MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

BY

H. G. WELLS

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1916

CONTENTS

• BOOK I — MATCHING’S EASY AT
  EASE
  • MR. DIRECK VISITS MR.
    BRITLING
  • MR. BRITLING CONTINUES
    HIS EXPOSITION
  • THE ENTERTAINMENT OF MR.
    DIRECK REACHES A CLIMAX
  • MR. BRITLING IN
    SOLILOQUY
  • THE COMING OF THE
    DAY

• BOOK II — MATCHING’S EASY AT
  WAR
  • ONLOOKERS
  • TAKING
    PART
  • MALIGNITY
  • IN THE WEB OF THE
    INEFFECTIVE

• BOOK III — THE TESTAMENT OF
  MATCHING’S EASY
  • MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A
    WALK
  • MR. BRITLING WRITES
    UNTIL SUNRISE

BOOK I

MATCHING’S EASY AT EASE

CHAPTER THE FIRST

MR. DIRECK VISITS MR. BRITLING

§ 1

It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck’s first visit to England, and
he was at his acutest perception of differences. He found England
in every way gratifying and satisfactory, and more of a contrast
with things American than he had ever dared to hope.

He had promised himself this visit for many years, but being of
a sunny rather than energetic temperament—though he firmly
believed himself to be a reservoir of clear-sighted American
energy—he had allowed all sorts of things, and more
particularly the uncertainties of Miss Mamie Nelson, to keep him
back. But now there were no more uncertainties about Miss Mamie
Nelson, and Mr. Direck had come over to England just to convince
himself and everybody else that there were other interests in life
for him than Mamie….

And also, he wanted to see the old country from which his
maternal grandmother had sprung. Wasn’t there even now in his
bedroom in New York a water-colour of Market Saffron church, where
the dear old lady had been confirmed? And generally he wanted to
see Europe. As an interesting side show to the excursion he hoped,
in his capacity of the rather underworked and
rather over-salaried secretary of the Massachusetts Society for the
Study of Contemporary Thought, to discuss certain agreeable
possibilities with Mr. Britling, who lived at Matching’s Easy.

Mr. Direck was a type of man not uncommon in America. He was
very much after the fashion of that clean and pleasant-looking
person one sees in the advertisements in American magazines, that
agreeable person who smiles and says, “Good, it’s the Fizgig
Brand,” or “Yes, it’s a Wilkins, and that’s the Best,” or “My
shirt-front never rucks; it’s a Chesson.” But now he was saying,
still with the same firm smile, “Good. It’s English.” He was
pleased by every unlikeness to things American, by every item he
could hail as characteristic; in the train to London he had laughed
aloud with pleasure at the chequer-board of little fields upon the
hills of Cheshire, he had chuckled to find himself in a compartment
without a corridor; he had tipped the polite yet kindly guard
magnificently, after doubting for a moment whether he ought to tip
him at all, and he had gone about his hotel in London saying
“Lordy! Lordy! My word!” in a kind of ecstasy, verifying the
delightful absence of telephone, of steam-heat, of any dependent
bathroom. At breakfast the waiter (out of Dickens it seemed) had
refused to know what “cereals” were, and had given him his egg in a
china egg-cup such as you see in the pictures in Punch. The
Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be
true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had
to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting
some passer-by with the question, “Say! But is this little wet
ditch here the Historical River Thames?”

In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good
and careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty
in controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and
indulge in dry “Americanisms” and poker
metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him questions he
wanted to say “Yep” or “Sure,” words he would no more have used in
America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he had a sense
of rôle. He wanted to be visibly and audibly America
eye-witnessing. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an
Englishman would expect him to be. At any rate, his clothes had
been made by a strongly American New York tailor, and upon the
strength of them a taxi-man had assumed politely but firmly that
the shillings on his taximeter were dollars, an incident that
helped greatly to sustain the effect of Mr. Direck, in Mr. Direck’s
mind, as something standing out with an almost representative
clearness against the English scene…. So much so that the
taxi-man got the dollars….

Because all the time he had been coming over he had dreaded that
it wasn’t true, that England was a legend, that London would turn
out to be just another thundering great New York, and the English
exactly like New Englanders….

§ 2

And now here he was on the branch line of the little old Great
Eastern Railway, on his way to Matching’s Easy in Essex, and he was
suddenly in the heart of Washington Irving’s England.

Washington Irving’s England! Indeed it was. He couldn’t sit
still and just peep at it, he had to stand up in the little
compartment and stick his large, firm-featured, kindly countenance
out of the window as if he greeted it. The country under the June
sunshine was neat and bright as an old-world garden, with little
fields of corn surrounded by dog-rose hedges, and woods and small
rushy pastures of an infinite tidiness. He had seen a real deer
park, it had rather tumbledown iron gates between its
shield-surmounted pillars, and in the distance, beyond all
question, was Bracebridge Hall nestling among
great trees. He had seen thatched and timbered cottages, and
half-a-dozen inns with creaking signs. He had seen a fat vicar
driving himself along a grassy lane in a governess cart drawn by a
fat grey pony. It wasn’t like any reality he had ever known. It was
like travelling in literature.

Mr. Britling’s address was the Dower House, and it was, Mr.
Britling’s note had explained, on the farther edge of the park at
Claverings. Claverings! The very name for some stately home of
England….

And yet this was only forty-two miles from London. Surely it
brought things within the suburban range. If Matching’s Easy were
in America, commuters would live there. But in supposing that, Mr.
Direck displayed his ignorance of a fact of the greatest importance
to all who would understand England. There is a gap in the suburbs
of London. The suburbs of London stretch west and south and even
west by north, but to the north-eastward there are no suburbs;
instead there is Essex. Essex is not a suburban county; it is a
characteristic and individualised county which wins the heart.
Between dear Essex and the centre of things lie two great barriers,
the East End of London and Epping Forest. Before a train could get
to any villadom with a cargo of season-ticket holders it would have
to circle about this rescued woodland and travel for twenty
unprofitable miles, and so once you are away from the main Great
Eastern lines Essex still lives in the peace of the eighteenth
century, and London, the modern Babylon, is, like the stars, just a
light in the nocturnal sky. In Matching’s Easy, as Mr. Britling
presently explained to Mr. Direck, there are half-a-dozen old
people who have never set eyes on London in their lives—and
do not want to.

“Aye-ya!”

“Fussin’ about thea.”

“Mr. Robinson, ‘e went to Lon’, ‘e did. That’s ‘ow ‘e ‘urt ‘is
fut.”

Mr. Direck had learnt at the main-line junction that he had to tell the guard to stop the train for
Matching’s Easy; it only stopped “by request”; the thing was
getting better and better; and when Mr. Direck seized his grip and
got out of the train there was just one little old Essex
station-master and porter and signalman and everything, holding a
red flag in his hand and talking to Mr. Britling about the
cultivation of the sweet peas which glorified the station. And
there was the Mr. Britling who was the only item of business and
the greatest expectation in Mr. Direck’s European journey, and he
was quite unlike the portraits Mr. Direck had seen and quite
unmistakably Mr. Britling all the same, since there was nobody else
upon the platform, and he was advancing with a gesture of
welcome.

“Did you ever see such peas, Mr. Dick?” said Mr. Britling by way
of introduction.

“My word,” said Mr. Direck in a good old Farmer Hayseed
kind of voice.

“Aye-ya!” said the station-master in singularly strident tones.
“It be a rare year for sweet peas,” and then he slammed the door of
the carriage in a leisurely manner and did dismissive things with
his flag, while the two gentlemen took stock, as people say, of one
another.

§ 3

Except in the doubtful instance of Miss Mamie Nelson, Mr.
Direck’s habit was good fortune. Pleasant things came to him. Such
was his position as the salaried secretary of this society of
thoughtful Massachusetts business men to which allusion has been
made. Its purpose was to bring itself expeditiously into touch with
the best thought of the age.

Too busily occupied with practical realities to follow the
thought of the age through all its divagations and into all its
recesses, these Massachusetts business men had had to consider
methods of access more quintessential and
nuclear. And they had decided not to hunt out the best thought in
its merely germinating stages, but to wait until it had emerged and
flowered to some trustworthy recognition, and then, rather than
toil through recondite and possibly already reconsidered books and
writings generally, to offer an impressive fee to the emerged new
thinker, and to invite him to come to them and to lecture to them
and to have a conference with them, and to tell them simply,
competently and completely at first hand just all that he was
about. To come, in fact, and be himself—in a highly
concentrated form. In this way a number of interesting Europeans
had been given very pleasant excursions to America, and the society
had been able to form very definite opinions upon their teaching.
And Mr. Britling was one of the representative thinkers upon which
this society had decided to inform itself. It was to broach this
invitation and to offer him the impressive honorarium by which the
society honoured not only its guests but itself, that Mr. Direck
had now come to Matching’s Easy. He had already sent Mr. Britling a
letter of introduction, not indeed intimating his precise purpose,
but mentioning merely a desire to know him, and the letter had been
so happily phrased and its writer had left such a memory of
pleasant hospitality on Mr. Britling’s mind during Mr. Britling’s
former visit to New York, that it had immediately produced for Mr.
Direck an invitation not merely to come and see him but to come and
stay over the week-end.

And here they were shaking hands.

Mr. Britling did not look at all as Mr. Direck had expected him
to look. He had expected an Englishman in a country costume of
golfing tweeds, like the Englishman in country costume one sees in
American illustrated stories. Drooping out of the country costume
of golfing tweeds he had expected to see the mildly unhappy face,
pensive even to its drooping moustache, with which Mr. Britling’s
publisher had for some faulty and unfortunate reason familiarised the American public. Instead of this,
Mr. Britling was in a miscellaneous costume, and mildness was the
last quality one could attribute to him. His moustache, his hair,
his eyebrows bristled; his flaming freckled face seemed about to
bristle too. His little hazel eyes came out with a “ping” and
looked at Mr. Direck. Mr. Britling was one of a large but still
remarkable class of people who seem at the mere approach of
photography to change their hair, their clothes, their moral
natures. No photographer had ever caught a hint of his essential
Britlingness and bristlingness. Only the camera could ever induce
Mr. Britling to brush his hair, and for the camera alone did he
reserve that expression of submissive martyrdom Mr. Direck knew.
And Mr. Direck was altogether unprepared for a certain casualness
of costume that sometimes overtook Mr. Britling. He was wearing now
a very old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of
knickerbockers, not tweed breeches but tweed knickerbockers of a
remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtuous socialistic
homespun tweeds that drag out into woolly knots and strings
wherever there is attrition. His stockings were worsted and
wrinkled, and on his feet were those extraordinary slippers of
bright-coloured bast-like interwoven material one buys in the north
of France. These were purple with a touch of green. He had, in
fact, thought of the necessity of meeting Mr. Direck at the station
at the very last moment, and had come away from his study in the
clothes that had happened to him when he got up. His face wore the
amiable expression of a wire-haired terrier disposed to be
friendly, and it struck Mr. Direck that for a man of his real
intellectual distinction Mr. Britling was unusually short.

For there can be no denying that Mr. Britling was, in a sense,
distinguished. The hero and subject of this novel was at its very
beginning a distinguished man. He was in the Who’s Who of
two continents. In the last few years he had grown with some
rapidity into a writer recognised and
welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the American public,
and even known to a select circle of British readers. To his
American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a
serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought
and national character and poets and painting. He had come through
America some years ago as one of those Kahn scholars, those
promising writers and intelligent men endowed by Auguste Kahn of
Paris, who go about the world nowadays in comfort and consideration
as the travelling guests of that original philanthropist—to
acquire the international spirit. Previously he had been a critic
of art and literature and a writer of thoughtful third leaders in
the London Times. He had begun with a Pembroke fellowship
and a prize poem. He had returned from his world tour to his
reflective yet original corner of The Times and to the
production of books about national relationships and social
psychology, that had brought him rapidly into prominence.

His was a naturally irritable mind, which gave him point and
passion; and moreover he had a certain obstinate originality and a
generous disposition. So that he was always lively, sometimes
spacious, and never vile. He loved to write and talk. He talked
about everything, he had ideas about everything; he could no more
help having ideas about everything than a dog can resist smelling
at your heels. He sniffed at the heels of reality. Lots of people
found him interesting and stimulating, a few found him seriously
exasperating. He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and
empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and
automobiles and the future of India and China and aesthetics and
America and the education of mankind in general…. And all that
sort of thing….

Mr. Direck had read a very great deal of all this expressed
opiniativeness of Mr. Britling: he found it entertaining and
stimulating stuff, and it was with genuine enthusiasm that he had
come over to encounter the man himself. On
his way across the Atlantic and during the intervening days, he had
rehearsed this meeting in varying keys, but always on the
supposition that Mr. Britling was a large, quiet, thoughtful sort
of man, a man who would, as it were, sit in attentive rows like a
public meeting and listen. So Mr. Direck had prepared quite a
number of pleasant and attractive openings, and now he felt was the
moment for some one of these various simple, memorable utterances.
But in none of these forecasts had he reckoned with either the
spontaneous activities of Mr. Britling or with the station-master
of Matching’s Easy. Oblivious of any conversational necessities
between Mr. Direck and Mr. Britling, this official now took charge
of Mr. Direck’s grip-sack, and, falling into line with the two
gentlemen as they walked towards the exit gate, resumed what was
evidently an interrupted discourse upon sweet peas, originally
addressed to Mr. Britling.

He was a small, elderly man with a determined-looking face and a
sea voice, and it was clear he overestimated the distance of his
hearers.

“Mr. Darling what’s head gardener up at Claverings, ‘e
can’t get sweet peas like that, try ‘ow ‘e will. Tried
everything ‘e ‘as. Sand ballast, ‘e’s tried. Seeds same as me. ‘E
came along ‘ere only the other day, ‘e did, and ‘e says to me, ‘e
says, ‘darned ‘f I can see why a station-master should beat a
professional gardener at ‘is own game,’ ‘e says, ‘but you do. And
in your orf time, too, so’s to speak,’ ‘e says. ‘I’ve tried sile,’
‘e says——”

“Your first visit to England?” asked Mr. Britling of his
guest.

“Absolutely,” said Mr. Direck.

“I says to ‘im, ‘there’s one thing you ‘aven’t tried,’ I says,”
the station-master continued, raising his voice by a Herculean feat
still higher.

“I’ve got a little car outside here,” said Mr. Britling. “I’m a
couple of miles from the station.”

“I says to ‘im, I says, ”ave you tried the vibritation
of the trains?’ I says. ‘That’s what you
‘aven’t tried, Mr. Darling. That’s what you can’t try,’ I
says. ‘But you rest assured that that’s the secret of my sweet
peas,’ I says, ‘nothing less and nothing more than the vibritation
of the trains.'”

Mr. Direck’s mind was a little confused by the double nature of
the conversation and by the fact that Mr. Britling spoke of a car
when he meant an automobile. He handed his ticket mechanically to
the station-master, who continued to repeat and endorse his
anecdote at the top of his voice as Mr. Britling disposed himself
and his guest in the automobile.

“You know you ‘aven’t ‘urt that mud-guard, sir, not the
slightest bit that matters,” shouted the station-master. “I’ve been
a looking at it—er. It’s my fence that’s suffered most. And
that’s only strained the post a lil’ bit. Shall I put your bag in
behind, sir?”

Mr. Direck assented, and then, after a momentary hesitation,
rewarded the station-master’s services.

“Ready?” asked Mr. Britling.

“That’s all right sir,” the station-master reverberated.

With a rather wide curve Mr. Britling steered his way out of the
station into the highroad.

§ 4

And now it seemed was the time for Mr. Direck to make his
meditated speeches. But an unexpected complication was to defeat
this intention. Mr. Direck perceived almost at once that Mr.
Britling was probably driving an automobile for the first or second
or at the extremest the third time in his life.

The thing became evident when he struggled to get into the high
gear—an attempt that stopped the engine, and it was even more
startlingly so when Mr. Britling narrowly missed a collision with a
baker’s cart at a corner. “I pressed the accelerator,” he explained
afterwards, “instead of the brake. One does
at first. I missed him by less than a foot.” The estimate was a
generous one. And after that Mr. Direck became too anxious not to
distract his host’s thoughts to persist with his conversational
openings. An attentive silence came upon both gentlemen that was
broken presently by a sudden outcry from Mr. Britling and a great
noise of tormented gears. “Damn!” cried Mr. Britling, and “How the
devil?”

Mr. Direck perceived that his host was trying to turn the car
into a very beautiful gateway, with gate-houses on either side.
Then it was manifest that Mr. Britling had abandoned this idea, and
then they came to a stop a dozen yards or so along the main road.
“Missed it,” said Mr. Britling, and took his hands off the steering
wheel and blew stormily, and then whistled some bars of a fretful
air, and became still.

“Do we go through these ancient gates?” asked Mr. Direck.

Mr. Britling looked over his right shoulder and considered
problems of curvature and distance. “I think,” he said, “I will go
round outside the park. It will take us a little longer, but it
will be simpler than backing and manoeuvring here now…. These
electric starters are remarkably convenient things. Otherwise now I
should have to get down and wind up the engine.”

After that came a corner, the rounding of which seemed to
present few difficulties until suddenly Mr. Britling cried out,
“Eh! eh! EH! Oh, damn!”

Then the two gentlemen were sitting side by side in a rather
sloping car that had ascended the bank and buried its nose in a
hedge of dog-rose and honeysuckle, from which two missel thrushes,
a blackbird and a number of sparrows had made a hurried
escape….

§ 5

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Britling without assurance, and after a
little peaceful pause, “I can reverse out of this.”

He seemed to feel some explanation was due to Mr. Direck. “You
see, at first—it’s perfectly simple—one steers
round a corner and then one doesn’t put the wheels straight
again, and so one keeps on going round—more than one meant
to. It’s the bicycle habit; the bicycle rights itself. One expects
a car to do the same thing. It was my fault. The book explains all
this question clearly, but just at the moment I forgot.”

He reflected and experimented in a way that made the engine
scold and fuss….

“You see, she won’t budge for the reverse….
She’s—embedded…. Do you mind getting out and turning the
wheel back? Then if I reverse, perhaps we’ll get a move on….”

Mr. Direck descended, and there were considerable efforts.

“If you’d just grip the spokes. Yes, so…. One, Two, Three!…
No! Well, let’s just sit here until somebody comes along to help
us. Oh! Somebody will come all right. Won’t you get up again?”

And after a reflective moment Mr. Direck resumed his seat beside
Mr. Britling….

§ 6

The two gentlemen smiled at each other to dispel any suspicion
of discontent.

“My driving leaves something to be desired,” said Mr. Britling
with an air of frank impartiality. “But I have only just got this
car for myself—after some years of hired cars—the sort
of lazy arrangement where people supply car, driver, petrol, tyres,
insurance and everything at so much a month. It bored me
abominably. I can’t imagine now how I stood it for so long. They
sent me down a succession of compact, scornful boys who used to go
fast when I wanted to go slow, and slow when I wanted to go fast,
and who used to take every corner on the wrong side at top speed, and charge dogs and hens for the
sport of it, and all sorts of things like that. They would not even
let me choose my roads. I should have got myself a car long ago,
and driven it, if it wasn’t for that infernal business with a
handle one had to do when the engine stopped. But here, you see, is
a reasonably cheap car with an electric starter—American, I
need scarcely say. And here I am—going at my own pace.”

Mr. Direck glanced for a moment at the pretty disorder of the
hedge in which they were embedded, and smiled and admitted that it
was certainly much more agreeable.

Before he had finished saying as much Mr. Britling was talking
again.

He had a quick and rather jerky way of speaking; he seemed to
fire out a thought directly it came into his mind, and he seemed to
have a loaded magazine of thoughts in his head. He spoke almost
exactly twice as fast as Mr. Direck, clipping his words much more,
using much compacter sentences, and generally cutting his corners,
and this put Mr. Direck off his game.

That rapid attack while the transatlantic interlocutor is
deploying is indeed a not infrequent defect of conversations
between Englishmen and Americans. It is a source of many
misunderstandings. The two conceptions of conversation differ
fundamentally. The English are much less disposed to listen than
the American; they have not quite the same sense of conversational
give and take, and at first they are apt to reduce their visitors
to the rôle of auditors wondering when their turn will begin.
Their turn never does begin. Mr. Direck sat deeply in his slanting
seat with a half face to his celebrated host and said “Yep” and
“Sure” and “That is so,” in the dry grave tones that he
believed an Englishman would naturally expect him to use, realising
this only very gradually.

Mr. Britling, from his praise of the enterprise that had at last
brought a car he could drive within his reach, went on to that
favourite topic of all intelligent Englishmen, the adverse criticism of things British. He pointed
out that the central position of the brake and gear levers in his
automobile made it extremely easy for the American manufacturer to
turn it out either as a left-handed or a right-handed car, and so
adapt it either to the Continental or to the British rule of the
road. No English cars were so adaptable. We British suffered much
from our insular rule of the road, just as we suffered much from
our insular weights and measures. But we took a perverse pride in
such disadvantages. The irruption of American cars into England was
a recent phenomenon, it was another triumph for the tremendous
organising ability of the American mind. They were doing with the
automobile what they had done with clocks and watches and rifles,
they had standardised and machined wholesale, while the British
were still making the things one by one. It was an extraordinary
thing that England, which was the originator of the industrial
system and the original developer of the division of labour, should
have so fallen away from systematic manufacturing. He believed this
was largely due to the influence of Oxford and the Established
Church….

At this point Mr. Direck was moved by an anecdote. “It will help
to illustrate what you are saying, Mr. Britling, about systematic
organisation if I tell you a little incident that happened to a
friend of mine in Toledo, where they are setting up a big plant
with a view to capturing the entire American and European market in
the class of the thousand-dollar car——”

“There’s no end of such little incidents,” said Mr. Britling,
cutting in without apparent effort. “You see, we get it on both
sides. Our manufacturer class was, of course, originally an
insurgent class. It was a class of distended craftsmen. It had the
craftsman’s natural enterprise and natural radicalism. As soon as
it prospered and sent its boys to Oxford it was lost. Our
manufacturing class was assimilated in no time to the
conservative classes, whose education has
always had a mandarin quality—very, very little of it, and
very cold and choice. In America you have so far had no real
conservative class at all. Fortunate continent! You cast out your
Tories, and you were left with nothing but Whigs and Radicals. But
our peculiar bad luck has been to get a sort of revolutionary who
is a Tory mandarin too. Ruskin and Morris, for example, were as
reactionary and anti-scientific as the dukes and the bishops.
Machine haters. Science haters. Rule of Thumbites to the bone. So
are our current Socialists. They’ve filled this country with the
idea that the ideal automobile ought to be made entirely by the
hand labour of traditional craftsmen, quite individually, out of
beaten copper, wrought iron and seasoned oak. All this
electric-starter business and this electric lighting outfit I have
here, is perfectly hateful to the English mind…. It isn’t that we
are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The
British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not
that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and
glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally,
with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British
electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get
by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional
electricity. Keep it in Leyden jars…. At Claverings here they
still refuse to have electric bells. There was a row when the
Solomonsons, who were tenants here for a time, tried to put them
in….”

Mr. Direck had followed this cascade of remarks with a patient
smile and a slowly nodding head. “What you say,” he said, “forms a
very marked contrast indeed with the sort of thing that goes on in
America. This friend of mine I was speaking of, the one who is
connected with an automobile factory in Toledo——”

“Of course,” Mr. Britling burst out again, “even conservatism
isn’t an ultimate thing. After all, we and your enterprising friend at Toledo, are very much the
same blood. The conservatism, I mean, isn’t racial. And our earlier
energy shows it isn’t in the air or in the soil. England has become
unenterprising and sluggish because England has been so prosperous
and comfortable….”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Direck. “My friend of whom I was telling
you, was a man named Robinson, which indicates pretty clearly that
he was of genuine English stock, and, if I may say so, quite of
your build and complexion; racially, I should say, he was,
well—very much what you are….”

§ 7

This rally of Mr. Direck’s mind was suddenly interrupted.

Mr. Britling stood up, and putting both hands to the sides of
his mouth, shouted “Yi-ah! Aye-ya! Thea!” at unseen hearers.

After shouting again, several times, it became manifest that he
had attracted the attention of two willing but deliberate labouring
men. They emerged slowly, first as attentive heads, from the
landscape. With their assistance the car was restored to the road
again. Mr. Direck assisted manfully, and noted the respect that was
given to Mr. Britling and the shillings that fell to the men, with
an intelligent detachment. They touched their hats, they called Mr.
Britling “Sir.” They examined the car distantly but kindly. “Ain’t
‘urt ‘e, not a bit ‘e ain’t, not really,” said one encouragingly.
And indeed except for a slight crumpling of the mud-guard and the
detachment of the wire of one of the headlights the automobile was
uninjured. Mr. Britling resumed his seat; Mr. Direck gravely and in
silence got up beside him. They started with the usual convulsion,
as though something had pricked the vehicle unexpectedly and
shamefully behind. And from this point Mr. Britling, driving with
meticulous care, got home without further mishap, excepting only
that he scraped off some of the metal edge of
his footboard against the gate-post of his very agreeable
garden.

His family welcomed his safe return, visitor and all, with
undisguised relief and admiration. A small boy appeared at the
corner of the house, and then disappeared hastily again. “Daddy’s
got back all right at last,” they heard him shouting to unseen
hearers.

§ 8

Mr. Direck, though he was a little incommoded by the suppression
of his story about Robinson—for when he had begun a thing he
liked to finish it—found Mr. Britling’s household at once
thoroughly British, quite un-American and a little difficult to
follow. It had a quality that at first he could not define at all.
Compared with anything he had ever seen in his life before it
struck him as being—he found the word at last—sketchy.
For instance, he was introduced to nobody except his hostess, and
she was indicated to him by a mere wave of Mr. Britling’s hand.
“That’s Edith,” he said, and returned at once to his car to put it
away. Mrs. Britling was a tall, freckled woman with pretty bright
brown hair and preoccupied brown eyes. She welcomed him with a
handshake, and then a wonderful English parlourmaid—she at
least was according to expectations—took his grip-sack and
guided him to his room. “Lunch, sir,” she said, “is outside,” and
closed the door and left him to that and a towel-covered can of hot
water.

It was a square-looking old red-brick house he had come to, very
handsome in a simple Georgian fashion, with a broad lawn before it
and great blue cedar trees, and a drive that came frankly up to the
front door and then went off with Mr. Britling and the car round to
unknown regions at the back. The centre of the house was a big airy
hall, oak-panelled, warmed in winter only by one large fireplace
and abounding in doors which he knew opened into the square
separate rooms that England favours. Bookshelves and stuffed birds comforted the landing outside his
bedroom. He descended to find the hall occupied by a small bright
bristling boy in white flannel shirt and knickerbockers and bare
legs and feet. He stood before the vacant open fireplace in an
attitude that Mr. Direck knew instantly was also Mr. Britling’s.
“Lunch is in the garden,” the Britling scion proclaimed, “and I’ve
got to fetch you. And, I say! is it true? Are you American?”

“Why surely,” said Mr. Direck.

“Well, I know some American,” said the boy. “I learnt it.”

“Tell me some,” said Mr. Direck, smiling still more amiably.

“Oh! Well—God darn you! Ouch, Gee-whizz! Soak him, Maud!
It’s up to you, Duke….”

“Now where did you learn all that?” asked Mr. Direck
recovering.

“Out of the Sunday Supplement,” said the youthful Britling.

“Why! Then you know all about Buster Brown,” said Mr. Direck.
“He’s Fine—eh?”

The Britling child hated Buster Brown. He regarded Buster Brown
as a totally unnecessary infant. He detested the way he wore his
hair and the peculiar cut of his knickerbockers and—him. He
thought Buster Brown the one drop of paraffin in the otherwise
delicious feast of the Sunday Supplement. But he was a diplomatic
child.

“I think I like Happy Hooligan better,” he said. “And dat ole
Maud.”

He reflected with joyful eyes, Buster clean forgotten. “Every
week,” he said, “she kicks some one.”

It came to Mr. Direck as a very pleasant discovery that a
British infant could find a common ground with the small people at
home in these characteristically American jests. He had never
dreamt that the fine wine of Maud and Buster could travel.

“Maud’s a treat,” said the youthful Britling, relapsing into his
native tongue.

Mr. Britling appeared coming to meet them. He was now in a grey
flannel suit—he must have jumped into it—and altogether
very much tidier….

§ 9

The long narrow table under the big sycamores between the house
and the adapted barn that Mr. Direck learnt was used for “dancing
and all that sort of thing,” was covered with a blue linen diaper
cloth, and that too surprised him. This was his first meal in a
private household in England, and for obscure reasons he had
expected something very stiff and formal with “spotless napery.” He
had also expected a very stiff and capable service by implacable
parlourmaids, and the whole thing indeed highly genteel. But two
cheerful women servants appeared from what was presumably the
kitchen direction, wheeling a curious wicker erection, which his
small guide informed him was called Aunt Clatter—manifestly
deservedly—and which bore on its shelves the substance of the
meal. And while the maids at this migratory sideboard carved and
opened bottles and so forth, the small boy and a slightly larger
brother, assisted a little by two young men of no very defined
position and relationship, served the company. Mrs. Britling sat at
the head of the table, and conversed with Mr. Direck by means of
hostess questions and imperfectly accepted answers while she kept a
watchful eye on the proceedings.

The composition of the company was a matter for some perplexity
to Mr. Direck. Mr. and Mrs. Britling were at either end of the
table, that was plain enough. It was also fairly plain that the two
barefooted boys were little Britlings. But beyond this was a cloud
of uncertainty. There was a youth of perhaps seventeen, much darker
than Britling but with nose and freckles rather like his, who might
be an early son or a stepson; he was shock-headed and with that look about his arms and legs that
suggests overnight growth; and there was an unmistakable young
German, very pink, with close-cropped fair hair, glasses and a
panama hat, who was probably the tutor of the younger boys. (Mr.
Direck also was wearing his hat, his mind had been filled with an
exaggerated idea of the treacheries of the English climate before
he left New York. Every one else was hatless.) Finally, before one
reached the limits of the explicable there was a pleasant young man
with a lot of dark hair and very fine dark blue eyes, whom
everybody called “Teddy.” For him, Mr. Direck hazarded
“secretary.”

But in addition to these normal and understandable presences,
there was an entirely mysterious pretty young woman in blue linen
who sat and smiled next to Mr. Britling, and there was a rather
kindred-looking girl with darker hair on the right of Mr. Direck
who impressed him at the very outset as being still prettier,
and—he didn’t quite place her at first—somehow familiar
to him; there was a large irrelevant middle-aged lady in black with
a gold chain and a large nose, between Teddy and the tutor; there
was a tall middle-aged man with an intelligent face, who might be a
casual guest; there was an Indian young gentleman faultlessly
dressed up to his brown soft linen collar and cuffs, and thereafter
an uncontrolled outbreak of fine bronze modelling and abundant
fuzzy hair; and there was a very erect and attentive baby of a year
or less, sitting up in a perambulator and gesticulating cheerfully
to everybody. This baby it was that most troubled the orderly mind
of Mr. Direck. The research for its paternity made his conversation
with Mrs. Britling almost as disconnected and absent-minded as her
conversation with him. It almost certainly wasn’t Mrs. Britling’s.
The girl next to him or the girl next to Mr. Britling or the lady
in black might any of them be married, but if so where was the
spouse? It seemed improbable that they would wheel out a foundling
to lunch….

Realising at last that the problem of relationship must be left
to solve itself if he did not want to dissipate and consume his
mind entirely, Mr. Direck turned to his hostess, who was enjoying a
brief lull in her administrative duties, and told her what a
memorable thing the meeting of Mr. Britling in his own home would
be in his life, and how very highly America was coming to esteem
Mr. Britling and his essays. He found that with a slight change of
person, one of his premeditated openings was entirely serviceable
here. And he went on to observe that it was novel and entertaining
to find Mr. Britling driving his own automobile and to note that it
was an automobile of American manufacture. In America they had
standardised and systematised the making of such things as
automobiles to an extent that would, he thought, be almost
startling to Europeans. It was certainly startling to the European
manufacturers. In illustration of that he might tell a little story
of a friend of his called Robinson—a man who curiously enough
in general build and appearance was very reminiscent indeed of Mr.
Britling. He had been telling Mr. Britling as much on his way here
from the station. His friend was concerned with several others in
one of the biggest attacks that had ever been made upon what one
might describe in general terms as the thousand-dollar light
automobile market. What they said practically was this: This market
is a jig-saw puzzle waiting to be put together and made one. We are
going to do it. But that was easier to figure out than to do. At
the very outset of this attack he and his associates found
themselves up against an unexpected and very difficult
proposition….

At first Mrs. Britling had listened to Mr. Direck with an almost
undivided attention, but as he had developed his opening the feast
upon the blue linen table had passed on to a fresh phase that
demanded more and more of her directive intelligence. The two
little boys appeared suddenly at her elbows. “Shall we take the
plates and get the strawberries, Mummy?” they
asked simultaneously. Then one of the neat maids in the background
had to be called up and instructed in undertones, and Mr. Direck
saw that for the present Robinson’s illuminating experience was not
for her ears. A little baffled, but quite understanding how things
were, he turned to his neighbour on his left….

The girl really had an extraordinarily pretty smile, and there
was something in her soft bright brown eye—like the movement
of some quick little bird. And—she was like somebody he knew!
Indeed she was. She was quite ready to be spoken to.

“I was telling Mrs. Britling,” said Mr. Direck, “what a very
great privilege I esteem it to meet Mr. Britling in this highly
familiar way.”

“You’ve not met him before?”

“I missed him by twenty-four hours when he came through Boston
on the last occasion. Just twenty-four hours. It was a matter of
very great regret to me.”

“I wish I’d been paid to travel round the world.”

“You must write things like Mr. Britling and then Mr. Kahn will
send you.”

“Don’t you think if I promised well?”

“You’d have to write some promissory notes, I think—just
to convince him it was all right.”

The young lady reflected on Mr. Britling’s good fortune.

“He saw India. He saw Japan. He had weeks in Egypt. And he went
right across America.”

Mr. Direck had already begun on the liner to adapt himself to
the hopping inconsecutiveness of English conversation. He made now
what he felt was quite a good hop, and he dropped his voice to a
confidential undertone. (It was probably Adam in his first
conversation with Eve, who discovered the pleasantness of dropping
into a confidential undertone beside a pretty ear with a pretty
wave of hair above it.)

“It was in India, I presume,” murmured Mr. Direck, “that Mr.
Britling made the acquaintance of the coloured gentleman?”

“Coloured gentleman!” She gave a swift glance down the table as
though she expected to see something purple with yellow spots. “Oh,
that is one of Mr. Lawrence Carmine’s young men!” she explained
even more confidentially and with an air of discussing the silver
bowl of roses before him. “He’s a great authority on Indian
literature, he belongs to a society for making things pleasant for
Indian students in London, and he has them down.”

“And Mr. Lawrence Carmine?” he pursued.

Even more intimately and confidentially she indicated Mr.
Carmine, as it seemed by a motion of her eyelash.

Mr. Direck prepared to be even more sotto-voce and to
plumb a much profounder mystery. His eye rested on the
perambulator; he leant a little nearer to the ear…. But the
strawberries interrupted him.

“Strawberries!” said the young lady, and directed his regard to
his left shoulder by a little movement of her head.

He found one of the boys with a high-piled plate ready to serve
him.

And then Mrs. Britling resumed her conversation with him. She
was so ignorant, she said, of things American, that she did not
even know if they had strawberries there. At any rate, here they
were at the crest of the season, and in a very good year. And in
the rose season too. It was one of the dearest vanities of English
people to think their apples and their roses and their strawberries
the best in the world.

“And their complexions,” said Mr. Direck, over the pyramid of
fruit, quite manifestly intending a compliment. So that was all
right…. But the girl on the left of him was speaking across the
table to the German tutor, and did not hear
what he had said. So that even if it wasn’t very neat it didn’t
matter….

Then he remembered that she was like that old daguerreotype of a
cousin of his grandmother’s that he had fallen in love with when he
was a boy. It was her smile. Of course! Of course!… And he’d sort
of adored that portrait…. He felt a curious disposition to tell
her as much….

