The Secret Places of the Heart (21 page)

"She is different," argued Sir Richmond.

"But you are the same," said the shadow of Martin with Martin's
unsparing return. "Your love has never been a steadfast thing. It comes
and goes like the wind. You are an extravagantly imperfect lover. But
I have learnt to accept you, as people accept the English weather....
Never in all your life have you loved, wholly, fully, steadfastly—as
people deserve to be loved—not your mother nor your father, not your
wife nor your children, nor me, nor our child, nor any living thing.
Pleasant to all of us at times—at times bitterly disappointing. You
do not even love this work of yours steadfastly, this work to which you
sacrifice us all in turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have
these moods and changes, that is why you have these lassitudes. So it is
you are made....

"And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so much
simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it—as you can do—and then
fail it, as you will do...."

Sir Richmond's mind and body lay very still for a time.

"Should I fail her?..."

For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his mind.

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and unforeseeing
his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had been just a blind drive
to get hold of her and possess her....

Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence again.

"But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a perfect love,
my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy, its ruthless criticism?
Has the world ever seen a perfect lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection
that brings us together in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all,
likely to get a more perfect love in all her life than this poor love of
mine? And isn't it good for her that she should love?"

"Perfect love cherishes. Perfect love foregoes."

Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the immediate
question. "Perfect love," the phrase was his point of departure. Was
it true that he could not love passionately and completely? Was that
fundamentally what was the matter with him? Was that perhaps what was
the matter with the whole world of mankind? It had not yet come to
that power of loving which makes action full and simple and direct and
unhesitating. Man upon his planet has not grown up to love, is still an
eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent. He lacks the courage to
love and the wisdom to love. Love is here. But it comes and goes, it
is mixed with greeds and jealousies and cowardice and cowardly
reservations. One hears it only in snatches and single notes. It is like
something tuning up before the Music begins.... The metaphor altogether
ran away with Sir Richmond's half dreaming mind. Some day perhaps all
life would go to music.

Love was music and power. If he had loved enough he need never have
drifted away from his wife. Love would have created love, would have
tolerated and taught and inspired. Where there is perfect love there
is neither greed nor impatience. He would have done his work calmly.
He would have won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and
quarrelling with it perpetually....

"Flimsy creatures," he whispered. "Uncertain health. Uncertain
strength. A will that comes and goes. Moods of baseness. Moods of utter
beastliness.... Love like April sunshine. April?..."

He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high summer
sunshine, into a continuing music, of love. He thought of a world like
some great playhouse in which players and orchestra and audience all
co-operate in a noble production without dissent or conflict. He thought
he was the savage of thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great
world that is still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead. His effort to
see more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy pinnacles and
to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his dream and left him awake
again and wrestling with the problem of Miss Grammont.

The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable. He had to release Miss
Grammont from the adventure into which he had drawn her. This decision
stood out stern-and inevitable in his mind with no conceivable
alternative.

As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its difficulty.
He was profoundly in love with her, he was still only learning how
deeply, and she was not going to play a merely passive part in this
affair. She was perhaps as deeply in love with him....

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He
could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it
to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion.
"To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me....
It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like
taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her.... It
would scar her with a second humiliation...."

Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow and contrive by some
sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to go from her suddenly? But a
mere sudden parting would not end things between them now unless he
went off abruptly without explanations or any arrangements for further
communications. At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit
but evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her father at
Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that Sir Richmond realized
that now it could not end in that fashion, that with the whisper of love
and the touching of lips, something had been started that would go on,
that would develop. To break off now and go away without a word would
leave a raw and torn end, would leave her perplexed and perhaps even
more humiliated with an aching mystery to distress her. "Why did he go?
Was it something I said?—something he found out or imagined?"

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this problem. She and
he had got into each other's lives to stay: the real problem was
the terms upon which they were to stay in each other's lives. Close
association had brought them to the point of being, in the completest
sense, lovers; that could not be; and the real problem was the
transmutation of their relationship to some form compatible with his
honour and her happiness. A word, an idea, from some recent reading
floated into Sir Richmond's head. "Sublimate," he whispered. "We have
to sublimate this affair. We have to put this relationship upon a Higher
Plane."

His mind stopped short at that.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart. "God! How I
loathe the Higher Plane!....

"God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some poor little
kid who has to wear irons on its legs."

"I WANT her.... Do you hear, Martin? I want her."

As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and Miss
Grammont—Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out—traversing Europe and
Asia in headlong flight. To a sunlit beach in the South Seas....

His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and fantastic
interruptions had not occurred.

"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane—and keep it
there. We two love one another—that has to be admitted now. (I ought
never to have touched her. I ought never to have thought of touching
her.) But we two are too high, our aims and work and obligations are too
high for any ordinary love making. That sort of thing would embarrass
us, would spoil everything.

"Spoil everything," he repeated, rather like a small boy who learns an
unpalatable lesson.

For a time Sir Richmond, exhausted by moral effort, lay staring at the
darkness.

"It has to be done. I believe I can carry her through with it if I can
carry myself. She's a finer thing than I am.... On the whole I am glad
it's only one more day. Belinda will be about.... Afterwards we can
write to each other.... If we can get over the next day it will be all
right. Then we can write about fuel and politics—and there won't be
her voice and her presence. We shall really SUBLIMATE.... First class
idea—sublimate!.... And I will go back to dear old Martin who's all
alone there and miserable; I'll be kind to her and play my part and tell
her her Carbuncle scar rather becomes her.... And in a little while I
shall be altogether in love with her again.

