The Secret Places of the Heart

“That I have some writing to do – before the post goes,” said the doctor brightly.

“Oh! come and see the cathedral!” cried Sir Richmond with ill-concealed dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.

“I’m afraid,” said the doctor mulishly. “Impossible.”

(With the unspoken addition of, “You try her for a bit.”)

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. “We can go first to look for shops,” she said. “There’s those things you want to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can all go together as far as that. And while you are shopping, if you wouldn’t mind getting one or two things for me…”

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and eager to resume with him…

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He could think over his notes…

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in their common programme…

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America. “Young woman” was how he thought of her; she didn’t correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a “young lady “; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word “girl” with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word “boy.” She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could talk with her as if he talked with a man like himself – but with a zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking for effect at all, she was talking because she was tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some moments surveying it.

“It’s a perfect little lady of a cathedral,” said Sir Richmond. “But why, I wonder, did we build it?”

“Your memory ought to be better than mine,” she said, with her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp against the blue. “I’ve been away for so long-over there-that I forget altogether. Why DID we build it?”

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. “My friend, the philosopher,” he had said, “will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are. You must talk to him – he is a very curious and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he says, passing thoughts. We are – what does he call it? – Man on his Planet, taking control of life.”

“Man and woman,” she had amended.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had failed altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond found very great difficulty in recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.

“We built temples by habit and tradition,” said Sir Richmond. “But the impulse was losing its force.”

She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly quizzical expression.

But he had his reply ready.

“We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were already very clever engineers. What interested us here wasn’t the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display our power over stone. We made it into reeds and branches. We squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think people have ever feared and worshipped in this – this artist’s lark – as they did in Stonehenge?”

“I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here,” she said.

Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. “The spirit of the Gothic cathedrals,” he said, “is the spirit of the sky-scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition. The Freemasons on the building could hardly refrain from jeering at the little priest they had left down below there, performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his altar. He was just their excuse for doing it all.”

“Sky-scrapers?” she conceded. “An early display of the sky-scraper spirit… You are doing your best to make me feel thoroughly at home.”

“You are more at home here still than in that new country of ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other cathedrals we built in Europe… It was the fun of building made us do it…”

“H’m,” she said. “And my sky-scrapers?”

“Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most about America. It’s still large enough, mentally and materially, to build all sorts of things… Over here, the sites are frightfully crowded…”

“And what do you think we are building now? And what do you think you are building over here?”

“What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up. I believe it is time we began to build in earnest. For good…”

“But are we building anything at all?”

“A new world.”

“Show it me,” she said.

“We’re still only at the foundations,” said Sir Richmond. “Nothing shows as yet.”

“I wish I could believe they were foundations.”

“But can you doubt we are scrapping the old?..”

It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so they strolled to and fro round and about the west end and along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging their ideas very frankly and freely about the things that had recently happened to the world and what they thought they ought to be doing in it.

Section 5

After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a corner of the smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed from tweedy pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of Miss Grammont’s hair and a necklace of the same colourings kept the peace between her jolly sun-burnt cheek and her soft untanned neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr. Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.

The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of the steady continuity of Sir Richmond’s duologue with Miss Grammont. Miss Seyffert’s methods were too discursive and exclamatory. She broke every thread that appeared. The Old George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss Seyffert laced the entire evening with her recognition of the fact. “Just look at that old beam!” she would cry suddenly. “To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot in America!”

Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she chose. After the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat deep in a basket chair and spoke now and then. Miss Seyffert gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.

Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her chair threw out the statement that Italy was frightfully overpopulated. “In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a cheese. Nobody seems to be living. Everyone is too busy keeping alive.”

“Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules,” said Miss Seyffert.

“Little children working like slaves,” said Miss Grammont.

“And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the roadside. Who ought to be getting wages – sufficient…”

“Begging – from foreigners – is just a sport in Italy,” said Sir Richmond. “It doesn’t imply want. But I agree that a large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole world is. Don’t you think so, Martineau?”

“Well – yes – for its present social organization.”

“For any social organization,” said Sir Richmond.

“I’ve no doubt of it,” said Miss Seyffert, and added amazingly: “I’m out for Birth Control all the time.”

A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty coffee cup.

“The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives,” said Sir Richmond. “Which amount to nothing. Which do not even represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources, the fuel and surplus energy of the world.”

“I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives,” Miss Grammont reflected.