“What makes this visit even more interesting if possible to me,”
he said to Mrs. Britling, “than it would otherwise be, is that this
Essex country is the country in which my maternal grandmother was
raised, and also long way back my mother’s father’s people. My
mother’s father’s people were very early New England people
indeed…. Well, no. If I said Mayflower it wouldn’t be
true. But it would approximate. They were Essex Hinkinsons. That’s
what they were. I must be a good third of me at least Essex. My
grandmother was an Essex Corner, I must confess I’ve had some
thought—”

“Corner?” said the young lady at his elbow sharply.

“I was telling Mrs. Britling I had some thought—”

“But about those Essex relatives of yours?”

“Well, of finding if they were still about in these parts….
Say! I haven’t dropped a brick, have I?”

He looked from one face to another.

“She’s a Corner,” said Mrs. Britling.

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, and hesitated for a moment. It was so
delightful that one couldn’t go on being just discreet. The
atmosphere was free and friendly. His intonation disarmed offence.
And he gave the young lady the full benefit of a quite expressive
eye. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Cousin Corner. How are the old
folks at home?”

§ 10

The bright interest of this consulship helped Mr. Direck more
than anything to get the better of his Robinson-anecdote crave, and when presently he found his dialogue with
Mr. Britling resumed, he turned at once to this remarkable
discovery of his long lost and indeed hitherto unsuspected
relative. “It’s an American sort of thing to do, I suppose,” he
said apologetically, “but I almost thought of going on, on Monday,
to Market Saffron, which was the locality of the Hinkinsons, and
just looking about at the tombstones in the churchyard for a day or
so.”

“Very probably,” said Mr. Britling, “you’d find something about
them in the parish registers. Lots of our registers go back three
hundred years or more. I’ll drive you over in my lil’ old car.”

“Oh! I wouldn’t put you to that trouble,” said Mr. Direck
hastily.

“It’s no trouble. I like the driving. What I have had of it. And
while we’re at it, we’ll come back by Harborough High Oak and look
up the Corner pedigree. They’re all over that district still. And
the road’s not really difficult; it’s only a bit up and down and
roundabout.”

“I couldn’t think, Mr. Britling, of putting you to that much
trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I want a day off, and I’m dying to take
Gladys——”

“Gladys?” said Mr. Direck with sudden hope.

“That’s my name for the lil’ car. I’m dying to take her for
something like a decent run. I’ve only had her out four times
altogether, and I’ve not got her up yet to forty miles. Which I’m
told she ought to do easily. We’ll consider that settled.”

For the moment Mr. Direck couldn’t think of any further excuse.
But it was very clear in his mind that something must happen; he
wished he knew of somebody who could send a recall telegram from
London, to prevent him committing himself to the casual destinies
of Mr. Britling’s car again. And then another interest became
uppermost in his mind.

“You’d hardly believe me,” he said, “if I told you that that
Miss Corner of yours has a quite extraordinary resemblance to a
miniature I’ve got away there in America of a cousin of my maternal
grandmother’s. She seems a very pleasant young lady.”

But Mr. Britling supplied no further information about Miss
Corner.

“It must be very interesting,” he said, “to come over here and
pick up these American families of yours on the monuments and
tombstones. You know, of course, that district south of Evesham
where every other church monument bears the stars and stripes, the
arms of departed Washingtons. I doubt though if you’ll still find
the name about there. Nor will you find many Hinkinsons in Market
Saffron. But lots of this country here has five or six
hundred-year-old families still flourishing. That’s why Essex is so
much more genuinely Old England than Surrey, say, or Kent. Round
here you’ll find Corners and Fairlies, and then you get Capels, and
then away down towards Dunmow and Braintree Maynards and Byngs. And
there are oaks and hornbeams in the park about Claverings that have
echoed to the howling of wolves and the clank of men in armour. All
the old farms here are moated—because of the wolves.
Claverings itself is Tudor, and rather fine too. And the cottages
still wear thatch….”

He reflected. “Now if you went south of London instead of
northward it’s all different. You’re in a different period, a
different society. You’re in London suburbs right down to the sea.
You’ll find no genuine estates left, not of our deep-rooted
familiar sort. You’ll find millionaires and that sort of people,
sitting in the old places. Surrey is full of rich stockbrokers,
company-promoters, bookies, judges, newspaper proprietors. Sort of
people who fence the paths across their parks. They do something to
the old places—I don’t know what they do—but instantly
the countryside becomes a villadom. And
little sub-estates and red-brick villas and art cottages spring up.
And a kind of new, hard neatness. And pneumatic tyre and automobile
spirit advertisements, great glaring boards by the roadside. And
all the poor people are inspected and rushed about until they
forget who their grandfathers were. They become villa parasites and
odd-job men, and grow basely rich and buy gramophones. This Essex
and yonder Surrey are as different as Russia and Germany. But for
one American who comes to look at Essex, twenty go to Godalming and
Guildford and Dorking and Lewes and Canterbury. Those Surrey people
are not properly English at all. They are strenuous. You have to
get on or get out. They drill their gardeners, lecture very fast on
agricultural efficiency, and have miniature rifle ranges in every
village. It’s a county of new notice-boards and barbed-wire fences;
there’s always a policeman round the corner. They dress for dinner.
They dress for everything. If a man gets up in the night to look
for a burglar he puts on the correct costume—or doesn’t go.
They’ve got a special scientific system for urging on their tramps.
And they lock up their churches on a week-day. Half their soil is
hard chalk or a rationalistic sand, only suitable for bunkers and
villa foundations. And they play golf in a large, expensive,
thorough way because it’s the thing to do…. Now here in Essex
we’re as lax as the eighteenth century. We hunt in any old clothes.
Our soil is a rich succulent clay; it becomes semi-fluid in
winter—when we go about in waders shooting duck. All our
fingerposts have been twisted round by facetious men years ago. And
we pool our breeds of hens and pigs. Our roses and oaks are
wonderful; that alone shows that this is the real England. If I
wanted to play golf—which I don’t, being a decent Essex
man—I should have to motor ten miles into Hertfordshire. And
for rheumatics and longevity Surrey can’t touch us. I want you to
be clear on these points, because they really will affect
your impressions of this place…. This
country is a part of the real England—England outside London
and outside manufactures. It’s one with Wessex and Mercia or old
Yorkshire—or for the matter of that with Meath or Lothian.
And it’s the essential England still….”

§ 11

It detracted a little from Mr. Direck’s appreciation of this
flow of information that it was taking them away from the rest of
the company. He wanted to see more of his new-found cousin, and
what the baby and the Bengali gentleman—whom manifestly one
mustn’t call “coloured”—and the large-nosed lady and all the
other inexplicables would get up to. Instead of which Mr. Britling
was leading him off alone with an air of showing him round the
premises, and talking too rapidly and variously for a question to
be got in edgeways, much less any broaching of the matter that Mr.
Direck had come over to settle.

There was quite a lot of rose garden, it made the air delicious,
and it was full of great tumbling bushes of roses and of neglected
standards, and it had a long pergola of creepers and trailers and a
great arbour, and underneath over the beds everywhere, contrary to
all the rules, the blossom of a multitude of pansies and stock and
little trailing plants swarmed and crowded and scrimmaged and
drilled and fought great massed attacks. And then Mr. Britling
talked their way round a red-walled vegetable garden with an
abundance of fruit trees, and through a door into a terraced square
that had once been a farmyard, outside the converted barn. The barn
doors had been replaced by a door-pierced window of glass, and in
the middle of the square space a deep tank had been made, full of
rainwater, in which Mr. Britling remarked casually that “everybody”
bathed when the weather was hot. Thyme and rosemary and suchlike
sweet-scented things grew on the terrace
about the tank, and ten trimmed little trees of Arbor vitae
stood sentinel. Mr. Direck was tantalisingly aware that beyond some
lilac bushes were his new-found cousin and the kindred young woman
in blue playing tennis with the Indian and another young man, while
whenever it was necessary the large-nosed lady crossed the stage
and brooded soothingly over the perambulator. And Mr. Britling,
choosing a seat from which Mr. Direck just couldn’t look
comfortably through the green branches at the flying glimpses of
pink and blue and white and brown, continued to talk about England
and America in relation to each other and everything else under the
sun.

Presently through a distant gate the two small boys were
momentarily visible wheeling small but serviceable bicycles,
followed after a little interval by the German tutor. Then an
enormous grey cat came slowly across the garden court, and sat down
to listen respectfully to Mr. Britling. The afternoon sky was an
intense blue, with little puff-balls of cloud lined out across
it.

Occasionally, from chance remarks of Mr. Britling’s, Mr. Direck
was led to infer that his first impressions as an American visitor
were being related to his host, but as a matter of fact he was
permitted to relate nothing; Mr. Britling did all the talking. He
sat beside his guest and spirted and played ideas and reflections
like a happy fountain in the sunshine.

Mr. Direck sat comfortably, and smoked with quiet appreciation
the one after-lunch cigar he allowed himself. At any rate, if he
himself felt rather word-bound, the fountain was nimble and
entertaining. He listened in a general sort of way to the talk, it
was quite impossible to follow it thoughtfully throughout all its
chinks and turnings, while his eyes wandered about the garden and
went ever and again to the flitting tennis-players beyond the
green. It was all very gay and comfortable and complete; it was
various and delightful without being in the least opulent;
that was one of the little secrets America
had to learn. It didn’t look as though it had been made or bought
or cost anything, it looked as though it had happened rather
luckily….

Mr. Britling’s talk became like a wide stream flowing through
Mr. Direck’s mind, bearing along momentary impressions and
observations, drifting memories of all the crowded English sights
and sounds of the last five days, filmy imaginations about
ancestral names and pretty cousins, scraps of those prepared
conversational openings on Mr. Britling’s standing in America, the
explanation about the lecture club, the still incompletely
forgotten purport of the Robinson anecdote….

“Nobody planned the British estate system, nobody planned the
British aristocratic system, nobody planned the confounded
constitution, it came about, it was like layer after layer wrapping
round an agate, but you see it came about so happily in a way, it
so suited the climate and the temperament of our people and our
island, it was on the whole so cosy, that our people settled down
into it, you can’t help settling down into it, they had already
settled down by the days of Queen Anne, and Heaven knows if we
shall ever really get away again. We’re like that little shell the
Lingula, that is found in the oldest rocks and lives to-day:
it fitted its easy conditions, and it has never modified since. Why
should it? It excretes all its disturbing forces. Our younger sons
go away and found colonial empires. Our surplus cottage children
emigrate to Australia and Canada or migrate into the towns. It
doesn’t alter this….”

§ 12

Mr. Direck’s eye had come to rest upon the barn, and its
expression changed slowly from lazy appreciation to a brightening
intelligence. Suddenly he resolved to say something. He resolved to
say it so firmly that he determined to say it even if Mr. Britling
went on talking all the time.

“I suppose, Mr. Britling,” he said, “this barn here dates from
the days of Queen Anne.”

“The walls of the yard here are probably earlier: probably
monastic. That grey patch in the corner, for example. The barn
itself is Georgian.”

“And here it is still. And this farmyard, here it is still.”

Mr. Britling was for flying off again, but Mr. Direck would not
listen; he held on like a man who keeps his grip on a lasso.

“There’s one thing I would like to remark about your barn, Mr.
Britling, and I might, while I am at it, say the same thing about
your farmyard.”

Mr. Britling was held. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “the point that strikes me most about
all this is that that barn isn’t a barn any longer, and that this
farmyard isn’t a farmyard. There isn’t any wheat or chaff or
anything of that sort in the barn, and there never will be again:
there’s just a pianola and a dancing floor, and if a cow came into
this farmyard everybody in the place would be shooing it out again.
They’d regard it as a most unnatural object.”

He had a pleasant sense of talking at last. He kept right on. He
was moved to a sweeping generalisation.

“You were so good as to ask me, Mr. Britling, a little while
ago, what my first impression of England was. Well, Mr. Britling,
my first impression of England that seems to me to matter in the
least is this: that it looks and feels more like the traditional
Old England than any one could possibly have believed, and that in
reality it is less like the traditional Old England than any one
would ever possibly have imagined.”

He was carried on even further. He made a tremendous literary
epigram. “I thought,” he said, “when I looked out of the train this
morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find
it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.”

CHAPTER THE SECOND

MR. BRITLING CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION

§ 1

Mr. Direck found little reason to revise his dictum in the
subsequent experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and
the next day were steadily consistent in confirming what a very
good dictum it had been. The scenery was the traditional scenery of
England, and all the people seemed quicker, more irresponsible,
more chaotic, than any one could have anticipated, and entirely
inexplicable by any recognised code of English
relationships….

“You think that John Bull is dead and a strange generation is
wearing his clothes,” said Mr. Britling. “I think you’ll find very
soon it’s the old John Bull. Perhaps not Mrs. Humphry Ward’s John
Bull, or Mrs. Henry Wood’s John Bull but true essentially to
Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Meredith….”

“I suppose,” he added, “there are changes. There’s a new
generation grown up….”

He looked at his barn and the swimming pool. “It’s a good point
of yours about the barn,” he said. “What you say reminds me of that
very jolly thing of Kipling’s about the old mill-wheel that began
by grinding corn and ended by driving dynamos….

“Only I admit that barn doesn’t exactly drive a dynamo….

“To be frank, it’s just a pleasure barn….

“The country can afford it….”

§ 2

He left it at that for the time, but throughout the afternoon
Mr. Direck had the gratification of seeing his thought floating
round and round in the back-waters of Mr. Britling’s mental
current. If it didn’t itself get into the stream again its
reflection at any rate appeared and reappeared. He was taken about
with great assiduity throughout the afternoon, and he got no more
than occasional glimpses of the rest of the Dower House circle
until six o’clock in the evening.

Meanwhile the fountains of Mr. Britling’s active and
encyclopædic mind played steadily.

He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her
incessantly. He wanted to state England to Mr. Direck as the
amiable summation of a grotesque assembly of faults. That was the
view into which the comforts and prosperities of his middle age had
brought him from a radicalism that had in its earlier stages been
angry and bitter. And for Mr. Britling England was “here.” Essex
was the county he knew. He took Mr. Direck out from his walled
garden by a little door into a trim paddock with two white goals.
“We play hockey here on Sundays,” he said in a way that gave Mr.
Direck no hint of the practically compulsory participation of every
visitor to Matching’s Easy in this violent and dangerous exercise,
and thence they passed by a rich deep lane and into a high road
that ran along the edge of the deer park of Claverings. “We will
call in on Claverings later,” said Mr. Britling. “Lady Homartyn has
some people there for the week-end, and you ought to see the sort
of thing it is and the sort of people they are. She wanted us to
lunch there to-morrow, but I didn’t accept that because of our
afternoon hockey.”

Mr. Direck received this reason uncritically.

The village reminded Mr. Direck of Abbey’s pictures. There was
an inn with a sign standing out in the road, a painted sign of the Clavering Arms; it had a water
trough (such as Mr. Weller senior ducked the dissenter in) and a
green painted table outside its inviting door. There were also a
general shop and a number of very pleasant cottages, each marked
with the Mainstay crest. All this was grouped about a green with
real geese drilling thereon. Mr. Britling conducted his visitor
(through a lych gate) into the church-yard, and there they found
mossy, tumble-down tombstones, one with a skull and cross-bones
upon it, that went back to the later seventeenth century. In the
aisle of the church were three huge hatchments, and there was a
side chapel devoted to the Mainstay family and the Barons Homartyn,
with a series of monuments that began with painted Tudor effigies
and came down to a vast stained glass window of the vilest
commercial Victorian. There were also mediæval brasses of
parish priests, and a marble crusader and his lady of some
extinguished family which had ruled Matching’s Easy before the
Mainstays came. And as the two gentlemen emerged from the church
they ran against the perfect vicar, Mr. Dimple, ample and genial,
with an embracing laugh and an enveloping voice. “Come to see the
old country,” he said to Mr. Direck. “So Good of you Americans to
do that! So Good of you….”

There was some amiable sparring between the worthy man and Mr.
Britling about bringing Mr. Direck to church on Sunday morning.
“He’s terribly Lax,” said Mr. Dimple to Mr. Direck, smiling
radiantly. “Terribly Lax. But then nowadays Everybody is so
Lax. And he’s very Good to my Coal Club; I don’t know what we
should do without him. So I just admonish him. And if he doesn’t go
to church, well, anyhow he doesn’t go anywhere else. He may be a
poor churchman, but anyhow he’s not a dissenter….”

“In England, you see,” Mr. Britling remarked, after they had
parted from the reverend gentleman, “we have
domesticated everything. We have even domesticated God.”

For awhile Mr. Britling showed Mr. Direck English lanes, and
then came back along narrow white paths across small fields of
rising wheat, to the village and a little gate that led into the
park.

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “what you say about domestication does
seem to me to be very true indeed. Why! even those clouds up there
look as though they had a shepherd and were grazing.”

“Ready for shearing almost,” said Mr. Britling.

“Indeed,” said Mr. Direck, raising his voice a little, “I’ve
seen scarcely anything in England that wasn’t domesticated, unless
it was some of your back streets in London.”

Mr. Britling seemed to reflect for a moment. “They’re an
excrescence,” he said….

§ 3

The park had a trim wildness like nature in an old Italian
picture; dappled fallow deer grouped close at hand and looked at
the two men fearlessly; the path dropped through oak trees and some
stunted bracken to a little loitering stream, that paused ever and
again to play at ponds and waterfalls and bear a fleet of
water-lily leaves; and then their way curved round in an indolent
sweep towards the cedars and shrubberies of the great house. The
house looked low and extensive to an American eye, and its
red-brick chimneys rose like infantry in open order along its
extended line. There was a glimpse of flower-bright garden and
terraces to the right as they came round the corner to the front of
the house through a path cut in the laurel bushes.

Mr. Britling had a moment of exposition as they approached the
entrance.

“I expect we shall find Philbert from the Home Office—or
is it the Local Government Board?—and Sir Thomas Loot, the Treasury man. There may be some
other people of that sort, the people we call the Governing Class.
Wives also. And I rather fancy the Countess of Frensham is coming,
she’s strong on the Irish Question, and Lady Venetia Trumpington,
who they say is a beauty—I’ve never seen her. It’s Lady
Homartyn’s way to expect me to come in—not that I’m an
important item at these week-end social feasts—but she likes
to see me on the table—to be nibbled at if any one wants to
do so—like the olives and the salted almonds. And she always
asks me to lunch on Sunday and I always refuse—because of the
hockey. So you see I put in an appearance on the Saturday
afternoon….”

They had reached the big doorway.

It opened into a large cool hall adorned with the heads of
hippopotami and rhinoceroses and a stuffed lion, and furnished
chiefly with a vast table on which hats and sticks and newspapers
were littered. A manservant with a subdued, semi-confidential
manner, conveyed to Mr. Britling that her ladyship was on the
terrace, and took the hats and sticks that were handed to him and
led the way through the house. They emerged upon a broad terrace
looking out under great cedar trees upon flower beds and stone urns
and tennis lawns and yew hedges that dipped to give a view of
distant hills. On the terrace were grouped perhaps a dozen people
for the most part holding teacups, they sat in deck chairs and
folding seats about a little table that bore the tea-things. Lady
Homartyn came forward to welcome the newcomers.

Mr. Direck was introduced as a travelling American gratified to
see a typical English country house, and Lady Homartyn in an
habituated way ran over the points of her Tudor specimen. Mr.
Direck was not accustomed to titled people, and was suddenly in
doubt whether you called a baroness “My Lady” or “Your Ladyship,”
so he wisely avoided any form of address until he had a lead from
Mr. Britling. Mr. Britling presently called her “Lady Homartyn.” She took Mr. Direck and sat him down
beside a lady whose name he didn’t catch, but who had had a lot to
do with the British Embassy at Washington, and then she handed Mr.
Britling over to the Rt. Honble. George Philbert, who was anxious
to discuss certain points in the latest book of essays. The
conversation of the lady from Washington was intelligent but not
exacting, and Mr. Direck was able to give a certain amount of
attention to the general effect of the scene.

He was a little disappointed to find that the servants didn’t
wear livery. In American magazine pictures and in American
cinematograph films of English stories and in the houses of very
rich Americans living in England, they do so. And the Mansion House
is misleading; he had met a compatriot who had recently dined at
the Mansion House, and who had described “flunkeys” in hair-powder
and cloth of gold—like Thackeray’s Jeames Yellowplush. But
here the only servants were two slim, discreet and attentive young
gentlemen in black coats with a gentle piety in their manner
instead of pride. And he was a little disappointed too by a certain
lack of splendour in the company. The ladies affected him as being
ill-dressed; there was none of the hard snap, the “There!
and what do you say to it?” about them of the well-dressed American
woman, and the men too were not so much tailored as unobtrusively
and yet grammatically clothed.

§ 4

He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversation when
everything was thrown into commotion by the important arrival of
Lady Frensham, and there was a general reshuffling of places. Lady
Frensham had arrived from London by automobile; she appeared in
veils and swathings and a tremendous dust cloak, with a sort of
nephew in her train who had driven the car. She was manifestly a
constitutionally triumphant woman. A certain
afternoon lassitude vanished in the swirl of her arrival. Mr.
Philbert removed wrappings and handed them to the manservant.

“I lunched with Sir Edward Carson to-day, my dear,” she told
Lady Homartyn, and rolled a belligerent eye at Philbert.

“And is he as obdurate as ever?” asked Sir Thomas.

“Obdurate! It’s Redmond who’s obdurate,” cried Lady Frensham.
“What do you say, Mr. Britling?”

“A plague on both your parties,” said Mr. Britling.

“You can’t keep out of things like that,” said Lady Frensham
with the utmost gusto, “when the country’s on the very verge of
civil war…. You people who try to pretend there isn’t a grave
crisis when there is one, will be more accountable than any
one—when the civil war does come. It won’t spare you. Mark my
words!”

The party became a circle.

Mr. Direck found himself the interested auditor of a real
English country-house week-end political conversation. This at any
rate was like the England of which Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novels had
informed him, but yet not exactly like it. Perhaps that was due to
the fact that for the most part these novels dealt with the England
of the ‘nineties, and things had lost a little in dignity since
those days. But at any rate here were political figures and titled
people, and they were talking about the “country.”…

Was it possible that people of this sort did “run” the country,
after all?… When he had read Mrs. Humphry Ward in America he had
always accepted this theory of the story quite easily, but now that
he saw and heard them—!

But all governments and rulers and ruling classes when you look
at them closely are incredible….

“I don’t believe the country is on the verge of civil war,” said
Mr. Britling.

“Facts!” cried Lady Frensham, and seemed to wipe away delusions
with a rapid gesture of her hands.

“You’re interested in Ireland, Mr. Dirks?” asked Lady
Homartyn.

“We see it first when we come over,” said Mr. Direck rather
neatly, and after that he was free to attend to the general
discussion.

Lady Frensham, it was manifest, was one of that energetic body
of aristocratic ladies who were taking up an irreconcilable
attitude against Home Rule “in any shape or form” at that time.
They were rapidly turning British politics into a system of bitter
personal feuds in which all sense of imperial welfare was lost. A
wild ambition to emulate the extremest suffragettes seems to have
seized upon them. They insulted, they denounced, they refused every
invitation lest they should meet that “traitor” the Prime Minister,
they imitated the party hatreds of a fiercer age, and even now the
moderate and politic Philbert found himself treated as an invisible
object. They were supported by the extremer section of the Tory
press, and the most extraordinary writers were set up to froth like
lunatics against the government as “traitors,” as men who “insulted
the King”; the Morning Post and the lighter-witted side of
the Unionist press generally poured out a torrent of partisan
nonsense it is now almost incredible to recall. Lady Frensham,
bridling over Lady Homartyn’s party, and for a time leaving Mr.
Britling, hurried on to tell of the newest developments of the
great feud. She had a wonderful description of Lady Londonderry
sitting opposite “that old rascal, the Prime Minister,” at a
performance of Mozart’s Zauberflöte.

“If looks could kill!” cried Lady Frensham with tremendous
gusto.

“Sir Edward is quite firm that Ulster means to fight. They have
machine-guns—ammunition. And I am sure the army is with
us….”

“Where did they get those machine-guns and ammunition?” asked
Mr. Britling suddenly.

“Ah! that’s a secret,” cried Lady Frensham.

“Um,” said Mr. Britling.

“You see,” said Lady Frensham; “it will be civil war! And
yet you writing people who have influence do nothing to prevent
it!”

“What are we to do, Lady Frensham?”

“Tell people how serious it is.”

“You mean, tell the Irish Nationalists to lie down and be walked
over. They won’t be….”

“We’ll see about that,” cried Lady Frensham, “we’ll see about
that!”

She was a large and dignified person with a kind of figure-head
nobility of carriage, but Mr. Direck was suddenly reminded of a
girl cousin of his who had been expelled from college for some
particularly elaborate and aimless rioting….

“May I say something to you, Lady Frensham,” said Mr. Britling,
“that you have just said to me? Do you realise that this Carsonite
campaign is dragging these islands within a measurable distance of
civil war?”

“It’s the fault of your Lloyd George and his government. It’s
the fault of your Socialists and sentimentalists. You’ve made the
mischief and you have to deal with it.”

“Yes. But do you really figure to yourself what a civil war may
mean for the empire? Surely there are other things in the world
besides this quarrel between the ‘loyalists’ of Ulster and the
Liberal government; there are other interests in this big empire
than party advantages? Yon think you are going to frighten this
Home Rule government into some ridiculous sort of collapse that
will bring in the Tories at the next election. Well, suppose you
don’t manage that. Suppose instead that you really do contrive to
bring about a civil war. Very few people here or in Ireland want
it—I was over there not a month
ago—but when men have loaded guns in their hands they
sometimes go off. And then people see red. Few people realise what
an incurable sore opens when fighting begins. Suppose part of the
army revolts and we get some extraordinary and demoralising
fighting over there. India watches these things. Bengal may imitate
Ireland. At that distance rebellion and treason are rebellion and
treason whether they are coloured orange or green. And then suppose
the Germans see fit to attack us!”

Lady Frensham had a woman’s elusiveness. “Your Redmondites would
welcome them with open arms.”

“It isn’t the Redmondites who invite them now, anyhow,” said Mr.
Britling, springing his mine. “The other day one of your
‘loyalists,’ Andrews, was talking in the Morning Post of
preferring conquest by Germany to Home Rule; Craig has been at the
same game; Major Crawford, the man who ran the German Mausers last
April, boasted that he would transfer his allegiance to the German
Emperor rather than see Redmond in power.”

“Rhetoric!” said Lady Frensham. “Rhetoric!”

“But one of your Ulster papers has openly boasted that
arrangements have been made for a ‘powerful Continental monarch’ to
help an Ulster rebellion.”

“Which paper?” snatched Lady Frensham.

Mr. Britling hesitated.

Mr. Philbert supplied the name. “I saw it. It was the Irish
Churchman.”

“You two have got your case up very well,” said Lady Frensham.
“I didn’t know Mr. Britling was a party man.”

“The Nationalists have been circulating copies,” said Philbert.
“Naturally.”

“They make it look worse than mere newspaper talk and speeches,”
Mr. Britling pressed. “Carson, it seems, was lunching with the
German Emperor last autumn. A fine fuss you’d make if Redmond did
that. All this gun-running, too, is German gun-running.”

“What does it matter if it is?” said Lady Frensham, allowing a
belligerent eye to rest for the first time on Philbert. “You drove
us to it. One thing we are resolved upon at any cost. Johnny
Redmond may rule England if he likes; he shan’t rule
Ireland….”

Mr. Britling shrugged his shoulders, and his face betrayed
despair.

“My one consolation,” he said, “in this storm is a talk I had
last month with a young Irishwoman in Meath. She was a young person
of twelve, and she took a fancy to me—I think because I went
with her in an alleged dangerous canoe she was forbidden to
navigate alone. All day the eternal Irish Question had banged about
over her observant head. When we were out on the water she suddenly
decided to set me right upon a disregarded essential. ‘You
English,’ she said, ‘are just a bit disposed to take all this
trouble seriously. Don’t you fret yourself about it… Half the
time we’re just laffing at you. You’d best leave us all
alone….'”

And then he went off at a tangent from his own anecdote.

“But look at this miserable spectacle!” he cried. “Here is a
chance of getting something like a reconciliation of the old feud
of English and Irish, and something like a settlement of these
ancient distresses, and there seems no power, no conscience, no
sanity in any of us, sufficient to save it from this cantankerous
bitterness, this sheer wicked mischief of mutual exasperation….
Just when Ireland is getting a gleam of prosperity…. A murrain on
both your parties!”

“I see, Mr. Britling, you’d hand us all over to Jim Larkin!”

“I’d hand you all over to Sir Horace Plunkett—”

“That doctrinaire dairyman!” cried Lady Frensham, with an air of
quite conclusive repartee. “You’re hopeless, Mr. Britling. You’re
hopeless.”

And Lady Homartyn, seeing that the phase of mere personal
verdicts drew near, created a diversion by giving Lady Frensham a second cup of tea, and fluttering
like a cooling fan about the heated brows of the disputants. She
suggested tennis….

§ 5

Mr. Britling was still flushed and ruffled as he and his guest
returned towards the Dower House. He criticised England himself
unmercifully, but he hated to think that in any respect she fell
short of perfection; even her defects he liked to imagine were just
a subtler kind of power and wisdom. And Lady Frensham had stuck her
voice and her gestures through all these amiable illusions. He was
like a lover who calls his lady a foolish rogue, and is startled to
find that facts and strangers do literally agree with him.

But it was so difficult to resolve Lady Frensham and the Irish
squabble generally into anything better than idiotic mischief, that
for a time he was unusually silent—wrestling with the
problem, and Mr. Direck got the conversational initiative.

“To an American mind it’s a little—startling,” said Mr.
Direck, “to hear ladies expressing such vigorous political
opinions.”

“I don’t mind that,” said Mr. Britling. “Women over here go into
politics and into public-houses—I don’t see why they
shouldn’t. If such things are good enough for men they are good
enough for women; we haven’t your sort of chivalry. But it’s the
peculiar malignant silliness of this sort of Toryism that’s so
discreditable. It’s discreditable. There’s no good in denying it.
Those people you have heard and seen are a not unfair sample of our
governing class—of a certain section of our governing
class—as it is to-day. Not at all unfair. And you see how
amazingly they haven’t got hold of anything. There was a time when
they could be politic…. Hidden away they have politic instincts
even now…. But it makes me sick to think of this Irish business.
Because, you know, it’s true—we are drifting towards
civil war there.”

“You are of that opinion?” said Mr. Direck.

“Well, isn’t it so? Here’s all this Ulster gun-running—you
heard how she talked of it? Isn’t it enough to drive the south into
open revolt?…”

“Is there very much, do you think, in the suggestion that some
of this Ulster trouble is a German intrigue? You and Mr. Philbert
were saying things—”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Britling shortly.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “But it isn’t because I don’t think
our Unionists and their opponents aren’t foolish enough for
anything of the sort. It’s only because I don’t believe that the
Germans are so stupid as to do such things…. Why should
they?…

“It makes me—expressionless with anger,” said Mr. Britling
after a pause, reverting to his main annoyance. “They won’t
consider any compromise. It’s sheer love of quarrelling…. Those
people there think that nothing can possibly happen. They are like
children in a nursery playing at rebellion. Unscathed and heedless.
Until there is death at their feet they will never realise they are
playing with loaded guns….”

For a time he said no more; and listened perfunctorily while Mr.
Direck tried to indicate the feeling in New England towards the
Irish Question and the many difficult propositions an American
politician has to face in that respect. And when Mr. Britling took
up the thread of speech again it had little or no relation to Mr.
Direck’s observations.

“The psychology of all this recent insubordination and violence
is—curious. Exasperating too…. I don’t quite grasp it….
It’s the same thing whether you look at the suffrage business or
the labour people or at this Irish muddle. People may be too safe.
You see we live at the end of a series of secure generations in
which none of the great things of life have changed materially.
We’ve grown up with no sense of danger—that is to say, with
no sense of responsibility. None of us, none of us—for though
I talk my actions belie me—really
believe that life can change very fundamentally any more forever.
All this”,—Mr. Britling waved his arm
comprehensively—”looks as though it was bound to go on
steadily forever. It seems incredible that the system could be
smashed. It seems incredible that anything we can do will ever
smash the system. Lady Homartyn, for example, is incapable of
believing that she won’t always be able to have week-end parties at
Claverings, and that the letters and the tea won’t come to her
bedside in the morning. Or if her imagination goes to the point of
supposing that some day she won’t be there to receive the
tea, it means merely that she supposes somebody else will be. Her
pleasant butler may fear to lose his ‘situation,’ but nothing on
earth could make him imagine a time when there will not be a
‘situation’ for him to lose. Old Asquith thinks that we always have
got along, and that we always shall get along by being quietly
artful and saying, ‘Wait and see.’ And it’s just because we are all
convinced that we are so safe against a general breakdown that we
are able to be so recklessly violent in our special cases. Why
shouldn’t women have the vote? they argue. What does it matter? And
bang goes a bomb in Westminster Abbey. Why shouldn’t Ulster create
an impossible position? And off trots some demented Carsonite to
Germany to play at treason on some half word of the German
Emperor’s and buy half a million rifles….

“Exactly like children being very, very naughty….

“And,” said Mr. Britling with a gesture to round off his
discourse, “we do go on. We shall go on—until there is a
spark right into the magazine. We have lost any belief we ever had
that fundamental things happen. We are everlasting children in an
everlasting nursery….”

And immediately he broke out again.

“The truth of the matter is that hardly any one has ever yet
mastered the fact that the world is round. The world is
round—like an orange. The thing is told us—like any old scandal—at school. For all practical
purposes we forget it. Practically we all live in a world as flat
as a pancake. Where time never ends and nothing changes. Who really
believes in any world outside the circle of the horizon? Here we
are and visibly nothing is changing. And so we go on
to—nothing will ever change. It just goes on—in space,
in time. If we could realise that round world beyond, then indeed
we should go circumspectly…. If the world were like a whispering
gallery, what whispers might we not hear now—from India, from
Africa, from Germany, warnings from the past, intimations of the
future….

“We shouldn’t heed them….”

§ 6

And indeed at the very moment when Mr. Britling was saying these
words, in Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the hour was somewhat later,
men whispered together, and one held nervously to a black parcel
that had been given him and nodded as they repeated his
instructions, a black parcel with certain unstable chemicals and a
curious arrangement of detonators therein, a black parcel destined
ultimately to shatter nearly every landmark of Mr. Britling’s and
Lady Frensham’s cosmogony….

§ 7

When Mr. Direck and Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House the
guest was handed over to Mrs. Britling and Mr. Britling vanished,
to reappear at supper time, for the Britlings had a supper in the
evening instead of dinner. When Mr. Britling did reappear every
trace of his vexation with the levities of British politics and the
British ruling class had vanished altogether, and he was no longer
thinking of all that might be happening in Germany or India….

While he was out of the way Mr. Direck extended his acquaintance
with the Britling household. He was taken round the garden and
shown the roses by Mrs. Britling, and beyond the rose garden in a
little arbour they came upon Miss Corner reading a book. She looked
very grave and pretty reading a book. Mr. Direck came to a pause in
front of her, and Mrs. Britling stopped beside him. The young lady
looked up and smiled.

“The last new novel?” asked Mr. Direck pleasantly.

“Campanella’s ‘City of the Sun.'”

“My word! but isn’t that stiff reading?”

“You haven’t read it,” said Miss Corner.

“It’s a dry old book anyhow.”

“It’s no good pretending you have,” she said, and there Mr.
Direck felt the conversation had to end.

“That’s a very pleasant young lady to have about,” he said to
Mrs. Britling as they went on towards the barn court.

“She’s all at loose ends,” said Mrs. Britling. “And she reads
like a—Whatever does read? One drinks like a fish. One eats
like a wolf.”

