The Secret Places of the Heart (18 page)

One was left at the mercy of V.V.'s character....

"I ought to see more of her," he thought. "She gets away from me. Just
as her mother did." A man need not suspect his womenkind but he should
know what they are doing. It is duty, his protective duty to them. These
companions, these Seyffert women and so forth, were all very well in
their way; there wasn't much they kept from you if you got them cornered
and asked them intently. But a father's eye is better. He must go about
with the girl for a time, watch her with other men, give her chances
to talk business with him and see if she took them. "V.V., I'm going
to make a man of you," the phrase ran through his brain. The deep
instinctive jealousy of the primordial father was still strong in old
Grammont's blood. It would be pleasant to go about with her on his
right hand in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and
unapproachable,—above that sort of nonsense, above all other masculine
subjugation.

"V.V., I'm going to make a man of you...."

His mind grew calmer. Whatever she wanted in Paris should be hers. He'd
just let her rip. They'd be like sweethearts together, he and his girl.

Old Grammont dozed off into dreamland.

The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr. Grammont upon
the Atlantic, were of a gentler, more romantic character. In them V.V.
was no longer a daughter in the fierce focus of a father's jealousy, but
the goddess enshrined in a good man's heart. Indeed the figure that the
limelight of the reverie fell upon was not V.V. at all but Mr. Gunter
Lake himself, in his favourite role of the perfect lover.

An interminable speech unfolded itself. "I ask for nothing in return.
I've never worried you about that Caston business and I never will.
Married to me you shall be as free as if you were unmarried. Don't I
know, my dear girl, that you don't love me yet. Let that be as you wish.
I want nothing you are not willing to give me, nothing at all. All I
ask is the privilege of making life happy—and it shall be happy—for
you.... All I ask. All I ask. Protect, guard, cherish...."

For to Mr. Gunter Lake it seemed there could be no lovelier thing in
life than a wife "in name only" slowly warmed into a glow of passion by
the steadfast devotion and the strength and wisdom of a mate at first
despised. Until at last a day would come....

"My darling!" Mr. Gunter Lake whispered to the darkness. "My little
guurl. IT HAS BEEN WORTH THE WAITING...."

Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old George with a
telegram in her hand. "My father reported his latitude and longitude by
wireless last night. The London people think he will be off Falmouth
in four days' time. He wants me to join his liner there and go on to
Cherbourg and Paris. He's arranged that. He is the sort of man who can
arrange things like that. There'll be someone at Falmouth to look after
us and put us aboard the liner. I must wire them where I can pick up a
telegram to-morrow."

"Wells in Somerset," said Sir Richmond.

His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he wanted her
first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town that was three or
four hundred years older than Salisbury, perched on a hill, a Saxon
town, where Alfred had gathered his forces against the Danes and where
Canute, who had ruled over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland,
and had come near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a little
sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views. They
would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they would go in
the afternoon through the pleasant west country where the Celts had
prevailed against the old folk of the Stonehenge temple and the Romans
against the Celts and the Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the
Danes against the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes
and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to
Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh village the Celts
had made for themselves three or four hundred years before the
Romans came. And at Glastonbury also there were the ruins of a great
Benedictine church and abbey that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence
they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine
and sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of
Europe right up to Reformation times.

"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will be like
turning over the pages of the history of our family, to and fro. There
will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be
something from almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge. Rome
will be poorly represented, but that may come the day after at Bath. And
the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn.
We will come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There
we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which the tobacco
comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set sail thither—was it
yesterday or the day before? You will understand at Bristol how it
is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming land—to Africa and
America and the whole wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the
bye, with their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour
problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I
don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath we'll get in somehow.
And then as an Anglo-American showman I shall be tempted to run you
northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here
and there and show you monuments bearing little shields with the stars
and stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the Washington
family monuments."

"It was not only from England that America came," said Miss Grammont.

"But England takes an American memory back most easily and most
fully—to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the emperors and the
Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe.... For you and me anyhow
this is our past, this was our childhood, and this is our land." He
interrupted laughing as she was about to reply. "Well, anyhow," he said,
"it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with the ripest
history in every grain of its soil. So we'll send a wire to your London
people and tell them to send their instructions to Wells."

