第29章 THE FIFTH(6)

"Our muddles were unconscious.We drifted from mood to mood and forgot.There was more sunshine then, more laughter perhaps, and blacker despair.Despair like the despair of children that can weep itself to sleep....It's over....Was it battle and massacre that ended that long afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine? Or did strange men bring a sickness--measles, perhaps, or the black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into the land across the southern sea? I can't remember...."Sir Richmond turned about."I would like to dig up the bottom of this ditch here foot by foot--and dry the stuff and sift it--very carefully....Then I might begin to remember things."Section 5

In the evening, after a pleasant supper, they took a turn about the walls with the moon sinking over beyond Silbury, and then went in and sat by lamplight before a brightly fussy wood fire and smoked.There were long intervals of friendly silence.

"I don't in the least want to go on talking about myself, "said Sir Richmond abruptly.

"Let it rest then," said the doctor generously.

"To-day, among these ancient memories, has taken me out of myself wonderfully.I can't tell you how good Avebury has been for me.This afternoon half my consciousness has seemed to be a tattooed creature wearing a knife of stone....""The healing touch of history."

"And for the first time my damned Committee has mattered scarcely a rap."Sir Richmond stretched himself in his chair and blinked cheerfully at his cigar smoke.

"Nevertheless," he said, "this confessional business of yours has been an excellent exercise.It has enabled me to get outside myself, to look at myself as a Case.Now I can even see myself as a remote Case.That I needn't bother about further....So far as that goes, I think we have done all that there is to be done.""I shouldn't say that--quite--yet," said the doctor.

"I don't think I'm a subject for real psychoanalysis at all.

I'm not an overlaid sort of person.When I spread myself out there is not much indication of a suppressed wish or of anything masked or buried of that sort.What you get is a quite open and recognized discord of two sets of motives."The doctor considered."Yes, I think that is true.Your LIBIDO is, I should say, exceptionally free.Generally you are doing what you want to do--overdoing, in fact, what you want to do and getting simply tired.""Which is the theory I started with.I am a case of fatigue under irritating circumstances with very little mental complication or concealment.""Yes," said the doctor."I agree.You are not a case for psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, at all.You are in open conflict with yourself, upon moral and social issues.

Practically open.Your problems are problems of conscious conduct.""As I said."

"Of what renunciations you have consciously to make."Sir Richmond did not answer that....

"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for magnanimity.This day particularly has been a good day.When we stood on this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be standing outside myself in an immense still sphere of past and future.I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw myself four thousand years away, and all my distresses as very little incidents in that perspective.Away there in London the case is altogether different; after three hours or so of the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed moment of personality.There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is only the rankling dispute.For all those three hours, perhaps, I have been thinking of just what I had to say, just how I had to say it, just how I looked while Isaid it, just how much I was making myself understood, how Imight be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented, challenged, denied.One draws in more and more as one is used up.At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting, pin-point of SELF....One goes back to one's home unable to recover.Fighting it over again.All night sometimes....I get up and walk about the room and curse....Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of mind to Westminster?""When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor, unhelpfully.He added after some seconds, "Milton knew of these troubles.'Not without dust and heat' he wrote--a great phrase.""But the dust chokes me," said Sir Richmond.

He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay beside him on the table.But he did not open it.He held it in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all that evening."I do not think that I shall stir up my motives any more for a time.Better to go on into the west country cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past.""I can prescribe nothing better," said Dr.Martineau.

"Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on one or two of your minor entanglements.""I don't want to think of them, said Sir Richmond."Let me get right away from everything.Until my skin has grown again."