They found the German tutor in a little court playing Badminton
with the two younger boys. He was a plump young man with glasses
and compact gestures; the game progressed chiefly by misses and the
score was counted in German. He won thoughtfully and chiefly
through the ardour of the younger brother, whose enthusiastic
returns invariably went out. Instantly the boys attacked Mrs.
Britling with a concerted enthusiasm. “Mummy! Is it to be
dressing-up supper?”

Mrs. Britling considered, and it was manifest that Mr. Direck
was material to her answer.

“We wrap ourselves up in curtains and bright things instead of
dressing,” she explained. “We have a sort of wardrobe of fancy
dresses. Do you mind?”

Mr. Direck was delighted.

And this being settled, the two small boys went off with their mother upon some special decorative project
they had conceived and Mr. Direck was left for a time to Herr
Heinrich.

Herr Heinrich suggested a stroll in the rose garden, and as Mr.
Direck had not hitherto been shown the rose garden by Herr
Heinrich, he agreed. Sooner or later everybody, it was evident, had
got to show him that rose garden.

“And how do you like living in an English household?” said Mr.
Direck, getting to business at once. “It’s interesting to an
American to see this English establishment, and it must be still
more interesting to a German.”

“I find it very different from Pomerania,” said Herr Heinrich.
“In some respects it is more agreeable, in others less so. It is a
pleasant life but it is not a serious life.

“At any time,” continued Herr Heinrich, “some one may say, ‘Let
us do this thing,’ or ‘Let us do that thing,’ and then everything
is disarranged.

“People walk into the house without ceremony. There is much
kindness but no politeness. Mr. Britling will go away for three or
four days, and when he returns and I come forward to greet him and
bow, he will walk right past me, or he will say just like this,
‘How do, Heinrich?'”

“Are you interested in Mr. Britling’s writings?” Mr. Direck
asked.

“There again I am puzzled. His work is known even in Germany.
His articles are reprinted in German and Austrian reviews. You
would expect him to have a certain authority of manner. You would
expect there to be discussion at the table upon questions of
philosophy and aesthetics…. It is not so. When I ask him
questions it is often that they are not seriously answered.
Sometimes it is as if he did not like the questions I askt of him.
Yesterday I askt of him did he agree or did he not agree with Mr.
Bernard Shaw. He just said—I wrote it down in my
memoranda—he said: ‘Oh! Mixt Pickles.’ What can one
understand of that?—Mixt Pickles!”…

The young man’s sedulous blue eyes looked out of his pink face
through his glasses at Mr. Direck, anxious for any light he could
offer upon the atmospheric vagueness of this England.

He was, he explained, a student of philology preparing for his
doctorate. He had not yet done his year of military service. He was
studying the dialects of East Anglia—

“You go about among the people?” Mr. Direck inquired.

“No, I do not do that. But I ask Mr. Carmine and Mrs. Britling
and the boys many questions. And sometimes I talk to the
gardener.”

He explained how he would prepare his thesis and how it would be
accepted, and the nature of his army service and the various stages
by which he would subsequently ascend in the orderly professorial
life to which he was destined. He confessed a certain lack of
interest in philology, but, he said, “it is what I have to do.” And
so he was going to do it all his life through. For his own part he
was interested in ideas of universal citizenship, in Esperanto and
Ido and universal languages and such-like attacks upon the barriers
between man and man. But the authorities at home did not favour
cosmopolitan ideas, and so he was relinquishing them. “Here, it is
as if there were no authorities,” he said with a touch of envy.

Mr. Direck induced him to expand that idea.

Herr Heinrich made Mr. Britling his instance. If Mr. Britling
were a German he would certainly have some sort of title, a
definite position, responsibility. Here he was not even called Herr
Doktor. He said what he liked. Nobody rewarded him; nobody
reprimanded him. When Herr Heinrich asked him of his position,
whether he was above or below Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Arnold White
or Mr. Garvin or any other publicist, he made jokes. Nobody here
seemed to have a title and nobody seemed to have a definite place.
There was Mr. Lawrence Carmine; he was a
student of Oriental questions; he had to do with some public
institution in London that welcomed Indian students; he was a
Geheimrath—

“Eh?” said Mr. Direck.

“It is—what do they call it? the Essex County Council.”
But nobody took any notice of that. And when Mr. Philbert, who was
a minister in the government, came to lunch he was just like any
one else. It was only after he had gone that Herr Heinrich had
learnt by chance that he was a minister and “Right
Honourable….”

“In Germany everything is definite. Every man knows his place,
has his papers, is instructed what to do….”

“Yet,” said Mr. Direck, with his eyes on the glowing roses, the
neat arbour, the long line of the red wall of the vegetable garden
and a distant gleam of cornfield, “it all looks orderly
enough.”

“It is as if it had been put in order ages ago,” said Herr
Heinrich.

“And was just going on by habit,” said Mr. Direck, taking up the
idea.

Their comparisons were interrupted by the appearance of “Teddy,”
the secretary, and the Indian young gentleman, damp and genial, as
they explained, “from the boats.” It seemed that “down below”
somewhere was a pond with a punt and an island and a toy dinghy.
And while they discussed swimming and boating, Mr. Carmine appeared
from the direction of the park conversing gravely with the elder
son. They had been for a walk and a talk together. There were
proposals for a Badminton foursome. Mr. Direck emerged from the
general interchange with Mr. Lawrence Carmine, and then strolled
through the rose garden to see the sunset from the end. Mr. Direck
took the opportunity to verify his impression that the elder son
was the present Mrs. Britling’s stepson, and he also contrived by a
sudden admiration for a distant row of evening primroses to deflect
their path past the arbour in which the
evening light must now be getting a little too soft for Miss
Corner’s book.

Miss Corner was drawn into the sunset party. She talked to Mr.
Carmine and displayed, Mr. Direck thought, great originality of
mind. She said “The City of the Sun” was like the cities the boys
sometimes made on the playroom floor. She said it was the dearest
little city, and gave some amusing particulars. She described the
painted walls that made the tour of the Civitas Solis a liberal
education. She asked Mr. Carmine, who was an authority on Oriental
literature, why there were no Indian nor Chinese Utopias.

Now it had never occurred to Mr. Direck to ask why there were no
Indian nor Chinese Utopias, and even Mr. Carmine seemed surprised
to discover this deficiency.

“The primitive patriarchal village is Utopia to India and
China,” said Mr. Carmine, when they had a little digested the
inquiry. “Or at any rate it is their social ideal. They want no
Utopias.”

“Utopias came with cities,” he said, considering the question.
“And the first cities, as distinguished from courts and autocratic
capitals, came with ships. India and China belong to an earlier
age. Ships, trade, disorder, strange relationships, unofficial
literature, criticism—and then this idea of some novel
remaking of society….”

§ 8

Then Mr. Direck fell into the hands of Hugh, the eldest son, and
anticipating the inevitable, said that he liked to walk in the rose
garden. So they walked in the rose garden.

“Do you read Utopias?” said Mr. Direck, cutting any preface, in
the English manner.

“Oh, rather!” said Hugh, and became at once friendly and
confidential.

“We all do,” he explained. “In England everybody talks of change
and nothing ever changes.”

“I found Miss Corner reading—what was it? the Sun
People?—some old classical Italian work.”

“Campanella,” said Hugh, without betraying the slightest
interest in Miss Corner. “Nothing changes in England, because the
people who want to change things change their minds before they
change anything else. I’ve been in London talking for the last
half-year. Studying art they call it. Before that I was a science
student, and I want to be one again. Don’t you think, Sir, there’s
something about science—it’s steadier than anything else in
the world?”

Mr. Direck thought that the moral truths of human nature were
steadier than science, and they had one of those little discussions
of real life that begin about a difference inadequately
apprehended, and do not so much end as are abandoned. Hugh struck
him as being more speculative and detached than any American
college youth of his age that he knew—but that might not be a
national difference but only the Britling strain. He seemed to have
read more and more independently, and to be doing less. And he was
rather more restrained and self-possessed.

Before Mr. Direck could begin a proper inquiry into the young
man’s work and outlook, he had got the conversation upon America.
He wanted tremendously to see America. “The dad says in one of his
books that over here we are being and that over there you are
beginning. It must be tremendously stimulating to think that your
country is still being made….”

Mr. Direck thought that an interesting point of view. “Unless
something tumbles down here, we never think of altering it,” the
young man remarked. “And even then we just shore it up.”

His remarks had the effect of floating off from some busy mill
of thought within him. Hitherto Mr. Direck had been inclined to
think this silent observant youth, with his hands in his pockets
and his shoulders a little humped, as
probably shy and adolescently ineffective. But the head was
manifestly quite busy….

“Miss Corner,” he began, taking the first thing that came into
his head, and then he remembered that he had already made the
remark he was going to make not five minutes ago.

“What form of art,” he asked, “are you contemplating in your
studies at the present time in London?”….

Before this question could be dealt with at all adequately, the
two small boys became active in the garden beating in everybody to
“dress-up” before supper. The secretary, Teddy, came in a fatherly
way to look after Mr. Direck and see to his draperies.

§ 9

Mr. Direck gave his very best attention to this business of
draping himself, for he had not the slightest intention of
appearing ridiculous in the eyes of Miss Corner. Teddy came with an
armful of stuff that he thought “might do.”

“What’ll I come as?” asked Mr. Direck.

“We don’t wear costumes,” said Teddy. “We just put on all the
brightest things we fancy. If it’s any costume at all, it’s
Futurist.”

“And surely why shouldn’t one?” asked Mr. Direck, greatly struck
by this idea. “Why should we always be tied by the fashions and
periods of the past?”

He rejected a rather Mephistopheles-like costume of crimson and
a scheme for a brigand-like ensemble based upon what was evidently
an old bolero of Mrs. Britling’s, and after some reflection he
accepted some black silk tights. His legs were not legs to be
ashamed of. Over this he tried various brilliant wrappings from the
Dower House armoire, and chose at last, after some
hesitation in the direction of a piece of gold and purple brocade,
a big square of green silk curtain stuff adorned with
golden pheasants and other large and
dignified ornaments; this he wore toga fashion over his light
silken under-vest—Teddy had insisted on the abandonment of
his shirt “if you want to dance at all”—and fastened with a
large green glass-jewelled brooch. From this his head and neck
projected, he felt, with a tolerable dignity. Teddy suggested a
fillet of green ribbon, and this Mr. Direck tried, but after
prolonged reflection before the glass rejected. He was still
weighing the effect of this fillet upon the mind of Miss Corner
when Teddy left him to make his own modest preparations. Teddy’s
departure gave him a chance for profile studies by means of an
arrangement of the long mirror and the table looking-glass that he
had been too shy to attempt in the presence of the secretary. The
general effect was quite satisfactory.

“Wa-a-a-l,” he said with a quaver of laughter, “now who’d have
thought it?” and smiled a consciously American smile at himself
before going down.

The company was assembling in the panelled hall, and made a
brilliant show in the light of the acetylene candles against the
dark background. Mr. Britling in a black velvet cloak and black
silk tights was a deeper shade among the shadows; the high lights
were Miss Corner and her sister, in glittering garments of peacock
green and silver that gave a snake-like quality to their lithe
bodies. They were talking to the German tutor, who had become a
sort of cotton Cossack, a spectacled Cossack in buff and bright
green. Mrs. Britling was dignified and beautiful in a purple
djibbah, and her stepson had become a handsome still figure of
black and crimson. Teddy had contrived something elaborate and
effective in the Egyptian style, with a fish-basket and a cuirass
of that thin matting one finds behind washstands; the small boys
were brigands, with immensely baggy breeches and cummerbunds in
which they had stuck a selection of paper-knives and toy pistols
and similar weapons. Mr. Carmine and his young man had come
provided with real Indian costumes; the
feeling of the company was that Mr. Carmine was a mullah. The
aunt-like lady with the noble nose stood out amidst these levities
in a black silk costume with a gold chain. She refused, it seemed,
to make herself absurd, though she encouraged the others to
extravagance by nods and enigmatical smiles. Nevertheless she had
put pink ribbons in her cap. A family of father, golden-haired
mother, and two young daughters, sympathetically attired, had just
arrived, and were discarding their outer wrappings with the
assistance of host and hostess.

It was all just exactly what Mr. Direck had never expected in
England, and equally unexpected was the supper on a long candle-lit
table without a cloth. No servants were present, but on a sideboard
stood a cold salmon and cold joints and kalter aufschnitt and
kartoffel salat, and a variety of other comestibles, and many
bottles of beer and wine and whisky. One helped oneself and anybody
else one could, and Mr. Direck did his best to be very attentive to
Mrs. Britling and Miss Corner, and was greatly assisted by the
latter.

Everybody seemed unusually gay and bright-eyed. Mr. Direck found
something exhilarating and oddly exciting in all this unusual
bright costume and in this easy mutual service; it made everybody
seem franker and simpler. Even Mr. Britling had revealed a sturdy
handsomeness that had not been apparent to Mr. Direck before, and
young Britling left no doubts now about his good looks. Mr. Direck
forgot his mission and his position, and indeed things generally,
in an irrational satisfaction that his golden pheasants harmonised
with the glitter of the warm and smiling girl beside him. And he
sat down beside her—”You sit anywhere,” said Mrs.
Britling—with far less compunction than in his ordinary
costume he would have felt for so direct a confession of
preference. And there was something in her eyes, it was quite
indefinable and yet very satisfying, that told him that now he
escaped from the stern square imperatives of his patriotic tailor in New York she had made a
discovery of him.

Everybody chattered gaily, though Mr. Direck would have found it
difficult to recall afterwards what it was they chattered about,
except that somehow he acquired the valuable knowledge that Miss
Corner was called Cecily, and her sister Letty, and then—so
far old Essex custom held—the masculine section was left for
a few minutes for some imaginary drinking, and a lighting of cigars
and cigarettes, after which everybody went through interwoven
moonlight and afterglow to the barn. Mr. Britling sat down to a
pianola in the corner and began the familiar cadences of “Whistling
Rufus.”

“You dance?” said Miss Cecily Corner.

“I’ve never been much of a dancing man,” said Mr. Direck. “What
sort of dance is this?”

“Just anything. A two-step.”

Mr. Direck hesitated and regretted a well-spent youth, and then
Hugh came prancing forward with outstretched hands and swept her
away.

Just for an instant Mr. Direck felt that this young man was a
trifle superfluous….

But it was very amusing dancing.

It wasn’t any sort of taught formal dancing. It was a
spontaneous retort to the leaping American music that Mr. Britling
footed out. You kept time, and for the rest you did as your nature
prompted. If you had a partner you joined hands, you fluttered to
and from one another, you paced down the long floor together, you
involved yourselves in romantic pursuits and repulsions with other
couples. There was no objection to your dancing alone. Teddy, for
example, danced alone in order to develop certain Egyptian gestures
that were germinating in his brain. There was no objection to your
joining hands in a cheerful serpent….

Mr. Direck hung on to Cissie and her partner. They danced very
well together; they seemed to like and
understand each other. It was natural of course for two young
people like that, thrown very much together, to develop an
affection for one another…. Still, she was older by three or four
years.

It seemed unreasonable that the boy anyhow shouldn’t be in love
with her….

It seemed unreasonable that any one shouldn’t be in love with
her….

Then Mr. Direck remarked that Cissie was watching Teddy’s
manoeuvres over her partner’s shoulder with real affection and
admiration….

But then most refreshingly she picked up Mr. Direck’s gaze and
gave him the slightest of smiles. She hadn’t forgotten him.

The music stopped with an effect of shock, and all the bobbing,
whirling figures became walking glories.

“Now that’s not difficult, is it?” said Miss Corner, glowing
happily.

“Not when you do it,” said Mr. Direck.

“I can’t imagine an American not dancing a two-step. You must do
the next with me. Listen! It’s ‘Away Down Indiana’ … ah! I knew
you could.”

Mr. Direck, too, understood now that he could, and they went off
holding hands rather after the fashion of two skaters.

“My word!” said Mr. Direck. “To think I’d be dancing.”

But he said no more because he needed his breath.

He liked it, and he had another attempt with one of the visitor
daughters, who danced rather more formally, and then Teddy took the
pianola and Mr. Direck was astonished by the spectacle of an
eminent British thinker in a whirl of black velvet and extremely
active black legs engaged in a kind of Apache dance in pursuit of
the visitor wife. In which Mr. Lawrence Carmine suddenly
mingled.

“In Germany,” said Herr Heinrich, “we do not dance like this. It could not be considered seemly. But it
is very pleasant.”

And then there was a waltz, and Herr Heinrich bowed to and took
the visitor wife round three times, and returned her very
punctually and exactly to the point whence he had taken her, and
the Indian young gentleman (who must not be called “coloured”)
waltzed very well with Cecily. Mr. Direck tried to take a tolerant
European view of this brown and white combination. But he secured
her as soon as possible from this Asiatic entanglement, and danced
with her again, and then he danced with her again.

“Come and look at the moonlight,” cried Mrs. Britling.

And presently Mr. Direck found himself strolling through the
rose garden with Cecily. She had the sweetest moonlight face, her
white shining robe made her a thing of moonlight altogether. If Mr.
Direck had not been in love with her before he was now altogether
in love. Mamie Nelson, whose freakish unkindness had been rankling
like a poisoned thorn in his heart all the way from Massachusetts,
suddenly became Ancient History.

A tremendous desire for eloquence arose in Mr. Direck’s soul, a
desire so tremendous that no conceivable phrase he could imagine
satisfied it. So he remained tongue-tied. And Cecily was
tongue-tied, too. The scent of the roses just tinted the clear
sweetness of the air they breathed.

Mr. Direck’s mood was an immense solemnity, like a dark ocean
beneath the vast dome of the sky, and something quivered in every
fibre of his being, like moonlit ripples on the sea. He felt at the
same time a portentous stillness and an immense enterprise….

Then suddenly the pianola, pounding a cake walk, burst out into
ribald invitation….

“Come back to dance!” cried Cecily, like one from whom a spell
has just been broken. And Mr. Direck, snatching at a vanishing
scrap of everything he had not said, remarked, “I shall never
forget this evening.”

She did not seem to hear that.

They danced together again. And then Mr. Direck danced with the
visitor lady, whose name he had never heard. And then he danced
with Mrs. Britling, and then he danced with Letty. And then it
seemed time for him to look for Miss Cecily again.

And so the cheerful evening passed until they were within a
quarter of an hour of Sunday morning. Mrs. Britling went to exert a
restraining influence upon the pianola.

“Oh! one dance more!” cried Cissie Corner.

“Oh! one dance more!” cried Letty.

“One dance more,” Mr. Direck supported, and then things really
had to end.

There was a rapid putting out of candles and a stowing away of
things by Teddy and the sons, two chauffeurs appeared from the
region of the kitchen and brought Mr. Lawrence Carmine’s car and
the visitor family’s car to the front door, and everybody drifted
gaily through the moonlight and the big trees to the front of the
house. And Mr. Direck saw the perambulator waiting—the
mysterious perambulator—a little in the dark beyond the front
door.

The visitor family and Mr. Carmine and his young Indian
departed. “Come to hockey!” shouted Mr. Britling to each departing
car-load, and Mr. Carmine receding answered: “I’ll bring
three!”

Then Mr. Direck, in accordance with a habit that had been
growing on him throughout the evening, looked around for Miss
Cissie Corner and failed to find her. And then behold she was
descending the staircase with the mysterious baby in her arms. She
held up a warning finger, and then glanced at her sleeping burthen.
She looked like a silvery Madonna. And Mr. Direck remembered that
he was still in doubt about that baby….

Teddy, who was back in his flannels, seized upon the
perambulator. There was much careful baby stowing on the part of
Cecily; she displayed an infinitely maternal
solicitude. Letty was away changing; she reappeared jauntily taking
leave, disregarding the baby absolutely, and Teddy departed
bigamously, wheeling the perambulator between the two sisters into
the hazes of the moonlight. There was much crying of good nights.
Mr. Direck’s curiosities narrowed down to a point of great
intensity….

Of course, Mr. Britling’s circle must be a very “Advanced”
circle…

§ 10

Mr. Direck found he had taken leave of the rest of the company,
and drifted into a little parlour with Mr. Britling and certain
glasses and siphons and a whisky decanter on a tray….

“It is a very curious thing,” said Mr. Direck, “that in England
I find myself more disposed to take stimulants and that I no longer
have the need for iced water that one feels at home. I ascribe it
to a greater humidity in the air. One is less dried and one is less
braced. One is no longer pursued by a thirst, but one needs
something to buck one up a little. Thank you. That is enough.”

Mr. Direck took his glass of whisky and soda from Mr. Britling’s
hand.

Mr. Britling seated himself in an armchair by the fireplace and
threw one leg carelessly over the arm. In his black velvet cloak
and cap, and his black silk tights, he was very like a minor
character, a court chamberlain for example, in some cloak and
rapier drama. “I find this week-end dancing and kicking about
wonderfully wholesome,” he said. “That and our Sunday hockey. One
starts the new week clear and bright about the mind. Friday is
always my worst working day.”

Mr. Direck leant against the table, wrapped in his golden
pheasants, and appreciated the point.

“Your young people dance very cheerfully,” he said.

“We all dance very cheerfully,” said Mr. Britling.

“Then this Miss Corner,” said Mr. Direck, “she is the sister, I
presume, is she? of that pleasant young lady who is
married—she is married, isn’t she?—to the young man you
call Teddy.”

“I should have explained these young people. They’re the sort of
young people we are producing over here now in quite enormous
quantity. They are the sort of equivalent of the Russian
Intelligentsia, an irresponsible middle class with ideas. Teddy,
you know, is my secretary. He’s the son, I believe, of a Kilburn
solicitor. He was recommended to me by Datcher of The Times.
He came down here and lived in lodgings for a time. Then suddenly
appeared the young lady.”

“Miss Corner’s sister?”

“Exactly. The village was a little startled. The cottager who
had let the rooms came to me privately. Teddy is rather touchy on
the point of his personal independence, he considers any demand for
explanations as an insult, and probably all he had said to the old
lady was, ‘This is Letty—come to share my rooms.’ I put the
matter to him very gently. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, rather in the manner
of some one who has overlooked a trifle. ‘I got married to her in
the Christmas holidays. May I bring her along to see Mrs.
Britling?’ We induced him to go into a little cottage I rent. The
wife was the daughter of a Colchester journalist and printer. I
don’t know if you talked to her.”

“I’ve talked to the sister rather.”

“Well, they’re both idea’d. They’re highly educated in the sense
that they do really think for themselves. Almost fiercely. So does
Teddy. If he thinks he hasn’t thought anything he thinks for
himself, he goes off and thinks it different. The sister is a
teacher who wants to take the B.A. degree in London University.
Meanwhile she pays the penalty of her sex.”

“Meaning—?” asked Mr. Direck, startled.

“Oh! that she puts in a great deal too much of her time upon
housework and minding her sister’s baby.”

“She’s a very interesting and charming young lady indeed,” said
Mr. Direck. “With a sort of Western college freedom of
mind—and something about her that isn’t American at all.”

Mr. Britling was following the train of his own thoughts.

“My household has some amusing contrasts,” he said. “I don’t
know if you have talked to that German.

“He’s always asking questions. And you tell him any old thing
and he goes and writes it down in his room upstairs, and afterwards
asks you another like it in order to perplex himself by the variety
of your answers. He regards the whole world with a methodical
distrust. He wants to document it and pin it down. He suspects it
only too justly of disorderly impulses, and a capacity for
self-contradiction. He is the most extraordinary contrast to Teddy,
whose confidence in the universe amounts almost to effrontery.
Teddy carries our national laxness to a foolhardy extent. He is
capable of leaving his watch in the middle of Claverings Park and
expecting to find it a month later—being carefully taken care
of by a squirrel, I suppose—when he happens to want it. He’s
rather like a squirrel himself—without the habit of hoarding.
He is incapable of asking a question about anything; he would be
quite sure it was all right anyhow. He would feel that asking
questions betrayed a want of confidence—was a sort of
incivility. But my German, if you notice,—his normal
expression is one of grave solicitude. He is like a conscientious
ticket-collector among his impressions. And did you notice how
beautifully my pianola rolls are all numbered and catalogued? He
did that. He set to work and did it as soon as he got here, just as
a good cat when you bring it into the house sets to work and
catches mice. Previously the pianola music was chaos. You took what
God sent you.

“And he looks like a German,” said Mr. Britling.

“He certainly does that,” said Mr. Direck.

“He has the fair type of complexion, the rather full habit of
body, the temperamental disposition, but in addition that
close-cropped head, it is almost as if it were shaved, the
plumpness, the glasses—those are things that are made. And
the way he carries himself. And the way he thinks. His
meticulousness. When he arrived he was delightful, he was wearing a
student’s corps cap and a rucksack, he carried a violin; he seemed
to have come out of a book. No one would ever dare to invent so
German a German for a book. Now, a young Frenchman or a young
Italian or a young Russian coming here might look like a foreigner,
but he wouldn’t have the distinctive national stamp a German has.
He wouldn’t be plainly French or Italian or Russian. Other peoples
are not made; they are neither made nor created but
proceeding—out of a thousand indefinable causes. The Germans
are a triumph of directive will. I had to remark the other day that
when my boys talked German they shouted. ‘But when one talks German
one must shout,’ said Herr Heinrich. ‘It is taught so in the
schools.’ And it is. They teach them to shout and to throw out
their chests. Just as they teach them to read notice-boards and not
think about politics. Their very ribs are not their own. My Herr
Heinrich is comparatively a liberal thinker. He asked me the other
day, ‘But why should I give myself up to philology? But then,’ he
reflected, ‘it is what I have to do.'”

Mr. Britling seemed to have finished, and then just as Mr.
Direck was planning a way of getting the talk back by way of Teddy
to Miss Corner, he snuggled more deeply into his chair, reflected
and broke out again.

“This contrast between Heinrich’s carefulness and Teddy’s
easy-goingness, come to look at it, is I suppose one of the most
fundamental in the world. It reaches to everything. It mixes up
with education, statecraft, morals. Will you make or will you take?
Those are the two extreme courses in all such
things. I suppose the answer of wisdom to that is, like all wise
answers, a compromise. I suppose one must accept and then make all
one can of it…. Have you talked at all to my eldest son?”

“He’s a very interesting young man indeed,” said Mr. Direck. “I
should venture to say there’s a very great deal in him. I was most
impressed by the few words I had with him.”

“There, for example, is one of my perplexities,” said Mr.
Britling.

Mr. Direck waited for some further light on this sudden
transition.

“Ah! your troubles in life haven’t begun yet. Wait till you’re a
father. That cuts to the bone. You have the most delicate thing in
the world in hand, a young kindred mind. You feel responsible for
it, you know you are responsible for it; and you lose touch with
it. You can’t get at it. Nowadays we’ve lost the old tradition of
fatherhood by divine right—and we haven’t got a new one. I’ve
tried not to be a cramping ruler, a director, a domestic tyrant to
that lad—and in effect it’s meant his going his own way…. I
don’t dominate. I hoped to advise. But you see he loves my respect
and good opinion. Too much. When things go well I know of them.
When the world goes dark for him, then he keeps his trouble from
me. Just when I would so eagerly go into it with him…. There’s
something the matter now, something—it may be grave. I feel
he wants to tell me. And there it is!—it seems I am the last
person to whom he can humiliate himself by a confession of
blundering, or weakness…. Something I should just laugh at and
say, ‘That’s in the blood of all of us, dear Spit of myself. Let’s
see what’s to be done.’…”

He paused and then went on, finding in the unfamiliarity and
transitoriness of his visitor a freedom he might have failed to
find in a close friend.

“I am frightened at times at all I don’t know about in that boy’s mind. I know nothing of his
religiosities. He’s my son and he must have religiosities. I know
nothing of his ideas or of his knowledge about sex and all that
side of life. I do not know of the things he finds beautiful. I can
guess at times; that’s all; when he betrays himself…. You see,
you don’t know really what love is until you have children. One
doesn’t love women. Indeed you don’t! One gives and gets; it’s a
trade. One may have tremendous excitements and expectations and
overwhelming desires. That’s all very well in its way. But the love
of children is an exquisite tenderness: it rends the heart. It’s a
thing of God. And I lie awake at nights and stretch out my hands in
the darkness to this lad—who will never know—until his
sons come in their time….”

He made one of his quick turns again.

“And that’s where our English way makes for distresses. Mr.
Prussian respects and fears his father; respects authorities,
attends, obeys and—his father has a hold upon him. But
I said to myself at the outset, ‘No, whatever happens, I will not
usurp the place of God. I will not be the Priest-Patriarch of my
children. They shall grow and I will grow beside them, helping but
not cramping or overshadowing.’ They grow more. But they blunder
more. Life ceases to be a discipline and becomes an
experiment….”

“That’s very true,” said Mr. Direck, to whom it seemed the time
was ripe to say something. “This is the problem of America perhaps
even more than of England. Though I have not had the parental
experience you have undergone…. I can see very clearly that a son
is a very serious proposition.”

“The old system of life was organisation. That is where Germany
is still the most ancient of European states. It’s a reversion to a
tribal cult. It’s atavistic…. To organise or discipline, or mould
characters or press authority, is to assume that you have reached
finality in your general philosophy. It
implies an assured end. Heinrich has his assured end, his
philological professorship or thereabouts as a part of the Germanic
machine. And that too has its assured end in German national
assertion. Here, we have none of those convictions. We know we
haven’t finality, and so we are open and apologetic and receptive,
rather than wilful…. You see all organisation, with its
implication of finality, is death. We feel that. The Germans don’t.
What you organise you kill. Organised morals or organised religion
or organised thought are dead morals and dead religion and dead
thought. Yet some organisation you must have. Organisation is like
killing cattle. If you do not kill some the herd is just waste. But
you musn’t kill all or you kill the herd. The unkilled cattle are
the herd, the continuation; the unorganised side of life is the
real life. The reality of life is adventure, not performance. What
isn’t adventure isn’t life. What can be ruled about can be
machined. But priests and schoolmasters and bureaucrats get hold of
life and try to make it all rules, all etiquette and
regulation and correctitude…. And parents and the love of parents
make for the same thing. It is all very well to experiment for
oneself, but when one sees these dear things of one’s own, so young
and inexperienced and so capable of every sort of gallant
foolishness, walking along the narrow plank, going down into dark
jungles, ah! then it makes one want to wrap them in laws and
foresight and fence them about with ‘Verboten’ boards in all the
conceivable aspects….”

“In America of course we do set a certain store upon youthful
self-reliance,” said Mr. Direck.

“As we do here. It’s in your blood and our blood. It’s the
instinct of the English and the Irish anyhow to suspect government
and take the risks of the chancy way…. And manifestly the
Russians, if you read their novelists, have the same twist in
them…. When we get this young Prussian here, he’s a marvel to us.
He really believes in Law. He likes to
obey. That seems a sort of joke to us. It’s curious how foreign
these Germans are—to all the rest of the world. Because of
their docility. Scratch the Russian and you get the Tartar. Educate
the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or
Frenchman or any real northern European except the German, and you
get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order
without organisation—of something beyond organisation….

“It’s one o’clock,” said Mr. Britling abruptly, perceiving a
shade of fatigue upon the face of his hearer and realising that his
thoughts had taken him too far, “and Sunday. Let’s go to bed.”

§ 11

For a time Mr. Direck could not sleep. His mind had been too
excited by this incessant day with all its novelties and all its
provocations to comparison. The whole complicated spectacle grouped
itself, with a naturalness and a complete want of logic that all
who have been young will understand, about Cecily Corner.

She had to be in the picture, and so she came in as though she
were the central figure, as though she were the quintessential
England. There she was, the type, the blood, the likeness, of no
end of Massachusetts families, the very same stuff indeed, and yet
she was different….

For a time his thoughts hovered ineffectively about certain
details of her ear and cheek, and one may doubt if his interest in
these things was entirely international….

Then he found himself under way with an exposition of certain
points to Mr. Britling. In the security of his bed he could imagine
that he was talking very slowly and carefully while Mr. Britling
listened; already he was more than half way to dreamland or he
could not have supposed anything so incredible.

“There’s a curious sort of difference,” he was saying. “It is difficult to define, but on the whole I might
express it by saying that such a gathering as this if it was in
America would be drawn with harder lines, would show its bones more
and have everything more emphatic. And just to take one
illustrative point: in America in such a gathering as this there
would be bound to be several jokes going on as it were, running
jokes and running criticisms, from day to day and from week to
week…. There would be jokes about your writing and your influence
and jokes about Miss Corner’s advanced reading…. You see, in
America we pay much more attention to personal character. Here
people, I notice, are not talked to about their personal characters
at all, and many of them do not seem to be aware and do not seem to
mind what personal characters they have….

“And another thing I find noteworthy is the way in which what I
might call mature people seem to go on having a good time instead
of standing by and applauding the young people having a good
time…. And the young people do not seem to have set out to have a
good time at all…. Now in America, a charming girl like Miss
Corner would be distinctly more aware of herself and her vitality
than she is here, distinctly more. Her peculiarly charming sidelong
look, if I might make so free with her—would have been called
attention to. It’s a perfectly beautiful look, the sort of look
some great artist would have loved to make immortal. It’s a look I
shall find it hard to forget…. But she doesn’t seem to be aware
in the least of it. In America she would be aware of it. She would
be distinctly aware of it. She would have been made aware of
it. She would have been advised of it. It would be looked for and
she would know it was looked for. She would give it as a
singer gives her most popular song. Mamie Nelson, for example, used
to give a peculiar little throw back of the chin and a laugh…. It
was talked about. People came to see it….

“Of course Mamie Nelson was a very brilliant girl indeed. I
suppose in England you would say we spoilt her. I suppose we did
spoil her….”

It came into Mr. Direck’s head that for a whole day he had
scarcely given a thought to Mamie Nelson. And now he was thinking
of her—calmly. Why shouldn’t one think of Mamie Nelson
calmly?

She was a proud imperious thing. There was something Southern in
her. Very dark blue eyes she had, much darker than Miss
Corner’s….

But how tortuous she had been behind that outward pride of hers!
For four years she had let him think he was the only man who really
mattered in the world, and all the time quite clearly and
definitely she had deceived him. She had made a fool of him and she
had made a fool of the others perhaps—just to have her
retinue and play the queen in her world. And at last humiliation,
bitter humiliation, and Mamie with her chin in the air and her
bright triumphant smile looking down on him.

Hadn’t he, she asked, had the privilege of loving her?

She took herself at the value they had set upon her.

Well—somehow—that wasn’t right….

All the way across the Atlantic Mr. Direck had been trying to
forget her downward glance with the chin up, during that last
encounter—and other aspects of the same humiliation. The
years he had spent upon her! The time! Always relying upon her
assurance of a special preference for him. He tried to think he was
suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, and to conceal from
himself just how bitterly his pride and vanity had been rent by her
ultimate rejection. There had been a time when she had given him
reason to laugh in his sleeve at Booth Wilmington.

Perhaps Booth Wilmington had also had reason for laughing in his
sleeve….

Had she even loved Booth Wilmington? Or had she just snatched at
him?…

Wasn’t he, Direck, as good a man as Booth Wilmington
anyhow?…

For some moments the old sting of jealousy rankled again. He
recalled the flaring rivalry that had ended in his defeat, the
competition of gifts and treats…. A thing so open that all
Carrierville knew of it, discussed it, took sides…. And over it
all Mamie with her flashing smile had sailed like a processional
goddess….

Why, they had made jokes about him in the newspapers!

One couldn’t imagine such a contest in Matching’s Easy. Yet
surely even in Matching’s Easy there are lovers.

Is it something in the air, something in the climate that makes
things harder and clearer in America?…

Cissie—why shouldn’t one call her Cissie in one’s private
thoughts anyhow?—would never be as hard and clear as Mamie.
She had English eyes—merciful eyes….

That was the word—merciful!

The English light, the English air, are merciful….

Merciful….

They tolerate old things and slow things and imperfect
apprehensions. They aren’t always getting at you….

They don’t laugh at you…. At least—they laugh
differently….

Was England the tolerant country? With its kind eyes and its
wary sidelong look. Toleration. In which everything mellowed and
nothing was destroyed. A soft country. A country with a passion for
imperfection. A padded country….

