way.”

The doctor reflected further. “I suppose,” he began and stopped short.

He heard Sir Richmond move in his chair, creaking an interrogation.

“You have never,” said the doctor, “turned to the idea of God?”

Sir Richmond grunted and made no other answer for the better part of a minute.

As Dr. Martineau waited for his companion to speak, a falling star streaked the deep blue above them.

“I can’t believe in a God,” said Sir Richmond.

“Something after the fashion of a God,” said the doctor insidiously.

“No,” said Sir Richmond. “Nothing that reassures.”

“But this loneliness, this craving for companionship…”

“We have all been through that,” said Sir Richmond. “We have all in our time lain very still in the darkness with our souls crying out for the fellowship of God, demanding some sign, some personal response. The faintest feeling of assurance would have satisfied us.”

“And there has never been a response?”

“Have YOU ever had a response?”

“Once I seemed to have a feeling of exaltation and security.”

“Well?”

“Perhaps I only persuaded myself that I had. I had been reading William James on religious experiences and I was thinking very much of Conversion. I tried to experience Conversion…”

“Yes?”

“It faded.”

“It always fades,” said Sir Richmond with anger in his voice. “I wonder how many people there are nowadays who have passed through this last experience of ineffectual invocation, this appeal to the fading shadow of a vanished God. In the night. In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak to me! Does he answer? In the silence you hear the little blood vessels whisper in your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on the darkness…”

Dr. Martineau sat without a word.

“I can believe that over all things Righteousness rules. I can believe that. But Righteousness is not friendliness nor mercy nor comfort nor any such dear and intimate things. This cuddling up to Righteousness! It is a dream, a delusion and a phase. I’ve tried all that long ago. I’ve given it up long ago. I’ve grown out of it. Men do – after forty. Our souls were made in the squatting-place of the submen of ancient times. They are made out of primitive needs and they die before our bodies as those needs are satisfied. Only young people have souls, complete. The need for a personal God, feared but reassuring, is a youth’s need. I no longer fear the Old Man nor want to propitiate the Old Man nor believe he matters any more. I’m a bit of an Old Man myself I discover. Yes. But the other thing still remains.”

“The Great Mother of the Gods,” said Dr. Martineau – still clinging to his theories.

“The need of the woman,” said Sir Richmond. “I want mating because it is my nature to mate. I want fellowship because I am a social animal and I want it from another social animal. Not from any God – any inconceivable God. Who fades and disappears. No…

“Perhaps that other need will fade presently. I do not know. Perhaps it lasts as long as life does. How can I tell?”

He was silent for a little while. Then his voice sounded in the night, as if he spoke to himself. “But as for the God of All Things consoling and helping! Imagine it! That up there – having fellowship with me! I would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with those stars.”

CHAPTER THE FIFTH