The Secret Places of the Heart (11 page)

"Yes, but—"

"I want a rest anyhow...."

There was nothing for Dr. Martineau to say to that.

The two gentlemen smoked for some time in a slightly uncomfortable
silence. Dr. Martineau cleared his throat twice and lit a second cigar.
They then agreed to admire the bridge and think well of Maidenhead. Sir
Richmond communicated hopeful news about his car, which was to arrive
the next morning before ten—he'd just ring the fellow up presently to
make sure—and Dr. Martineau retired early and went rather thoughtfully
to bed. The spate of Sir Richmond's confidences, it was evident, was
over.

Sir Richmond's car arrived long before ten, brought down by a young
man in a state of scared alacrity—Sir Richmond had done some vigorous
telephoning before turning in,—the Charmeuse set off in a repaired and
chastened condition to town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two
investigators into the springs of human conduct were able to resume
their westward journey. They ran through scattered Twyford with its
pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities of Reading,
by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up long wooded slopes to
Savernake forest, where they found the road heavy and dusty, still in
its war-time state, and so down a steep hill to the wide market street
which is Marlborough. They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the
afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest artificial
mound in Europe. They left the car by the roadside and clambered to the
top and were very learned and inconclusive about the exact purpose of
this vast heap of chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before
the temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.

Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road into the
wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn there kept by pleasant
people, and they garaged the car in the cowshed and took two rooms for
the night that they might the better get the atmosphere of the ancient
place. Wonderful indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already
two thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a great wall
of earth with its ditch most strangely on its inner and not on its outer
side; and within this enclosure gigantic survivors of the great circles
of unhewn stone that, even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete.
A whole village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for the
most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall is sufficient to
embrace them all with their gardens and paddocks; four cross-roads meet
at the village centre. There are drawings of Avebury before these things
arose there, when it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most
part the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed. To
the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow creeps up and
down the intervening meadows as the seasons change. Around this lonely
place rise the Downs, now bare sheep pastures, in broad undulations,
with a wart-like barrow here and there, and from it radiate, creeping
up to gain and hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways
of that forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of England,
these roads already disused when the Romans made their highway past
Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced for scores of miles through
the land, running to Salisbury and the English Channel, eastward to
the crossing at the Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the
Severn, and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.

The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed the shadow
cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up the down to the
northward to get a general view of the village, had tea and smoked
round the walls again in the warm April sunset. The matter of their
conversation remained prehistoric. Both were inclined to find fault
with the archaeological work that had been done on the place. "Clumsy
treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said. "They bore into Silbury Hill and
expect to find a mummified chief or something sensational of that sort,
and they don't, and they report nothing. They haven't sifted finely
enough; they haven't thought subtly enough. These walls of earth ought
to tell what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods they
used. Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a cattle land? Were
these hills covered by forests? I don't know. These archaeologists don't
know. Or if they do they haven't told me, which is just as bad. I don't
believe they know.

"What trade came here along these tracks? So far as I know, they had no
beasts of burthen. But suppose one day someone were to find a potsherd
here from early Knossos, or a fragment of glass from Pepi's Egypt."

The place had stirred up his imagination. He wrestled with his ignorance
as if he thought that by talking he might presently worry out some
picture of this forgotten world, without metals, without beasts of
burthen, without letters, without any sculpture that has left a trace,
and yet with a sense of astronomical fact clear enough to raise the
great gnomon of Silbury, and with a social system complex enough to give
the large and orderly community to which the size of Avebury witnesses
and the traffic to which the green roads testify.

The doctor had not realized before the boldness and liveliness of his
companion's mind. Sir Richmond insisted that the climate must have been
moister and milder in those days; he covered all the downlands with
woods, as Savernake was still covered; beneath the trees he restored a
thicker, richer soil. These people must have done an enormous lot with
wood. This use of stones here was a freak. It was the very strangeness
of stones here that had made them into sacred things. One thought too
much of the stones of the Stone Age. Who would carve these lumps of
quartzite when one could carve good oak? Or beech—a most carvable wood.
Especially when one's sharpest chisel was a flint. "It's wood we ought
to look for," said Sir Richmond. "Wood and fibre." He declared that
these people had their tools of wood, their homes of wood, their gods
and perhaps their records of wood. "A peat bog here, even a few feet of
clay, might have pickled some precious memoranda.... No such luck....
Now in Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron
age—half way to our own times—quite beautifully pickled."

Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir Richmond nor
the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the riddle why the ditch
was inside and not outside the great wall.

"And what was our Mind like in those days?" said Sir Richmond. "That, I
suppose, is what interests you. A vivid childish mind, I guess, with not
a suspicion as yet that it was Man ruling his Planet or anything of that
sort."

The doctor pursed his lips. "None," he delivered judicially. "If one
were able to recall one's childhood—at the age of about twelve or
thirteen—when the artistic impulse so often goes into abeyance and one
begins to think in a troubled, monstrous way about God and Hell, one
might get something like the mind of this place."

"Thirteen. You put them at that already?... These people, you think,
were religious?"