England—all stuffed with soft feathers … under one’s
ear. A pillow—with soft, kind Corners … Beautiful rounded
Corners…. Dear, dear Corners. Cissie Corners. Corners. Could
there be a better family?

Massachusetts—but in heaven….

Harps playing two-steps, and kind angels wrapped in
moonlight.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE ENTERTAINMENT OF MR. DIRECK REACHES A CLIMAX

§ 1

Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easy-going feast.
Then the small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the
pond and the boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with
Hugh, talking rather intently. And when Mr. Direck returned from
the boats in a state of greatly enhanced popularity he found Mr.
Britling conversing over his garden railings to what was altogether
a new type of Britisher in Mr. Direck’s experience. It was a tall,
lean, sun-bitten youngish man of forty perhaps, in brown tweeds,
looking more like the Englishman of the American illustrations than
anything Mr. Direck had met hitherto. Indeed he came very near to a
complete realisation of that ideal except that there was a sort of
intensity about him, and that his clipped moustache had the
restrained stiffness of a wiry-haired terrier. This gentleman Mr.
Direck learnt was Colonel Rendezvous. He spoke in clear short
sentences, they had an effect of being punched out, and he was
refusing to come into the garden and talk.

“Have to do my fourteen miles before lunch,” he said. “You
haven’t seen Manning about, have you?”

“He isn’t here,” said Mr. Britling, and it seemed to Mr. Direck
that there was the faintest ambiguity in this reply.

“Have to go alone, then,” said Colonel Rendezvous. “They told me
that he had started to come here.”

“I shall motor over to Bramley High Oak for your Boy Scout
festival,” said Mr. Britling.

“Going to have three thousand of ’em,” said the Colonel. “Good
show.”

His steely eyes seemed to search the cover of Mr. Britling’s
garden for the missing Manning, and then he decided to give him up.
“I must be going,” he said. “So long. Come up!”

A well-disciplined dog came to heel, and the lean figure had
given Mr. Direck a semi-military salutation and gone upon its way.
It marched with a long elastic stride; it never looked back.

“Manning,” said Mr. Britling, “is probably hiding up in my rose
garden.”

“Curiously enough, I guessed from your manner that that might be
the case,” said Mr. Direck.

“Yes. Manning is a London journalist. He has a little cottage
about a mile over there”—Mr. Britling pointed
vaguely—”and he comes down for the week-ends. And Rendezvous
has found out he isn’t fit. And everybody ought to be fit. That is
the beginning and end of life for Rendezvous. Fitness. An almost
mineral quality, an insatiable activity of body, great mental
simplicity. So he takes possession of poor old Manning and trots
him for that fourteen miles—at four miles an hour. Manning
goes through all the agonies of death and damnation, he half
dissolves, he pants and drags for the first eight or ten miles, and
then I must admit he rather justifies Rendezvous’ theory. He is to
be found in the afternoon in a hammock suffering from blistered
feet, but otherwise unusually well. But if he can escape it, he
does. He hides.”

“But if he doesn’t want to go with Rendezvous, why does he?”
said Mr. Direck.

“Well, Rendezvous is accustomed to the command of men. And
Manning’s only way of refusing things is on printed forms. Which he
doesn’t bring down to Matching’s Easy. Ah! behold!”

Far away across the lawn between two blue cedars there appeared a leisurely form in grey flannels and a
loose tie, advancing with manifest circumspection.

“He’s gone,” cried Britling.

The leisurely form, obviously amiable, obviously a little out of
condition, became more confident, drew nearer.

“I’m sorry to have missed him,” he said cheerfully. “I thought
he might come this way. It’s going to be a very warm day indeed.
Let us sit about somewhere and talk.

“Of course,” he said, turning to Direck, “Rendezvous is the life
and soul of the country.”

They strolled towards a place of seats and hammocks between the
big trees and the rose garden, and the talk turned for a time upon
Rendezvous. “They have the tidiest garden in Essex,” said Manning.
“It’s not Mrs. Rendezvous’ fault that it is so. Mrs. Rendezvous, as
a matter of fact, has a taste for the picturesque. She just puts
the things about in groups in the beds. She wants them, she says,
to grow anyhow. She desires a romantic disorder. But she never gets
it. When he walks down the path all the plants dress
instinctively…. And there’s a tree near their gate; it used to be
a willow. You can ask any old man in the village. But ever since
Rendezvous took the place it’s been trying to present arms. With
the most extraordinary results. I was passing the other day with
old Windershin. ‘You see that there old poplar,’ he said. ‘It’s a
willow,’ said I. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it did used to be a willow before
Colonel Rendezvous he came. But now it’s a poplar.’… And, by
Jove, it is a poplar!”…

The conversation thus opened by Manning centred for a time upon
Colonel Rendezvous. He was presented as a monster of energy and
self-discipline; as the determined foe of every form of looseness,
slackness, and easy-goingness.

“He’s done wonderful work for the local Boy Scout movement,”
said Manning.

“It’s Kitchenerism,” said Britling.

“It’s the army side of the efficiency stunt,” said Manning.

There followed a digression upon the Boy Scout movement, and Mr.
Direck made comparisons with the propaganda of Seton Thompson in
America. “Colonel Teddyism,” said Manning. “It’s a sort of reaction
against everything being too easy and too safe.”

“It’s got its anti-decadent side,” said Mr. Direck.

“If there is such a thing as decadence,” said Mr. Britling.

“If there wasn’t such a thing as decadence,” said Manning, “we
journalists would have had to invent it.”…

“There is something tragical in all this—what shall I call
it?—Kitchenerism,” Mr. Britling reflected “Here you have it
rushing about and keeping itself—screwed up, and trying
desperately to keep the country screwed up. And all because there
may be a war some day somehow with Germany. Provided Germany
is insane. It’s that war, like some sort of bee in
Rendezvous’ brains, that is driving him along the road now to
Market Saffron—he always keeps to the roads because they are
severer—through all the dust and sunshine. When he might be
here gossiping….

“And you know, I don’t see that war coming,” said Mr. Britling.
“I believe Rendezvous sweats in vain. I can’t believe in that war.
It has held off for forty years. It may hold off forever.”

He nodded his head towards the German tutor, who had come into
view across the lawn, talking profoundly with Mr. Britling’s eldest
son.

“Look at that pleasant person. There he is—Echt
Deutsch—if anything ever was. Look at my son there! Do
you see the two of them engaged in mortal combat? The thing’s too
ridiculous. The world grows sane. They may fight in the Balkans
still; in many ways the Balkan States are in the very rear of
civilisation; but to imagine decent countries like this or Germany
going back to bloodshed! No…. When I see
Rendezvous keeping it up and keeping it up, I begin to see just how
poor Germany must be keeping it up. I begin to realise how sick
Germany must be getting of the high road and the dust and heat and
the everlasting drill and restraint…. My heart goes out to the
South Germans. Old Manning here always reminds me of Austria. Think
of Germany coming like Rendezvous on a Sunday morning, and looking
stiffly over Austria’s fence. ‘Come for a good hard walk, man. Keep
Fit….'”

“But suppose this Balkan trouble becomes acute,” said
Manning.

“It hasn’t; it won’t. Even if it did we should keep out of
it.”

“But suppose Russia grappled Austria and Germany flung herself
suddenly upon France—perhaps taking Belgium on the way.”

“Oh!—we should fight. Of course we should fight. Could any
one but a congenital idiot suppose we shouldn’t fight? They know we
should fight. They aren’t altogether idiots in Germany. But the
thing’s absurd. Why should Germany attack France? It’s as if
Manning here took a hatchet suddenly and assailed Edith…. It’s
just the dream of their military journalists. It’s such schoolboy
nonsense. Isn’t that a beautiful pillar rose? Edith only put it in
last year…. I hate all this talk of wars and rumours of wars….
It’s worried all my life. And it gets worse and it gets emptier
every year….”

§ 2

Now just at that moment there was a loud report….

But neither Mr. Britling nor Mr. Manning nor Mr. Direck was
interrupted or incommoded in the slightest degree by that report.
Because it was too far off over the curve of this round world to be
either heard or seen at Matching’s Easy. Nevertheless it was a very
loud report. It occurred at an open space by
a river that ran through a cramped Oriental city, a city spiked
with white minarets and girt about by bare hills under a blazing
afternoon sky. It came from a black parcel that the Archduke
Francis Ferdinand of Austria, with great presence of mind, had just
flung out from the open hood of his automobile, where, tossed from
the side of the quay, it had descended a few seconds before. It
exploded as it touched the cobbled road just under the front of the
second vehicle in the procession, and it blew to pieces the front
of the automobile and injured the aide-de-camp who was in it and
several of the spectators. Its thrower was immediately gripped by
the bystanders. The procession stopped. There was a tremendous
commotion amongst that brightly-costumed crowd, a hot excitement in
vivid contrast to the Sabbath calm of Matching’s Easy….

Mr. Britling, to whom the explosion was altogether inaudible,
continued his dissertation upon the common-sense of the world and
the practical security of our Western peace.

§ 3

Lunch was an open-air feast again. Three visitors had dropped
in; they had motored down from London piled up on a motor-cycle and
a side-car; a brother and two sisters they seemed to be, and they
had apparently reduced hilariousness to a principle. The rumours of
coming hockey that had been floating on the outskirts of Mr.
Direck’s consciousness ever since his arrival, thickened and
multiplied…. It crept into his mind that he was expected to
play….

He decided he would not play. He took various people into his
confidence. He told Mr. Britling, and Mr. Britling said, “We’ll
make you full back, where you’ll get a hit now and then and not
have very much to do. All you have to remember is to hit with the
flat side of your stick and not raise it above your shoulders.” He
told Teddy, and Teddy said, “I strongly
advise you to dress as thinly as you can consistently with decency,
and put your collar and tie in your pocket before the game begins.
Hockey is properly a winter game.” He told the maiden aunt-like
lady with the prominent nose, and she said almost enviously, “Every
one here is asked to play except me. I assuage the perambulator. I
suppose one mustn’t be envious. I don’t see why I shouldn’t play.
I’m not so old as all that.” He told Hugh, and Hugh warned him to
be careful not to get hold of one of the sprung sticks. He
considered whether it wouldn’t be wiser to go to his own room and
lock himself in, or stroll off for a walk through Claverings Park.
But then he would miss Miss Corner, who was certain, it seemed, to
come up for hockey. On the other hand, if he did not miss her he
might make himself ridiculous in her eyes, and efface the effect of
the green silk stuff with the golden pheasants.

He determined to stay behind until she arrived, and explain to
her that he was not going to play. He didn’t somehow want her to
think he wasn’t perfectly fit to play.

Mr. Carmine arrived in an automobile with two Indians and a
gentleman who had been a prospector in Alaska, the family who had
danced overnight at the Dower House reappeared, and then Mrs.
Teddy, very detached with a special hockey stick, and Miss Corner
wheeling the perambulator. Then came further arrivals. At the
earliest opportunity Mr. Direck secured the attention of Miss
Corner, and lost his interest in any one else.

“I can’t play this hockey,” said Mr. Direck. “I feel strange
about it. It isn’t an American game. Now if it were
baseball—!”

He left her to suppose him uncommonly hot stuff at baseball.

“If you’re on my side,” said Cecily, “mind you pass to me.”

It became evident to Mr. Direck that he was going to play this
hockey after all.

“Well,” he said, “if I’ve got to play hockey, I guess I’ve got
to play hockey. But can’t I just get a bit of practice somewhere
before the game begins?”

So Miss Corner went off to get two sticks and a ball and came
back to instruct Mr. Direck. She said he had a good eye. The two
small boys scenting play in the air got sticks and joined them. The
overnight visitor’s wife appeared from the house in abbreviated
skirts, and wearing formidable shin-guards. With her abundant fair
hair, which was already breaking loose, so to speak, to join the
fray, she looked like a short stout dismounted Valkyr. Her gaze was
clear and firm.

§ 4

Hockey as it was played at the Dower House at Matching’s Easy
before the war, was a game combining danger, physical exercise and
kindliness in a very high degree. Except for the infant in the
perambulator and the outwardly calm but inwardly resentful aunt,
who wheeled the child up and down in a position of maximum danger
just behind the unnetted goal, every one was involved. Quite
able-bodied people acquainted with the game played forward, the
less well-informed played a defensive game behind the forward line,
elderly, infirm, and bulky persons were used chiefly as obstacles
in goal. Several players wore padded leg-guards, and all players
were assumed to have them and expected to behave accordingly.

Proceedings began with an invidious ceremony called picking up.
This was heralded by Mr. Britling, clad in the diaphanous flannels
and bearing a hockey stick, advancing with loud shouts to the
centre of the hockey field. “Pick up! Pick up!” echoed the young
Britlings.

Mr. Direck became aware of a tall, drooping man with long hair
and long digressive legs in still longer white flannel trousers,
and a face that was somehow familiar. He was talking with
affectionate intimacy to Manning, and suddenly Mr. Direck
remembered that it was in Manning’s weekly
paper, The Sectarian, in which a bitter caricaturist
enlivened a biting text, that he had become familiar with the
features of Manning’s companion. It was Raeburn, Raeburn the
insidious, Raeburn the completest product of the party system….
Well, that was the English way. “Come for the pick up!” cried the
youngest Britling, seizing upon Mr. Direck’s elbow. It appeared
that Mr. Britling and the overnight dinner guest—Mr. Direck
never learnt his name—were picking up.

Names were shouted. “I’ll take Cecily!” Mr. Direck heard Mr.
Britling say quite early. The opposing sides as they were picked
fell into two groups. There seemed to be difficulties about some of
the names. Mr. Britling, pointing to the more powerful looking of
the Indian gentlemen, said, “You, Sir.”

“I’m going to speculate on Mr. Dinks,” said Mr. Britling’s
opponent.

Mr. Direck gathered that Mr. Dinks was to be his hockey
name.

“You’re on our side,” said Mrs. Teddy. “I think you’ll
have to play forward, outer right, and keep a sharp eye on
Cissie.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Mr. Direck.

His captain presently confirmed this appointment.

His stick was really a sort of club and the ball was a firm hard
cricket ball…. He resolved to be very gentle with Cecily, and see
that she didn’t get hurt.

The sides took their places for the game, and a kind of order
became apparent to Mr. Direck. In the centre stood Mr. Britling and
the opposing captain, and the ball lay between them. They were
preparing to “bully off” and start the game. In a line with each of
them were four other forwards. They all looked spirited and intent
young people, and Mr. Direck wished he had had more exercise to
justify his own alert appearance. Behind each centre forward
hovered one of the Britling boys. Then on each side came a vaguer
row of three backs, persons of gentler
disposition or maturer years. They included Mr. Raeburn, who was
considered to have great natural abilities for hockey but little
experience. Mr. Raeburn was behind Mr. Direck. Mrs. Britling was
the centre back. Then in a corner of Mr. Direck’s side was a small
girl of six or seven, and in the half-circle about the goal a lady
in a motoring dust coat and a very short little man whom Mr. Direck
had not previously remarked. Mr. Lawrence Carmine, stripped to the
braces, which were richly ornamented with Oriental embroidery, kept
goal for our team.

The centre forwards went through a rapid little ceremony. They
smote their sticks on the ground, and then hit the sticks together.
“One,” said Mr. Britling. The operation was repeated. “Two,” …
“Three.”

Smack, Mr. Britling had got it and the ball had gone to the
shorter and sturdier of the younger Britlings, who had been
standing behind Mr. Direck’s captain. Crack, and it was away to
Teddy; smack, and it was coming right at Direck.

“Lordy!” he said, and prepared to smite it.

Then something swift and blue had flashed before him,
intercepted the ball and shot it past him. This was Cecily Corner,
and she and Teddy were running abreast like the wind towards Mr.
Raeburn.

“Hey!” cried Mr. Raeburn, “stop!” and advanced, as it seemed to
Mr. Direck, with unseemly and threatening gestures towards
Cissie.

But before Mr. Direck could adjust his mind to this new phase of
affairs, Cecily had passed the right honourable gentleman with the
same mysterious ease with which she had flashed by Mr. Direck, and
was bearing down upon the miscellaneous Landwehr which formed the
“backs” of Mr. Direck’s side.

“You rabbit!” cried Mr. Raeburn, and became
extraordinarily active in pursuit, administering great lengths of
arm and leg with a centralised efficiency he had not hitherto
displayed.

Running hard to the help of Mr. Raeburn was the youngest
Britling boy, a beautiful contrast. It was like a puff ball
supporting and assisting a conger eel. In front of Mr. Direck the
little stout man was being alert. Teddy was supporting the attack
near the middle of the field, crying “Centre!” while Mr. Britling,
very round and resolute, was bouncing straight towards the
threatened goal. But Mrs. Teddy, running as swiftly as her sister,
was between Teddy and the ball. Whack! the little short man’s stick
had clashed with Cecily’s. Confused things happened with sticks and
feet, and the little short man appeared to be trying to cut down
Cecily as one cuts down a tree, she tried to pass the ball to her
centre forward—too late, and then Mrs. Teddy had intercepted
it, and was flickering back towards Mr. Britling’s goal in a rush
in which Mr. Direck perceived it was his duty to join.

Yes, he had to follow up Mrs. Teddy and pick up the ball if he
had a chance and send it in to her or the captain or across to the
left forwards, as circumstances might decide. It was perfectly
clear.

Then came his moment. The little formidably padded lady who had
dined at the Dower House overnight, made a gallant attack upon Mrs.
Teddy. Out of the confusion of this clash the ball spun into Mr.
Direck’s radius. Where should he smite and how? A moment of
reflection was natural.

But now the easy-fitting discipline of the Dower House style of
hockey became apparent. Mr. Direck had last observed the tall young
Indian gentleman, full of vitality and anxious for destruction, far
away in the distance on the opposing right wing. But now,
regardless of the more formal methods of the game, this young man
had resolved, without further delay and at any cost, to hit the
ball hard, and he was travelling like some Asiatic typhoon with an
extreme velocity across the remonstrances of Mr. Britling and the
general order of his side. Mr. Direck became
aware of him just before his impact. There was a sort of collision
from which Mr. Direck emerged with a feeling that one side of his
face was permanently flattened, but still gallantly resolved to hit
the comparatively lethargic ball. He and the staggered but resolute
Indian clashed sticks again. And Mr. Direck had the best of it.
Years of experience couldn’t have produced a better pass to the
captain….

“Good pass!”

Apparently from one of the London visitors.

But this was some game!

The ball executed some rapid movements to and fro across the
field. Our side was pressing hard. There was a violent convergence
of miscellaneous backs and suchlike irregulars upon the threatened
goal. Mr. Britling’s dozen was rapidly losing its disciplined
order. One of the sidecar ladies and the gallant Indian had shifted
their activities to the defensive back, and with them was a
spectacled gentleman waving his stick, high above all recognised
rules. Mr. Direck’s captain and both Britling boys hurried to join
the fray. Mr. Britling, who seemed to Mr. Direck to be for a
captain rather too demagogic, also ran back to rally his forces by
loud cries. “Pass outwardly!” was the burthen of his
contribution.

The struggle about the Britling goal ceased to be a game and
became something between a fight and a social gathering. Mr.
Britling’s goal-keeper could be heard shouting, “I can’t see the
ball! Lift your feet!” The crowded conflict lurched towards
the goal posts. “My shin!” cried Mr. Manning. “No, you
don’t!“

Whack, but again whack!

Whack! “Ah! would you?” Whack.

“Goal!” cried the side-car gentleman.

“Goal!” cried the Britling boys….

Mr. Manning, as goal-keeper, went to recover the ball, but one
of the Britling boys politely anticipated him.

The crowd became inactive, and then began to drift back to
loosely conceived positions.

“It’s no good swarming into goal like that,” Mr. Britling, with
a faint asperity in his voice, explained to his followers. “We’ve
got to keep open and not crowd each other.”

Then he went confidentially to the energetic young Indian to
make some restrictive explanation of his activities.

Mr. Direck strolled back towards Cecily. He was very warm and a
little blown, but not, he felt, disgraced. He was winning.

“You’ll have to take your coat off,” she said.

It was a good idea.

It had occurred to several people and the boundary line was
already dotted with hastily discarded jackets and wraps and so
forth. But the lady in the motoring dust coat was buttoning it to
the chin.

“One goal love,” said the minor Britling boy.

“We haven’t begun yet, Sunny,” said Cecily.

“Sonny! That’s American,” said Mr. Direck.

“No. We call him Sunny Jim,” said Cecily. “They’re bullying off
again.”

“Sunny Jim’s American too,” said Mr. Direck, returning to his
place….

The struggle was resumed. And soon it became clear that the
first goal was no earnest of the quality of the struggle. Teddy and
Cecily formed a terribly efficient combination. Against their
brilliant rushes, supported in a vehement but effective manner by
the Indian to their right and guided by loud shoutings from Mr.
Britling (centre), Mr. Direck and the side-car lady and Mr. Raeburn
struggled in vain. One swift advance was only checked by the dust
cloak, its folds held the ball until help arrived; another was
countered by a tremendous swipe of Mr. Raeburn’s that sent the ball
within an inch of the youngest Britling’s
head and right across the field; the third resulted in a swift pass
from Cecily to the elder Britling son away on her right, and he
shot the goal neatly and swiftly through the lattice of Mr.
Lawrence Carmine’s defensive movements. And after that very rapidly
came another goal for Mr. Britling’s side and then another.

Then Mr. Britling cried out that it was “Half Time,” and
explained to Mr. Direck that whenever one side got to three goals
they considered it was half time and had five minutes’ rest and
changed sides. Everybody was very hot and happy, except the lady in
the dust cloak who was perfectly cool. In everybody’s eyes shone
the light of battle, and not a shadow disturbed the brightness of
the afternoon for Mr. Direck except a certain unspoken anxiety
about Mr. Raeburn’s trousers.

You see Mr. Direck had never seen Mr. Raeburn before, and knew
nothing about his trousers.

They appeared to be coming down.

To begin with they had been rather loose over the feet and
turned up, and as the game progressed, fold after fold of
concertina-ed flannel gathered about his ankles. Every now and then
Mr. Raeburn would seize the opportunity of some respite from the
game to turn up a fresh six inches or so of this accumulation.
Naturally Mr. Direck expected this policy to end unhappily. He did
not know that the flannel trousers of Mr. Raeburn were like a
river, that they could come down forever and still remain
inexhaustible….

He had visions of this scene of happy innocence being suddenly
blasted by a monstrous disaster….

Apart from this worry Mr. Direck was as happy as any one
there!

Perhaps these apprehensions affected his game. At any rate he
did nothing that pleased him in the second half, Cecily danced all
over him and round and about him, and in the
course of ten minutes her side had won the two remaining goals with
a score of Five-One; and five goals is “game” by the standards of
Matching’s Easy.

And then with the very slightest of delays these insatiable
people picked up again. Mr. Direck slipped away and returned in a
white silk shirt, tennis trousers and a belt. This time he and
Cecily were on the same side, the Cecily-Teddy combination was
broken, and he it seemed was to take the place of the redoubtable
Teddy on the left wing with her.

This time the sides were better chosen and played a long,
obstinate, even game. One-One. One-Two. One-Three. (Half Time.)
Two-Three. Three all. Four-Three. Four all….

By this time Mr. Direck was beginning to master the simple
strategy of the sport. He was also beginning to master the fact
that Cecily was the quickest, nimblest, most indefatigable player
on the field. He scouted for her and passed to her. He developed
tacit understandings with her. Ideas of protecting her had gone to
the four winds of Heaven. Against them Teddy and a sidecar girl
with Raeburn in support made a memorable struggle. Teddy was as
quick as a cat. “Four-Three” looked like winning, but then Teddy
and the tall Indian and Mrs. Teddy pulled square. They almost
repeated this feat and won, but Mr. Manning saved the situation
with an immense oblique hit that sent the ball to Mr. Direck. He
ran with the ball up to Raeburn and then dodged and passed to
Cecily. There was a lively struggle to the left; the ball was hit
out by Mr. Raeburn and thrown in by a young Britling; lost by the
forwards and rescued by the padded lady. Forward again! This time
will do it!

Cecily away to the left had worked round Mr. Raeburn once more.
Teddy, realising that things were serious, was tearing back to
attack her.

Mr. Direck supported with silent intentness. “Centre!” cried Mr.
Britling. “Cen-tre!”

“Mr. Direck!” came her voice, full of confidence. (Of such
moments is the heroic life.) The ball shot behind the hurtling
Teddy. Mr. Direck stopped it with his foot, a trick he had just
learnt from the eldest Britling son. He was neither slow nor hasty.
He was in the half-circle, and the way to the goal was barred only
by the dust-cloak lady and Mr. Lawrence Carmine. He made as if to
shoot to Mr. Carmine’s left and then smacked the ball, with the
swiftness of a serpent’s stroke, to his right.

He’d done it! Mr. Carmine’s stick and feet were a yard away.

Then hard on this wild triumph came a flash of horror. One can’t
see everything. His eye following the ball’s trajectory….

Directly in its line of flight was the perambulator.

The ball missed the legs of the lady with the noble nose by a
kind of miracle, hit and glanced off the wheel of the perambulator,
and went spinning into a border of antirrhinums.

“Good!” cried Cecily. “Splendid shot!”

He’d shot a goal. He’d done it well. The perambulator it seemed
didn’t matter. Though apparently the impact had awakened the baby.
In the margin of his consciousness was the figure of Mr. Britling
remarking: “Aunty. You really mustn’t wheel the
perambulator—just there.”

“I thought,” said the aunt, indicating the goal posts by a
facial movement, “that those two sticks would be a sort of
protection…. Aah! Did they then?”

Never mind that.

“That’s game!” said one of the junior Britlings to Mr.
Direck with a note of high appreciation, and the whole party,
relaxing and crumpling like a lowered flag, moved towards the house
and tea.

§ 5

“We’ll play some more after tea,” said Cecily. “It will be
cooler then.”

“My word, I’m beginning to like it,” said Mr. Direck.

“You’re going to play very well,” she said.

And such is the magic of a game that Mr. Direck was humbly proud
and grateful for her praise, and trotted along by the side of this
creature who had revealed herself so swift and resolute and
decisive, full to overflowing of the mere pleasure of just trotting
along by her side. And after tea, which was a large confused
affair, enlivened by wonderful and entirely untruthful
reminiscences of the afternoon by Mr. Raeburn, they played again,
with fewer inefficients and greater skill and swiftness, and Mr.
Direck did such quick and intelligent things that everybody
declared that he was a hockey player straight from heaven. The
dusk, which at last made the position of the ball too speculative
for play, came all too soon for him. He had played in six games,
and he knew he would be as stiff as a Dutch doll in the morning.
But he was very, very happy.

The rest of the Sunday evening was essentially a sequel to the
hockey.

Mr. Direck changed again, and after using some embrocation that
Mrs. Britling recommended very strongly, came down in a black
jacket and a cheerfully ample black tie. He had a sense of physical
well-being such as he had not experienced since he came aboard the
liner at New York. The curious thing was that it was not quite the
same sense of physical well-being that one had in America. That is
bright and clear and a little dry, this was—humid. His mind
quivered contentedly, like sunset midges over a lake—it had
no hard bright flashes—and his body wanted to sit about. His
sense of intimacy with Cecily increased each time he looked at her.
When she met his eyes she smiled. He’d caught her style now, he
felt; he attempted no more compliments and
was frankly her pupil at hockey and Badminton. After supper Mr.
Britling renewed his suggestion of an automobile excursion on the
Monday.

“There’s nothing to take you back to London,” said Mr. Britling,
“and we could just hunt about the district with the little old car
and see everything you want to see….”

Mr. Direck did not hesitate three seconds. He thought of Gladys;
he thought of Miss Cecily Corner.

“Well, indeed,” he said, “if it isn’t burthening you, if I’m not
being any sort of inconvenience here for another night, I’d be
really very glad indeed of the opportunity of going around and
seeing all these ancient places….”

§ 6

The newspapers came next morning at nine, and were full of the
Sarajevo Murders. Mr. Direck got the Daily Chronicle and
found quite animated headlines for a British paper.

“Who’s this Archduke,” he asked, “anyhow? And where is this
Bosnia? I thought it was a part of Turkey.”

“It’s in Austria,” said Teddy.

“It’s in the middle ages,” said Mr. Britling. “What an odd,
pertinaceous business it seems to have been. First one bomb, then
another; then finally the man with the pistol. While we were
strolling about the rose garden. It’s like something out of ‘The
Prisoner of Zenda.'”

“Please,” said Herr Heinrich.

Mr. Britling assumed an attentive expression.

“Will not this generally affect European politics?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps it will.”

“It says in the paper that Serbia has sent those bombs to
Sarajevo.”

“It’s like another world,” said Mr. Britling, over his paper.
“Assassination as a political method. Can you imagine anything of
the sort happening nowadays west of the
Adriatic? Imagine some one assassinating the American
Vice-President, and the bombs being at once ascribed to the arsenal
at Toronto!… We take our politics more sadly in the West….
Won’t you have another egg, Direck?”

“Please! Might this not lead to a war?”

“I don’t think so. Austria may threaten Serbia, but she doesn’t
want to provoke a conflict with Russia. It would be going too near
the powder magazine. But it’s all an extraordinary business.”

“But if she did?” Herr Heinrich persisted.

“She won’t…. Some years ago I used to believe in the
inevitable European war,” Mr. Britling explained to Mr. Direck,
“but it’s been threatened so long that at last I’ve lost all belief
in it. The Powers wrangle and threaten. They’re far too cautious
and civilised to let the guns go off. If there was going to be a
war it would have happened two years ago when the Balkan League
fell upon Turkey. Or when Bulgaria attacked Serbia….”

Herr Heinrich reflected, and received these conclusions with an
expression of respectful edification.

“I am naturally anxious,” he said, “because I am taking tickets
for my holidays at an Esperanto Conference at Boulogne.”

§ 7

“There is only one way to master such a thing as driving an
automobile,” said Mr. Britling outside his front door, as he took
his place in the driver’s seat, “and that is to resolve that from
the first you will take no risks. Be slow if you like. Stop and
think when you are in doubt. But do nothing rashly, permit no
mistakes.”

It seemed to Mr. Direck as he took his seat beside his host that
this was admirable doctrine.

They started out of the gates with an extreme deliberation.
Indeed twice they stopped dead in the act of turning into the road,
and the engine had to be restarted.

“You will laugh at me,” said Mr. Britling; “but I’m resolved to
have no blunders this time.”

“I don’t laugh at you. It’s excellent,” said Mr. Direck.

“It’s the right way,” said Mr. Britling. “Care—oh damn!
I’ve stopped the engine again.
Ugh!—ah!—so!—Care, I was saying—and
calm.”

“Don’t think I want to hurry you,” said Mr. Direck. “I
don’t….”

They passed through the tillage at a slow, agreeable pace,
tooting loudly at every corner, and whenever a pedestrian was
approached. Mr. Direck was reminded that he had still to broach the
lecture project to Mr. Britling. So much had happened—

The car halted abruptly and the engine stopped.

“I thought that confounded hen was thinking of crossing the
road,” said Mr. Britling. “Instead of which she’s gone through the
hedge. She certainly looked this way…. Perhaps I’m a little fussy
this morning…. I’ll warm up to the work presently.”

“I’m convinced you can’t be too careful,” said Mr. Direck. “And
this sort of thing enables one to see the country better….”

Beyond the village Mr. Britling seemed to gather confidence. The
pace quickened. But whenever other traffic or any indication of a
side way appeared discretion returned. Mr. Britling stalked his
sign posts, crawling towards them on the belly of the lowest gear;
he drove all the morning like a man who is flushing ambuscades. And
yet accident overtook him. For God demands more from us than mere
righteousness.

He cut through the hills to Market Saffron along a lane-road
with which he was unfamiliar. It began to go up hill. He explained
to Mr. Direck how admirably his engine would climb hills on the top
gear.

They took a curve and the hill grew steeper, and Mr. Direck
opened the throttle.

They rounded another corner, and still more steeply the hill
rose before them.

The engine began to make a chinking sound, and the car lost
pace. And then Mr. Britling saw a pleading little white board with
the inscription “Concealed Turning.” For the moment he thought a
turning might be concealed anywhere. He threw out his clutch and
clapped on his brake. Then he repented of what he had done. But the
engine, after three Herculean throbs, ceased to work. Mr. Britling
with a convulsive clutch at his steering wheel set the electric
hooter snarling, while one foot released the clutch again and the
other, on the accelerator, sought in vain for help. Mr. Direck felt
they were going back, back, in spite of all this vocalisation. He
clutched at the emergency brake. But he was too late to avoid
misfortune. With a feeling like sitting gently in butter, the car
sank down sideways and stopped with two wheels in the ditch.

Mr. Britling said they were in the ditch—said it with
quite unnecessary violence….

This time two cart horses and a retinue of five men were
necessary to restore Gladys to her self-respect….

After that they drove on to Market Saffron, and got there in
time for lunch, and after lunch Mr. Direck explored the church and
the churchyard and the parish register….

After lunch Mr. Britling became more cheerful about his driving.
The road from Market Saffron to Blandish, whence one turns off to
Matching’s Easy, is the London and Norwich high road; it is an old
Roman Stane Street and very straightforward and honest in its
stretches. You can see the cross roads half a mile away, and the
low hedges give you no chance of a surprise. Everybody is cheered
by such a road, and everybody drives more confidently and quickly,
and Mr. Britling particularly was heartened by it and gradually let
out Gladys from the almost excessive restriction that had hitherto
marked the day. “On a road like this nothing
can happen,” said Mr. Britling.

“Unless you broke an axle or burst a tyre,” said Mr. Direck.

“My man at Matching’s Easy is most careful in his inspection,”
said Mr. Britling, putting the accelerator well down and watching
the speed indicator creep from forty to forty-five. “He went over
the car not a week ago. And it’s not one month old—in use
that is.”

Yet something did happen.

It was as they swept by the picturesque walls under the big old
trees that encircle Brandismead Park. It was nothing but a slight
miscalculation of distances. Ahead of them and well to the left,
rode a postman on a bicycle; towards them, with that curious effect
of implacable fury peculiar to motor cycles, came a motor cyclist.
First Mr. Britling thought that he would not pass between these
two, then he decided that he would hurry up and do so, then he
reverted to his former decision, and then it seemed to him that he
was going so fast that he must inevitably run down the postman. His
instinct not to do that pulled the car sharply across the path of
the motor cyclist. “Oh, my God!” cried Mr. Britling. “My God!”
twisted his wheel over and distributed his feet among his levers
dementedly.

He had an imperfectly formed idea of getting across right in
front of the motor cyclist, and then they were going down the brief
grassy slope between the road and the wall, straight at the wall,
and still at a good speed. The motor cyclist smacked against
something and vanished from the problem. The wall seemed to rush up
at them and then—collapse. There was a tremendous concussion.
Mr. Direck gripped at his friend the emergency brake, but had only
time to touch it before his head hit against the frame of the glass
wind-screen, and a curtain fell upon everything….

He opened his eyes upon a broken wall, a crumpled motor car, and
an undamaged motor cyclist in the aviator’s
cap and thin oilskin overalls dear to motor cyclists. Mr. Direck
stared and then, still stunned and puzzled, tried to raise himself.
He became aware of acute pain.

“Don’t move for a bit,” said the motor cyclist. “Your arm and
side are rather hurt, I think….”

§ 8

In the course of the next twelve hours Mr. Direck was to make a
discovery that was less common in the days before the war than it
has been since. He discovered that even pain and injury may be
vividly interesting and gratifying.

If any one had told him he was going to be stunned for five or
six minutes, cut about the brow and face and have a bone in his
wrist put out, and that as a consequence he would find himself
pleased and exhilarated, he would have treated the prophecy with
ridicule; but here he was lying stiffly on his back with his wrist
bandaged to his side and smiling into the darkness even more
brightly than he had smiled at the Essex landscape two days before.
The fact is pain hurts or irritates, but in itself it does not make
a healthily constituted man miserable. The expectation of pain, the
certainty of injury may make one hopeless enough, the reality
rouses our resistance. Nobody wants a broken bone or a delicate
wrist, but very few people are very much depressed by getting one.
People can be much more depressed by smoking a hundred cigarettes
in three days or losing one per cent. of their capital.

