The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

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.