The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise as the morning advanced. They had walked by the road to Marlow and had lunched at a riverside inn, returning after a restful hour in an arbour on the lawn of this place to tea at Maidenhead. It was as they returned that Sir Richmond took up the thread of their overnight conversation again.
"In the night," he said, "I was thinking over the account I tried to give you of my motives. A lot of it was terribly out of drawing."
"Facts?" asked the doctor.
"No, the facts were all right. It was the atmosphere, the proportions. . . . I don't know if I gave you the effect of something Don Juanesque? . . ."
"Vulgar poem," said the doctor remarkably." I discounted that."
"Vulgar!"
"Intolerable. Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a kitchen."
Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing that used to be called a pet aversion.
"I don't want you to think that I run about after women in an habitual and systematic manner. Or that I deliberately hunt them in the interests of my work and energy. Your questions had set me theorizing about myself. And I did my best to improvise a scheme of motives yesterday. It was, I perceive, a jerry-built scheme, run up at short notice. My nocturnal reflections convinced me of that. I put reason into things that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the wanderings of desire have no single drive. All sorts of motives come in, high and low, down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness. What was true in it all was this, that a man with any imagination in a fatigue phase falls naturally into these complications because they are more attractive to his type and far easier and more refreshing to the mind, at the outset, than anything else. And they do work a sort of recovery in him, They send him back to his work refreshed--so far, that is, as his work is concerned."
"At the OUTSET they are easier," said the doctor.
Sir Richmond laughed. "When one is fagged it is only the outset counts. The more tired one is the more readily one moves along the line of least resistance. . . .
"That is one footnote to what I said. So far as the motive of my work goes, I think we got something like the spirit of it. What I said about that was near the truth of things. . . .
"But there is another set of motives altogether, "Sir Richmond went on with an air of having cleared the ground for his real business, "that I didn't go into at all yesterday."
He considered. "It arises out of these other affairs. Before you realize it your affections are involved. I am a man much swayed by my affections."
Mr. Martineau glanced at him. There was a note of genuine self-reproach in Sir Richmond's voice.
"I get fond of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing. They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little and human and suddenly I find they've GOT me. I'm distressed. I'm filled with something between pity and an impulse of responsibility. I become tender towards them. I am impelled to take care of them. I want to ease them off, to reassure them, to make them stop hurting at any cost. I don't see why it should be the weak and sickly and seamy side of people that grips me most, but it is. I don't know why it should be their failures that gives them power over me, but it is. I told you of this girl, this mistress of mine, who is ill just now. SHE'S got me in that way; she's got me tremendously."
"You did not speak of her yesterday with any morbid excess of pity," the doctor was constrained to remark.
"I abused her very probably. I forget exactly what I said. . . ."
The doctor offered no assistance.
"But the reason why I abuse her is perfectly plain. I abuse her because she distresses me by her misfortunes and instead of my getting anything out of her, I go out to her. But I DO go out to her. All this time at the back of my mind I am worrying about her. She has that gift of making one feel for her. I am feeling that damned carbuncle almost as if it had been my affair instead of hers.
"That carbuncle has made me suffer FRIGHTFULLY. . . . Why should I? It isn't mine."
He regarded the doctor earnestly. The doctor controlled a strong desire to laugh.
"I suppose the young lady--" he began.
"Oh! SHE puts in suffering all right. I've no doubt about that.
"I suppose," Sir Richmond went on, "now that I have told you so much of this affair, I may as well tell you all. It is a sort of comedy, a painful comedy, of irrelevant affections."
The doctor was prepared to be a good listener. Facts he would always listen to; it was only when people told him their theories that he would interrupt with his "Exactly."
"This young woman is a person of considerable genius. I don't know if you have seen in the illustrated papers a peculiar sort of humorous illustrations usually with a considerable amount of bite in them over the name of Martin Leeds?
"Extremely amusing stuff."
"It is that Martin Leeds. I met her at the beginning of her career. She talks almost as well as she draws. She amused me immensely. I'm not the sort of man who waylays and besieges women and girls. I'm not the pursuing type. But I perceived that in some odd way I attracted her and I was neither wise enough nor generous enough not to let the thing develop."
"H'm," said Dr. Martineau.
"I'd never had to do with an intellectually brilliant woman before. I see now that the more imaginative force a woman has, the more likely she is to get into a state of extreme self-abandonment with any male thing upon which her imagination begins to crystallize. Before I came along she'd mixed chiefly with a lot of young artists and students, all doing nothing at all except talk about the things they were going to do. I suppose I profited by the contrast, being older and with my hands full of affairs. Perhaps something had happened that had made her recoil towards my sort of thing. I don't know. But she just let herself go at me."
"And you?"
"Let myself go too. I'd never met anything like her before. It was her wit took me. It didn't occur to me that she wasn't my contemporary and as able as I was. As able to take care of herself. All sorts of considerations that I should have shown to a sillier woman I never dreamt of showing to her. I had never met anyone so mentally brilliant before or so helpless and headlong. And so here we are on each other's hands! "
"But the child?
"It happened to us. For four years now things have just happened to us. All the time I have been overworking, first at explosives and now at this fuel business. She too is full of her work.
"Nothing stops that though everything seems to interfere with it. And in a distraught, preoccupied way we are abominably fond of each other. 'Fond' is the word. But we are both too busy to look after either ourselves or each other.
"She is much more incapable than I am," said Sir Richmond as if he delivered a weighed and very important judgment.