And everybody had been most delightful to Mr. Direck.

He had had the monopoly of damage. Mr. Britling, holding on to
the steering wheel, had not even been thrown out. “Unless I’m
internally injured,” he said, “I’m not hurt at all. My liver
perhaps—bruised a little….”

Gladys had been abandoned in the ditch, and they had been very
kindly brought home by a passing automobile.
Cecily had been at the Dower House at the moment of the rueful
arrival. She had seen how an American can carry injuries. She had
made sympathy and helpfulness more delightful by expressed
admiration.

“She’s a natural born nurse,” said Mr. Direck, and then rather
in the tone of one who addressed a public meeting: “But this sort
of thing brings out all the good there is in a woman.”

He had been quite explicit to them and more particularly to her,
when they told him he must stay at the Dower House until his arm
was cured. He had looked the application straight into her pretty
eyes.

“If I’m to stay right here just as a consequence of that little
shake up, may be for a couple of weeks, may be three, and if you’re
coming to do a bit of a talk to me ever and again, then I tell you
I don’t call this a misfortune. It isn’t a misfortune. It’s right
down sheer good luck….”

And now he lay as straight as a mummy, with his soul filled with
radiance of complete mental peace. After months of distress and
confusion, he’d got straight again. He was in the middle of a real
good story, bright and clean. He knew just exactly what he
wanted.

“After all,” he said, “it’s true. There’s ideals. She’s
an ideal. Why, I loved her before ever I set eyes on Mamie. I loved
her before I was put into pants. That old portrait, there it was
pointing my destiny…. It’s affinity…. It’s natural
selection….

“Well, I don’t know what she thinks of me yet, but I do know
very well what she’s got to think of me. She’s got to think
all the world of me—if I break every limb of my body making
her do it.

“I’d a sort of feeling it was right to go in that old
automobile.

“Say what you like, there’s a Guidance….”

He smiled confidentially at the darkness as if they shared a
secret.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

MR. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY

§ 1

Very different from the painful contentment of the bruised and
broken Mr. Direck was the state of mind of his unwounded host. He
too was sleepless, but sleepless without exaltation. The day had
been too much for him altogether; his head, to borrow an admirable
American expression, was “busy.”

How busy it was, a whole chapter will be needed to
describe….

The impression Mr. Britling had made upon Mr. Direck was one of
indefatigable happiness. But there were times when Mr. Britling was
called upon to pay for his general cheerful activity in lump sums
of bitter sorrow. There were nights—and especially after
seasons of exceptional excitement and nervous activity—when
the reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would welter
prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of
unhappiness—active insatiable unhappiness—a beating
with rods.

The sorrows of the sanguine temperament are brief but furious;
the world knows little of them. The world has no need to reckon
with them. They cause no suicides and few crimes. They hurry past,
smiting at their victim as they go. None the less they are misery.
Mr. Britling in these moods did not perhaps experience the grey and
hopeless desolations of the melancholic nor the red damnation of
the choleric, but he saw a world that bristled with misfortune and
error, with poisonous thorns and traps and swampy places and
incurable blunderings. An almost
insupportable remorse for being Mr. Britling would pursue
him—justifying itself upon a hundred counts….

And for being such a Britling!…

Why—he revived again that bitter question of a thousand
and one unhappy nights—why was he such a fool? Such a hasty
fool? Why couldn’t he look before he leapt? Why did he take risks?
Why was he always so ready to act upon the supposition that all was
bound to go well? (He might as well have asked why he had quick
brown eyes.)

Why, for instance, hadn’t he adhered to the resolution of the
early morning? He had begun with an extremity of caution….

It was a characteristic of these moods of Mr. Britling that they
produced a physical restlessness. He kept on turning over and then
turning over again, and sitting up and lying back, like a martyr on
a gridiron….

This was just the latest instance of a life-long trouble. Will
there ever be a sort of man whose thoughts are quick and his acts
slow? Then indeed we shall have a formidable being. Mr. Britling’s
thoughts were quick and sanguine and his actions even more eager
than his thoughts. Already while he was a young man Mr. Britling
had found his acts elbow their way through the hurry of his ideas
and precipitate humiliations. Long before his reasons were
marshalled, his resolutions were formed. He had attempted a
thousand remonstrances with himself; he had sought to remedy the
defects in his own character by written inscriptions in his bedroom
and memoranda inside his watch case. “Keep steady!” was one of
them. “Keep the End in View.” And, “Go steadfastly, coherently,
continuously; only so can you go where you will.” In distrusting
all impulse, scrutinising all imagination, he was persuaded lay his
one prospect of escape from the surprise of countless miseries.
Otherwise he danced among glass bombs and barbed wire.

There had been a time when he could exhort himself to such fundamental charge and go through phases of
the severest discipline. Always at last to be taken by surprise
from some unexpected quarter. At last he had ceased to hope for any
triumph so radical. He had been content to believe that in recent
years age and a gathering habit of wisdom had somewhat slowed his
leaping purpose. That if he hadn’t overcome he had at least to a
certain extent minimised it. But this last folly was surely the
worst. To charge through this patient world with—how much did
the car weigh? A ton certainly and perhaps more—reckless of
every risk. Not only to himself but others. At this thought, he
clutched the steering wheel again. Once more he saw the bent back
of the endangered cyclist, once more he felt rather than saw the
seething approach of the motor bicycle, and then through a long
instant he drove helplessly at the wall….

Hell perhaps is only one such incident, indefinitely
prolonged….

Anything might have been there in front of him. And indeed now,
out of the dreamland to which he could not escape something had
come, something that screamed sharply….

“Good God!” he cried, “if I had hit a child! I might have hit a
child!” The hypothesis flashed into being with the thought, tried
to escape and was caught. It was characteristic of Mr. Britling’s
nocturnal imagination that he should individualise this child quite
sharply as rather plain and slender, with reddish hair, staring
eyes, and its ribs crushed in a vivid and dreadful manner, pinned
against the wall, mixed up with some bricks, only to be extracted,
oh! horribly.

But this was not fair! He had hurt no child! He had merely
pitched out Mr. Direck and broken his arm….

It wasn’t his merit that the child hadn’t been there!

The child might have been there!

Mere luck.

He lay staring in despair—as an involuntary God might
stare at many a thing in this amazing universe—staring at the
little victim his imagination had called into being only to
destroy….

§ 2

If he had not crushed a child other people had. Such things
happened. Vicariously at any rate he had crushed many
children….

Why are children ever crushed?

And suddenly all the pain and destruction and remorse of all the
accidents in the world descended upon Mr. Britling.

No longer did he ask why am I such a fool, but why are we all
such fools? He became Man on the automobile of civilisation,
crushing his thousands daily in his headlong and yet aimless
career….

That was a trick of Mr. Britling’s mind. It had this tendency to
spread outward from himself to generalised issues. Many minds are
like that nowadays. He was not so completely individualised as
people are supposed to be individualised—in our law, in our
stories, in our moral judgments. He had a vicarious factor. He
could slip from concentrated reproaches to the liveliest remorse
for himself as The Automobilist in General, or for himself as
England, or for himself as Man. From remorse for smashing his guest
and his automobile he could pass by what was for him the most
imperceptible of transitions to remorse for every accident that has
ever happened through the error of an automobilist since
automobiles began. All that long succession of blunderers became
Mr. Britling. Or rather Mr. Britling became all that vast
succession of blunderers.

These fluctuating lapses from individuation made Mr. Britling a
perplexity to many who judged only by the old personal standards.
At times he seemed a monster of cantankerous self-righteousness,
whom nobody could please or satisfy, but
indeed when he was most pitiless about the faults of his race or
nation he was really reproaching himself, and when he seemed more
egotistical and introspective and self-centred he was really
ransacking himself for a clue to that same confusion of purposes
that waste the hope and strength of humanity. And now through the
busy distresses of the night it would have perplexed a watching
angel to have drawn the line and shown when Mr. Britling, was
grieving for his own loss and humiliation and when he was grieving
for these common human weaknesses of which he had so large a
share.

And this double refraction of his mind by which a concentrated
and individualised Britling did but present a larger impersonal
Britling beneath, carried with it a duplication of his conscience
and sense of responsibility. To his personal conscience he was
answerable for his private honour and his debts and the Dower House
he had made and so on, but to his impersonal conscience he was
answerable for the whole world. The world from the latter point of
view was his egg. He had a subconscious delusion that he had laid
it. He had a subconscious suspicion that he had let it cool and
that it was addled. He had an urgency to incubate it. The variety
and interest of his talk was largely due to that persuasion, it was
a perpetual attempt to spread his mental feathers over the task
before him….

§ 3

After this much of explanation it is possible to go on to the
task which originally brought Mr. Direck to Matching’s Easy, the
task that Massachusetts society had sent him upon, the task of
organising the mental unveiling of Mr. Britling. Mr. Direck saw Mr.
Britling only in the daylight, and with an increasing distraction
of the attention towards Miss Cecily Corner. We may see him rather
more clearly in the darkness, without any distraction except
his own.

Now the smashing of Gladys was not only the source of a series
of reproaches and remorses directly arising out of the smash; it
had also a wide system of collateral consequences, which were also
banging and blundering their way through the Britling mind. It was
extraordinarily inconvenient in quite another direction that the
automobile should be destroyed. It upset certain plans of Mr.
Britling’s in a direction growing right out from all the Dower
House world in which Mr. Direck supposed him to be completely set
and rooted. There were certain matters from which Mr. Britling had
been averting his mind most strenuously throughout the week-end.
Now, there was no averting his mind any more.

Mr. Britling was entangled in a love affair. It was, to be
exact, and disregarding minor affinities, his eighth love affair.
And the new automobile, so soon as he could drive it efficiently,
was to have played quite a solvent and conclusive part in certain
entangled complications of this relationship.

A man of lively imagination and quick impulses naturally has
love affairs as he drives himself through life, just as he
naturally has accidents if he drives an automobile.

And the peculiar relations that existed between Mr. Britling and
Mrs. Britling tended inevitably to make these love affairs
troublesome, undignified and futile. Especially when they were
viewed from the point of view of insomnia.

Mr. Britling’s first marriage had been a passionately happy one.
His second was by comparison a marriage in neutral tint. There is
much to be said for that extreme Catholic theory which would make
marriage not merely lifelong but eternal. Certainly Mr. Britling
would have been a finer if not a happier creature if his
sentimental existence could have died with his first wife or
continued only in his love for their son. He had married in the
glow of youth, he had had two years of clean and simple loving,
helping, quarrelling and the happy ending of
quarrels. Something went out of him into all that, which could not
be renewed again. In his first extremity of grief he knew that
perfectly well—and then afterwards he forgot it. While there
is life there is imagination, which makes and forgets and goes
on.

He met Edith under circumstances that did not in any way recall
his lost Mary. He met her, as people say, “socially”; Mary, on the
other hand, had been a girl at Newnham while he was a fellow of
Pembroke, and there had been something of accident and something of
furtiveness in their lucky discovery of each other. There had been
a flush in it; there was dash in it. But Edith he saw and chose and
had to woo. There was no rushing together; there was solicitation
and assent. Edith was a Bachelor of Science of London University
and several things like that, and she looked upon the universe
under her broad forehead and broad-waving brown hair with quiet
watchful eyes that had nothing whatever to hide, a thing so
incredible to Mr. Britling that he had loved and married her very
largely for the serenity of her mystery. And for a time after their
marriage he sailed over those brown depths plumbing furiously.

Of course he did not make his former passion for Mary at all
clear to her. Indeed, while he was winning Edith it was by no means
clear to himself. He was making a new emotional drama, and
consciously and subconsciously he dismissed a hundred reminiscences
that sought to invade the new experience, and which would have been
out of key with it. And without any deliberate intention to that
effect he created an atmosphere between himself and Edith in which
any discussion of Mary was reduced to a minimum, and in which Hugh
was accepted rather than explained. He contrived to believe that
she understood all sorts of unsayable things; he invented miracles
of quite uncongenial mute mutuality….

It was over the chess-board that they first began to discover
their extensive difficulties of sympathy. Mr. Britling’s play was characterised by a superficial brilliance,
much generosity and extreme unsoundness; he always moved directly
his opponent had done so—and then reflected on the situation.
His reflection was commonly much wiser than his moves. Mrs.
Britling was, as it were, a natural antagonist to her husband; she
was as calm as he was irritable. She was never in a hurry to move,
and never disposed to make a concession. Quietly, steadfastly, by
caution and deliberation, without splendour, without error, she had
beaten him at chess until it led to such dreadful fits of anger
that he had to renounce the game altogether. After every such
occasion he would be at great pains to explain that he had merely
been angry with himself. Nevertheless he felt, and would not let
himself think (while she concluded from incidental heated phrases),
that that was not the complete truth about the outbreak.

Slowly they got through the concealments of that specious
explanation. Temperamentally they were incompatible.

They were profoundly incompatible. In all things she was
defensive. She never came out; never once had she surprised him
halfway upon the road to her. He had to go all the way to her and
knock and ring, and then she answered faithfully. She never
surprised him even by unkindness. If he had a cut finger she would
bind it up very skilfully and healingly, but unless he told her she
never discovered he had a cut finger. He was amazed she did not
know of it before it happened. He piped and she did not dance. That
became the formula of his grievance. For several unhappy years she
thwarted him and disappointed him, while he filled her with dumb
inexplicable distresses. He had been at first so gay an activity,
and then he was shattered; fragments of him were still as gay and
attractive as ever, but between were outbreaks of anger, of
hostility, of something very like malignity. Only very slowly did
they realise the truth of their relationship
and admit to themselves that the fine bud of love between them had
failed to flower, and only after long years were they able to
delimit boundaries where they had imagined union, and to
become—allies. If it had been reasonably possible for them to
part without mutual injury and recrimination they would have done
so, but two children presently held them, and gradually they had to
work out the broad mutual toleration of their later relations. If
there was no love and delight between them there was a real
habitual affection and much mutual help. She was proud of his
steady progress to distinction, proud of each intimation of respect
he won; she admired and respected his work; she recognised that he
had some magic, of liveliness and unexpectedness that was precious
and enviable. So far as she could help him she did. And even when
he knew that there was nothing behind it, that it was indeed little
more than an imaginative inertness, he could still admire and
respect her steady dignity and her consistent honourableness. Her
practical capacity was for him a matter for continual
self-congratulation. He marked the bright order of her household,
her flowering borders, the prosperous high-born roses of her garden
with a wondering appreciation. He had never been able to keep
anything in order. He relied more and more upon her. He showed his
respect for her by a scrupulous attention to her dignity, and his
confidence by a franker and franker emotional neglect. Because she
expressed so little he succeeded in supposing she felt little, and
since nothing had come out of the brown depths of her eyes he saw
fit at last to suppose no plumb-line would ever find anything
there. He pursued his interests; he reached out to this and that;
he travelled; she made it a matter of conscience to let him go
unhampered; she felt, she thought—unrecorded; he did, and he
expressed and re-expressed and over-expressed, and started this and
that with quick irrepressible activity, and so there had
accumulated about them the various items of the life to whose more
ostensible accidents Mr. Direck was now for
an indefinite period joined.

It was in the nature of Mr. Britling to incur things; it was in
the nature of Mrs. Britling to establish them. Mr. Britling had
taken the Dower House on impulse, and she had made it a delightful
home. He had discovered the disorderly delights of mixed Sunday
hockey one weekend at Pontings that had promised to be dull, and
she had made it an institution…. He had come to her with his
orphan boy and a memory of a passionate first loss that sometimes,
and more particularly at first, he seemed to have forgotten
altogether, and at other times was only too evidently lamenting
with every fibre of his being. She had taken the utmost care of the
relics of her duskily pretty predecessor that she found in
unexpected abundance in Mr. Britling’s possession, and she had done
her duty by her sometimes rather incomprehensible stepson. She
never allowed herself to examine the state of her heart towards
this youngster; it is possible that she did not perceive the
necessity for any such examination….

So she went through life, outwardly serene and dignified, one of
a great company of rather fastidious, rather unenterprising women
who have turned for their happiness to secondary things, to those
fair inanimate things of household and garden which do not turn
again and rend one, to aestheticisms and delicacies, to order and
seemliness. Moreover she found great satisfaction in the health and
welfare, the growth and animation of her own two little boys. And
no one knew, and perhaps even she had contrived to forget, the
phases of astonishment and disillusionment, of doubt and bitterness
and secret tears, that spread out through the years in which she
had slowly realised that this strange, fitful, animated man who had
come to her, vowing himself hers, asking for her so urgently and
persuasively, was ceasing, had ceased, to love her, that his heart
had escaped her, that she had missed it; she never dreamt that she
had hurt it, and that after its first
urgent, tumultuous, incomprehensible search for her it had hidden
itself bitterly away….

§ 4

The mysterious processes of nature that had produced Mr.
Britling had implanted in him an obstinate persuasion that
somewhere in the world, from some human being, it was still
possible to find the utmost satisfaction for every need and
craving. He could imagine as existing, as waiting for him, he knew
not where, a completeness of understanding, a perfection of
response, that would reach all the gamut of his feelings and
sensations from the most poetical to the most entirely physical, a
beauty of relationship so transfiguring that not only would
she—it went without saying that this completion was a
woman—be perfectly beautiful in its light but, what was
manifestly more incredible, that he too would be perfectly
beautiful and quite at his ease…. In her presence there could be
no self-reproaches, no lapses, no limitations, nothing but
happiness and the happiest activities…. To such a persuasion half
the imaginative people in the world succumb as readily and
naturally as ducklings take to water. They do not doubt its truth
any more than a thirsty camel doubts that presently it will come to
a spring.

This persuasion is as foolish as though a camel hoped that some
day it would drink from such a spring that it would never thirst
again. For the most part Mr. Britling ignored its presence in his
mind, and resisted the impulses it started. But at odd times, and
more particularly in the afternoon and while travelling and in
between books, Mr. Britling so far succumbed to this strange
expectation of a wonder round the corner that he slipped the
anchors of his humour and self-contempt and joined the great
cruising brotherhood of the Pilgrims of Love….

In fact—though he himself had never made a
reckoning of it—he had been upon eight
separate cruises. He was now upon the eighth….

Between these various excursions—they took him round and
about the world, so to speak, they cast him away on tropical
beaches, they left him dismasted on desolate seas, they involved
the most startling interventions and the most inconvenient
consequences—there were interludes of penetrating philosophy.
For some years the suspicion had been growing up in Mr. Britling’s
mind that in planting this persuasion in his being, the mysterious
processes of Nature had been, perhaps for some purely biological
purpose, pulling, as people say, his leg, that there were not these
perfect responses, that loving a woman is a thing one does
thoroughly once for all—or so—and afterwards recalls
regrettably in a series of vain repetitions, and that the career of
the Pilgrim of Love, so soon as you strip off its credulous
glamour, is either the most pitiful or the most vulgar and vile of
perversions from the proper conduct of life. But this suspicion had
not as yet grown to prohibitive dimensions with him, it was not
sufficient to resist the seasons of high tide, the sudden promise
of the salt-edged breeze, the invitation of the hovering sea-bird;
and he was now concealing beneath the lively surface of activities
with which Mr. Direck was now familiar, a very extensive system of
distresses arising out of the latest, the eighth of these
digressional adventures….

Mr. Britling had got into it very much as he had got into the
ditch on the morning before his smash. He hadn’t thought the affair
out and he hadn’t looked carefully enough. And it kept on
developing in just the ways he would rather that it didn’t.

The seventh affair had been very disconcerting. He had made a
fool of himself with quite a young girl; he blushed to think how
young; it hadn’t gone very far, but it had made his nocturnal
reflections so disagreeable that he had—by no means for the
first time—definitely and forever
given up these foolish dreams of love. And when Mrs. Harrowdean
swam into his circle, she seemed just exactly what was wanted to
keep his imagination out of mischief. She came bearing flattery to
the pitch of adoration. She was the brightest and cleverest of
young widows. She wrote quite admirably criticism in the
Scrutator and the Sectarian, and occasionally poetry
in the Right Review—when she felt disposed to do so.
She had an intermittent vein of high spirits that was almost better
than humour and made her quickly popular with most of the people
she met, and she was only twenty miles away in her pretty house and
her absurd little jolly park.

There was something, she said, in his thought and work that was
like walking in mountains. She came to him because she wanted to
clamber about the peaks and glens of his mind.

It was natural to reply that he wasn’t by any means the serene
mountain elevation she thought him, except perhaps for a kind of
loneliness….

She was a great reader of eighteenth century memoirs, and some
she conveyed to him. Her mental quality was all in the vein of the
friendships of Rousseau and Voltaire, and pleasantly and trippingly
she led him along the primrose path of an intellectual liaison. She
came first to Matching’s Easy, where she was sweet and bright and
vividly interested and a great contrast to Mrs. Britling, and then
he and she met in London, and went off together with a fine sense
of adventure for a day at Richmond, and then he took some work with
him to her house and stayed there….

Then she went away into Scotland for a time and he wanted her
again tremendously and clamoured for her eloquently, and then it
was apparent and admitted between them that they were admirably in
love, oh! immensely in love.

The transitions from emotional mountaineering to ardent
intimacies were so rapid and impulsive that each phase obliterated its predecessor, and it was only
with a vague perplexity that Mr. Britling found himself transferred
from the rôle of a mountainous objective for pretty little
pilgrims to that of a sedulous lover in pursuit of the happiness of
one of the most uncertain, intricate, and entrancing of feminine
personalities. This was not at all his idea of the proper relations
between men and women, but Mrs. Harrowdean had a way of challenging
his gallantry. She made him run about for her; she did not demand
but she commanded presents and treats and surprises; she even
developed a certain jealousy in him. His work began to suffer from
interruptions. Yet they had glowing and entertaining moments
together that could temper his rebellious thoughts with the threat
of irreparable loss. “One must love, and all things in life are
imperfect,” was how Mr. Britling expressed his reasons for
submission. And she had a hold upon him too in a certain facile
pitifulness. She was little; she could be stung sometimes by the
slightest touch and then her blue eyes would be bright with
tears.

Those possible tears could weigh at times even more than those
possible lost embraces.

And there was Oliver.

Oliver was a person Mr. Britling had never seen. He grew into
the scheme of things by insensible gradations. He was a government
official in London; he was, she said, extraordinarily dull, he was
lacking altogether in Mr. Britling’s charm and interest, but he was
faithful and tender and true. And considerably younger than Mr.
Britling. He asked nothing but to love. He offered honourable
marriage. And when one’s heart was swelling unendurably one could
weep in safety on his patient shoulder. This patient shoulder of
Oliver’s ultimately became Mr. Britling’s most exasperating
rival.

She liked to vex him with Oliver. She liked to vex him
generally. Indeed in this by no means abnormal love affair, there
was a very strong antagonism. She seemed to
resent the attraction Mr. Britling had for her and the emotions and
pleasure she had with him. She seemed under the sway of an
instinctive desire to make him play heavily for her, in time, in
emotion, in self-respect. It was intolerable to her that he could
take her easily and happily. That would be taking her cheaply. She
valued his gifts by the bother they cost him, and was determined
that the path of true love should not, if she could help it, run
smooth. Mr. Britling on the other hand was of the school of polite
and happy lovers. He thought it outrageous to dispute and
contradict, and he thought that making love was a cheerful,
comfortable thing to be done in a state of high good humour and
intense mutual appreciation. This levity offended the lady’s pride.
She drew unfavourable contrasts with Oliver. If Oliver lacked charm
he certainly did not lack emotion. He desired sacrifice, it seemed,
almost more than satisfactions. Oliver was a person of the most
exemplary miserableness; he would weep copiously and frequently.
She could always make him weep when she wanted to do so. By holding
out hopes and then dashing them if by no other expedient. Why did
Mr. Britling never weep? She wept.

Some base streak of competitiveness in Mr. Britling’s nature
made it seem impossible that he should relinquish the lady to
Oliver. Besides, then, what would he do with his dull days, his
afternoons, his need for a properly demonstrated affection?

So Mr. Britling trod the path of his eighth digression, rather
overworked in the matter of flowers and the selection of small
jewellery, stalked by the invisible and indefatigable Oliver,
haunted into an unwilling industry of attentions—attentions
on the model of the professional lover of the French
novels—by the memory and expectation of tearful scenes. “Then
you don’t love me! And it’s all spoilt. I’ve risked talk and my
reputation…. I was a fool ever to dream of making love
beautifully….”

Exactly like running your car into a soft wet ditch when you
cannot get out and you cannot get on. And your work and your
interests waiting and waiting for you!…

The car itself was an outcome of the affair. It was Mrs.
Harrowdean’s idea, she thought chiefly of pleasant expeditions to
friendly inns in remote parts of the country, inns with a flavour
of tacit complicity, but it fell in very pleasantly with Mr.
Britling’s private resentment at the extraordinary inconvenience of
the railway communications between Matching’s Easy and her station
at Pyecrafts, which involved a journey to Liverpool Street and a
long wait at a junction. And now the car was smashed up—just
when he had acquired skill enough to take it over to Pyecrafts
without shame, and on Tuesday or Wednesday at latest he would have
to depart in the old way by the London train….

Only the most superficial mind would assert nowadays that man is
a reasonable creature. Man is an unreasonable creature, and it was
entirely unreasonable and human for Mr. Britling during his
nocturnal self-reproaches to mix up his secret resentment at his
infatuation for Mrs. Harrowdean with his ill-advised attack upon
the wall of Brandismead Park. He ought never to have bought that
car; he ought never to have been so ready to meet Mrs. Harrowdean
more than half-way.

What exacerbated his feeling about Mrs. Harrowdean was a new
line she had recently taken with regard to Mrs. Britling. From her
first rash assumption that Mr. Britling was indifferent to his
wife, she had come to realise that on the contrary he was in some
ways extremely tender about his wife. This struck her as an
outrageous disloyalty. Instead of appreciating a paradox she
resented an infidelity. She smouldered with perplexed resentment
for some days, and then astonished her lover by a series of
dissertations of a hostile and devastating nature upon the lady of
the Dower House.

He tried to imagine he hadn’t heard all that he had heard, but
Mrs. Harrowdean had a nimble pen and nimbler afterthoughts, and
once her mind had got to work upon the topic she developed her
offensive in half-a-dozen brilliant letters…. On the other hand
she professed a steadily increasing passion for Mr. Britling. And
to profess passion for Mr. Britling was to put him under a sense of
profound obligation—because indeed he was a modest man. He
found himself in an emotional quandary.

You see, if Mrs. Harrowdean had left Mrs. Britling alone
everything would have been quite tolerable. He considered Mrs.
Harrowdean a charming human being, and altogether better than he
deserved. Ever so much better. She was all initiative and response
and that sort of thing. And she was so discreet. She had her own
reputation to think about, and one or two of her
predecessors—God rest the ashes of those fires!—had not
been so discreet. Yet one could not have this sort of thing going
on behind Edith’s back. All sorts of things one might have going on
behind Edith’s back, but not this writing and saying of perfectly
beastly things about Edith. Nothing could alter the fact that Edith
was his honour….

§ 5

Throughout the week-end Mr. Britling had kept this trouble well
battened down. He had written to Mrs. Harrowdean a brief ambiguous
note saying, “I am thinking over all that you have said,” and after
that he had scarcely thought about her at all. Or at least he had
always contrived to be much more vividly thinking about something
else. But now in these night silences the suppressed trouble burst
hatches and rose about him.

What a mess he had made of the whole scheme of his emotional
life! There had been a time when he had started out as gaily with
his passions and his honour as he had started out with Gladys to go
to Market Saffron. He had as little taste
for complications as he had for ditches. And now his passions and
his honour were in a worse case even than poor muddy smashed up
Gladys as the cart-horses towed her off, for she at any rate might
be repaired. But he—he was a terribly patched fabric of
explanations now. Not indeed that he had ever stooped to
explanations. But there he was! Far away, like a star seen down the
length of a tunnel, was that first sad story of a love as clean as
starlight. It had been all over by eight-and-twenty and he could
find it in his heart to grieve that he had ever given a thought to
love again. He should have lived a decent widower…. Then Edith
had come into his life, Edith that honest and unconscious
defaulter. And there again he should have stuck to his
disappointment. He had stuck to it—nine days out of every
ten. It’s the tenth day, it’s the odd seductive moment, it’s the
instant of confident pride—and there is your sanguine
temperament in the ditch.

He began to recapitulate items in the catalogue of his
escapades, and the details of his automobile misadventures mixed
themselves up with the story of his heart steering. For example
there was that tremendous Siddons affair. He had been taking the
corner of a girlish friendship and he had taken it altogether too
far. What a frightful mess that had been! When once one is off the
road anything may happen, from a crumpled mud-guard to the car on
the top of you. And there was his forty miles an hour spurt with
the great and gifted Delphine Marquise—for whom he was to
have written a play and been a perfect Annunzio. Until Willersley
appeared—very like the motor-cyclist—buzzing in the
opposite direction. And then had ensued angers,
humiliations….

Had every man this sort of crowded catalogue? Was every
forty-five-year-old memory a dark tunnel receding from the star of
youth? It is surely a pity that life cannot end at thirty. It comes
to one clean and in perfect order….

Is experience worth having?

What a clean, straight thing the spirit of youth is. It is like
a bright new spear. It is like a finely tempered sword. The figure
of his boy took possession of his mind, his boy who looked out on
the world with his mother’s dark eyes, the slender son of that
whole-hearted first love. He was a being at once fine and simple,
an intimate mystery. Must he in his turn get dented and wrinkled
and tarnished?

The boy was in trouble. What was the trouble?

Was it some form of the same trouble that had so tangled and
tainted and scarred the private pride of his father? And how was it
possible for Mr. Britling, disfigured by heedless misadventures,
embarrassed by complications and concealments, to help this honest
youngster out of his perplexities? He imagined possible forms of
these perplexities. Graceless forms. Ugly forms. Such forms as only
the nocturnal imagination would have dared present….

Oh, why had he been such a Britling? Why was he still such a
Britling?

Mr. Britling sat up in his bed and beat at the bedclothes with
his fists. He uttered uncompleted vows, “From this hour forth …
from this hour forth….”

He must do something, he felt. At any rate he had his
experiences. He could warn. He could explain away. Perhaps he might
help to extricate, if things had got to that pitch.

Should he write to his son? For a time he revolved a long,
tactful letter in his mind. But that was impossible. Suppose the
trouble was something quite different? It would have to be a letter
in the most general terms….

§ 6

It was in the doubly refracting nature of Mr. Britling’s mind
that while he was deploring his inefficiency in regard to his son, he was also deploring the
ineffectiveness of all his generation of parents. Quite insensibly
his mind passed over to the generalised point of view.

In his talks with Mr. Direck, Mr. Britling could present England
as a great and amiable spectacle of carelessness and relaxation,
but was it indeed an amiable spectacle? The point that Mr. Direck
had made about the barn rankled in his thoughts. His barn was a
barn no longer, his farmyard held no cattle; he was just living
laxly in the buildings that ancient needs had made, he was living
on the accumulated prosperity of former times, the spendthrift heir
of toiling generations. Not only was he a pampered, undisciplined
sort of human being; he was living in a pampered, undisciplined
sort of community. The two things went together…. This confounded
Irish business, one could laugh at it in the daylight, but was it
indeed a thing to laugh at? We were drifting lazily towards a real
disaster. We had a government that seemed guided by the principles
of Mr. Micawber, and adopted for its watchword “Wait and see.” For
months now this trouble had grown more threatening. Suppose
presently that civil war broke out in Ireland! Suppose presently
that these irritated, mishandled suffragettes did some desperate
irreconcilable thing, assassinated for example! The bomb in
Westminster Abbey the other day might have killed a dozen
people…. Suppose the smouldering criticism of British rule in
India and Egypt were fanned by administrative indiscretions into a
flame….

And then suppose Germany had made trouble….

Usually Mr. Britling kept his mind off Germany. In the daytime
he pretended Germany meant nothing to England. He hated alarmists.
He hated disagreeable possibilities. He declared the idea of a
whole vast nation waiting to strike at us incredible. Why should
they? You cannot have seventy million lunatics…. But in the
darkness of the night one cannot dismiss things in this way. Suppose, after all, their army was more than a
parade, their navy more than a protest?

We might be caught—It was only in the vast melancholia of
such occasions that Mr. Britling would admit such possibilities,
but we might be caught by some sudden declaration of war…. And
how should we face it?

He recalled the afternoon’s talk at Claverings and such samples
of our governmental machinery as he chanced to number among his
personal acquaintance. Suppose suddenly the enemy struck! With
Raeburn and his friends to defend us! Or if the shock tumbled them
out of power, then with these vituperative Tories, these spiteful
advocates of weak tyrannies and privileged pretences in the place
of them. There was no leadership in England. In the lucid darkness
he knew that with a terrible certitude. He had a horrible vision of
things disastrously muffled; of Lady Frensham and her Morning
Post friends first garrulously and maliciously “patriotic,”
screaming her way with incalculable mischiefs through the storm,
and finally discovering that the Germans were the real aristocrats
and organising our national capitulation on that understanding. He
knew from talk he had heard that the navy was weak in mines and
torpedoes, unprovided with the great monitors needed for a war with
Germany; torn by doctrinaire feuds; nevertheless the sea power was
our only defence. In the whole country we might muster a military
miscellany of perhaps three hundred thousand men. And he had no
faith in their equipment, in their direction. General French, the
one man who had his entire confidence, had been forced to resign
through some lawyer’s misunderstanding about the Irish difficulty.
He did not believe any plans existed for such a war as Germany
might force upon us, any calculation, any foresight of the thing at
all.

Why had we no foresight? Why had we this wilful blindness to
disagreeable possibilities? Why did we lie
so open to the unexpected crisis? Just what he said of himself he
said also of his country. It was curious to remember that. To
realise how closely Dower House could play the microcosm to the
whole Empire….

It became relevant to the trend of his thoughts that his son had
through his mother a strong strain of the dark Irish in his
composition.

How we had wasted Ireland! The rich values that lay in Ireland,
the gallantry and gifts, the possible friendliness, all these
things were being left to the Ulster politicians and the Tory women
to poison and spoil, just as we left India to the traditions of the
chattering army women and the repressive instincts of our
mandarins. We were too lazy, we were too negligent. We passed our
indolent days leaving everything to somebody else. Was this the
incurable British, just as it was the incurable Britling,
quality?

Was the whole prosperity of the British, the far-flung empire,
the securities, the busy order, just their good luck? It was a
question he had asked a hundred times of his national as of his
personal self. No doubt luck had favoured him. He was prosperous,
and he was still only at the livelier end of middle age. But was
there not also a personal factor, a meritorious factor? Luck had
favoured the British with a well-placed island, a hardening
climate, accessible minerals, but then too was there not also a
national virtue? Once he had believed in that, in a certain
gallantry, a noble levity, an underlying sound sense. The last ten
years of politics had made him doubt that profoundly. He clung to
it still, but without confidence. In the night that dear persuasion
left him altogether…. As for himself he had a certain brightness
and liveliness of mind, but the year of his fellowship had been a
soft year, he had got on to The Times through something very
like a misapprehension, and it was the chances of a dinner and a
duchess that had given him the opportunity of the Kahn show. He’d
dropped into good things that suited him.
That at any rate was the essence of it. And these lucky chances had
been no incentive to further effort. Because things had gone easily
and rapidly with him he had developed indolence into a philosophy.
Here he was just over forty, and explaining to the world,
explaining all through the week-end to this American—until
even God could endure it no longer and the smash stopped
him—how excellent was the backwardness of Essex and English
go-as-you-please, and how through good temper it made in some
mysterious way for all that was desirable. A fat English doctrine.
Punch has preached it for forty years.

But this wasn’t what he had always been. He thought of the
strenuous intentions of his youth, before he had got into this
turmoil of amorous experiences, while he was still out there with
the clean star of youth. As Hugh was….

