The Secret Places of the Heart

The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was accustomed
to let in visitors who had this air of being annoyed and finding one
umbrella too numerous for them. It mattered nothing to her that the
gentleman was asking for Dr. Martineau as if he was asking for something
with an unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of his
umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive mahogany stand.
"What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the door of the consulting
room.

"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly with its
distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond Hardy."

The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in undivided
possession of the large indifferent apartment in which the nervous and
mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to
the distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase
containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical works, some
paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and
a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced
rather than mitigated the promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted
to the midmost of the three windows and stared out despondently at
Harley Street.

For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty jacket on
its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.

"Damned fool I was to come here," he said... "DAMNED fool!

"Rush out of the place?...

"I've given my name."...

He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended not to
hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can do for me," he
said.

"I'm sure
I
don't," said the doctor. "People come here and talk."

There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the figure that
confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height wanted at least three
inches of Sir Richmond's five feet eleven; he was humanly plump, his
face was round and pink and cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of
the full moon, of what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air
and exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short or he
had braced them too high so that he seemed to have grown out of them
quite recently. Sir Richmond had been dreading an encounter with some
dominating and mesmeric personality; this amiable presence dispelled his
preconceived resistances.

Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been running
upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets, seemed intent only on
disavowals. "People come here and talk. It does them good, and sometimes
I am able to offer a suggestion.

"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded the idea.

"I'm jangling damnably...overwork....."

"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork. Overwork never
hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can work—good straightforward
work, without internal resistance, until he drops,—and never hurt
himself. You must be working against friction."

"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to death....
And it's so DAMNED important I SHOULDN'T break down. It's VITALLY
important."

He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering gesture
of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags. I explode at any
little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily for ten minutes and I can't
leave off working."

"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond Hardy? In the
papers. What is it?"

"Fuel."

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly can't afford
to have you ill."

"I AM ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that Commission."

"Your technical knowledge—"

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the national
fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's what I'm up
against. You don't know the job I have to do. You don't know what a
Commission of that sort is. The moral tangle of it. You don't know how
its possibilities and limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long
before a single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole thing
with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as daylight. I
might have seen it at first.... Three experts who'd been got at; they
thought
I
'd been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted
them to do provided you called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the
socialist art critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers,
oil profiteers, financial adventurers...."

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the days before
the war it was different. Then there was abundance. A little grabbing
or cornering was all to the good. All to the good. It prevented things
being used up too fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia
was tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all this
is altered. We're living in a different world. The public won't stand
things it used to stand. It's a new public. It's—wild. It'll smash up
the show if they go too far. Everything short and running shorter—food,
fuel, material. But these people go on. They go on as though nothing had
changed.... Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn them. There are men on
that Commission who would steal the brakes off a mountain railway just
before they went down in it.... It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles.
It's—! But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."

"You think there may be a smash-up?"

"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."

"A social smash-up."

"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"

"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All sorts of
people I find think that," said the doctor. "All sorts of people lie
awake thinking of it."

"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too," he said and
seemed to reflect. But he was observing his patient acutely—with his
ears.

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and left his
sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered swiftly
what line of talk he had best follow.

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor. "It's at
the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new state of mind.
Before the war it was abnormal—a phase of neurasthenia. Now it is
almost the normal state with whole classes of intelligent people.
Intelligent, I say. The others always have been casual and adventurous
and always will be. A loss of confidence in the general background of
life. So that we seem to float over abysses."

"We do," said Sir Richmond.

"And we have nothing but the old habits and ideas acquired in the days
of our assurance. There is a discord, a jarring."

The doctor pursued his train of thought. "A new, raw and dreadful sense
of responsibility for the universe. Accompanied by a realization that
the job is overwhelmingly too big for us."

"We've got to stand up to the job," said Sir Richmond. "Anyhow, what
else is there to do? We MAY keep things together.... I've got to do my
bit. And if only I could hold myself at it, I could beat those fellows.
But that's where the devil of it comes in. Never have I been so desirous
to work well in my life. And never have I been so slack and weak-willed
and inaccurate.... Sloppy.... Indolent.... VICIOUS!..."

The doctor was about to speak, but Sir Richmond interrupted him. "What's
got hold of me? What's got hold of me? I used to work well enough. It's
as if my will had come untwisted and was ravelling out into separate
strands. I've lost my unity. I'm not a man but a mob. I've got to
recover my vigour. At any cost."

Again as the doctor was about to speak the word was taken out of his
mouth. "And what I think of it, Dr. Martineau, is this: it's fatigue.
It's mental and moral fatigue. Too much effort. On too high a level. And
too austere. One strains and fags. FLAGS! 'Flags' I meant to say. One
strains and flags and then the lower stuff in one, the subconscious
stuff, takes control."

There was a flavour of popularized psychoanalysis about this, and the
doctor drew in the corners of his mouth and gave his head a critical
slant. "M'm." But this only made Sir Richmond raise his voice and
quicken his speech. "I want," he said, "a good tonic. A pick-me-up,
a stimulating harmless drug of some sort. That's indicated anyhow. To
begin with. Something to pull me together, as people say. Bring me up to
the scratch again."

"I don't like the use of drugs," said the doctor.

The expectation of Sir Richmond's expression changed to disappointment.
"But that's not reasonable," he cried. "That's not reasonable. That's
superstition. Call a thing a drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug.
Everything that affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink.
Noise is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response to
stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I want food. When
I'm overactive and sleepless I want tranquillizing. When I'm dispersed I
want pulling together."

"But we don't know how to use drugs," the doctor objected.

"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.