"Queer what a brute I've always been to Martin."

"Queer that Martin can come in a dream to me and take the upper hand
with me.

"Queer that NOW—I love Martin."

He thought still more profoundly. "By the time the Committee meets again
I shall have been tremendously refreshed."

He repeated:—"Put things on the Higher Plane and keep them there. Then
go back to Martin. And so to the work. That's it...."

Nothing so pacifies the mind as a clear-cut purpose. Sir Richmond fell
asleep during the fourth recapitulation of this programme.

When Miss Grammont appeared at breakfast Sir Richmond saw at once that
she too had had a restless night. When she came into the little long
breakfast room of the inn with its brown screens and its neat white
tables it seemed to him that the Miss Grammont of his nocturnal
speculations, the beautiful young lady who had to be protected and
managed and loved unselfishly, vanished like some exorcised intruder.
Instead was this real dear young woman, who had been completely
forgotten during the reign of her simulacrum and who now returned
completely remembered, familiar, friendly, intimate. She touched his
hand for a moment, she met his eyes with the shadow of a smile in her
own.

"Oranges!" said Belinda from the table by the window. "Beautiful
oranges."

She had been preparing them, poor Trans-atlantic exile, after the
fashion in which grape fruits are prepared upon liners and in the
civilized world of the west. "He's getting us tea spoons," said Belinda,
as they sat down.

"This is realler England than ever," she said. "I've been up an hour.
I found a little path down to the river bank. It's the greenest morning
world and full of wild flowers. Look at these."

"That's lady's smock," said Sir Richmond. "It's not really a flower;
it's a quotation from Shakespeare."

"And there are cowslips!"

"CUCKOO BUDS OF YELLOW HUE. DO PAINT THE MEADOWS WITH DELIGHT. All the
English flowers come out of Shakespeare. I don't know what we did before
his time."

The waiter arrived with the tea spoons for the oranges.

Belinda, having distributed these, resumed her discourse of enthusiasm
for England. She asked a score of questions about Gloucester and
Chepstow, the Severn and the Romans and the Welsh, and did not wait for
the answers. She did not want answers; she talked to keep things going.
Her talk masked a certain constraint that came upon her companions after
the first morning's greetings were over.

Sir Richmond as he had planned upstairs produced two Michelin maps.
"To-day," he said, "we will run back to Bath—from which it will be easy
for you to train to Falmouth. We will go by Monmouth and then turn back
through the Forest of Dean, where you will get glimpses of primitive
coal mines still worked by two men and a boy with a windlass and a pail.
Perhaps we will go through Cirencester. I don't know. Perhaps it is
better to go straight to Bath. In the very heart of Bath you will
find yourselves in just the same world you visited at Pompeii. Bath is
Pompeii overlaid by Jane Austen's England."

He paused for a moment. "We can wire to your agents from here before we
start and we can pick up their reply at Gloucester or Nailsworth or even
Bath itself. So that if your father is nearer than we suppose—But I
think to-morrow afternoon will be soon enough for Falmouth, anyhow."

He stopped interrogatively.

Miss Grammont's face was white. "That will do very well," she said.

They started, but presently they came to high banks that showed such
masses of bluebells, ragged Robin, great stitchwort and the like that
Belinda was not to be restrained. She clamoured to stop the car and go
up the bank and pick her hands full, and so they drew up by the roadside
and Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont sat down near the car while Belinda
carried her enthusiastic onslaught on the flowers up the steep bank and
presently out of earshot.

The two lovers said unheeded things about the flowers to each other
and then fell silent. Then Miss Grammont turned her head and seemed
deliberately to measure her companion's distance. Evidently she judged
her out of earshot.

"Well," said Miss Grammont in her soft even voice. "We love one another.
Is that so still?"

"I could not love you more."

"It wasn't a dream?"

"No."

"And to-morrow we part?"

He looked her in the eyes. "I have been thinking of that all night," he
said at last.

"I too."

"And you think—?"

"That we must part. Just as we arranged it when was it? Three days or
three ages ago? There is nothing else in the world to do except for us
to go our ways.... I love you. That means for a woman—It means that I
want to be with you. But that is impossible.... Don't doubt whether I
love you because I say—impossible...."

Sir Richmond, faced with his own nocturnal decision, was now moved to
oppose it flatly. "Nothing that one can do is impossible."

She glanced again at Belinda and bent down towards him. "Suppose," she
said, "you got back into that car with me; suppose that instead of going
on as we have planned, you took me away. How much of us would go?"

"You would go," said Sir Richmond, "and my heart."

"And this work of yours? And your honour? For the honour of a man in
this New Age of yours will be first of all in the work he does for the
world. And you will leave your work to be just a lover. And the work
that I might do because of my father's wealth; all that would vanish
too. We should leave all of that, all of our usefulness, all that
much of ourselves. But what has made me love you? Just your breadth of
vision, just the sense that you mattered. What has made you love me?
Just that I have understood the dream of your work. All that we should
have to leave behind. We should specialize, in our own scandal. We
should run away just for one thing. To think, by sharing the oldest,
simplest, dearest indulgences in the world, that we had got each other.
When really we had lost each other, lost all that mattered...."