In those days he had had no amiable doctrine of compromise. He
had truckled to no “domesticated God,” but talked of the “pitiless
truth”; he had tolerated no easygoing pseudo-aristocratic social
system, but dreamt of such a democracy “mewing its mighty youth” as
the world had never seen. He had thought that his brains were to do
their share in building up this great national imago,
winged, divine, out of the clumsy, crawling, snobbish,
comfort-loving caterpillar of Victorian England. With such dreams
his life had started, and the light of them, perhaps, had helped
him to his rapid success. And then his wife had died, and he had
married again and become somehow more interested in his income, and
then the rather expensive first of the eight experiences had
drained off so much of his imaginative energy, and the second had
drained off so much, and there had been quarrels and feuds, and the
way had been lost, and the days had passed. He hadn’t failed.
Indeed he counted as a success among his generation. He alone, in
the night watches, could gauge the quality of that success. He was
widely known, reputably known; he prospered.
Much had come, oh! by a mysterious luck, but everything was doomed
by his invincible defects. Beneath that hollow, enviable show there
ached waste. Waste, waste, waste—his heart, his imagination,
his wife, his son, his country—his automobile….

Then there flashed into his mind a last straw of disagreeable
realisation.

He hadn’t as yet insured his automobile! He had meant to do so.
The papers were on his writing-desk.

§ 7

On these black nights, when the personal Mr. Britling would lie
awake thinking how unsatisfactorily Mr. Britling was going on, and
when the impersonal Mr. Britling would be thinking how
unsatisfactorily his universe was going on, the whole mental
process had a likeness to some complex piece of orchestral music
wherein the organ deplored the melancholy destinies of the race
while the piccolo lamented the secret trouble of Mrs. Harrowdean;
the big drum thundered at the Irish politicians, and all the
violins bewailed the intellectual laxity of the university system.
Meanwhile the trumpets prophesied wars and disasters, the cymbals
ever and again inserted a clashing jar about the fatal delay in the
automobile insurance, while the triangle broke into a plangent solo
on the topic of a certain rotten gate-post he always forgot in the
daytime, and how in consequence the cows from the glebe farm got
into the garden and ate Mrs. Britling’s carnations.

Time after time he had promised to see to that gatepost….

The organ motif battled its way to complete predominance.
The lesser themes were drowned or absorbed. Mr. Britling returned
from the rôle of an incompetent automobilist to the
rôle of a soul naked in space and time wrestling with giant
questions. These cosmic solicitudes, it may
be, are the last penalty of irreligion. Was Huxley right, and was
all humanity, even as Mr. Britling, a careless, fitful thing,
playing a tragically hopeless game, thinking too slightly, moving
too quickly, against a relentless antagonist?

Or is the whole thing just witless, accidentally cruel perhaps,
but not malignant? Or is it wise, and merely refusing to pamper us?
Is there somewhere in the immensities some responsive kindliness,
some faint hope of toleration and assistance, something sensibly on
our side against death and mechanical cruelty? If so, it certainly
refuses to pamper us…. But if the whole thing is cruel, perhaps
also it is witless and will-less? One cannot imagine the ruler of
everything a devil—that would be silly. So if at the worst it
is inanimate then anyhow we have our poor wills and our poor wits
to pit against it. And manifestly then, the good of life, the
significance of any life that is not mere receptivity, lies in the
disciplined and clarified will and the sharpened and tempered mind.
And what for the last twenty years—for all his lectures and
writings—had he been doing to marshal the will and harden the
mind which were his weapons against the Dark? He was ready enough
to blame others—dons, politicians, public apathy, but what
was he himself doing?

What was he doing now?

Lying in bed!

His son was drifting to ruin, his country was going to the
devil, the house was a hospital of people wounded by his
carelessness, the country roads choked with his smashed (and
uninsured) automobiles, the cows were probably lined up along the
borders and munching Edith’s carnations at this very moment, his
pocketbook and bureau were stuffed with venomous insults about
her—and he was just lying in bed!

Suddenly Mr. Britling threw back his bedclothes and felt for the
matches on his bedside table.

Indeed this was by no means the first time that his
brain had become a whirring torment in his
skull. Previous experiences had led to the most careful provision
for exactly such states. Over the end of the bed hung a light, warm
pyjama suit of llama-wool, and at the feet of it were two tall
boots of the same material that buckled to the middle of his calf.
So protected, Mr. Britling proceeded to make himself tea. A Primus
stove stood ready inside the fender of his fireplace, and on it was
a brightly polished brass kettle filled with water; a little table
carried a tea-caddy, a tea-pot, a lemon and a glass. Mr. Britling
lit the stove and then strolled to his desk. He was going to write
certain “Plain Words about Ireland.” He lit his study lamp and
meditated beside it until a sound of water boiling called him to
his tea-making.

He returned to his desk stirring the lemon in his glass of tea.
He would write the plain common sense of this Irish situation. He
would put things so plainly that this squabbling folly would
have to cease. It should be done austerely, with a sort of
ironical directness. There should be no abuse, no bitterness, only
a deep passion of sanity.

What is the good of grieving over a smashed automobile?

He sipped his tea and made a few notes on his writing pad. His
face in the light of his shaded reading lamp had lost its
distraught expression, his hand fingered his familiar fountain
pen….

§ 8

The next morning Mr. Britling came into Mr. Direck’s room. He
was pink from his morning bath, he was wearing a cheerful
green-and-blue silk dressing gown, he had shaved already, he showed
no trace of his nocturnal vigil. In the bathroom he had whistled
like a bird. “Had a good night?” he said. “That’s famous. So did I.
And the wrist and arm didn’t even ache enough to keep you
awake?”

“I thought I heard you talking and walking about,” said Mr.
Direck.

“I got up for a little bit and worked. I often do that. I hope I
didn’t disturb you. Just for an hour or so. It’s so delightfully
quiet in the night….”

He went to the window and blinked at the garden outside. His two
younger sons appeared on their bicycles returning from some early
expedition. He waved a hand of greeting. It was one of those summer
mornings when attenuated mist seems to fill the very air with
sunshine dust.

“This is the sunniest morning bedroom in the house,” he said.
“It’s south-east.”

The sunlight slashed into the masses of the blue cedar outside
with a score of golden spears.

“The Dayspring from on High,” he said…. “I thought of rather a
useful pamphlet in the night.

“I’ve been thinking about your luggage at that hotel,” he went
on, turning to his guest again. “You’ll have to write and get it
packed up and sent down here—

“No,” he said, “we won’t let you go until you can hit out with
that arm and fell a man. Listen!”

Mr. Direck could not distinguish any definite sound.

“The smell of frying rashers, I mean,” said Mr. Britling. “It’s
the clarion of the morn in every proper English home….

“You’d like a rasher, coffee?

“It’s good to work in the night, and it’s good to wake in the
morning,” said Mr. Britling, rubbing his hands together. “I suppose
I wrote nearly two thousand words. So quiet one is, so
concentrated. And as soon as I have had my breakfast I shall go on
with it again.”

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE COMING OF THE DAY

§ 1

It was quite characteristic of the state of mind of England in
the summer of 1914 that Mr. Britling should be mightily concerned
about the conflict in Ireland, and almost deliberately negligent of
the possibility of a war with Germany.

The armament of Germany, the hostility of Germany, the
consistent assertion of Germany, the world-wide clash of British
and German interests, had been facts in the consciousness of
Englishmen for more than a quarter of a century. A whole generation
had been born and brought up in the threat of this German war. A
threat that goes on for too long ceases to have the effect of a
threat, and this overhanging possibility had become a fixed and
scarcely disturbing feature of the British situation. It kept the
navy sedulous and Colonel Rendezvous uneasy; it stimulated a small
and not very influential section of the press to a series of
reminders that bored Mr. Britling acutely, it was the excuse for an
agitation that made national service ridiculous, and quite
subconsciously it affected his attitude to a hundred things. For
example, it was a factor in his very keen indignation at the Tory
levity in Ireland, in his disgust with many things that irritated
or estranged Indian feeling. It bored him; there it was, a danger,
and there was no denying it, and yet he believed firmly that it was
a mine that would never be fired, an avalanche that would never
fall. It was a nuisance, a stupidity, that kept Europe drilling and
wasted enormous sums on unavoidable preparations; it hung up
everything like a noisy argument in a drawing-room, but that
human weakness and folly would ever let the
mine actually explode he did not believe. He had been in France in
1911, he had seen how close things had come then to a conflict, and
the fact that they had not come to a conflict had enormously
strengthened his natural disposition to believe that at bottom
Germany was sane and her militarism a bluff.

But the Irish difficulty was a different thing. There, he felt,
was need for the liveliest exertions. A few obstinate people in
influential positions were manifestly pushing things to an
outrageous point….

He wrote through the morning—and as the morning progressed
the judicial calm of his opening intentions warmed to a certain
regrettable vigour of phrasing about our politicians, about our
political ladies, and our hand-to-mouth press….

He came down to lunch in a frayed, exhausted condition, and was
much afflicted by a series of questions from Herr Heinrich. For it
was an incurable characteristic of Herr Heinrich that he asked
questions; the greater part of his conversation took the form of
question and answer, and his thirst for information was as marked
as his belief that German should not simply be spoken but spoken
“out loud.” He invariably prefaced his inquiries with the word
“Please,” and he insisted upon ascribing an omniscience to his
employer that it was extremely irksome to justify after a strenuous
morning of enthusiastic literary effort. He now took the
opportunity of a lull in the solicitudes and congratulations that
had followed Mr. Direck’s appearance—and Mr. Direck was so
little shattered by his misadventure that with the assistance of
the kindly Teddy he had got up and dressed and come down to
lunch—to put the matter that had been occupying his mind all
the morning, even to the detriment of the lessons of the Masters
Britling.

“Please!” he said, going a deeper shade of pink and partly
turning to Mr. Britling.

A look of resignation came into Mr. Britling’s eyes. “Yes?” he
said.

“I do not think it will be wise to take my ticket for the
Esperanto Conference at Boulogne. Because I think it is probable to
be war between Austria and Servia, and that Russia may make war on
Austria.”

“That may happen. But I think it improbable.”

“If Russia makes war on Austria, Germany will make war on
Russia, will she not?”

“Not if she is wise,” said Mr. Britling, “because that would
bring in France.”

“That is why I ask. If Germany goes to war with France I should
have to go to Germany to do my service. It will be a great
inconvenience to me.”

“I don’t imagine Germany will do anything so frantic as to
attack Russia. That would not only bring in France but
ourselves.”

“England?”

“Of course. We can’t afford to see France go under. The thing is
as plain as daylight. So plain that it cannot possibly happen….
Cannot…. Unless Germany wants a universal war.”

“Thank you,” said Herr Heinrich, looking obedient rather than
reassured.

“I suppose now,” said Mr. Direck after a pause, “that there
isn’t any strong party in Germany that wants a war. That young
Crown Prince, for example.”

“They keep him in order,” said Mr. Britling a little irritably.
“They keep him in order….

“I used to be an alarmist about Germany,” said Mr. Britling,
“but I have come to feel more and more confidence in the sound
common sense of the mass of the German population, and in the
Emperor too if it comes to that. He is—if Herr Heinrich will
permit me to agree with his own German comic papers—sometimes
a little theatrical, sometimes a little egotistical, but in his
operatic, boldly coloured way he means
peace. I am convinced he means peace….”

§ 2

After lunch Mr. Britling had a brilliant idea for the ease and
comfort of Mr. Direck.

It seemed as though Mr. Direck would be unable to write any
letters until his wrist had mended. Teddy tried him with a
typewriter, but Mr. Direck was very awkward with his left hand, and
then Mr. Britling suddenly remembered a little peculiarity he had
which it was possible that Mr. Direck might share unconsciously,
and that was his gift of looking-glass writing with his left hand.
Mr. Britling had found out quite by chance in his schoolboy days
that while his right hand had been laboriously learning to write,
his left hand, all unsuspected, had been picking up the same
lesson, and that by taking a pencil in his left hand and writing
from right to left, without watching what he was writing, and then
examining the scrawl in a mirror, he could reproduce his own
handwriting in exact reverse. About three people out of five have
this often quite unsuspected ability. He demonstrated his gift, and
then Miss Cecily Corner, who had dropped in in a casual sort of way
to ask about Mr. Direck, tried it, and then Mr. Direck tried it.
And they could all do it. And then Teddy brought a sheet of copying
carbon, and so Mr. Direck, by using the carbon reversed under his
paper, was restored to the world of correspondence again.

They sat round a little table under the cedar trees amusing
themselves with these experiments, and after that Cecily and Mr.
Britling and the two small boys entertained themselves by drawing
pigs with their eyes shut, and then Mr. Britling and Teddy played
hard at Badminton until it was time for tea. And Cecily sat by Mr.
Direck and took an interest in his accident, and he told her about
summer holidays in the Adirondacks and how he loved to travel. She
said she would love to travel. He said that
so soon as he was better he would go on to Paris and then into
Germany. He was extraordinarily curious about this Germany and its
tremendous militarism. He’d far rather see it than Italy, which
was, he thought, just all art and ancient history. His turn was for
modern problems. Though of course he didn’t intend to leave out
Italy while he was at it. And then their talk was scattered, and
there was great excitement because Herr Heinrich had lost his
squirrel.

He appeared coming out of the house into the sunshine, and so
distraught that he had forgotten the protection of his hat. He was
very pink and deeply moved.

“But what shall I do without him?” he cried. “He has gone!”

The squirrel, Mr. Direck gathered, had been bought by Mrs.
Britling for the boys some month or so ago; it had been christened
“Bill” and adored and then neglected, until Herr Heinrich took it
over. It had filled a place in his ample heart that the none too
demonstrative affection of the Britling household had left empty.
He abandoned his pursuit of philology almost entirely for the
cherishing and adoration of this busy, nimble little creature. He
carried it off to his own room, where it ran loose and took the
greatest liberties with him and his apartment. It was an
extraordinarily bold and savage little beast even for a squirrel,
but Herr Heinrich had set his heart and his very large and patient
will upon the establishment of sentimental relations. He believed
that ultimately Bill would let himself be stroked, that he would
make Bill love him and understand him, and that his would be the
only hand that Bill would ever suffer to touch him. In the
meanwhile even the untamed Bill was wonderful to watch. One could
watch him forever. His front paws were like hands, like a
musician’s hands, very long and narrow. “He would be a musician if
he could only make his fingers go apart, because when I play my
violin he listens. He is attentive.”

The entire household became interested in Herr Heinrich’s
attacks upon Bill’s affection. They watched his fingers with
particular interest because it was upon those that Bill vented his
failures to respond to the stroking advances.

“To-day I have stroked him once and he has bitten me three
times,” Herr Heinrich reported. “Soon I will stroke him three times
and he shall not bite me at all…. Also yesterday he climbed up me
and sat on my shoulder, and suddenly bit my ear. It was not hard he
bit, but sudden.

“He does not mean to bite,” said Herr Heinrich. “Because when he
has bit me he is sorry. He is ashamed.

“You can see he is ashamed.”

Assisted by the two small boys, Herr Heinrich presently got a
huge bough of oak and brought it into his room, converting the
entire apartment into the likeness of an aviary. “For this,” said
Herr Heinrich, looking grave and diplomatic through his glasses,
“Billy will be very grateful. And it will give him confidence with
me. It will make him feel we are in the forest together.”

Mrs. Britling came to console her husband in the matter.

“It is not right that the bedroom should be filled with trees.
All sorts of dust and litter came in with it.”

“If it amuses him,” said Mr. Britling.

“But it makes work for the servants.”

“Do they complain?”

“No.”

“Things will adjust themselves. And it is amusing that he should
do such a thing….”

And now Billy had disappeared, and Herr Heinrich was on the
verge of tears. It was so ungrateful of Billy. Without a word.

“They leave my window open,” he complained to Mr. Direck. “Often
I have askit them not to. And of course he did not understand. He
has out climbit by the ivy. Anything may
have happened to him. Anything. He is not used to going out alone.
He is too young.

“Perhaps if I call—”

And suddenly he had gone off round the house crying: “Beelee!
Beelee! Here is an almond for you! An almond, Beelee!”

“Makes me want to get up and help,” said Mr. Direck. “It’s a
tragedy.”

Everybody else was helping. Even the gardener and his boy
knocked off work and explored the upper recesses of various
possible trees.

“He is too young,” said Herr Heinrich, drifting back…. And
then presently: “If he heard my voice I am sure he would show
himself. But he does not show himself.”

It was clear he feared the worst….

At supper Billy was the sole topic of conversation, and
condolence was in the air. The impression that on the whole he had
displayed rather a brutal character was combated by Herr Heinrich,
who held that a certain brusqueness was Billy’s only fault, and
told anecdotes, almost sacred anecdotes, of the little creature’s
tenderer, nobler side. “When I feed him always he says, ‘Thank
you,'” said Herr Heinrich. “He never fails.” He betrayed darker
thoughts. “When I went round by the barn there was a cat that sat
and looked at me out of a laurel bush,” he said. “I do not like
cats.”

Mr. Lawrence Carmine, who had dropped in, was suddenly reminded
of that lugubrious old ballad, “The Mistletoe Bough,” and recited
large worn fragments of it impressively. It tells of how a
beautiful girl hid away in a chest during a Christmas game of
hide-and-seek, and how she was found, a dried vestige, years
afterwards. It took a very powerful hold upon Herr Heinrich’s
imagination. “Let us now,” he said, “make an examination of every
box and cupboard and drawer. Marking each as we go….”

When Mr. Britling went to bed that night, after a long gossip
with Carmine about the Bramo Samaj and modern developments of
Indian thought generally, the squirrel was still undiscovered.

The worthy modern thinker undressed slowly, blew out his candle
and got into bed. Still meditating deeply upon the God of the
Tagores, he thrust his right hand under his pillow according to his
usual practice, and encountered something soft and warm and active.
He shot out of bed convulsively, lit his candle, and lifted his
pillow discreetly.

He discovered the missing Billy looking crumpled and
annoyed.

For some moments there was a lively struggle before Billy was
gripped. He chattered furiously and bit Mr. Britling twice. Then
Mr. Britling was out in the passage with the wriggling lump of warm
fur in his hand, and paddling along in the darkness to the door of
Herr Heinrich. He opened it softly.

A startled white figure sat up in bed sharply.

“Billy,” said Mr. Britling by way of explanation, dropped his
capture on the carpet, and shut the door on the touching
reunion.

§ 3

A day was to come when Mr. Britling was to go over the history
of that sunny July with incredulous minuteness, trying to trace the
real succession of events that led from the startling crime at
Sarajevo to Europe’s last swift rush into war. In a sense it was
untraceable; in a sense it was so obvious that he was amazed the
whole world had not watched the coming of disaster. The plain fact
of the case was that there was no direct connection; the Sarajevo
murders were dropped for two whole weeks out of the general
consciousness, they went out of the papers, they ceased to be
discussed; then they were picked up again and used as an excuse for
war. Germany, armed so as to be a threat to all the world, weary at
last of her mighty vigil, watching the
course of events, decided that her moment had come, and snatched
the dead archduke out of his grave again to serve her tremendous
ambition.

It may well have seemed to the belligerent German patriot that
all her possible foes were confused, divided within themselves, at
an extremity of distraction and impotence. The British Isles seemed
slipping steadily into civil war. Threat was met by counter-threat,
violent fool competed with violent fool for the admiration of the
world, the National Volunteers armed against the Ulster men;
everything moved on with a kind of mechanical precision from parade
and meeting towards the fatal gun-running of Howth and the first
bloodshed in Dublin streets. That wretched affray, far more than
any other single thing, must have stiffened Germany in the course
she had chosen. There can be no doubt of it; the mischief makers of
Ireland set the final confirmation upon the European war. In
England itself there was a summer fever of strikes; Liverpool was
choked by a dockers’ strike, the East Anglian agricultural
labourers were in revolt, and the building trade throughout the
country was on the verge of a lockout. Russia seemed to be in the
crisis of a social revolution. From Baku to St. Petersburg there
were insurrectionary movements in the towns, and on the
23rd—the very day of the Austrian ultimatum—Cossacks
were storming barbed wire entanglements in the streets of the
capital. The London Stock Exchange was in a state of panic
disorganisation because of a vast mysterious selling of securities
from abroad. And France, France it seemed was lost to all other
consideration in the enthralling confrontations and denunciations
of the Caillaux murder trial, the trial of the wife of her ex-prime
Minister for the murder of a blackmailing journalist. It was a case
full of the vulgarest sexual violence. Before so piquant a
spectacle France it seemed could have no time nor attention for the
revelation of M. Humbert, the Reporter of the Army Committee,
proclaiming that the artillery was short of
ammunition, that her infantry had boots “thirty years old” and not
enough of those….

Such were the appearances of things. Can it be wondered if it
seemed to the German mind that the moment for the triumphant
assertion of the German predominance in the world had come? A day
or so before the Dublin shooting, the murder of Sarajevo had been
dragged again into the foreground of the world’s affairs by an
ultimatum from Austria to Serbia of the extremest violence. From
the hour when the ultimatum was discharged the way to Armageddon
lay wide and unavoidable before the feet of Europe. After the
Dublin conflict there was no turning back. For a week Europe was
occupied by proceedings that were little more than the recital of a
formula. Austria could not withdraw her unqualified threats without
admitting error and defeat, Russia could not desert Serbia without
disgrace, Germany stood behind Austria, France was bound to Russia
by a long confederacy of mutual support, and it was impossible for
England to witness the destruction of France or the further
strengthening of a loud and threatening rival. It may be that
Germany counted on Russia giving way to her, it may be she counted
on the indecisions and feeble perplexities of England, both these
possibilities were in the reckoning, but chiefly she counted on
war. She counted on war, and since no nation in all the world had
ever been so fully prepared in every way for war as she was, she
also counted on victory.

One writes “Germany.” That is how one writes of nations, as
though they had single brains and single purposes. But indeed while
Mr. Britling lay awake and thought of his son and Lady Frensham and
his smashed automobile and Mrs. Harrowdean’s trick of abusive
letter-writing and of God and evil and a thousand perplexities, a
multitude of other brains must also have been busy, lying also in
beds or sitting in studies or watching in guard-rooms or chatting
belatedly in cafés or smoking-rooms or pacing the bridges of
battleships or walking along in city or
country, upon this huge possibility the crime of Sarajevo had just
opened, and of the state of the world in relation to such
possibilities. Few women, one guesses, heeded what was happening,
and of the men, the men whose decision to launch that implacable
threat turned the destinies of the world to war, there is no reason
to believe that a single one of them had anything approaching the
imaginative power needed to understand fully what it was they were
doing. We have looked for an hour or so into the seething pot of
Mr. Britling’s brain and marked its multiple strands, its
inconsistencies, its irrational transitions. It was but a specimen.
Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal
determination of the world’s destinies, had its streak of personal
motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections. One man
decided to say this because if he said that he would
contradict something he had said and printed four or five days ago;
another took a certain line because so he saw his best opportunity
of putting a rival into a perplexity. It would be strange if one
could reach out now and recover the states of mind of two such
beings as the German Kaiser and his eldest son as Europe stumbled
towards her fate through the long days and warm, close nights of
that July. Here was the occasion for which so much of their lives
had been but the large pretentious preparation, coming right into
their hands to use or forgo, here was the opportunity that would
put them into the very forefront of history forever; this
journalist emperor with the paralysed arm, this common-fibred, sly,
lascivious son. It is impossible that they did not dream of glory
over all the world, of triumphant processions, of a world-throne
that would outshine Caesar’s, of a godlike elevation, of acting
Divus Caesar while yet alive. And being what they were they must
have imagined spectators, and the young man, who was after all a
young man of particularly poor quality, imagined no doubt certain
women onlookers, certain humiliated and astonished friends,
and thought of the clothes he would wear and
the gestures he would make. The nickname his English cousins had
given this heir to all the glories was the “White Rabbit.” He was
the backbone of the war party at court. And presently he stole
bric-à-brac. That will help posterity to the proper values
of things in 1914. And the Teutonic generals and admirals and
strategists with their patient and perfect plans, who were so
confident of victory, each within a busy skull must have enacted
anticipatory dreams of his personal success and marshalled his
willing and unwilling admirers. Readers of histories and memoirs as
most of this class of men are, they must have composed little
eulogistic descriptions of the part themselves were to play in the
opening drama, imagined pleasing vindications and interesting
documents. Some of them perhaps saw difficulties, but few foresaw
failure. For all this set of brains the thing came as a choice to
take or reject; they could make war or prevent it. And they chose
war.

It is doubtful if any one outside the directing intelligence of
Germany and Austria saw anything so plain. The initiative was with
Germany. The Russian brains and the French brains and the British
brains, the few that were really coming round to look at this
problem squarely, had a far less simple set of problems and
profounder uncertainties. To Mr. Britling’s mind the Round Table
Conference at Buckingham Palace was typical of the disunion and
indecision that lasted up to the very outbreak of hostilities. The
solemn violence of Sir Edward Carson was intensely antipathetic to
Mr. Britling, and in his retrospective inquiries he pictured to
himself that dark figure with its dropping under-lip, seated, heavy
and obstinate, at that discussion, still implacable though the King
had but just departed after a little speech that was packed with
veiled intimations of imminent danger…

Mr. Britling had no mercy in his mind for the treason of
obstinate egotism and for persistence in a mistaken course. His own temperamental weaknesses lay in
such different directions. He was always ready to leave one trail
for another; he was always open to conviction, trusting to the
essentials of his character for an ultimate consistency. He hated
Carson in those days as a Scotch terrier might hate a bloodhound,
as something at once more effective and impressive, and
exasperatingly, infinitely less intelligent.

§ 4

Thus—a vivid fact as yet only in a few hundred skulls or
so—the vast catastrophe of the Great War gathered behind the
idle, dispersed and confused spectacle of an indifferent world,
very much as the storms and rains of late September gathered behind
the glow and lassitudes of August, and with scarcely more of set
human intention. For the greater part of mankind the European
international situation was at most something in the papers, no
more important than the political disturbances in South Africa,
where the Herzogites were curiously uneasy, or the possible trouble
between Turkey and Greece. The things that really interested people
in England during the last months of peace were boxing and the
summer sales. A brilliant young Frenchman, Carpentier, who had
knocked out Bombardier Wells, came over again to defeat Gunboat
Smith, and did so to the infinite delight of France and the whole
Latin world, amidst the generous applause of Anglo-Saxondom. And
there was also a British triumph over the Americans at polo, and a
lively and cultured newspaper discussion about a proper motto for
the arms of the London County Council. The trial of Madame Caillaux
filled the papers with animated reports and vivid pictures; Gregori
Rasputin was stabbed and became the subject of much lively gossip
about the Russian Court; and Ulivi, the Italian impostor who
claimed he could explode mines by means of an “ultra-red” ray, was
exposed and fled with a lady, very
amusingly. For a few days all the work at Woolwich Arsenal was held
up because a certain Mr. Entwhistle, having refused to erect a
machine on a concrete bed laid down by non-unionists, was rather
uncivilly dismissed, and the Irish trouble pounded along its
tiresome mischievous way. People gave a divided attention to these
various topics, and went about their individual businesses.

And at Dower House they went about their businesses. Mr.
Direck’s arm healed rapidly; Cecily Corner and he talked of their
objects in life and Utopias and the books of Mr. Britling, and he
got down from a London bookseller Baedeker’s guides for Holland and
Belgium, South Germany and Italy; Herr Heinrich after some doubt
sent in his application form and his preliminary deposit for the
Esperanto Conference at Boulogne, and Billy consented to be stroked
three times but continued to bite with great vigour and
promptitude. And the trouble about Hugh, Mr. Britling’s eldest son,
resolved itself into nothing of any vital importance, and settled
itself very easily.

§ 5

After Hugh had cleared things up and gone back to London Mr.
Britling was inclined to think that such a thing as apprehension
was a sin against the general fairness and integrity of life.

Of all things in the world Hugh was the one that could most
easily rouse Mr. Britling’s unhappy aptitude for distressing
imaginations. Hugh was nearer by far to his heart and nerves than
any other creature. In the last few years Mr. Britling, by the
light of a variety of emotional excursions in other directions, had
been discovering this. Whatever Mr. Britling discovered he talked
about; he had evolved from his realisation of this tenderness,
which was without an effort so much tenderer than all the subtle
and tremendous feelings he had attempted in his—excursions,
the theory that he had expounded to Mr. Direck that it is only
through our children that we are able to
achieve disinterested love, real love. But that left unexplained
that far more intimate emotional hold of Hugh than of his very
jolly little step-brothers. That was a fact into which Mr. Britling
rather sedulously wouldn’t look….

Mr. Britling was probably much franker and more open-eyed with
himself and the universe than a great number of intelligent people,
and yet there were quite a number of aspects of his relations with
his wife, with people about him, with his country and God and the
nature of things, upon which he turned his back with an attentive
persistence. But a back too resolutely turned may be as indicative
as a pointing finger, and in this retrogressive way, and tacitly
even so far as his formal thoughts, his unspoken comments, went,
Mr. Britling knew that he loved his son because he had lavished the
most hope and the most imagination upon him, because he was the one
living continuation of that dear life with Mary, so lovingly stormy
at the time, so fine now in memory, that had really possessed the
whole heart of Mr. Britling. The boy had been the joy and marvel of
the young parents; it was incredible to them that there had ever
been a creature so delicate and sweet, and they brought
considerable imagination and humour to the detailed study of his
minute personality and to the forecasting of his future. Mr.
Britling’s mind blossomed with wonderful schemes for his education.
All that mental growth no doubt contributed greatly to Mr.
Britling’s peculiar affection, and with it there interwove still
tenderer and subtler elements, for the boy had a score of Mary’s
traits. But there were other things still more conspicuously
ignored. One silent factor in the slow widening of the breach
between Edith and Mr. Britling was her cool estimate of her
stepson. She was steadfastly kind to this shock-headed, untidy
little dreamer, he was extremely well cared for in her hands, she
liked him and she was amused by him—it is difficult to
imagine what more Mr. Britling could have
expected—but it was as plain as
daylight that she felt that this was not the child she would have
cared to have borne. It was quite preposterous and perfectly
natural that this should seem to Mr. Britling to be unfair to
Hugh.

Edith’s home was more prosperous than Mary’s; she brought her
own money to it; the bringing up of her children was a far more
efficient business than Mary’s instinctive proceedings. Hugh had
very nearly died in his first year of life; some summer infection
had snatched at him; that had tied him to his father’s heart by a
knot of fear; but no infection had ever come near Edith’s own
nursery. And it was Hugh that Mr. Britling had seen, small and
green-faced and pitiful under an anaesthetic for some necessary
small operation to his adenoids. His younger children had never
stabbed to Mr. Britling’s heart with any such pitifulness; they
were not so thin-skinned as their elder brother, not so assailable
by the little animosities of dust and germ. And out of such things
as this evolved a shapeless cloud of championship for Hugh.
Jealousies and suspicions are latent in every human relationship.
We go about the affairs of life pretending magnificently that they
are not so, pretending to the generosities we desire. And in all
step-relationships jealousy and suspicion are not merely latent,
they stir.

It was Mr. Britling’s case for Hugh that he was something
exceptional, something exceptionally good, and that the peculiar
need there was to take care of him was due to a delicacy of nerve
and fibre that was ultimately a virtue. The boy was quick, quick to
hear, quick to move, very accurate in his swift way, he talked
unusually soon, he began to sketch at an early age with an
incurable roughness and a remarkable expressiveness. That he was
sometimes ungainly, often untidy, that he would become so mentally
preoccupied as to be uncivil to people about him, that he caught
any malaise that was going, was all a part of that. The sense of
Mrs. Britling’s unexpressed criticisms, the implied contrasts with
the very jolly, very uninspired younger
family, kept up a nervous desire in Mr. Britling for evidences and
manifestations of Hugh’s quality. Not always with happy results; it
caused much mutual irritation, but not enough to prevent the growth
of a real response on Hugh’s part to his father’s solicitude. The
youngster knew and felt that his father was his father just as
certainly as he felt that Mrs. Britling was not his mother. To his
father he brought his successes and to his father he appealed.

But he brought his successes more readily than he brought his
troubles. So far as he himself was concerned he was disposed to
take a humorous view of the things that went wrong and didn’t come
off with him, but as a “Tremendous Set-Down for the Proud Parent”
they resisted humorous treatment….

Now the trouble that he had been hesitating to bring before his
father was concerned with that very grave interest of the young,
his Object in Life. It had nothing to do with those erotic
disturbances that had distressed his father’s imagination. Whatever
was going on below the surface of Hugh’s smiling or thoughtful
presence in that respect had still to come to the surface and find
expression. But he was bothered very much by divergent strands in
his own intellectual composition. Two sets of interests pulled at
him, one—it will seem a dry interest to many readers, but for
Hugh it glittered and fascinated—was crystallography and
molecular physics; the other was caricature. Both aptitudes sprang
no doubt from the same exceptional sensitiveness to form. As a
schoolboy he exercised both very happily, but now he was getting to
the age of specialisation, and he was fluctuating very much between
science and art. After a spell of scientific study he would come
upon a fatigue period and find nothing in life but absurdities and
a lark that one could represent very amusingly; after a bout of
funny drawings his mind went back to his light and crystals and
films like a Magdalen repenting in a church. After his
public school he had refused Cambridge and
gone to University College, London, to work under the great and
inspiring Professor Cardinal; simultaneously Cardinal had been
arranging to go to Cambridge, and Hugh had scarcely embarked upon
his London work when Cardinal was succeeded by the dull,
conscientious and depressing Pelkingham, at whose touch crystals
became as puddings, bubble films like cotton sheets, transparency
vanished from the world, and X rays dwarfed and died. And Hugh
degenerated immediately into a scoffing trifler who wished to give
up science for art.

He gave up science for art after grave consultation with his
father, and the real trouble that had been fretting him, it seemed,
was that now he repented and wanted to follow Cardinal to
Cambridge, and—a year lost—go on with science again. He
felt it was a discreditable fluctuation; he knew it would be a
considerable expense; and so he took two weeks before he could
screw himself up to broaching the matter.

“So that is all,” said Mr. Britling, immensely
relieved.

“My dear Parent, you didn’t think I had backed a bill or forged
a cheque?”

“I thought you might have married a chorus girl or something of
that sort,” said Mr. Britling.

“Or bought a large cream-coloured motor-car for her on the
instalment system, which she’d smashed up. No, that sort of thing
comes later…. I’ll just put myself down on the waiting list of
one of those bits of delight in the Cambridge tobacco
shops—and go on with my studies for a year or two….”

§ 6

Though Mr. Britling’s anxiety about his son was dispelled, his
mind remained curiously apprehensive throughout July. He had a
feeling that things were not going well with the world, a feeling
he tried in vain to dispel by various
distractions. Perhaps some subtler subconscious analysis of the
situation was working out probabilities that his conscious self
would not face. And when presently he bicycled off to Mrs.
Harrowdean for flattery, amusement, and comfort generally, he found
her by no means the exalting confirmation of everything he wished
to believe about himself and the universe, that had been her
delightful rôle in the early stages of their romantic
friendship. She maintained her hostility to Edith; she seemed bent
on making things impossible. And yet there were one or two phases
of the old sustaining intimacies.

They walked across her absurd little park to the summer-house
with the view on the afternoon of his arrival, and they discussed
the Irish pamphlet which was now nearly finished.

“Of course,” she said, “it will be a wonderful pamphlet.”

There was a reservation in her voice that made him wait.

“But I suppose all sorts of people could write an Irish
pamphlet. Nobody but you could write ‘The Silent Places.’ Oh,
why don’t you finish that great beautiful thing, and leave
all this world of reality and newspapers, all these Crude, Vulgar,
Quarrelsome, Jarring things to other people? You have the magic
gift, you might be a poet, you can take us out of all these horrid
things that are, away to Beautyland, and you are just content to be
a critic and a disputer. It’s your surroundings. It’s your sordid
realities. It’s that Practicality at your elbow. You ought never to
see a newspaper. You ought never to have an American come within
ten miles of you. You ought to live on bowls of milk drunk in
valleys of asphodel.”