"Intensely. In that personal way that gives death a nightmare terror.
And as for the fading of the artistic impulse, they've left not a trace
of the paintings and drawings and scratchings of the Old Stone people
who came before them."

"Adults with the minds of thirteen-year-old children. Thirteen-year-old
children with the strength of adults—and no one to slap them or tell
them not to.... After all, they probably only thought of death now and
then. And they never thought of fuel. They supposed there was no end to
that. So they used up their woods and kept goats to nibble and kill the
new undergrowth. DID these people have goats?"

"I don't know," said the doctor. "So little is known."

"Very like children they must have been. The same unending days. They
must have thought that the world went on for ever-just as they knew
it—like my damned Committee does.... With their fuel wasting away and
the climate changing imperceptibly, century by century.... Kings and
important men followed one another here for centuries and centuries....
They had lost their past and had no idea of any future.. .. They had
forgotten how they came into the land... When I was a child I believed
that my father's garden had been there for ever....

"This is very like trying to remember some game one played when one was
a child. It is like coming on something that one built up with bricks
and stones in some forgotten part of the garden...."

"The life we lived here," said the doctor, "has left its traces in
traditions, in mental predispositions, in still unanalyzed fundamental
ideas."

"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond. "Presently we
shall remember a lot more about all this. We shall remember what it was
like to live in this place, and the long journey hither, age by age out
of the south. We shall remember the sacrifices we made and the crazy
reasons why we made them. We sowed our corn in blood here. We had
strange fancies about the stars. Those we brought with us out of the
south where the stars are brighter. And what like were those wooden gods
of ours? I don't remember.... But I could easily persuade myself that I
had been here before."

They stood on the crest of the ancient wall and the setting sun cast
long shadows of them athwart a field of springing wheat.

"Perhaps we shall come here again," the doctor carried on Sir Richmond's
fancy; "after another four thousand years or so, with different names
and fuller minds. And then I suppose that this ditch won't be the riddle
it is now."

"Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused. "Our muddles
were unconscious. We drifted from mood to mood and forgot. There was
more sunshine then, more laughter perhaps, and blacker despair. Despair
like the despair of children that can weep itself to sleep.... It's
over.... Was it battle and massacre that ended that long afternoon here?
Or did the woods catch fire some exceptionally dry summer, leaving black
hills and famine? Or did strange men bring a sickness—measles, perhaps,
or the black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our
woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into the land
across the southern sea? I can't remember...."

Sir Richmond turned about. "I would like to dig up the bottom of
this ditch here foot by foot—and dry the stuff and sift it—very
carefully.... Then I might begin to remember things."

Section 5

In the evening, after a pleasant supper, they took a turn about the
walls with the moon sinking over beyond Silbury, and then went in and
sat by lamplight before a brightly fussy wood fire and smoked. There
were long intervals of friendly silence.

"I don't in the least want to go on talking about myself," said Sir
Richmond abruptly.

"Let it rest then," said the doctor generously.

"To-day, among these ancient memories, has taken me out of myself
wonderfully. I can't tell you how good Avebury has been for me. This
afternoon half my consciousness has seemed to be a tattooed creature
wearing a knife of stone...."

"The healing touch of history."

"And for the first time my damned Committee has mattered scarcely a rap."

Sir Richmond stretched himself in his chair and blinked cheerfully at
his cigar smoke.

"Nevertheless," he said, "this confessional business of yours has been
an excellent exercise. It has enabled me to get outside myself, to look
at myself as a Case. Now I can even see myself as a remote Case. That
I needn't bother about further.... So far as that goes, I think we have
done all that there is to be done."

"I shouldn't say that—quite—yet," said the doctor.

"I don't think I'm a subject for real psychoanalysis at all. I'm not
an overlaid sort of person. When I spread myself out there is not much
indication of a suppressed wish or of anything masked or buried of that
sort. What you get is a quite open and recognized discord of two sets of
motives."

The doctor considered. "Yes, I think that is true. Your LIBIDO is, I
should say, exceptionally free. Generally you are doing what you want to
do—overdoing, in fact, what you want to do and getting simply tired."

"Which is the theory I started with. I am a case of fatigue under
irritating circumstances with very little mental complication or
concealment."

"Yes," said the doctor. "I agree. You are not a case for psychoanalysis,
strictly speaking, at all. You are in open conflict with yourself, upon
moral and social issues. Practically open. Your problems are problems of
conscious conduct."

"As I said."

"Of what renunciations you have consciously to make."

Sir Richmond did not answer that....

"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for
magnanimity. This day particularly has been a good day. When we stood on
this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be standing outside myself
in an immense still sphere of past and future. I stood with my feet
upon the Stone Age and saw myself four thousand years away, and all my
distresses as very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in
London the case is altogether different; after three hours or so of
the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed moment of
personality. There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is
only the rankling dispute. For all those three hours, perhaps, I have
been thinking of just what I had to say, just how I had to say it,
just how I looked while I said it, just how much I was making myself
understood, how I might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented,
challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used up. At
last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting,
pin-point of SELF.... One goes back to one's home unable to recover.
Fighting it over again. All night sometimes.... I get up and walk about
the room and curse.... Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of
mind to Westminster?"