CHAPTER THE FIFTH

IN THE LAND OF THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLES

Section 1

A gust of confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil.  At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of intimacy.  They discussed the weather, which seemed to be settling down to the utmost serenity of which the English spring is capable, they talked of Sir Richmond’s coming car and of the possible routes before them.  Sir Richmond produced the Michelin maps which he had taken out of the pockets of the little Charmeuse.  The Bath Road lay before them, he explained, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Silbury Hill which overhangs Avebury.  Both travellers discovered a common excitement at the mention of Avebury and Silbury Hill.  Both took an intelligent interest in archaeology.  Both had been greatly stimulated by the recent work of Elliot Smith and Rivers upon what was then known as the Heliolithic culture.  It had revived their interest in Avebury and Stonehenge.  The doctor moreover had been reading Hippisley Cox’s green roads of England.

Neither gentleman had ever seen Avebury, but Dr. Martineau had once visited Stonehenge.

“Avebury is much the oldest,” said the doctor.  “They must have made Silbury Hill long before 2000 B.C.  It may be five thousand years old or even more.  It is the most important historical relic in the British Isles.  And the most neglected.”

They exchanged archaeological facts.  The secret places of the heart rested until the afternoon.

Then Sir Richmond saw fit to amplify his confessions in one particular.

Section 2

The doctor and his patient had discovered a need for exercise as the morning advanced.  They had walked by the road to Marlow and had lunched at a riverside inn, returning after a restful hour in an arbour on the lawn of this place to tea at Maidenhead.  It was as they returned that Sir Richmond took up the thread of their overnight conversation again.

“In the night,” he said, “I was thinking over the account I tried to give you of my motives.  A lot of it was terribly out of drawing.”

“Facts?” asked the doctor.

“No, the facts were all right.  It was the atmosphere, the proportions....  I don’t know if I gave you the effect of something Don Juanesque?...”

“Vulgar poem,” said the doctor remarkably.  “I discounted that.”

“Vulgar!”

“Intolerable.  Byron in sexual psychology is like a stink in a kitchen.”

Sir Richmond perceived he had struck upon the sort of thing that used to be called a pet aversion.