The Secret Places of the Heart Read Free Page B

immemorial
sleep to find himself in a vast chamber, in a great and ancient house, a
great and ancient house high amidst frozen and lifeless mountains—in a
sunless universe. You are not alone in it. You are not lord of all you
survey. Your leadership is disputed. The darkness even of the room you
are in is full of ancient and discarded but quite unsubjugated powers
and purposes.... They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws suddenly out of
the darkness into the light of your attention. They snatch things out
of your hand, they trip your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and
cluster behind you. Wherever your shadow falls, they creep right up to
you, creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The souls
of apes, monkeys, reptiles and creeping things haunt the passages and
attics and cellars of this living house in which your consciousness has
awakened...."
    The doctor gave this quotation from his unpublished book the advantages
of an abrupt break and a pause.
    Sir Richmond shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "And you propose a
vermin hunt in the old tenement?"
    "The modern man has to be master in his own house. He has to take stock
and know what is there."
    "Three weeks of self vivisection."
    "To begin with. Three weeks of perfect honesty with yourself. As an
opening.... It will take longer than that if we are to go through with
the job."
    "It is a considerable—process."
    "It is."
    "Yet you shrink from simple things like drugs!"
    "Self-knowledge—without anaesthetics."
    "Has this sort of thing ever done anyone any good at all?"
    "It has turned hundreds back to sanity and steady work."
    "How frank are we going to be? How full are we going to be? Anyhow—we
can break off at any time.... We'll try it. We'll try it.... And so for
this journey into the west of England.... And—if we can get there—I'm
not sure that we can get there—into the secret places of my heart."

Chapter the Second - Lady Hardy
*
    The patient left the house with much more self possession than he had
shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau had thrust him back from his
intenser prepossessions to a more generalized view of himself, had made
his troubles objective and detached him from them. He could even find
something amusing now in his situation. He liked the immense scope of
the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that most of it
was entirely true—and, in some untraceable manner, absurd. There were
entertaining possibilities in the prospect of the doctor drawing him
out—he himself partly assisting and partly resisting.
    He was a man of extensive reservations. His private life was in some
respects exceptionally private.
    "I don't confide.... Do I even confide in myself? I imagine I do.... Is
there anything in myself that I haven't looked squarely in the face?...
How much are we going into? Even as regards facts?
    "Does it really help a man—to see himself?..."
    Such thoughts engaged him until he found himself in his study. His desk
and his writing table were piled high with a heavy burthen of work.
Still a little preoccupied with Dr. Martineau's exposition, he began to
handle this confusion....
    At half past nine he found himself with three hours of good work behind
him. It had seemed like two. He had not worked like this for many weeks.
"This is very cheering," he said. "And unexpected. Can old Moon-face
have hypnotized me? Anyhow—... Perhaps I've only imagined I was ill....
Dinner?" He looked at his watch and was amazed at the time. "Good Lord!
I've been at it three hours. What can have happened? Funny I didn't hear
the gong."
    He went downstairs and found Lady Hardy reading a magazine in a
dining-room armchair and finely poised between devotion and martyrdom. A
shadow of vexation fell athwart his mind at the sight of her.
    "I'd no idea it was so late," he said. "I heard no gong."
    "After you swore so at poor Bradley I ordered that there should be no
gongs when we were alone. I did come up to your door about half