The Secret Places of the Heart (6 page)

"There were no children by your marriage?"

"Your line of thought, doctor, is too philoprogenitive. We have had
three. My daughter was married two years ago. She is in America. One
little boy died when he was three. The other is in India, taking up the
Mardipore power scheme again now that he is out of the army.... No, it
is simply that I was hopelessly disappointed with everything that a
good woman and a decent marriage had to give me. Pure disappointment and
vexation. The anti-climax to an immense expectation built up throughout
an imaginative boyhood and youth and early manhood. I was shocked
and ashamed at my own disappointment. I thought it mean and base.
Nevertheless this orderly household into which I had placed my life,
these almost methodical connubialities...."

He broke off in mid-sentence.

Dr. Martineau shook his head disapprovingly.

"No," he said, "it wasn't fair to your wife."

"It was shockingly unfair. I have always realized that. I've done what
I could to make things up to her.... Heaven knows what counter
disappointments she has concealed.... But it is no good arguing about
rights and wrongs now. This is not an apology for my life. I am telling
you what happened.

"Not for me to judge," said Dr. Martineau. "Go on."

"By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had satisfied
none but the most transitory desires and I had incurred a tremendous
obligation. That obligation didn't restrain me from making desperate
lunges at something vaguely beautiful that I felt was necessary to me;
but it did cramp and limit these lunges. So my story flops down into the
comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable, married man...I
was still driven by my dream of some extravagantly beautiful inspiration
called love and I sought it like an area sneak. Gods! What a story it
is when one brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and
sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world—somewhere. Hidden away
from me. I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear lost thing, now in the
corners of a smiling mouth, now in dark eyes beneath a black smoke of
hair, now in a slim form seen against the sky. Often I cared nothing for
the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding
from me...."

Sir Richmond's voice altered.

"I don't see what possible good it can do to talk over these things." He
began to row and rowed perhaps a score of strokes. Then he stopped
and the boat drove on with a whisper of water at the bow and over the
outstretched oar blades.

"What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried. "What a
fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She drives us into
indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even get the children which are
her only excuse for her mischief. See what a fantastic thing I am when
you take the machine to pieces! I have been a busy and responsible man
throughout my life. I have handled complicated public and industrial
affairs not unsuccessfully and discharged quite big obligations fully
and faithfully. And all the time, hidden away from the public eye,
my life has been laced by the thread of these—what can one call
them?—love adventures. How many? you ask. I don't know. Never have I
been a whole-hearted lover; never have I been able to leave love
alone.... Never has love left me alone.

"And as I am made," said Sir Richmond with sudden insistence, "AS I AM
MADE—I do not believe that I could go on without these affairs. I know
that you will be disposed to dispute that."

Dr. Martineau made a reassuring noise.

"These affairs are at once unsatisfying and vitally necessary. It is
only latterly that I have begun to perceive this. Women MAKE life
for me. Whatever they touch or see or desire becomes worth while
and otherwise it is not worth while. Whatever is lovely in my world,
whatever is delightful, has been so conveyed to me by some woman.
Without the vision they give me, I should be a hard dry industry in the
world, a worker ant, a soulless rage, making much, valuing nothing."

He paused.

"You are, I think, abnormal," considered the doctor.

"Not abnormal. Excessive, if you like. Without women I am a wasting
fever of distressful toil. Without them there is no kindness in
existence, no rest, no sort of satisfaction. The world is a battlefield,
trenches, barbed wire, rain, mud, logical necessity and utter
desolation—with nothing whatever worth fighting for. Whatever justifies
effort, whatever restores energy is hidden in women...."

"An access of sex," said Dr. Martineau. "This is a phase...."

"It is how I am made," said Sir Richmond.

A brief silence fell upon that. Dr. Martineau persisted. "It isn't how
you are made. We are getting to something in all this. It is, I insist,
a mood of how you are made. A distinctive and indicative mood."

Sir Richmond went on, almost as if he soliloquized.

"I would go through it all again.... There are times when the love
of women seems the only real thing in the world to me. And always it
remains the most real thing. I do not know how far I may be a normal man
or how far I may not be, so to speak, abnormally male, but to me life
has very little personal significance and no value or power until it
has a woman as intermediary. Before life can talk to me and say anything
that matters a woman must be present as a medium. I don't mean that it
has no significance mentally and logically; I mean that irrationally and
emotionally it has no significance. Works of art, for example, bore me,
literature bores me, scenery bores me, even the beauty of a woman bores
me, unless I find in it some association with a woman's feeling. It
isn't that I can't tell for myself that a picture is fine or a mountain
valley lovely, but that it doesn't matter a rap to me whether it is or
whether it isn't until there is a feminine response, a sexual motif, if
you like to call it that, coming in. Whatever there is of loveliness
or pride in life doesn't LIVE for me until somehow a woman comes in and
breathes upon it the breath of life. I cannot even rest until a woman
makes holiday for me. Only one thing can I do without women and that is
work, joylessly but effectively, and latterly for some reason that it is
up to you to discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."

"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous visit here.
It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago. We rowed down this same
backwater. I can see my companion's hand—she had very pretty hands with
rosy palms—trailing in the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly
under her sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected
from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it. She was one of those
people who seem always to be happy and to radiate happiness.

"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a thoroughly bad
lot. She had about as much morality, in the narrower sense of the word,
as a monkey. And yet she stands out in my mind as one of the most honest
women I have ever met. She was certainly one of the kindest. Part of
that effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her candid
blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner.... But—no! She was
really honest.