Mr. Britling, who liked this sort of thing in a way, and yet at
the same time felt ridiculously distended and altogether
preposterous while it was going on, answered feebly and
self-consciously.

“There was your letter in the Nation the other day,” she
said. “Why do you get drawn into arguments? I wanted to rush
into the Nation and pick you up and wipe the anger off you,
and carry you out of it all—into some quiet beautiful
place.”

“But one has to answer these people,” said Mr. Britling,
rolling along by the side of her like a full moon beside Venus, and
quite artlessly falling in with the tone of her.

She repeated lines from “The Silent Places” from memory. She
threw quite wonderful emotion into her voice. She made the words
glow. And he had only shown her the thing once….

Was he indeed burying a marvellous gift under the dust of
current affairs? When at last in the warm evening light they
strolled back from the summer-house to dinner he had definitely
promised her that he would take up and finish “The Silent
Places.”… And think over the Irish pamphlet again before he
published it….

Pyecrafts was like a crystal casket of finer soil withdrawn from
the tarred highways of the earth….

And yet the very next day this angel enemy of controversies
broke out in the most abominable way about Edith, and he had to
tell her more plainly than he had done hitherto, that he could not
tolerate that sort of thing. He wouldn’t have Edith guyed. He
wouldn’t have Edith made to seem base. And at that there was much
trouble between them, and tears and talk of Oliver….

Mr. Britling found himself unable to get on either with “The
Silent Places” or the pamphlet, and he was very unhappy….

Afterwards she repented very touchingly, and said that if only
he would love her she would swallow a thousand Ediths. He waived a
certain disrespect in the idea of her swallowing Edith, and they
had a beautiful reconciliation and talked of exalted things, and in
the evening he worked quite well upon “The Silent Places” and
thought of half-a-dozen quite wonderful
lines, and in the course of the next day he returned to Dower House
and Mr. Direck and considerable piles of correspondence and the
completion of the Irish pamphlet.

But he was restless. He was more restless in his house than he
had ever been. He could not understand it. Everything about him was
just as it had always been, and yet it was unsatisfactory, and it
seemed more unstable than anything had ever seemed before. He was
bored by the solemn development of the Irish dispute; he was
irritated by the smouldering threat of the Balkans; he was
irritated by the suffragettes and by a string of irrational little
strikes; by the general absence of any main plot as it were to hold
all these wranglings and trivialities together…. At the Dower
House the most unpleasant thoughts would come to him. He even had
doubts whether in “The Silent Places,” he had been plagiarising,
more or less unconsciously, from Henry James’s “Great Good
Place.”…

On the twenty-first of July Gladys came back repaired and
looking none the worse for her misadventure. Next day he drove her
very carefully over to Pyecrafts, hoping to drug his uneasiness
with the pretence of a grand passion and the praises of “The Silent
Places,” that beautiful work of art that was so free from any taint
of application, and alas! he found Mrs. Harrowdean in an evil mood.
He had been away from her for ten days—ten whole days. No
doubt Edith had manoeuvred to keep him. She hadn’t! Hadn’t
she? How was he, poor simple soul! to tell that she hadn’t? That
was the prelude to a stormy afternoon.

The burthen of Mrs. Harrowdean was that she was wasting her
life, that she was wasting the poor, good, patient Oliver’s life,
that for the sake of friendship she was braving the worst
imputations and that he treated her cavalierly, came when he wished
to do so, stayed away heartlessly, never thought she needed
little treats, little
attentions, little presents. Did he think she could settle
down to her poor work, such as it was, in neglect and loneliness?
He forgot women were dear little tender things, and had to be made
happy and kept happy. Oliver might not be clever and
attractive but he did at least in his clumsy way understand and try
and do his duty….

Towards the end of the second hour of such complaints the spirit
of Mr. Britling rose in revolt. He lifted up his voice against her,
he charged his voice with indignant sorrow and declared that he had
come over to Pyecrafts with no thought in his mind but sweet and
loving thoughts, that he had but waited for Gladys to be ready
before he came, that he had brought over the manuscript of “The
Silent Places” with him to polish and finish up, that “for days and
days” he had been longing to do this in the atmosphere of the dear
old summer-house with its distant view of the dear old sea, and
that now all that was impossible, that Mrs. Harrowdean had made it
impossible and that indeed she was rapidly making everything
impossible….

And having delivered himself of this judgment Mr. Britling, a
little surprised at the rapid vigour of his anger, once he had let
it loose, came suddenly to an end of his words, made a renunciatory
gesture with his arms, and as if struck with the idea, rushed out
of her room and out of the house to where Gladys stood waiting. He
got into her and started her up, and after some trouble with the
gear due to the violence of his emotion, he turned her round and
departed with her—crushing the corner of a small bed of
snapdragon as he turned—and dove her with a sulky
sedulousness back to the Dower House and newspapers and
correspondence and irritations, and that gnawing and irrational
sense of a hollow and aimless quality in the world that he had
hoped Mrs. Harrowdean would assuage. And the further he went from
Mrs. Harrowdean the harsher and unjuster it seemed to him that he
had been to her.

But he went on because he did not see how he could very well go
back.

§ 7

Mr. Direck’s broken wrist healed sooner than he desired. From
the first he had protested that it was the sort of thing that one
can carry about in a sling, that he was quite capable of travelling
about and taking care of himself in hotels, that he was only
staying on at Matching’s Easy because he just loved to stay on and
wallow in Mrs. Britling’s kindness and Mr. Britling’s company.
While as a matter of fact he wallowed as much as he could in the
freshness and friendliness of Miss Cecily Corner, and for more than
a third of this period Mr. Britling was away from home
altogether.

Mr. Direck, it should be clear by this time, was a man of more
than European simplicity and directness, and his intentions towards
the young lady were as simple and direct and altogether honest as
such intentions can be. It is the American conception of gallantry
more than any other people’s, to let the lady call the tune in
these affairs; the man’s place is to be protective, propitiatory,
accommodating and clever, and the lady’s to be difficult but
delightful until he catches her and houses her splendidly and gives
her a surprising lot of pocket-money, and goes about his business;
and upon these assumptions Mr. Direck went to work. But quite early
it was manifest to him that Cecily did not recognise his
assumptions. She was embarrassed when he got down one or two little
presents of chocolates and flowers for her from London—-the
Britling boys were much more appreciative—she wouldn’t let
him contrive costly little expeditions for her, and she protested
against compliments and declared she would stay away when he paid
them. And she was not contented by his general sentiments about
life, but asked the most direct questions about his occupation and
his activities. His chief occupation was being the well provided heir of a capable lawyer, and his
activities in the light of her inquiries struck him as being light
and a trifle amateurish, qualities he had never felt as any
drawback about them before. So that he had to rely rather upon
aspirations and the possibility, under proper inspiration, of a
more actively serviceable life in future.

“There’s a feeling in the States,” he said, “that we’ve had
rather a tendency to overdo work, and that there is scope for a
leisure class to develop the refinement and the wider meanings of
life.”

“But a leisure class doesn’t mean a class that does nothing,”
said Cecily. “It only means a class that isn’t busy in
business.”

“You’re too hard on me,” said Mr. Direck with that quiet smile
of his.

And then by way of putting her on the defensive he asked her
what she thought a man in his position ought to do.

“Something,” she said, and in the expansion of this vague
demand they touched on a number of things. She said that she was a
Socialist, and there was still in Mr. Direck’s composition a streak
of the old-fashioned American prejudice against the word. He
associated Socialists with Anarchists and deported aliens. It was
manifest too that she was deeply read in the essays and
dissertations of Mr. Britling. She thought everybody, man or woman,
ought to be chiefly engaged in doing something definite for the
world at large. (“There’s my secretaryship of the Massachusetts
Modern Thought Society, anyhow,” said Mr. Direck.) And she herself
wanted to be doing something—it was just because she did not
know what it was she ought to be doing that she was reading so
extensively and voraciously. She wanted to lose herself in
something. Deep in the being of Mr. Direck was the conviction that
what she ought to be doing was making love in a rapturously
egotistical manner, and enjoying every scrap of her own delightful
self and her own delightful
vitality—while she had it, but for the purposes of their
conversation he did not care to put it any more definitely than to
say that he thought we owed it to ourselves to develop our
personalities. Upon which she joined issue with great vigour.

“That is just what Mr. Britling says about you in his ‘American
Impressions,'” she said. “He says that America overdoes the
development of personalities altogether, that whatever else is
wrong about America that is where America is most clearly wrong. I
read that this morning, and directly I read it I thought, ‘Yes,
that’s exactly it! Mr. Direck is overdoing the development of
personalities.'”

“Me!”

“Yes. I like talking to you and I don’t like talking to you. And
I see now it is because you keep on talking of my Personality and
your Personality. That makes me uncomfortable. It’s like having
some one following me about with a limelight. And in a sort of way
I do like it. I like it and I’m flattered by it, and then I go off
and dislike it, dislike the effect of it. I find myself trying to
be what you have told me I am—sort of acting myself. I want
to glance at looking-glasses to see if I am keeping it up. It’s
just exactly what Mr. Britling says in his book about American
women. They act themselves, he says; they get a kind of story and
explanation about themselves and they are always trying to make it
perfectly plain and clear to every one. Well, when you do that you
can’t think nicely of other things.”

“We like a clear light on people,” said Mr. Direck.

“We don’t. I suppose we’re shadier,” said Cecily.

“You’re certainly much more in half-tones,” said Mr. Direck.
“And I confess it’s the half-tones get hold of me. But still you
haven’t told me, Miss Cissie, what you think I ought to do with
myself. Here I am, you see, very much at your disposal. What sort
of business do you think it’s my duty to go in for?”

“That’s for some one with more experience than I have, to tell
you. You should ask Mr. Britling.”

“I’d rather have it from you.”

“I don’t even know for myself,” she said.

“So why shouldn’t we start to find out together?” he asked.

It was her tantalising habit to ignore all such tentatives.

“One can’t help the feeling that one is in the world for
something more than oneself,” she said….

§ 8

Soon Mr. Direck could measure the time that was left to him at
the Dower House no longer by days but by hours. His luggage was
mostly packed, his tickets to Rotterdam, Cologne, Munich, Dresden,
Vienna, were all in order. And things were still very indefinite
between him and Cecily. But God has not made Americans clean-shaven
and firm-featured for nothing, and he determined that matters must
be brought to some sort of definition before he embarked upon
travels that were rapidly losing their attractiveness in this
concentration of his attention….

A considerable nervousness betrayed itself in his voice and
manner when at last he carried out his determination.

“There’s just a lil’ thing,” he said to her, taking advantage of
a moment when they were together after lunch, “that I’d value now
more than anything else in the world.”

She answered by a lifted eyebrow and a glance that had not so
much inquiry in it as she intended.

“If we could just take a lil’ walk together for a bit. Round by
Claverings Park and all that. See the deer again and the old trees.
Sort of scenery I’d like to remember when I’m away from it.”

He was a little short of breath, and there was a quite disproportionate gravity about her moment for
consideration.

“Yes,” she said with a cheerful acquiescence that came a couple
of bars too late. “Let’s. It will be jolly.”

“These fine English afternoons are wonderful afternoons,” he
remarked after a moment or so of silence. “Not quite the splendid
blaze we get in our summer, but—sort of glowing.”

“It’s been very fine all the time you’ve been here,” she
said….

After which exchanges they went along the lane, into the road by
the park fencing, and so to the little gate that lets one into the
park, without another word.

The idea took hold of Mr. Direck’s mind that until they got
through the park gate it would be quite out of order to say
anything. The lane and the road and the stile and the gate were all
so much preliminary stuff to be got through before one could get to
business. But after the little white gate the way was clear, the
park opened out and one could get ahead without bothering about the
steering. And Mr. Direck had, he felt, been diplomatically involved
in lanes and by-ways long enough.

“Well,” he said as he rejoined her after very carefully closing
the gate. “What I really wanted was an opportunity of just
mentioning something that happens to be of interest to you—if
it does happen to interest you…. I suppose I’d better put the
thing as simply as possible…. Practically…. I’m just right over
the head and all in love with you…. I thought I’d like to tell
you….”

Immense silences.

“Of course I won’t pretend there haven’t been others,” Mr.
Direck suddenly resumed. “There have. One particularly. But I can
assure you I’ve never felt the depth and height or anything like
the sort of Quiet Clear Conviction…. And now I’m just telling you
these things, Miss Corner, I don’t know whether it will interest
you if I tell you that you’re really and truly the very first
love I ever had as well as my last. I’ve had
sent over—I got it only yesterday—this lil’ photograph
of a miniature portrait of one of my ancestor’s relations—a
Corner just as you are. It’s here….”

He had considerable difficulties with his pockets and papers.
Cecily, mute and flushed and inconvenienced by a preposterous and
unaccountable impulse to weep, took the picture he handed her.

“When I was a lil’ fellow of fifteen,” said Mr. Direck in the
tone of one producing a melancholy but conclusive piece of
evidence, “I worshipped that miniature. It seemed to
me—the loveliest person…. And—it’s just you….”

He too was preposterously moved.

It seemed a long time before Cecily had anything to say, and
then what she had to say she said in a softened, indistinct voice.
“You’re very kind,” she said, and kept hold of the little
photograph.

They had halted for the photograph. Now they walked on
again.

“I thought I’d like to tell you,” said Mr. Direck and became
tremendously silent.

Cecily found him incredibly difficult to answer. She tried to
make herself light and offhand, and to be very frank with him.

“Of course,” she said, “I knew—I felt somehow—you
meant to say something of this sort to me—when you asked me
to come with you——”

“Well?” he said.

“And I’ve been trying to make my poor brain think of something
to say to you.”

She paused and contemplated her difficulties….

“Couldn’t you perhaps say something of the same kind—such
as I’ve been trying to say?” said Mr. Direck presently, with a note
of earnest helpfulness. “I’d be very glad if you could.”

“Not exactly,” said Cecily, more careful than ever.

“Meaning?”

“I think you know that you are the best of friends. I think you
are, oh—a Perfect Dear.”

“Well—that’s all right—so far.”

“That is as far.”

“You don’t know whether you love me? That’s what you mean to
say.”

“No…. I feel somehow it isn’t that…. Yet….”

“There’s nobody else by any chance?”

“No.” Cecily weighed things. “You needn’t trouble about
that.”

“Only … only you don’t know.”

Cecily made a movement of assent.

“It’s no good pretending I haven’t thought about you,” she
said.

“Well, anyhow I’ve done my best to give you the idea,” said Mr.
Direck. “I seem now to have been doing that pretty nearly all the
time.”

“Only what should we do?”

Mr. Direck felt this question was singularly artless.
“Why!—we’d marry,” he said. “And all that sort of thing.”

“Letty has married—and all that sort of thing,” said
Cecily, fixing her eye on him very firmly because she was colouring
brightly. “And it doesn’t leave Letty very
much—forrader.”

“Well now, they have a good time, don’t they? I’d have thought
they have a lovely time!”

“They’ve had a lovely time. And Teddy is the dearest husband.
And they have a sweet little house and a most amusing baby. And
they play hockey every Sunday. And Teddy does his work. And every
week is like every other week. It is just heavenly. Just always the
same heavenly. Every Sunday there is a fresh week of heavenly
beginning. And this, you see, isn’t heaven; it is earth. And they
don’t know it but they are getting bored. I
have been watching them, and they are getting dreadfully bored.
It’s heart-breaking to watch, because they are almost my dearest
people. Teddy used to be making perpetual jokes about the house and
the baby and his work and Letty, and now—he’s made all the
possible jokes. It’s only now and then he gets a fresh one. It’s
like spring flowers and then—summer. And Letty sits about and
doesn’t sing. They want something new to happen…. And there’s Mr.
and Mrs. Britling. They love each other. Much more than Mrs.
Britling dreams, or Mr. Britling for the matter of that. Once upon
a time things were heavenly for them too, I suppose. Until suddenly
it began to happen to them that nothing new ever happened….”

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “people can travel.”

“But that isn’t real happening,” said Cecily.

“It keeps one interested.”

“But real happening is doing something.”

“You come back to that,” said Mr. Direck. “I never met any one
before who’d quite got that spirit as you have it. I wouldn’t alter
it. It’s part of you. It’s part of this place. It’s what Mr.
Britling always seems to be saying and never quite knowing he’s
said it. It’s just as though all the things that are going on
weren’t the things that ought to be going on—but something
else quite different. Somehow one falls into it. It’s as if your
daily life didn’t matter, as if politics didn’t matter, as if the
King and the social round and business and all those things weren’t
anything really, and as though you felt there was something
else—out of sight—round the corner—that you ought
to be getting at. Well, I admit, that’s got hold of me too. And
it’s all mixed up with my idea of you. I don’t see that there’s
really a contradiction in it at all. I’m in love with you, all my
heart’s in love with you, what’s the good of being shy about it?
I’d just die for your littlest wish right here now, it’s just as
though I’d got love in my veins instead of
blood, but that’s not taking me away from that other thing. It’s
bringing me round to that other thing. I feel as if without you I
wasn’t up to anything at all, but with you—We’d not go
settling down in a cottage or just touring about with a Baedeker
Guide or anything of that kind. Not for long anyhow. We’d naturally
settle down side by side and do …”

“But what should we do?” asked Cecily.

There came a hiatus in their talk.

Mr. Direck took a deep breath.

“You see that old felled tree there. I was sitting on it the day
before yesterday and thinking of you. Will you come there and sit
with me on it? When you sit on it you get a view, oh! a perfectly
lovely English view, just a bit of the house and those clumps of
trees and the valley away there with the lily pond. I’d love to
have you in my memory of it….”

They sat down, and Mr. Direck opened his case. He was shy and
clumsy about opening it, because he had been thinking dreadfully
hard about it, and he hated to seem heavy or profound or anything
but artless and spontaneous to Cecily. And he felt even when he did
open his case that the effect of it was platitudinous and
disappointing. Yet when he had thought it out it had seemed very
profound and altogether living.

“You see one doesn’t want to use terms that have been used in a
thousand different senses in any way that isn’t a perfectly
unambiguous sense, and at the same time one doesn’t want to seem to
be canting about things or pitching anything a note or two higher
than it ought legitimately to go, but it seems to me that this sort
of something that Mr. Britling is always asking for in his essays
and writings and things, and what you are looking for just as much
and which seems so important to you that even love itself is a
secondary kind of thing until you can square the two together, is
nothing more nor less than Religion—I don’t mean this
Religion or that Religion but just Religion
itself, a Big, Solemn, Comprehensive Idea that holds you and me and
all the world together in one great, grand universal scheme. And
though it isn’t quite the sort of idea of love-making that’s been
popular—well, in places like Carrierville—for some
time, it’s the right idea; it’s got to be followed out if we don’t
want love-making to be a sort of idle, troublesome game of treats
and flatteries that is sure as anything to lead right away to
disappointments and foolishness and unfaithfulness and—just
Hell. What you are driving at, according to my interpretation, is
that marriage has got to be a religious marriage or else you are
splitting up life, that religion and love are most of life and all
the power there is in it, and that they can’t afford to be
harnessed in two different directions…. I never had these ideas
until I came here and met you, but they come up now in my mind as
though they had always been there…. And that’s why you don’t want
to marry in a hurry. And that’s why I’m glad almost that you don’t
want to marry in a hurry.”

He considered. “That’s why I’ll have to go on to Germany and
just let both of us turn things over in our minds.”

“Yes,” said Cecily, weighing his speech. “I think that is
it. I think that I do want a religious marriage, and that what is
wrong with Teddy and Letty is that they aren’t religious. They
pretend they are religious somewhere out of sight and round the
corner…. Only—”

He considered her gravely.

“What is Religion?” she asked.

Here again there was a considerable pause.

“Very nearly two-thirds of the papers read before our
Massachusetts society since my connection with it, have dealt with
that very question,” Mr. Direck began. “And one of our most
influential members was able to secure the services of a very able
and highly trained young woman from Michigan University, to make a
digest of all these representative utterances. We are having it
printed in a thoroughly artistic mariner, as
the club book for our autumn season. The drift of her results is
that religion isn’t the same thing as religions. That most
religions are old and that religion is always new…. Well, putting
it simply, religion is the perpetual rediscovery of that Great
Thing Out There…. What the Great Thing is goes by all sorts of
names, but if you know it’s there and if you remember it’s there,
you’ve got religion…. That’s about how she figured it out…. I
shall send you the book as soon as a copy comes over to me…. I
can’t profess to put it as clearly as she puts it. She’s got a real
analytical mind. But it’s one of the most suggestive lil’ books
I’ve ever seen. It just takes hold of you and makes you
think.”

He paused and regarded the ground before
him—thoughtfully.

“Life,” said Cecily, “has either got to be religious or else it
goes to pieces…. Perhaps anyhow it goes to pieces….”

Mr. Direck endorsed these observations by a slow nodding of the
head.

He allowed a certain interval to elapse. Then a vaguely
apprehended purpose that had been for a time forgotten in these
higher interests came back to him. He took it up with a breathless
sense of temerity.

“Well,” he said, “then you don’t hate me?”

She smiled.

“You don’t dislike me or despise me?”

She was still reassuring.

“You don’t think I’m just a slow American sort of portent?”

“No.”

“You think, on the whole, I might
even—someday——?”

She tried to meet his eyes with a pleasant frankness, and
perhaps she was franker than she meant to be.

“Look here,” said Mr. Direck, with a little quiver of emotion softening his mouth. “I’ll ask you
something. We’ve got to wait. Until you feel clearer. Still….
Could you bring yourself——? If just once—I could
kiss you….

“I’m going away to Germany,” he went on to her silence. “But I
shan’t be giving so much attention to Germany as I supposed I
should when I planned it out. But somehow—if I
felt—that I’d kissed you….”

With a delusive effect of calmness the young lady looked first
over her left shoulder and then over her right and surveyed the
park about them. Then she stood up. “We can go that way home,” she
said with a movement of her head, “through the little covert.”

Mr. Direck stood up too.

“If I was a poet or a bird,” said Mr. Direck, “I should sing.
But being just a plain American citizen all I can do is just to
talk about all I’d do if I wasn’t….”

And when they had reached the little covert, with its pathway of
soft moss and its sheltering screen of interlacing branches, he
broke the silence by saying, “Well, what’s wrong with right here
and now?” and Cecily stood up to him as straight as a spear, with
gifts in her clear eyes. He took her soft cool face between his
trembling hands, and kissed her sweet half-parted lips. When he
kissed her she shivered, and he held her tighter and would have
kissed her again. But she broke away from him, and he did not press
her. And muter than ever, pondering deeply, and secretly trembling
in the queerest way, these two outwardly sedate young people
returned to the Dower House….

And after tea the taxicab from the junction came for him and he
vanished, and was last seen as a waving hat receding along the top
of the dog-rose hedge that ran beyond the hockey field towards the
village.

“He will see Germany long before I shall,” said Herr Heinrich
with a gust of nostalgia. “I wish almost I had not agreed to go to
Boulogne.”

And for some days Miss Cecily Corner was a very grave and
dignified young woman indeed. Pondering….

§ 9

After the departure of Mr. Direck things international began to
move forward with great rapidity. It was exactly as if his American
deliberation had hitherto kept things waiting. Before his postcard
from Rotterdam reached the Dower House Austria had sent an
ultimatum to Serbia, and before Cecily had got the letter he wrote
her from Cologne, a letter in that curiously unformed handwriting
the stenographer and the typewriter are making an American
characteristic, Russia was mobilising, and the vast prospect of a
European war had opened like the rolling up of a curtain on which
the interests of the former week had been but a trivial embroidery.
So insistent was this reality that revealed itself that even the
shooting of the Dublin people after the gun-running of Howth was
dwarfed to unimportance. The mind of Mr. Britling came round from
its restless wanderings to a more and more intent contemplation of
the hurrying storm-clouds that swept out of nothingness to blacken
all his sky. He watched it, he watched amazed and incredulous, he
watched this contradiction of all his reiterated confessions of
faith in German sanity and pacifism, he watched it with all that
was impersonal in his being, and meanwhile his personal life ran in
a continually deeper and narrower channel as his intelligence was
withdrawn from it.

Never had the double refraction of his mind been more clearly
defined. On the one hand the Britling of the disinterested
intelligence saw the habitual peace of the world vanish as the
daylight vanishes when a shutter falls over the window of a cell;
and on the other the Britling of the private life saw all the
pleasant comfort of his relations with Mrs. Harrowdean disappearing
in a perplexing irrational quarrel. He did not want to lose
Mrs. Harrowdean; he contemplated their
breach with a profound and profoundly selfish dismay. It seemed the
wanton termination of an arrangement of which he was only beginning
to perceive the extreme and irreplaceable satisfactoriness.

It wasn’t that he was in love with her. He knew almost as
clearly as though he had told himself as much that he was not. But
then, on the other hand, it was equally manifest in its subdued and
ignored way that as a matter of fact she was hardly more in love
with him. What constituted the satisfactoriness of the whole affair
was its essential unlovingness and friendly want of emotion. It
left their minds free to play with all the terms and methods of
love without distress. She could summon tears and delights as one
summons servants, and he could act his part as lover with no sense
of lost control. They supplied in each other’s lives a long-felt
want—if only, that is, she could control her curious aptitude
for jealousy and the sexual impulse to vex. There, he felt, she
broke the convention of their relations and brought in serious
realities, and this little rift it was that had widened to a now
considerable breach. He knew that in every sane moment she dreaded
and wished to heal that breach as much as he did. But the deep
simplicities of the instincts they had tacitly agreed to bridge
over washed the piers of their reconciliation away.

And unless they could restore the bridge things would end, and
Mr. Britling felt that the ending of things would involve for him
the most extraordinary exasperation. She would go to Oliver for
comfort; she would marry Oliver; and he knew her well enough to be
sure that she would thrust her matrimonial happiness with Oliver
unsparingly upon his attention; while he, on the other hand, being
provided with no corresponding Olivette, would be left, a sort of
emotional celibate, with his slack times and his afternoons and his
general need for flattery and amusement dreadfully upon his own
hands. He would be tormented by jealousy. In
which case—and here he came to verities—his work would
suffer. It wouldn’t grip him while all these vague demands she
satisfied fermented unassuaged.

And, after the fashion of our still too adolescent world, Mr.
Britling and Mrs. Harrowdean proceeded to negotiate these extremely
unromantic matters in the phrases of that simple, honest and
youthful passionateness which is still the only language available,
and at times Mr. Britling came very near persuading himself that he
had something of the passionate love for her that he had once had
for his Mary, and that the possible loss of her had nothing to do
with the convenience of Pyecrafts or any discretion in the world.
Though indeed the only thing in the whole plexus of emotional
possibility that still kept anything of its youthful freshness in
his mind was the very strong objection indeed he felt to handing
her over to anybody else in the world. And in addition he had just
a touch of fatherly feeling that a younger man would not have had,
and it made him feel very anxious to prevent her making a fool of
herself by marrying a man out of spite. He felt that since an
obstinate lover is apt to be an exacting husband, in the end the
heavy predominance of Oliver might wring much sincerer tears from
her than she had ever shed for himself. But that generosity was but
the bright edge to a mainly possessive jealousy.

It was Mr. Britling who reopened the correspondence by writing a
little apology for the corner of the small snapdragon bed, and this
evoked an admirably touching reply. He replied quite naturally with
assurances and declarations. But before she got his second letter
her mood had changed. She decided that if he had really and truly
been lovingly sorry, instead of just writing a note to her he would
have rushed over to her in a wild, dramatic state of mind, and
begged forgiveness on his knees. She wrote therefore a second
letter to this effect, crossing his second one, and, her literary
gift getting the better of her, she expanded
her thesis into a general denunciation of his habitual
off-handedness with her, to an abandonment of all hope of ever
being happy with him, to a decision to end the matter once for all,
and after a decent interval of dignified regrets to summon Oliver
to the reward of his patience and goodness. The European situation
was now at a pitch to get upon Mr. Britling’s nerves, and he
replied with a letter intended to be conciliatory, but which
degenerated into earnest reproaches for her “unreasonableness.”
Meanwhile she had received his second and tenderly eloquent letter;
it moved her deeply, and having now cleared her mind of much that
had kept it simmering uncomfortably, she replied with a sweetly
loving epistle. From this point their correspondence had a kind of
double quality, being intermittently angry and loving; her third
letter was tender, and it was tenderly answered in his fourth; but
in the interim she had received his third and answered it with
considerable acerbity, to which his fifth was a retort, just
missing her generous and conclusive fifth. She replied to his fifth
on a Saturday evening—it was that eventful Saturday, Saturday
the First of August, 1914—by a telegram. Oliver was abroad in
Holland, engaged in a much-needed emotional rest, and she wired to
Mr. Britling: “Have wired for Oliver, he will come to me, do not
trouble to answer this.”

She was astonished to get no reply for two days. She got no
reply for two days because remarkable things were happening to the
telegraph wires of England just then, and her message, in the hands
of a boy scout on a bicycle, reached Mr. Britling’s house only on
Monday afternoon. He was then at Claverings discussing the invasion
of Belgium that made Britain’s participation in the war inevitable,
and he did not open the little red-brown envelope until about
half-past six. He failed to mark the date and hours upon it, but he
perceived that it was essentially a challenge. He was expected, he
saw, to go over at once with his renovated
Gladys and end this unfortunate clash forever in one striking and
passionate scene. His mind was now so full of the war that he found
this the most colourless and unattractive of obligations. But he
felt bound by the mysterious code of honour of the illicit love
affair to play his part. He postponed his departure until after
supper—there was no reason why he should be afraid of
motoring by moonlight if he went carefully—because Hugh came
in with Cissie demanding a game of hockey. Hockey offered a nervous
refreshment, a scampering forgetfulness of the tremendous disaster
of this war he had always believed impossible, that nothing else
could do, and he was very glad indeed of the irruption….

§ 10

For days the broader side of Mr. Britling’s mind, as
distinguished from its egotistical edge, had been reflecting more
and more vividly and coherently the spectacle of civilisation
casting aside the thousand dispersed activities of peace, clutching
its weapons and setting its teeth, for a supreme struggle against
militarist imperialism. From the point of view of Matching’s Easy
that colossal crystallising of accumulated antagonisms was for a
time no more than a confusion of headlines and a rearrangement of
columns in the white windows of the newspapers through which those
who lived in the securities of England looked out upon the world.
It was a display in the sphere of thought and print immeasurably
remote from the real green turf on which one walked, from the voice
and the church-bells of Mr. Dimple that sounded their ample
caresses in one’s ears, from the clashing of the stags who were
beginning to knock the velvet from their horns in the park, or the
clatter of the butcher’s cart and the respectful greeting of the
butcher boy down the lane. It was the spectacle of the world less
real even to most imaginations than the world of novels or
plays. People talked of these things always
with an underlying feeling that they romanced and
intellectualised.

On Thursday, July 23rd, the Austro-Hungarian minister at
Belgrade presented his impossible ultimatum to the Serbian
government, and demanded a reply within forty-eight hours. With the
wisdom of retrospect we know now clearly enough what that meant.
The Sarajevo crime was to be resuscitated and made an excuse for
war. But nine hundred and ninety-nine Europeans out of a thousand
had still no suspicion of what was happening to them. The ultimatum
figured prominently in the morning papers that came to Matching’s
Easy on Friday, but it by no means dominated the rest of the news;
Sir Edward Carson’s rejection of the government proposals for
Ulster was given the pride of place, and almost equally conspicuous
with the Serbian news were the Caillaux trial and the storming of
the St. Petersburg barricades by Cossacks. Herr Heinrich’s
questions at lunch time received reassuring replies.

On Saturday Sir Edward Carson was still in the central
limelight, Russia had intervened and demanded more time for Serbia,
and the Daily Chronicle declared the day a critical one for
Europe. Dublin with bayonet charges and bullets thrust Serbia into
a corner on Monday. No shots had yet been fired in the East, and
the mischief in Ireland that Germany had counted on was well ahead.
Sir Edward Grey was said to be working hard for peace.

“It’s the cry of wolf,” said Mr. Britling to Herr Heinrich.

“But at last there did come a wolf,” said Herr Heinrich. “I wish
I had not sent my first moneys to that Conference upon Esperanto. I
feel sure it will be put off.”

“See!” said Teddy very cheerfully to Herr Heinrich on Tuesday,
and held up the paper, in which “The Bloodshed in Dublin” had
squeezed the “War Cloud Lifting” into a quite subordinate
position.

“What did we tell you?” said Mrs. Britling. “Nobody wants a
European war.”

But Wednesday’s paper vindicated his fears. Germany had
commanded Russia not to mobilise.

“Of course Russia will mobilise,” said Herr Heinrich.

“Or else forever after hold her peace,” said Teddy.

“And then Germany will mobilise,” said Herr Heinrich, “and all
my holiday will vanish. I shall have to go and mobilise too. I
shall have to fight. I have my papers.”

“I never thought of you as a soldier before,” said Teddy.

“I have deferred my service until I have done my thesis,” said
Herr Heinrich. “Now all that will be—Piff! And my thesis
three-quarters finished.”

“That is serious,” said Teddy.

“Verdammte Dummheit!” said Herr Heinrich. “Why do they do
such things?”

On Thursday, the 30th of July, Caillaux, Carson, strikes, and
all the common topics of life had been swept out of the front page
of the paper altogether; the stock exchanges were in a state of
wild perturbation, and food prices were leaping fantastically.
Austria was bombarding Belgrade, contrary to the rules of war
hitherto accepted; Russia was mobilising; Mr. Asquith was, he
declared, not relaxing his efforts “to do everything possible to
circumscribe the area of possible conflict,” and the Vienna
Conference of Peace Societies was postponed. “I do not see why a
conflict between Russia and Austria should involve Western Europe,”
said Mr. Britling. “Our concern is only for Belgium and
France.”

But Herr Heinrich knew better. “No,” he said. “It is the war. It
has come. I have heard it talked about in Germany many times. But I
have never believed that it was obliged to come. Ach! It considers
no one. So long as Esperanto is disregarded, all these things must
be.”

Friday brought photographs of the mobilisation in Vienna, and the news that Belgrade was burning.
Young men in straw hats very like English or French or Belgian
young men in straw hats were shown parading the streets of Vienna,
carrying flags and banners portentously, blowing trumpets or waving
hats and shouting. Saturday saw all Europe mobilising, and Herr
Heinrich upon Teddy’s bicycle in wild pursuit of evening papers at
the junction. Mobilisation and the emotions of Herr Heinrich now
became the central facts of the Dower House situation. The two
younger Britlings mobilised with great vigour upon the playroom
floor. The elder had one hundred and ninety toy soldiers with a
considerable equipment of guns and wagons; the younger had a force
of a hundred and twenty-three, not counting three railway porters
(with trucks complete), a policeman, five civilians and two ladies.
Also they made a number of British and German flags out of paper.
But as neither would allow his troops to be any existing foreign
army, they agreed to be Redland and Blueland, according to the
colour of their prevailing uniforms. Meanwhile Herr Heinrich
confessed almost promiscuously the complication of his distresses
by a hitherto unexpected emotional interest in the daughter of the
village publican. She was a placid receptive young woman named Maud
Hickson, on whom the young man had, it seemed, imposed the more
poetical name of Marguerite.

“Often we have spoken together, oh yes, often,” he assured Mrs.
Britling. “And now it must all end. She loves flowers, she loves
birds. She is most sweet and innocent. I have taught her many words
in German and several times I have tried to draw her in pencil, and
now I must go away and never see her any more.”

His implicit appeal to the whole literature of Teutonic
romanticism disarmed Mrs. Britling’s objection that he had no
business whatever to know the young woman at all.

“Also,” cried Herr Heinrich, facing another aspect of his
distresses, “how am I to pack my things? Since I have been here I have bought many things, many
books, and two pairs of white flannel trousers and some shirts and
a tin instrument that I cannot work, for developing privately Kodak
films. All this must go into my little portmanteau. And it will not
go into my little portmanteau!

“And there is Billy! Who will now go on with the education of
Billy?”

