"Not for me to judge," said Dr.Martineau."Go on.""By marrying I had got nothing that my soul craved for, I had satisfied none but the most transitory desires and I had incurred a tremendous obligation.That obligation didn't restrain me from making desperate lunges at something vaguely beautiful that I felt was necessary to me; but it did cramp and limit these lunges.So my story flops down into the comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable, married man...I was still driven by my dream of some extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought it like an area sneak.Gods! What a story it is when one brings it all together! I couldn't believe that the glow and sweetness I dreamt of were not in the world--somewhere.
Hidden away from me.I seemed to catch glimpses of the dear lost thing, now in the corners of a smiling mouth, now in dark eyes beneath a black smoke of hair, now in a slim form seen against the sky.Often I cared nothing for the woman Imade 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.Adistinctive 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.Idon'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.Only one thing can Ido without women and that is work, joylessly but effectively, and latterly for some reason that it is up to you to discover, doctor, even the power of work has gone from me."Section 4
"This afternoon brings back to me very vividly my previous visit here.It was perhaps a dozen or fifteen years ago.We rowed down this same backwater.I can see my companion's hand--she had very pretty hands with rosy palms--trailing in the water, and her shadowed face smiling quietly under her sunshade, with little faint streaks of sunlight, reflected from the ripples, dancing and quivering across it.She was one of those people who seem always to be happy and to radiate happiness.
"By ordinary standards," said Sir Richmond, "she was a thoroughly bad lot.She had about as much morality, in the narrower sense of the word, as a monkey.And yet she stands out in my mind as one of the most honest women I have ever met.She was certainly one of the kindest.Part of that effect of honesty may have been due to her open brow, her candid blue eyes, the smiling frankness of her manner....
But--no! She was really honest.
