"A neutralized world.A separated world.How we should jostle in the streets! But the early Christians have tried it already.The thing is impossible.
"Very well, then, we have to make women more responsible again.In a new capacity.We have to educate them far more seriously as sources of energy--as guardians and helpers of men.And we have to suppress them far more rigorously as tempters and dissipaters.Instead of mothering babies they have to mother the race...."A vision of women made responsible floated before his eyes.
"Is that man working better since you got hold of him? If not, why not? "Or again,--Jane Smith was charged with neglecting her lover to the common danger....The inspector said the man was in a pitiful state, morally quite uncombed and infested with vulgar, showy ideas...."The doctor laughed, telescoped his pencil and stood up.
Section 7
It became evident after dinner that Sir Richmond also had been thinking over the afternoon's conversation.
He and Dr.Martineau sat in wide-armed cane chairs on the lawn with a wickerwork table bearing coffee cups and little glasses between them.A few other diners chatted and whispered about similar tables but not too close to our talkers to disturb them; the dining room behind them had cleared its tables and depressed its illumination.The moon, in its first quarter, hung above the sunset, sank after twilight, shone brighter and brighter among the western trees, and presently had gone, leaving the sky to an increasing multitude of stars.The Maidenhead river wearing its dusky blue draperies and its jewels of light had recovered all the magic Sir Richmond had stripped from it in the afternoon.The grave arches of the bridge, made complete circles by the reflexion of the water, sustained, as if by some unifying and justifying reason, the erratic flat flashes and streaks and glares of traffic that fretted to and fro overhead.A voice sang intermittently and a banjo tinkled, but remotely enough to be indistinct and agreeable.
"After all," Sir Richmond began abruptly," the search for some sort of sexual modus vivendi is only a means to an end.
One does not want to live for *** but only through ***.The main thing in my life has always been my work.This afternoon, under the Maidenhead influence, I talked too much of ***.I babbled.Of things one doesn't usually...""It was very illuminating," said the doctor.
"No doubt.But a temporary phase.It is the defective bearing talks....Just now--I happen to be irritated."The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor's face.
"The work is the thing," said Sir Richmond.So long as one can keep one's grip on it.""What," said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and sending wreaths of smoke up towards the star-dusted zenith, "what is your idea of your work? I mean, how do you see it in relation to yourself--and things generally?""Put in the most general terms?"
"Put in the most general terms."
"I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all.It is hard to put something one is always thinking about in general terms or to think of it as a whole....Now....
Fuel?...
"I suppose it was my father's business interests that pushed me towards specialization in fuel.He wanted me to have a thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific training was less easy to get for a boy than it is today.And much more inspiring when you got it.My mind was framed, so to speak, in geology and astronomical physics.I grew up to think on that scale.Just as a man who has been trained in history and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman empire.I don't know what your pocket map of the universe is, the map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other general ideas.To me this planet is a little ball of oxides and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface.And we, the minutest particles in that tarnish.Who can nevertheless, in some unaccountable way, take in the idea of this universe as one whole, who begin to dream of taking control of it.""That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view.
I suppose I have much the same general idea of the world.On rather more psychological lines.""We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something that is only just beginning to be aware of what it is--and what it might be.""Exactly," said the doctor."Good."
He went on eagerly."That is precisely how I see it.You and I are just particles in the tarnish, as you call it, who are becoming dimly awake to what we are, to what we have in common.Only a very few of us have got as far even as this.
These others here, for example...."
He indicated the rest of Maidenhead by a movement.
"Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy solicitudes fill them up.They haven't begun to get out of themselves.""We, I suppose, have," doubted Sir Richmond.
"We have."
The doctor had no doubt.He lay back in his chair, with his hands behind his head and his smoke ascending vertically to heaven.With the greatest contentment he began quoting himself."This getting out of one's individuality--this conscious getting out of one's individuality--is one of the most important and interesting aspects of the psychology of the new age that is now dawning.As compared with any previous age.Unconsciously, of course, every true artist, every philosopher, every scientific investigator, so far as his art or thought went, has always got out of himself,--has forgotten his personal interests and become Man thinking for the whole race.And intimations of the same thing have been at the heart of most religions.But now people are beginning to get this detachment without any distinctively religious feeling or any distinctive aesthetic or intellectual impulse, as if it were a plain matter of fact.Plain matter of fact, that we are only incidentally ourselves.That really each one of us is also the whole species, is really indeed all life.""A part of it."
