The Secret Places of the Heart

AT MAIDENHEAD

Section 1

The little Charmeuse was towed to hospital and the two psychiatrists took up their quarters at the Radiant Hotel with its pleasant lawns and graceful landing stage at the bend towards the bridge. Sir Richmond, after some trying work at the telephone, got into touch with his own proper car. A man would bring the car down in two days’ time at latest, and afterwards the detested coupe could go back to London. The day was still young, and after lunch and coffee upon a sunny lawn a boat seemed indicated. Sir Richmond astonished the doctor by going to his room, reappearing dressed in tennis flannels and looking very well in them. It occurred to the doctor as a thing hitherto unnoted that Sir Richmond was not indifferent to his personal appearance. The doctor had no flannels, but he had brought a brown holland umbrella lined with green that he had acquired long ago in Algiers, and this served to give him something of the riverside quality.

The day was full of sunshine and the river had a Maytime animation. Pink geraniums, vivid green lawns, gay awnings, bright glass, white paint and shining metal set the tone of Maidenhead life. At lunch there had been five or six small tables with quietly affectionate couples who talked in undertones, a tableful of bright-coloured Jews who talked in overtones, and a family party from the Midlands, badly smitten with shyness, who did not talk at all. “A resort, of honeymoon couples,” said the doctor, and then rather knowingly: “Temporary honeymoons, I fancy, in one or two of the cases.”

“Decidedly temporary,” said Sir Richmond, considering the company – “in most of the cases anyhow. The two in the corner might be married. You never know nowadays.”

He became reflective…

After lunch and coffee he rowed the doctor up the river towards Cliveden.

“The last time I was here,” he said, returning to the subject, “I was here on a temporary honeymoon.”

The doctor tried to look as though he had not thought that could be possible.

“I know my Maidenhead fairly well,” said Sir Richmond. “Aquatic activities, such as rowing, punting, messing about with a boat-hook, tying up, buzzing about in motor launches, fouling other people’s boats, are merely the stage business of the drama. The ruling interests of this place are love – largely illicit – and persistent drinking… Don’t you think the bridge charming from here?”

“I shouldn’t have thought – drinking,” said Dr. Martineau, after he had done justice to the bridge over his shoulder.

“Yes, the place has a floating population of quiet industrious soakers. The incurable river man and the river girl end at that.”

Dr. Martineau encouraged Sir Richmond by an appreciative silence.

“If we are to explore the secret places of the heart,” Sir Richmond went on, “we shall have to give some attention to this Maidenhead side of life. It is very material to my case. I have, – as I have said – BEEN HERE. This place has beauty and charm; these piled-up woods behind which my Lords Astor and Desborough keep their state, this shining mirror of the water, brown and green and sky blue, this fringe of reeds and scented rushes and forget-me-not and lilies, and these perpetually posing white swans: they make a picture. A little artificial it is true; one feels the presence of a Conservancy Board, planting the rushes and industriously nicking the swans; but none the less delightful. And this setting has appealed to a number of people as an invitation, as, in a way, a promise. They come here, responsive to that promise of beauty and happiness. They conceive of themselves here, rowing swiftly and gracefully, punting beautifully, brandishing boat-hooks with ease and charm. They look to meet, under pleasant or romantic circumstances, other possessors and worshippers of grace and beauty here. There will be glowing evenings, warm moonlight, distant voices singing…There is your desire, doctor, the desire you say is the driving force of life. But reality mocks it. Boats bump and lead to coarse ungracious quarrels; rowing can be curiously fatiguing; punting involves dreadful indignities. The romance here tarnishes very quickly. Romantic encounters fail to occur; in our impatience we resort to – accosting. Chilly mists arise from the water and the magic of distant singing is provided, even excessively, by boatloads of cads – with collecting dishes. When the weather keeps warm there presently arises an extraordinary multitude of gnats, and when it does not there is a need for stimulants. That is why the dreamers who come here first for a light delicious brush with love, come down at last to the Thamesside barmaid with her array of spirits and cordials as the quintessence of all desire.”