"We drifted here as we are doing now. She pulled at the sweet rushes
and crushed them in her hand. She adds a remembered brightness to this
afternoon.

"Honest. Friendly. Of all the women I have known, this woman who was
here with me came nearest to being my friend. You know, what we call
virtue in a woman is a tremendous handicap to any real friendliness with
a man. Until she gets to an age when virtue and fidelity are no longer
urgent practical concerns, a good woman, by the very definition of
feminine goodness, isn't truly herself. Over a vast extent of her being
she is RESERVED. She suppresses a vast amount of her being, holds back,
denies, hides. On the other hand, there is a frankness and honesty in
openly bad women arising out of the admitted fact that they are bad,
that they hide no treasure from you, they have no peculiarly precious
and delicious secrets to keep, and no poverty to conceal. Intellectually
they seem to be more manly and vigorous because they are, as people say,
unsexed. Many old women, thoroughly respectable old women, have the
same quality. Because they have gone out of the personal sex business.
Haven't you found that?"

"I have never," said the doctor, "known what you call an openly bad
woman,—at least, at all intimately...."

Sir Richmond looked with quick curiosity at his companion. "You have
avoided them!"

"They don't attract me."

"They repel you?"

"For me," said the doctor, "for any friendliness, a woman must be
modest.... My habits of thought are old-fashioned, I suppose, but
the mere suggestion about a woman that there were no barriers, no
reservation, that in any fashion she might more than meet me half
way..."

His facial expression completed his sentence.

"Now I wonder," whispered Sir Richmond, and hesitated for a moment
before he carried the great research into the explorer's country.
"You are afraid of women?" he said, with a smile to mitigate the
impertinence.

"I respect them."

"An element of fear."

"Well, I am afraid of them then. Put it that way if you like. Anyhow I
do not let myself go with them. I have never let myself go."

"You lose something. You lose a reality of insight."

There was a thoughtful interval.

"Having found so excellent a friend," said the doctor, "why did you ever
part from her?"

Sir Richmond seemed indisposed to answer, but Dr. Martineau's
face remained slantingly interrogative. He had found the effective
counterattack and he meant to press it. "I was jealous of her," Sir
Richmond admitted. "I couldn't stand that side of it."

After a meditative silence the doctor became briskly professional again.

"You care for your wife," he said. "You care very much for your wife.
She is, as you say, your great obligation and you are a man to respect
obligations. I grasp that. Then you tell me of these women who have come
and gone.... About them too you are perfectly frank... There remains
someone else." Sir Richmond stared at his physician.

"Well," he said and laughed. "I didn't pretend to have made my
autobiography anything more than a sketch."

"No, but there is a special person, the current person."

"I haven't dilated on my present situation, I admit."

"From some little things that have dropped from you, I should say there
is a child."

"That," said Sir Richmond after a brief pause, "is a good guess."

"Not older than three."

"Two years and a half."

"You and this lady who is, I guess, young, are separated. At any rate,
you can't go to her. That leaves you at loose ends, because for some
time, for two or three years at least, you have ceased to be—how
shall I put it?—an emotional wanderer."

"I begin to respect your psychoanalysis."

"Hence your overwhelming sense of the necessity of feminine
companionship for weary men. I guess she is a very jolly companion to be
with, amusing, restful—interesting."

"H'm," said Sir Richmond. "I think that is a fair description. When she
cares, that is. When she is in good form."

"Which she isn't at present," hazarded the doctor. He exploded a mine of
long-pent exasperation.

"She is the clumsiest hand at keeping well that I have ever known.
Health is a woman's primary duty. But she is incapable of the most
elementary precautions. She is maddeningly receptive to every infection.
At the present moment, when I am ill, when I am in urgent need of help
and happiness, she has let that wretched child get measles and
she herself won't let me go near her because she has got something
disfiguring, something nobody else could ever have or think of having,
called CARBUNCLE. Carbuncle!"

"It is very painful," said Dr. Martineau. "No doubt it is," said Sir
Richmond.

"No doubt it is." His voice grew bitter. He spoke with deliberation. "A
perfectly aimless, useless illness,—and as painful as it CAN be."

He spoke as if he slammed a door viciously. And indeed he had slammed
a door. The doctor realized that for the present there was no more
self-dissection to be got from Sir Richmond.

For some time Sir Richmond had been keeping the boat close up to the
foaming weir to the left of the lock by an occasional stroke. Now with
a general air of departure he swung the boat round and began to row down
stream towards the bridge and the Radiant Hotel.

"Time we had tea," he said.

After tea Dr. Martineau left Sir Richmond in a chair upon the lawn,
brooding darkly—apparently over the crime of the carbuncle. The doctor
went to his room, ostensibly to write a couple of letters and put on
a dinner jacket, but really to make a few notes of the afternoon's
conversation and meditate over his impressions while they were fresh.

His room proffered a comfortable armchair and into this he sank...
A number of very discrepant things were busy in his mind. He had
experienced a disconcerting personal attack. There was a whirl of active
resentment in the confusion.

"Apologetics of a rake," he tried presently.

"A common type, stripped of his intellectual dressing. Every third
manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some such undertow
of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an imaginative laxity,
the temptations of the trip to London—weakness masquerading as a
psychological necessity. The Lady of the Carbuncle seems to have got
rather a hold upon him. She has kept him in order for three or four
years."

The doctor scrutinized his own remarks with a judicious expression.

"I am not being fair. He ruffled me. Even if it is true, as I said, that
every third manufacturer from the midlands is in much the same case as
he is, that does not dismiss the case. It makes it a more important
one, much more important: it makes it a type case with the exceptional
quality of being self-expressive. Almost too selfexpressive.