"I'll tell Belinda," she said, "to be quick with her packing."

As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details of his
excellent programme and revised their impressions of the past and their
ideas about the future in the springtime sunlight of Wiltshire and
Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously
discreet chorus, it was inevitable that their conversation should
become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They
kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau's
philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its
Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their
position. They might profess to be Man and Woman in the most general
terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old
Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon
the Fuel Commission became more and more important. "What shall we do
with this planet of ours?" gave way by the easiest transitions to "What
are you and I doing and what have we got to do? How do you feel about it
all? What do you desire and what do you dare?"

It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to
a young woman whose interests in fuel were even greater than his own.
He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent
literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a
most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas. He thought her attitude
towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as
socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources
as a common property administered in the common interest, she and he
were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of
expression for the merely insubordinate discontent of the many with
the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class
jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she had had any
illusions about the working class possessing as a class any profounder
political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other class,
those illusions had long since departed. People were much the same, she
thought, in every class; there was no stratification of either rightness
or righteousness.

He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel
Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he found in
himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau and with a surer
confidence of understanding. Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got
his ideas into order and made them more readily expressible than they
would have been otherwise. He argued against the belief that any
class could be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the
conflict of motives he found in all the members of his Committee and
most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion he had already confessed
to Dr. Martineau that there was not a single member of the Fuel
Commission but had a considerable drive towards doing the right thing
about fuel, and not one who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive
towards the right thing. "That," said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life
so interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic disappointments, so
hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every man is a feeble man and every
man is a good man. My motives come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in
response to the circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most
men will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given perplexities
and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and vile. People say you cannot
change human nature and perhaps that is true, but you can change its
responses endlessly. The other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian
coal with Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a great bank of
men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken brown mass wrapped in their
brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly the sun came out and at a word the whole
body flung back their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became
one solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until one
understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had changed but the
sunshine. And given a change in laws and prevailing ideas, and the
very same people who are greedy traders, grasping owners and revolting
workers to-day will all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them
working together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end.
They aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any inner
necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in the present drama.
Which is nearly at the end of its run."

"That's a hopeful view," said Miss Grammont. "I don't see the flaw in
it—if there is a flaw."

"There isn't one," said Sir Richmond. "It is my chief discovery about
life. I began with the question of fuel and the energy it affords
mankind, and I have found that my generalization applies to all
human affairs. Human beings are fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate
idiots,—I grant you. That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak.
But they are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty well
materially if once we hammer out a sane collective method of getting and
using fuel. Which people generally will understand—in the place of
our present methods of snatch and wrangle. Of that I am absolutely
convinced. Some work, some help, some willingness you can get out of
everybody. That's the red. And the same principle applies to most labour
and property problems, to health, to education, to population, social
relationships and war and peace. We haven't got the right system, we
have inefficient half-baked systems, or no system at all, and a wild
confusion and war of ideas in all these respects. But there is a right
system possible none the less. Let us only hammer our way through to the
sane and reasonable organization in this and that and the other human
affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for good. We may
not live to see even the beginnings of success, but the spirit of order,
the spirit that has already produced organized science, if only there
are a few faithful, persistent people to stick to the job, will in the
long run certainly save mankind and make human life clean and splendid,
happy work in a clear mind. If I could live to see it!"

"And as for us—in our time?"

"Measured by the end we serve, we don't matter. You know we don't
matter."

"We have to find our fun in the building and in our confidence that we
do really build."

"So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship," said Sir
Richmond.

"So long as our confidence lasts," she repeated after him.

"Ah!" cried Sir Richmond. "There it is! So long as our confidence lasts!
So long as one keeps one's mind steady. That is what I came away with
Dr. Martineau to discuss. I went to him for advice. I haven't known him
for more than a month. It's amusing to find myself preaching forth to
you. It was just faith I had lost. Suddenly I had lost my power of work.
My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated. My will
failed me. I don't know if you will understand what that means. It
wasn't that my reason didn't assure me just as certainly as ever that
what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do. But somehow
that seemed a cold and personally unimportant proposition. The life had
gone out of it...."

He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.

"I don't know why I tell you these things," he said.