The Secret Places of the Heart [53]
piggywiggys. I've got a Committee full of that sort of thing. We live like little modest pigs. And let the world go hang. And pride ourselves upon our freedom from the sin of presumption. "Not quite that!" "Well! How do you put it?" "We are afraid," she said. "It's too vast. We want bright little lives of our own. " "Exactly--sensible little piggy-wiggys." "We have a right to life--and happiness. "First," said Sir Richmond, "as much right as a pig has to food. But whether we get life and happiness or fail to get them we human beings who have imaginations want something more nowadays. . . . Of course we want bright lives, of course we want happiness. Just as we want food, just as we want sleep. But when we have eaten, when we have slept, when we have jolly things about us--it is nothing. We have been made an exception of--and got our rations. The big thing confronts us still. It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it is the thing we have to think about. I do not know why it should be so, but I am compelled by something in my nature to want to serve this idea of a new age for mankind. I want it as my culminating want. I want a world in order, a disciplined mankind going on to greater things. Don't you?" "Now you tell me of it," she said with a smile, "I do." "But before--?" "No. You've made it clear. It wasn't clear before." "I've been talking of this sort of thing with my friend Dr. Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as talking. That perhaps is why I'm so clear and positive." "I don't complain that you are clear and positive. I've been coming along the same way. . . . It's refreshing to meet you." "I found it refreshing to meet Martineau." A twinge of conscience about Dr. Martineau turned Sir Richmond into a new channel. "He's a most interesting man," he said. "Rather shy in some respects. Devoted to his work. And he's writing a book which has saturated him in these ideas. Only two nights ago we stood here and talked about it. The Psychology of a New Age. The world, he believes, is entering upon a new phase in its history, the adolescence, so to speak, of mankind. It is an idea that seizes the imagination. There is a flow of new ideas abroad, he thinks, widening realizations, unprecedented hopes and fears. There is a consciousness of new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing the adolescence of our race. It is giving history a new and more intimate meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer relation with public affairs,--making them matter as formerly they didn't seem to matter. That idea of the bright little private life has to go by the board." "I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had been thinking over some such question before. "The private life," she said, "has a way of coming aboard again." Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of him. "You have some sort of work cut out for you," she said abruptly. "Yes. Yes, I have." "I haven't," she said. "So that I go about," she added, like someone who is looking for something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbing too searching a question at you--what you have found." Sir Richmond considered. "Incidentally," he smiled, " I want to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and barbaric person, your father. I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commission in London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington presently with proposals. " Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. "I suppose," she said, "poor father IS rather like an unbroken mule in business affairs. So many of our big business men in America are. He'll lash out at you." "I don't mind if only he lashes out openly in the sight of all men." She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely. "Tell me what you want to do to him. You find out so many things for me that I seem to have been thinking about in a sort of almost invisible half-conscious way. I've been suspecting for a long time that Civilization wasn't