“I say,” said the doctor. “You tear the place to pieces.”

“The desires of the place,” said Sir Richmond.

“I’m using the place as a symbol.”

He held his sculls awash, rippling in the water.

“The real force of life, the rage of life, isn’t here,” he said. “It’s down underneath, sulking and smouldering. Every now and then it strains and cracks the surface. This stretch of the Thames, this pleasure stretch, has in fact a curiously quarrelsome atmosphere. People scold and insult one another for the most trivial things, for passing too close, for taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose. Most of these notice boards on the bank show a thoroughly nasty spirit. People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats. You hear people quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk along the towing path. There is remarkably little happy laughter here. The RAGE, you see, is hostile to this place, the RAGE breaks through… The people who drift from one pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of pleasure, trying to forget the rage…”

“Isn’t it that there is some greater desire at the back of the human mind?” the doctor suggested. “Which refuses to be content with pleasure as an end?”

“What greater desire?” asked Sir Richmond, disconcertingly.

“Oh!..” The doctor cast about.

“There is no such greater desire,” said Sir Richmond. “You cannot name it. It is just blind drive. I admit its discontent with pleasure as an end – but has it any end of its own? At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking its desire and hasn’t found it.”

“Let us help in the search,” said the doctor, with an afternoon smile under his green umbrella. “Go on.”

Section 2

“Since our first talk in Harley Street,” said Sir Richmond, “I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)”

“Big these trees are,” said the doctor with infinite approval.

“I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant motives I am. I do not seem to deserve to be called a personality. I cannot discover even a general direction. Much more am I like a taxi-cab in which all sorts of aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got out. Are we all like that?”

“A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of memory?” said the doctor and considered. “More than that. More than that. We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities.”

“We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from complete dispersal.”

“Exactly,” said the doctor. “And there is also something, a consistency, that we call character.”

“It changes.”

“Consistently with itself.”

“I have been trying to recall my sexual history,” said Sir Richmond, going off at a tangent. “My sentimental education. I wonder if it differs very widely from yours or most men’s.”

“Some men are more eventful in these matters than others,” said the doctor, – it sounded – wistfully.

“They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, I suspect, whether they are eventful or not. The brakes may be strong or weak but the drive is the same. I can’t remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and knowledge in these matters. Can you?”

“Not much,” said the doctor. “No.”

“Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don’t remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can’t recall anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a certain – what shall I call it? – imaginative slavishness – not towards actual women but towards something magnificently feminine. My first love – ”

Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. “My first love was Britannia as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I must have been a very little chap at the time of the Britannia affair. I just clung to her in my imagination and did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little later, a secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the Crystal Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can remember, – for all of them. But I don’t remember anything very monstrous or incestuous in my childish imaginations, – such things as Freud, I understand, lays stress upon. If there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort in my case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a child which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and sees a lot of pictures of the nude human body, and so on, gets its mind shifted off any possible concentration upon the domestic aspect of sex. I got to definite knowledge pretty early. By the time I was eleven or twelve.”

“Normally?”

“What is normally? Decently, anyhow. Here again I may be forgetting much secret and shameful curiosity. I got my ideas into definite form out of a little straightforward physiological teaching and some dissecting of rats and mice. My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of his times and my people believed in him. I think much of this distorted perverse stuff that grows up in people’s minds about sex and develops into evil vices and still more evil habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things.”

“Not entirely,” said the doctor.

“Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes through the stuffy horrors described in James Joyce’s PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN.”

“I’ve not read it.”

“A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of purity and decency and under threats of hell fire.”

“Horrible!”

“Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that make young people write unclean words in secret places.”

“Yes, we certainly ventilate and sanitate in those matters nowadays. Where nothing is concealed, nothing can explode.”

“On the whole I came up to adolescence pretty straight and clean,” said Sir Richmond. “What stands out in my memory now is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely and kind and powerful and wonderful. That ruled my secret imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my mind as I grew up.”

“The mother complex,” said Dr. Martineau as a passing botanist might recognize and name a flower.