"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 Iam 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 MYwork."
"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.
