THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

BY H. G. WELLS

1922

CONTENTS

Chapter

1. THE CONSULTATION

2. LADY HARDY

3. THE DEPARTURE

4. AT MAIDENHEAD

5. IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES

6. THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

7. COMPANIONSHIP

8. FULL MOON

9. THE LAST DAYS OF SIR RICHMOND HARDY

THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE CONSULTATION

Section 1

The maid was a young woman of great natural calmness; she was
accustomed to let in visitors who had this air of being
annoyed and finding one umbrella too numerous for them. It
mattered nothing to her that the gentleman was asking for Dr.
Martineau as if he was asking for something with an
unpleasant taste. Almost imperceptibly she relieved him of
his umbrella and juggled his hat and coat on to a massive
mahogany stand. "What name, Sir?" she asked, holding open the
door of the consulting room.

"Hardy," said the gentleman, and then yielding it reluctantly
with its distasteful three-year-old honour, "Sir Richmond
Hardy."

The door closed softly behind him and he found himself in
undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in
which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world
eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished
specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase
containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical
works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs,
a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any
collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the
promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost
of the three windows and stared out despondently at Harley
Street.

For a minute or so he remained as still and limp as an empty
jacket on its peg, and then a gust of irritation stirred him.

"Damned fool I was to come here," he said..."DAMNED fool!

"Rush out of the place? . . .

"I've given my name." . . .

He heard the door behind him open and for a moment pretended
not to hear. Then he turned round. "I don't see what you can
do for me," he said.

"I'm sure _I_ don't," said the doctor. "People come here and
talk."

There was something reassuringly inaggressive about the
figure that confronted Sir Richmond. Dr. Martineau's height
wanted at least three inches of Sir Richmond's five feet
eleven; he was humanly plump, his face was round and pink and
cheerfully wistful, a little suggestive of the full moon, of
what the full moon might be if it could get fresh air and
exercise. Either his tailor had made his trousers too short
or he had braced them too high so that he seemed to have
grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been
dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric
personality; this amiable presence dispelled his preconceived
resistances.

Dr. Martineau, a little out of breath as though he had been
running upstairs, with his hands in his trouser pockets,
seemed intent only on disavowals. "People come here and talk.
It does them good, and sometimes I am able to offer a
suggestion.

"Talking to someone who understands a little," he expanded
the idea.

"I'm jangling damnably...overwork.. . . ."

"Not overwork," Dr. Martineau corrected. "Not overwork.
Overwork never hurt anyone. Fatigue stops that. A man can
work--good straightforward work, without internal resistance,
until he drops,--and never hurt himself. You must be working
against friction."

"Friction! I'm like a machine without oil. I'm grinding to
death. . . . And it's so DAMNED important I SHOULDN'T break
down. It's VITALLY important."

He stressed his words and reinforced them with a quivering
gesture of his upraised clenched hand. "My temper's in rags.
I explode at any little thing. I'm RAW. I can't work steadily
for ten minutes and I can't leave off working."

"Your name," said the doctor, "is familiar. Sir Richmond
Hardy? In the papers. What is it?"

"Fuel."

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly
can't afford to have you ill."

"I AM ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that
Commission."

"Your technical knowledge--"

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the
national fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's
what I'm up against. You don't know the job I have to do. You
don't know what a Commission of that sort is. The moral
tangle of it. You don't know how its possibilities and
limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long before a
single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole
thing with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as
daylight. I might have seen it at first. . . . Three experts
who'd been got at; they thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour
men who'd do anything you wanted them to do provided you
called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the socialist art
critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway
managers, oil profiteers, financial adventurers. . . . "

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the
days before the war it was different. Then there was
abundance. A little grabbing or cornering was all to the
good. All to the good. It prevented things being used up too
fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia was
tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all
this is altered. We're living in a different world. The
public won't stand things it used to stand. It's a new
public. It's--wild. It'll smash up the show if they go too
far. Everything short and running shorter--food, fuel,
material. But these people go on. They go on as though
nothing had changed. . . . Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn
them. There are men on that Commission who would steal the
brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in
it. . . . It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles. It's--!
But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."

"You think there may be a smash-up?"

"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."

"A social smash-up."

"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"

"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All
sorts of people I find think that," said the doctor. "All
sorts of people lie awake thinking of it."

"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too,"
he said and seemed to reflect. But he was observing his
patient acutely--with his ears.

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and
left his sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered
swiftly what line of talk he had best follow.

Section 2

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor.
"It's at the back of all sorts of mental trouble. It is a new
state of mind. Before the war it was abnormal--a phase of
neurasthenia. Now it is almost the normal state with whole
classes of intelligent people. Intelligent, I say. The others
always have been casual and adventurous and always will be. A
loss of confidence in the general background of life. So that
we seem to float over abysses."