"You see very much of each other?"
"She has a flat in Chelsea and a little cottage in South Cornwall, and we sometimes snatch a few days together, away somewhere in Surrey or up the Thames or at such a place as Southend where one is lost in a crowd of inconspicuous people. "Then things go well--they usually go well at the start--we are glorious companions. She is happy, she is creative, she will light up a new place with flashes of humour, with a keenness of appreciation . . . . "
"But things do not always go well?"
"Things," said Sir Richmond with the deliberation of a man who measures his words, "are apt to go wrong. . . . At the flat there is constant trouble with the servants; they bully her. A woman is more entangled with servants than a man. Women in that position seem to resent the work and freedom of other women. Her servants won't leave her in peace as they would leave a man; they make trouble for her. . . . And when we have had a few days anywhere away, even if nothing in particular has gone wrong--"
Sir Richmond stopped short.
"When they go wrong it is generally her fault," the doctor sounded.
"Almost always."
"But if they don't?" said the psychiatrist.
"It is difficult to describe. . . . The essential incompatibility of the whole thing comes out."
The doctor maintained his expression of intelligent interest.
"She wants to go on with her work. She is able to work anywhere. All she wants is just cardboard and ink. My mind on the other hand turns back to the Fuel Commission . . . ."
"Then any little thing makes trouble."
"Any little thing makes trouble. And we always drift round to the same discussion; whether we ought really to go on together."
"It is you begin that?"
"Yes, I start that. You see she is perfectly contented when I am about. She is as fond of me as I am of her."
"Fonder perhaps."
'I don't know. But she is--adhesive. Emotionally adhesive. All she wants to do is just to settle down when I am there and go on with her work. But then, you see, there is MY work."
"Exactly. . . . After all it seems to me that your great trouble is not in yourselves but in social institutions. Which haven't yet fitted themselves to people like you two. It is the sense of uncertainty makes her, as you say, adhesive. Nervously so. If we were indeed living in a new age Instead of the moral ruins of a shattered one--"
"We can't alter the age we live in," said Sir Richmond a little testily.
"No. Exactly. But we CAN realize, in any particular situation, that it is not the individuals to blame but the misfit of ideas and forms and prejudices."
"No," said Sir Richmond, obstinately rejecting this pacifying suggestion; "she could adapt herself. If she cared enough."
"But how?"
"She will not take the slightest trouble to adjust herself to the peculiarities of our position. . . . She could be cleverer. Other women are cleverer. Any other woman almost would be cleverer than she is."
"But if she was cleverer, she wouldn't be the genius she is. She would just be any other woman."
"Perhaps she would," said Sir Richmond darkly and desperately. "Perhaps she would. Perhaps it would be better if she was."
Dr. Martineau raised his eyebrows in a furtive aside.
"But here you see that it is that in my case, the fundamental incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case. That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel--and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is an attack. We quarrel on that. It isn't as though I found it so easy to stick to my work that I could disregard her hostility. And I can't bear to part from her. I threaten it, distress her excessively and then I am overcome by sympathy for her and I go back to her. . . . In the ordinary course of things I should be with her now."
"If it were not for the carbuncle?"
"If it were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me to see her disfigured. She does not understand--" Sir Richmond was at a loss for a phrase--"that it is not her good looks."
"She won't let you go to her?"
"It amounts to that. . . . And soon there will be all the trouble about educating the girl. Whatever happens, she must have as good a chance as--anyone. . . . "
"Ah! That is worrying you too!"
"Frightfully at times. If it were a boy it would be easier. It needs constant tact and dexterity to fix things up. Neither of us have any. It needs attention. . . . "
Sir Richmond mused darkly.
Dr. Martineau thought aloud. "An incompetent delightful person with Martin Leeds's sense of humour. And her powers of expression. She must be attractive to many people. She could probably do without you. If once you parted."
Sir Richmond turned on him eagerly.
"You think I ought to part from her? On her account?"
"On her account. It might pain her. But once the thing was done--"
"I want to part. I believe I ought to part."
"Well?"
"But then my affection comes in."
"That extraordinary--TENDERNESS of yours?"
"I'm afraid."
"Of what?"
"Anyone might get hold of her--if I let her down. She hasn't a tithe of the ordinary coolheaded calculation of an average woman. . . . I've a duty to her genius. I've got to take care of her."
To which the doctor made no reply.
"Nevertheless the idea of parting has been very much in my mind lately."
"Letting her go FREE?"
"You can put it in that way if you like."
"It might not be a fatal operation for either of you."
"And yet there are moods when parting is an intolerable idea. When one is invaded by a flood of affection.". . . . And old habits of association."
Dr. Martineau thought. Was that the right word,--affection? Perhaps it was.
They had come out on the towing path close by the lock and they found themselves threading their way through a little crowd of boating people and lookers-on. For a time their conversation was broken. Sir Richmond resumed it.
"But this is where we cease to be Man on his Planet and all the rest of it. This is where the idea of a definite task, fanatically followed to the exclusion of all minor considerations, breaks down. When the work is good, when we are sure we are all right, then we may carry off things with a high hand. But the work isn't always good, we aren't always sure. We blunder, we make a muddle, we are fatigued. Then the sacrificed affections come in as accusers. Then it is that we want to be reassured."
"And then it is that Miss Martin Leeds--?"
"Doesn't," Sir Richmond snapped.
Came a long pause.
"And yet--
"It is extraordinarily difficult to think of parting from Martin."