The Secret Places of the Heart Read Free

interested, prosperous, mildly distinguished. I
had been born and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed
that someone else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I never
enquired."
    "Nor did I," said Sir Richmond, "but—"
    "And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on. "Nobody had ever
steered the ship. It was adrift."
    "I realized that. I—"
    "It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by faith—as
children do, as the animals do. At the back of the healthy mind, human
or animal, has been this persuasion: 'This is all right. This will go
on. If I keep the rule, if I do so and so, all will be well. I need not
trouble further; things are cared for.'"
    "If we could go on like that!" said Sir Richmond.
    "We can't. That faith is dead. The war—and the peace—have killed it."
    The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance to the full
moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote things. "It may very well
be that man is no more capable of living out of that atmosphere of
assurance than a tadpole is of living out of water. His mental
existence may be conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become
incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically
self-seeking—incoherent... a stampede.... Human sanity may—DISPERSE.
    "That's our trouble," the doctor completed. "Our fundamental trouble.
All our confidences and our accustomed adaptations are destroyed. We fit
together no longer. We are—loose. We don't know where we are nor what
to do. The psychology of the former time fails to give safe responses,
and the psychology of the New Age has still to develop."
Section 4
    "That is all very well," said Sir Richmond in the resolute voice of one
who will be pent no longer. "That is all very well as far as it goes.
But it does not cover my case. I am not suffering from inadaptation. I
HAVE adapted. I have thought things out. I think—much as you do. Much
as you do. So it's not that. But—... Mind you, I am perfectly clear
where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the breakup
of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another system or perish
amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly. Science and plan have to
replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted.
Granted. We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it.
We've muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of world,
planned and scientific, has to be got going. Civilization renewed.
Rebuilding civilization—while the premises are still occupied and busy.
It's an immense enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some
ways it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips my
imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work. Working as I
do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall presently join up... The
attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand
it may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the
rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where
my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all
that I have been saying, but—The rest of me won't follow. The rest of
me refuses to attend, forgets, straggles, misbehaves."
    "Exactly."
    The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all. 'Amazingly,'
if you like.... I have this unlimited faith in our present tremendous
necessity—for work—for devotion; I believe my share, the work I am
doing, is essential to the whole thing—and I work sluggishly. I work
reluctantly. I work damnably."
    "Exact—" The doctor checked himself. "All that is explicable. Indeed it
is. Listen for a moment to me! Consider what you are. Consider what
we are. Consider what a man is before you marvel at his ineptitudes
of will. Face the accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand
generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And that ape
again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his