The hands of fate paused not for Herr Heinrich’s embarrassments
and distresses. He fretted from his room downstairs and back to his
room, he went out upon mysterious and futile errands towards the
village inn, he prowled about the garden. His head and face grew
pinker and pinker; his eyes were flushed and distressed. Everybody
sought to say and do kind and reassuring things to him.

“Ach!” he said to Teddy; “you are a civilian. You live in a free
country. It is not your war. You can be amused at it….”

But then Teddy was amused at everything.

Something but very dimly apprehended at Matching’s Easy,
something methodical and compelling away in London, seemed to be
fumbling and feeling after Herr Heinrich, and Herr Heinrich it
appeared was responding. Sunday’s post brought the decision.

“I have to go,” he said. “I must go right up to London to-day.
To an address in Bloomsbury. Then they will tell me how to go to
Germany. I must pack and I must get the taxi-cab from the junction
and I must go. Why are there no trains on the branch line on
Sundays for me to go by it?”

At lunch he talked politics. “I am entirely opposed to the war,”
he said. “I am entirely opposed to any war.”

“Then why go?” asked Mr. Britling. “Stay here with us. We all
like you. Stay here and do not answer your mobilisation
summons.”

“But then I shall lose all my country. I shall lose my papers. I
shall be outcast. I must go.”

“I suppose a man should go with his own country,” Mr. Britling
reflected.

“If there was only one language in all the world, none of such
things would happen,” Herr Heinrich declared. “There would be no
English, no Germans, no Russians.”

“Just Esperantists,” said Teddy.

“Or Idoists,” said Herr Heinrich. “I am not convinced of which.
In some ways Ido is much better.”

“Perhaps there would have to be a war between Ido and Esperanto
to settle it,” said Teddy.

“Who shall we play skat with when you have gone?” asked Mrs.
Britling.

“All this morning,” said Herr Heinrich, expanding in the warmth
of sympathy, “I have been trying to pack and I have been unable to
pack. My mind is too greatly disordered. I have been told not to
bring much luggage. Mrs. Britling, please.”

Mrs. Britling became attentive.

“If I could leave much of my luggage, my clothes, some of them,
and particularly my violin, it would be much more to my
convenience. I do not care to be mobilised with my violin. There
may be much crowding. Then I would but just take my
rucksack….”

“If you will leave your things packed up.”

“And afterwards they could be sent.”

But he did not leave them packed up. The taxi-cab, to order
which he had gone to the junction in the morning on Teddy’s
complaisant machine, came presently to carry him off, and the whole
family and the first contingent of the usual hockey players
gathered about it to see him off. The elder boy of the two juniors
put a distended rucksack upon the seat. Herr Heinrich then shook
hands with every one.

“Write and tell us how you get on,” cried Mrs. Britling.

“But if England also makes war!”

“Write to Reynolds—let me give you his address; he is my
agent in New York,” said Mr. Britling, and wrote it down.

“We’ll come to the village corner with you, Herr Heinrich,”
cried the boys.

“No,” said Herr Heinrich, sitting down into the automobile, “I
will part with you altogether. It is too much….”

“Auf Wiedersehen!” cried Mr. Britling. “Remember,
whatever happens there will be peace at last!”

“Then why not at the beginning?” Herr Heinrich demanded with a
reasonable exasperation and repeated his maturer verdict on the
whole European situation; “Verdammte Bummelei!“

“Go,” said Mr. Britling to the taxi driver.

“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Heinrich!”

“Auf Wiedersehen!“

“Good-bye, Herr Heinrich!”

“Good luck, Herr Heinrich!”

The taxi started with a whir, and Herr Heinrich passed out of
the gates and along the same hungry road that had so recently
consumed Mr. Direck. “Give him a last send-off,” cried Teddy. “One,
Two, Three! Auf Wiedersehen!“

The voices, gruff and shrill, sounded raggedly together. The
dog-rose hedge cut off the sight of the little face. Then the pink
head bobbed up again. He was standing up and waving the panama hat.
Careless of sunstroke….

Then Herr Heinrich had gone altogether….

“Well,” said Mr. Britling, turning away.

“I do hope they won’t hurt him,” said a visitor.

“Oh, they won’t put a youngster like that in the fighting line,”
said Mr. Britling. “He’s had no training yet. And he has to wear
glasses. How can he shoot? They’ll make a clerk of him.”

“He hasn’t packed at all,” said Mrs. Britling to her husband.
“Just come up for an instant and peep at his room.
It’s—touching.”

It was touching.

It was more than touching; in its minute, absurd way it was
symbolical and prophetic, it was the miniature of one small life
uprooted.

The door stood wide open, as he had left it open, careless of
all the little jealousies and privacies of occupation and
ownership. Even the windows were wide open as though he had needed
air; he who had always so sedulously shut his windows since first
he came to England. Across the empty fireplace stretched the great
bough of oak he had brought in for Billy, but now its twigs and
leaves had wilted, and many had broken off and fallen on the floor.
Billy’s cage stood empty upon a little table in the corner of the
room. Instead of packing, the young man had evidently paced up and
down in a state of emotional elaboration; the bed was disordered as
though he had several times flung himself upon it, and his books
had been thrown about the room despairfully. He had made some
little commencements of packing in a borrowed cardboard box. The
violin lay as if it lay in state upon the chest of drawers, the
drawers were all partially open, and in the middle of the floor
sprawled a pitiful shirt of blue, dropped there, the most flattened
and broken-hearted of garments. The fireplace contained an
unsuccessful pencil sketch of a girl’s face, torn across….

Husband and wife regarded the abandoned room in silence for a
time, and when Mr. Britling spoke he lowered his voice.

“I don’t see Billy,” he said.

“Perhaps he has gone out of the window,” said Mrs. Britling also
in a hushed undertone….

“Well,” said Mr. Britling abruptly and loudly, turning away from
this first intimation of coming desolations, “let us go down to our
hockey! He had to go, you know. And Billy
will probably come back again when he begins to feel
hungry….”

§ 11

Monday was a public holiday, the First Monday in August, and the
day consecrated by long-established custom to the Matching’s Easy
Flower Show in Claverings Park. The day was to live in Mr.
Britling’s memory with a harsh brightness like the brightness of
that sunshine one sees at times at the edge of a thunderstorm.
There were tents with the exhibits, and a tent for “Popular
Refreshments,” there was a gorgeous gold and yellow steam
roundabout with motor-cars and horses, and another in green and
silver with wonderfully undulating ostriches and lions, and each
had an organ that went by steam; there were cocoanut shies and many
ingenious prize-giving shooting and dart-throwing and ring-throwing
stalls, each displaying a marvellous array of crockery, clocks,
metal ornaments, and suchlike rewards. There was a race of gas
balloons, each with a postcard attached to it begging the finder to
say where it descended, and you could get a balloon for a shilling
and have a chance of winning various impressive and embarrassing
prizes if your balloon went far enough—fish carvers, a
silver-handled walking-stick, a bog-oak gramophone-record cabinet,
and things like that. And by a special gate one could go for
sixpence into the Claverings gardens, and the sixpence would be
doubled by Lady Homartyn and devoted next winter to the Matching’s
Easy coal club. And Mr. Britling went through all the shows with
his boys, and finally left them with a shilling each and his
blessing and paid his sixpence for the gardens and made his way as
he had promised, to have tea with Lady Homartyn.

The morning papers had arrived late, and he had been reading
them and re-reading them and musing over them intermittently until
his family had insisted upon his coming out to the festivities.
They said that if for no other reason he
must come to witness Aunt Wilshire’s extraordinary skill at the
cocoanut shy. She could beat everybody. Well, one must not miss a
thing like that. The headlines proclaimed, “The Great Powers at
War; France Invaded by Germany; Germany invaded by Russia; 100,000
Germans march into Luxemburg; Can England Abstain? Fifty Million
Loan to be Issued.” And Germany had not only violated the Treaty of
London but she had seized a British ship in the Kiel Canal…. The
roundabouts were very busy and windily melodious, and the shooting
gallery kept popping and jingling as people shot and broke bottles,
and the voices of the young men and women inviting the crowd to try
their luck at this and that rang loud and clear. Teddy and Letty
and Cissie and Hugh were developing a quite disconcerting skill at
the dart-throwing, and were bent upon compiling a complete tea-set
for the Teddy cottage out of their winnings. There was a score of
automobiles and a number of traps and gigs about the entrance to
the portion of the park that had been railed off for the festival,
the small Britling boys had met some nursery visitors from
Claverings House and were busy displaying skill and calm upon the
roundabout ostriches, and less than four hundred miles away with a
front that reached from Nancy to Liège more than a million
and a quarter of grey-clad men, the greatest and best-equipped host
the world had ever seen, were pouring westward to take Paris, grip
and paralyse France, seize the Channel ports, invade England, and
make the German Empire the master-state of the earth. Their
equipment was a marvel of foresight and scientific organisation,
from the motor kitchens that rumbled in their wake to the
telescopic sights of the sharp-shooters, the innumerable
machine-guns of the infantry, the supply of entrenching material,
the preparations already made in the invaded country….

“Let’s try at the other place for the sugar-basin!” said Teddy,
hurrying past. “Don’t get two sugar-basins,” said Cissie breathless in pursuit. “Hugh is trying for a
sugar-basin at the other place.”

Then Mr. Britling heard a bellicose note.

“Let’s have a go at the bottles,” said a cheerful young farmer.
“Ought to keep up our shooting, these warlike times….”

Mr. Britling ran against Hickson from the village inn and learnt
that he was disturbed about his son being called up as a reservist.
“Just when he was settling down here. It seems a pity they couldn’t
leave him for a bit.”

“‘Tis a noosence,” said Hickson, “but anyhow, they give first
prize to his radishes. He’ll be glad to hear they give first prize
to his radishes. Do you think, Sir, there’s very much probability
of this war? It do seem to be beginning like.”

“It looks more like beginning than it has ever done,” said Mr.
Britling. “It’s a foolish business.”

“I suppose if they start in on us we got to hit back at them,”
said Mr. Hickson. “Postman—he’s got his papers too….”

Mr. Britling made his way through the drifting throng towards
the little wicket that led into the Gardens….

He was swung round suddenly by a loud bang.

It was the gun proclaiming the start of the balloon race.

He stood for some moments watching the scene. The balloon start
had gathered a little crowd of people, village girls in white
gloves and cheerful hats, young men in bright ties and ready-made
Sunday suits, fathers and mothers, boy scouts, children, clerks in
straw hats, bicyclists and miscellaneous folk. Over their heads
rose Mr. Cheshunt, the factotum of the estate. He was standing on a
table and handing the little balloons up into the air one by one.
They floated up from his hand like many-coloured grapes, some
rising and falling, some soaring steadily upward, some spinning and
eddying, drifting eastward before the gentle breeze, a string of
bubbles against the sky and the big trees that bounded the
park. Farther away to the right were the
striped canvas tents of the flower-show, still farther off the
roundabouts churned out their music, the shooting galleries popped,
and the swing boats creaked through the air. Cut off from these
things by a line of fencing lay the open park in which the deer
grouped themselves under the great trees and regarded the festival
mistrustfully. Teddy and Hugh appeared breaking away from the
balloon race cluster, and hurrying back to their dart-throwing. A
man outside a little tent that stood apart was putting up a
brave-looking notice, “Unstinted Teas One Shilling.” The Teddy
perambulator was moored against the cocoanut shy, and Aunt Wilshire
was still displaying her terrible prowess at the cocoanuts. Already
she had won twenty-seven. Strange children had been impressed by
her to carry them, and formed her retinue. A wonderful old lady was
Aunt Wilshire….

Then across all the sunshine of this artless festival there
appeared, as if it were writing showing through a picture, “France
Invaded by Germany; Germany Invaded by Russia.”

Mr. Britling turned again towards the wicket, with its
collectors of tribute, that led into the Gardens.

§ 12

The Claverings gardens, and particularly the great rockery, the
lily pond, and the herbaceous borders, were unusually populous with
unaccustomed visitors and shy young couples. Mr. Britling had to go
to the house for instructions, and guided by the under-butler found
Lady Homartyn hiding away in the walled Dutch garden behind the
dairy. She had been giving away the prizes of the flower-show, and
she was resting in a deck chair while a spinster relation presided
over the tea. Mrs. Britling had fled the outer festival earlier,
and was sitting by the tea-things. Lady Meade and two or three
visitors had motored out from Hartleytree to
assist, and Manning had come in with his tremendous confirmation of
all that the morning papers had foreshadowed.

“Have you any news?” asked Mr. Britling.

“It’s war!” said Mrs. Britling.

“They are in Luxemburg,” said Manning. “That can only mean that
they are coming through Belgium.”

“Then I was wrong,” said Mr. Britling, “and the world is
altogether mad. And so there is nothing else for us to do but
win…. Why could they not leave Belgium alone?”

“It’s been in all their plans for the last twenty years,” said
Manning.

“But it brings us in for certain.”

“I believe they have reckoned on that.”

“Well!” Mr. Britling took his tea and sat down, and for a time
he said nothing.

“It is three against three,” said one of the visitors, trying to
count the Powers engaged.

“Italy,” said Manning, “will almost certainly refuse to fight.
In fact Italy is friendly to us. She is bound to be. This is, to
begin with, an Austrian war. And Japan will fight for us….”

“I think,” said old Lady Meade, “that this is the suicide of
Germany. They cannot possibly fight against Russia and France and
ourselves. Why have they ever begun it?”

“It may be a longer and more difficult war than people suppose,”
said Manning. “The Germans reckon they are going to win.”

“Against us all?”

“Against us all. They are tremendously prepared.”

“It is impossible that Germany should win,” said Mr. Britling,
breaking his silence. “Against her Germany has something more than
armies; all reason, all instinct—the three greatest peoples
in the world.”

“At present very badly supplied with war material.”

“That may delay things; it may make the task harder; but it will
not alter the end. Of course we are going to win. Nothing else is
thinkable. I have never believed they meant it. But I see now they
meant it. This insolent arming and marching, this forty years of
national blustering; sooner or later it had to topple over into
action….”

He paused and found they were listening, and he was carried on
by his own thoughts into further speech.

“This isn’t the sort of war,” he said, “that is settled by
counting guns and rifles. Something that has oppressed us all has
become intolerable and has to be ended. And it will be ended. I
don’t know what soldiers and politicians think of our prospects,
but I do know what ordinary reasonable men think of the business. I
know that all we millions of reasonable civilised onlookers are
prepared to spend our last shillings and give all our lives now,
rather than see Germany unbeaten. I know that the same thing is
felt in America, and that given half a chance, given just one extra
shake of that foolish mailed fist in the face of America, and
America also will be in this war by our side. Italy will come in.
She is bound to come in. France will fight like one man. I’m quite
prepared to believe that the Germans have countless rifles and
guns; have got the most perfect maps, spies, plans you can imagine.
I’m quite prepared to hear that they have got a thousand tremendous
surprises in equipment up their sleeves. I’m quite prepared for
sweeping victories for them and appalling disasters for us. Those
are the first things. What I do know is that the Germans understand
nothing of the spirit of man; that they do not dream for a moment
of the devil of resentment this war will arouse. Didn’t we all
trust them not to let off their guns? Wasn’t that the essence of
our liberal and pacific faith? And here they are in the heart of
Europe letting off their guns?”

“And such a lot of guns,” said Manning.

“Then you think it will be a long war, Mr. Britling?” said Lady
Meade.

“Long or short, it will end in the downfall of Germany. But I do
not believe it will be long. I do not agree with Manning. Even now
I cannot believe that a whole great people can be possessed by war
madness. I think the war is the work of the German armaments party
and of the Court party. They have forced this war on Germany.
Well—they must win and go on winning. So long as they win,
Germany will hold together, so long as their armies are not clearly
defeated nor their navy destroyed. But once check them and stay
them and beat them, then I believe that suddenly the spirit of
Germany will change even as it changed after Jena….”

“Willie Nixon,” said one of the visitors, “who came back from
Hamburg yesterday, says they are convinced they will have taken
Paris and St. Petersburg and one or two other little places and
practically settled everything for us by about Christmas.”

“And London?”

“I forgot if he said London. But I suppose a London more or less
hardly matters. They don’t think we shall dare come in, but if we
do they will Zeppelin the fleet and walk through our army—if
you can call it an army.”

Manning nodded confirmation.

“They do not understand,” said Mr. Britling.

“Sir George Padish told me the same sort of thing,” said Lady
Homartyn. “He was in Berlin in June.”

“Of course the efficiency of their preparations is almost
incredible,” said another of Lady Meade’s party.

“They have thought out and got ready for
everything—literally everything.”

§ 13

Mr. Britling had been a little surprised by the speech he had
made. He hadn’t realised before he began to talk how angry and
scornful he was at this final coming into
action of the Teutonic militarism that had so long menaced his
world. He had always said it would never really fight—and
here it was fighting! He was furious with the indignation of an
apologist betrayed. He had only realised the strength and passion
of his own belligerent opinions as he had heard them, and as he
walked back with his wife through the village to the Dower House,
he was still in the swirl of this self-discovery; he was darkly
silent, devising fiercely denunciatory phrases against Krupp and
Kaiser. “Krupp and Kaiser,” he grasped that obvious, convenient
alliteration. “It is all that is bad in mediævalism allied to
all that is bad in modernity,” he told himself.

“The world,” he said, startling Mrs. Britling with his sudden
speech, “will be intolerable to live in, it will be unendurable for
a decent human being, unless we win this war.

“We must smash or be smashed….”

His brain was so busy with such stuff that for a time he stared
at Mrs. Harrowdean’s belated telegram without grasping the meaning
of a word of it. He realised slowly that it was incumbent upon him
to go over to her, but he postponed his departure very readily in
order to play hockey. Besides which it would be a full moon, and he
felt that summer moonlight was far better than sunset and dinner
time for the declarations he was expected to make. And then he went
on phrase-making again about Germany until he had actually bullied
off at hockey.

Suddenly in the midst of the game he had an amazing thought. It
came to him like a physical twinge.

“What the devil are we doing at this hockey?” he asked abruptly
of Teddy, who was coming up to bully after a goal. “We ought to be
drilling or shooting against those infernal Germans.”

Teddy looked at him questioningly.

“Oh, come on!” said Mr. Britling with a gust of impatience, and
snapped the sticks together.

§ 14

Mr. Britling started for his moonlight ride about half-past nine
that night. He announced that he could neither rest nor work, the
war had thrown him into a fever; the driving of the automobile was
just the distraction he needed; he might not, he added casually,
return for a day or so. When he felt he could work again he would
come back. He filled up his petrol tank by the light of an electric
torch, and sat in his car in the garage and studied his map of the
district. His thoughts wandered from the road to Pyecrafts to the
coast, and to the possible route of a raider. Suppose the enemy
anticipated a declaration of war! Here he might come, and
here….

He roused himself from these speculations to the business in
hand.

The evening seemed as light as day, a cool moonshine filled the
world. The road was silver that flushed to pink at the approach of
Mr. Britling’s headlight, the dark turf at the wayside and the
bushes on the bank became for a moment an acid green as the glare
passed. The full moon was climbing up the sky, and so bright that
scarcely a star was visible in the blue grey of the heavens. Houses
gleamed white a mile away, and ever and again a moth would flutter
and hang in the light of the lamps, and then vanish again in the
night.

Gladys was in excellent condition for a run, and so was Mr.
Britling. He went neither fast nor slow, and with a quite
unfamiliar confidence. Life, which had seemed all day a congested
confusion darkened by threats, became cool, mysterious and aloof
and with a quality of dignified reassurance.

He steered along the narrow road by the black dog-rose hedge,
and so into the high road towards the village. The village was
alight at several windows but almost deserted. Out beyond, a
coruscation of lights burnt like a group of topaz and rubies set in
the silver shield of the night. The
festivities of the Flower Show were still in full progress, and the
reduction of the entrance fee after seven had drawn in every
lingering outsider. The roundabouts churned out their relentless
music, and the bottle-shooting galleries popped and crashed. The
well-patronised ostriches and motorcars flickered round in a
pulsing rhythm; black, black, black, before the naphtha flares.

Mr. Britling pulled up at the side of the road, and sat for a
little while watching the silhouettes move hither and thither from
shadow to shadow across the bright spaces.

“On the very brink of war—on the brink of Armageddon,” he
whispered at last. “Do they understand? Do any of us
understand?”

He slipped in his gear to starting, and was presently running
quietly with his engine purring almost inaudibly along the level
road to Hartleytree. The sounds behind him grew smaller and
smaller, and died away leaving an immense unruffled quiet under the
moon. There seemed no motion but his own, no sound but the neat,
subdued, mechanical rhythm in front of his feet. Presently he ran
out into the main road, and heedless of the lane that turned away
towards Pyecrafts, drove on smoothly towards the east and the sea.
Never before had he driven by night. He had expected a fumbling and
tedious journey; he found he had come into an undreamt-of silvery
splendour of motion. For it seemed as though even the automobile
was running on moonlight that night…. Pyecrafts could wait.
Indeed the later he got to Pyecrafts the more moving and romantic
the little comedy of reconciliation would be. And he was in no
hurry for that comedy. He felt he wanted to apprehend this vast
summer calm about him, that alone of all the things of the day
seemed to convey anything whatever of the majestic tragedy that was
happening to mankind. As one slipped through this still vigil one
could imagine for the first time the millions away there marching, the wide river valleys,
villages, cities, mountain-ranges, ports and seas inaudibly
busy.

“Even now,” he said, “the battleships may be fighting.”

He listened, but the sound was only the low intermittent
drumming of his cylinders as he ran with his throttle nearly
closed, down a stretch of gentle hill.

He felt that he must see the sea. He would follow the road
beyond the Rodwell villages, and then turn up to the crest of
Eastonbury Hill. And thither he went and saw in the gap of the low
hills beyond a V-shaped level of moonlit water that glittered and
yet lay still. He stopped his car by the roadside, and sat for a
long time looking at this and musing. And once it seemed to him
three little shapes like short black needles passed in line ahead
across the molten silver.

But that may have been just the straining of the eyes….

All sorts of talk had come to Mr. Britling’s ears about the
navies of England and France and Germany; there had been public
disputes of experts, much whispering and discussion in private. We
had the heavier vessels, the bigger guns, but it was not certain
that we had the preeminence in science and invention. Were they
relying as we were relying on Dreadnoughts, or had they their
secrets and surprises for us? To-night, perhaps, the great ships
were steaming to conflict….

To-night all over the world ships must be in flight and ships
pursuing; ten thousand towns must be ringing with the immediate
excitement of war….

Only a year ago Mr. Britling had been lunching on a battleship
and looking over its intricate machinery. It had seemed to him then
that there could be no better human stuff in the world than the
quiet, sunburnt, disciplined men and officers he had met…. And
our little army, too, must be gathering to-night, the little army
that had been chastened and reborn in South
Africa, that he was convinced was individually more gallant and
self-reliant and capable than any other army in the world. He would
have sneered or protested if he had heard another Englishman say
that, but in his heart he held the dear belief….

And what other aviators in the world could fly as the Frenchmen
and Englishmen he had met once or twice at Eastchurch and Salisbury
could fly? These are things of race and national quality. Let the
German cling to his gasbags. “We shall beat them in the air,” he
whispered. “We shall beat them on the seas. Surely we shall beat
them on the seas. If we have men enough and guns enough we shall
beat them on land…. Yet—For years they have been
preparing….”

There was little room in the heart of Mr. Britling that night
for any love but the love of England. He loved England now as a
nation of men. There could be no easy victory. Good for us with our
too easy natures that there could be no easy victory. But victory
we must have now—or perish….

He roused himself with a sigh, restarted his engine, and went on
to find some turning place. He still had a colourless impression
that the journey’s end was Pyecrafts.

“We must all do the thing we can,” he thought, and for a time
the course of his automobile along a winding down-hill road held
his attention so that he could not get beyond it. He turned about
and ran up over the hill again and down long slopes inland, running
very softly and smoothly with his lights devouring the road ahead
and sweeping the banks and hedges beside him, and as he came down a
little hill through a village he heard a confused clatter and
jingle of traffic ahead, and saw the danger triangle that warns of
cross-roads. He slowed down and then pulled up abruptly.

Riding across the gap between the cottages was a string of
horsemen, and then a grey cart, and then a team drawing a heavy object—a gun, and then more horsemen,
and then a second gun. It was all a dim brown procession in the
moonlight. A mounted officer came up beside him and looked at him
and then went back to the cross-roads, but as yet England was not
troubling about spies. Four more guns passed, and then a string of
carts and more mounted men, sitting stiffly. Nobody was singing or
shouting; scarcely a word was audible, and through all the column
there was an effect of quiet efficient haste. And so they passed,
and rumbled and jingled and clattered out of the scene, leaving Mr.
Britling in his car in the dreaming village. He restarted his
engine once more, and went his way thoughtfully.

He went so thoughtfully that presently he missed the road to
Pyecrafts—if ever he had been on the road to Pyecrafts at
all—altogether. He found himself upon a highway running
across a flattish plain, and presently discovered by the sight of
the Great Bear, faint but traceable in the blue overhead, that he
was going due north. Well, presently he would turn south and west;
that in good time; now he wanted to feel; he wanted to think. How
could he best help England in the vast struggle for which the empty
silence and beauty of this night seemed to be waiting? But indeed
he was not thinking at all, but feeling, feeling wonder, as he had
never felt it since his youth had passed from him. This war might
end nearly everything in the world as he had known the world; that
idea struggled slowly through the moonlight into consciousness, and
won its way to dominance in his mind.

The character of the road changed; the hedges fell away, the
pine trees and pine woods took the place of the black squat shapes
of the hawthorn and oak and apple. The houses grew rarer and the
world emptier and emptier, until he could have believed that he was
the only man awake and out-of-doors in all the slumbering
land….

For a time a little thing caught hold of his dreaming mind.
Continually as he ran on, black, silent birds rose startled out of the dust of the road before him,
and fluttered noiselessly beyond his double wedge of light. What
sort of bird could they be? Were they night-jars? Were they
different kinds of birds snatching at the quiet of the night for a
dust bath in the sand? This little independent thread of inquiry
ran through the texture of his mind and died away….

And at one place there was a great bolting of rabbits across the
road, almost under his wheels….

The phrases he had used that afternoon at Claverings came back
presently into his head. They were, he felt assured, the phrases
that had to be said now. This war could be seen as the noblest of
wars, as the crowning struggle of mankind against national
dominance and national aggression; or else it was a mere struggle
of nationalities and pure destruction and catastrophe. Its enormous
significances, he felt, must not be lost in any petty bickering
about the minor issues of the conflict. But were these enormous
significances being stated clearly enough? Were they being
understood by the mass of liberal and pacific thinkers? He drove
more and more slowly as these questions crowded upon his attention
until at last he came to a stop altogether…. “Certain things must
be said clearly,” he whispered. “Certain things—The meaning
of England…. The deep and long-unspoken desire for kindliness and
fairness…. Now is the time for speaking. It must be put as
straight now as her gun-fire, as honestly as the steering of her
ships.”

Phrases and paragraphs began to shape themselves in his mind as
he sat with one arm on his steering-wheel.

Suddenly he roused himself, turned over the map in the map-case
beside him, and tried to find his position….

So far as he could judge he had strayed right into
Suffolk….

About one o’clock in the morning he found himself in Newmarket.
Newmarket too was a moonlit emptiness, but as he hesitated at the
cross-roads he became aware of a policeman
standing quite stiff and still at the corner by the church.

“Matching’s Easy?” he cried.

“That road, Sir, until you come to Market Saffron, and then to
the left….”

Mr. Britling had a definite purpose now in his mind, and he
drove faster, but still very carefully and surely. He was already
within a mile or so of Market Saffron before he remembered that he
had made a kind of appointment with himself at Pyecrafts. He stared
at two conflicting purposes. He turned over certain
possibilities.

At the Market Saffron cross-roads he slowed down, and for a
moment he hung undecided.

“Oliver,” he said, and as he spoke he threw over his
steering-wheel towards the homeward way…. He finished his
sentence when he had negotiated the corner safely. “Oliver must
have her….”

And then, perhaps fifty yards farther along, and this time
almost indignantly: “She ought to have married him long
ago….”

He put his automobile in the garage, and then went round under
the black shadow of his cedars to the front door. He had no key,
and for a long time he failed to rouse his wife by flinging pebbles
and gravel at her half-open window. But at last he heard her
stirring and called out to her.

He explained he had returned because he wanted to write. He
wanted indeed to write quite urgently. He went straight up to his
room, lit his reading-lamp, made himself some tea, and changed into
his nocturnal suit. Daylight found him still writing very earnestly
at his pamphlet. The title he had chosen was: “And Now War
Ends.”

§ 15

In this fashion it was that the great war began in Europe and
came to one man in Matching’s Easy, as it
came to countless intelligent men in countless pleasant homes that
had scarcely heeded its coming through all the years of its
relentless preparation. The familiar scenery of life was drawn
aside, and War stood unveiled. “I am the Fact,” said War, “and I
stand astride the path of life. I am the threat of death and
extinction that has always walked beside life, since life began.
There can be nothing else and nothing more in human life until you
have reckoned with me.”

BOOK II

MATCHING’S EASY AT WAR

CHAPTER THE FIRST

ONLOOKERS

§ 1

On that eventful night of the first shots and the first deaths
Mr. Britling did not sleep until daylight had come. He sat writing
at this pamphlet of his, which was to hail the last explosion and
the ending of war. For a couple of hours he wrote with energy, and
then his energy flagged. There came intervals when he sat still and
did not write. He yawned and yawned again and rubbed his eyes. The
day had come and the birds were noisy when he undressed slowly,
dropping his clothes anyhow upon the floor, and got into
bed….

He woke to find his morning tea beside him and the housemaid
going out of the room. He knew that something stupendous had
happened to the world, but for a few moments he could not remember
what it was. Then he remembered that France was invaded by Germany
and Germany by Russia, and that almost certainly England was going
to war. It seemed a harsh and terrible fact in the morning light, a
demand for stresses, a certainty of destruction; it appeared now
robbed of all the dark and dignified beauty of the night. He
remembered just the same feeling of unpleasant, anxious expectation
as he now felt when the Boer War had begun fifteen years ago,
before the first news came. The first news of the Boer War had been
the wrecking of a British armoured train near Kimberley. What
similar story might not the overdue paper tell when presently it
came?

Suppose, for instance, that some important division of our Fleet
had been surprised and overwhelmed….

Suppose the Germans were already crumpling up the French armies
between Verdun and Belfort, very swiftly and dreadfully….

Suppose after all that the Cabinet was hesitating, and that
there would be no war for some weeks, but only a wrangle about
Belgian neutrality. While the Germans smashed France….

Or, on the other hand, there might be some amazing, prompt
success on our part. Our army and navy people were narrow, but in
their narrow way he believed they were extraordinarily good….

What would the Irish do?…

His thoughts were no more than a thorny jungle of unanswerable
questions through which he struggled in un-progressive circles.

He got out of bed and dressed in a slow, distraught manner. When
he reached his braces he discontinued dressing for a time; he
opened the atlas at Northern France, and stood musing over the
Belgian border. Then he turned to Whitaker’s Almanack to browse
upon the statistics of the great European armies. He was roused
from this by the breakfast gong.

At breakfast there was no talk of anything but war. Hugh was as
excited as a cat in thundery weather, and the small boys wanted
information about flags. The Russian and the Serbian flag were in
dispute, and the flag page of Webster’s Dictionary had to be
consulted. Newspapers and letters were both abnormally late, and
Mr. Britling, tiring of supplying trivial information to his
offspring, smoked cigarettes in the garden. He had an idea of
intercepting the postman. His eyes and ears informed him of the
approach of Mrs. Faber’s automobile. It was an old,
resolute-looking machine painted red, and driven by a trusted
gardener; there was no mistaking it.

Mrs. Faber was in it, and she stopped it outside the gate and
made signals. Mrs. Britling, attracted by the catastrophic sounds of Mrs. Faber’s vehicle, came
out by the front door, and she and her husband both converged upon
the caller.

§ 2

“I won’t come in,” cried Mrs. Faber, “but I thought I’d tell
you. I’ve been getting food.”

“Food?”

“Provisions. There’s going to be a run on provisions. Look at my
flitch of bacon!”

“But——”

“Faber says we have to lay in what we can. This war—it’s
going to stop everything. We can’t tell what will happen. I’ve got
the children to consider, so here I am. I was at Hickson’s before
nine….”

The little lady was very flushed and bright-eyed. Her fair hair
was disordered, her hat a trifle askew. She had an air of enjoying
unwonted excitements. “All the gold’s being hoarded too,” she said,
with a crow of delight in her voice. “Faber says that probably our
cheques won’t be worth that in a few days. He rushed off to
London to get gold at his clubs—while he can. I had to insist
on Hickson taking a cheque. ‘Never,’ I said, ‘will I deal with you
again—never—unless you do….’ Even then he looked at
me almost as if he thought he wouldn’t.

“It’s Famine!” she said, turning to Mr. Britling. “I’ve laid
hands on all I can. I’ve got the children to consider.”

“But why is it famine?” asked Mr. Britling.

“Oh! it is!” she said.

“But why?”

“Faber understands,” she said. “Of course it’s Famine….”

“And would you believe me,” she went on, going back to Mrs.
Britling, “that man Hickson stood behind his counter—where
I’ve dealt with him for years, and
refused absolutely to let me have more than a dozen tins of
sardines. Refused! Point blank!

“I was there before nine, and even then Hickson’s shop was
crowded—crowded, my dear!”

“What have you got?” said Mr. Britling with an inquiring
movement towards the automobile.

She had got quite a lot. She had two sides of bacon, a case of
sugar, bags of rice, eggs, a lot of flour.

“What are all these little packets?” said Mr. Britling.

Mrs. Faber looked slightly abashed.

“Cerebos salt,” she said. “One gets carried away a little. I
just got hold of it and carried it out to the car. I thought we
might have to salt things later.”

“And the jars are pickles?” said Mr. Britling.

“Yes. But look at all my flour! That’s what will go
first….”

The lady was a little flurried by Mr. Britling’s too detailed
examination of her haul. “What good is blacking?” he asked. She
would not hear him. She felt he was trying to spoil her morning.
She declared she must get on back to her home. “Don’t say I didn’t
warn you,” she said. “I’ve got no end of things to do. There’s
peas! I want to show cook how to bottle our peas. For this
year—it’s lucky, we’ve got no end of peas. I came by here
just for the sake of telling you.” And with that she presently
departed—obviously ruffled by Mrs. Britling’s lethargy and
Mr. Britling’s scepticism.

Mr. Britling watched her go off with a slowly rising
indignation.

“And that,” he said, “is how England is going to war! Scrambling
for food—at the very beginning.”

“I suppose she is anxious for the children,” said Mrs.
Britling.

“Blacking!”

“After all,” said Mr. Britling, “if other people are doing that
sort of thing—”

“That’s the idea of all panics. We’ve got not to do it…. The country hasn’t even declared war yet!
Hallo, here we are! Better late than never.”

The head of the postman, bearing newspapers and letters,
appeared gliding along the top of the hedge as he cycled down the
road towards the Dower House corner.

§ 3

England was not yet at war, but all the stars were marching to
that end. It was as if an event so vast must needs take its time to
happen. No doubt was left upon Mr. Britling’s mind, though a
whole-page advertisement in the Daily News, in enormous type
and of mysterious origin, implored Great Britain not to play into
the hands of Russia, Russia the Terrible, that bugbear of the
sentimental Radicals. The news was wide and sweeping, and rather
inaccurate. The Germans were said to be in Belgium and Holland, and
they had seized English ships in the Kiel Canal. A moratorium had
been proclaimed, and the reports of a food panic showed Mrs. Faber
to be merely one example of a large class of excitable people.

Mr. Britling found the food panic disconcerting. It did not
harmonise with his leading motif of the free people of the
world rising against the intolerable burthen of militarism. It
spoilt his picture….

Mrs. Britling shared the paper with Mr. Britling, they stood by
the bed of begonias near the cedar tree and read, and the air was
full of the cheerful activities of the lawn-mower that was being
drawn by a carefully booted horse across the hockey field.

Presently Hugh came flitting out of the house to hear what had
happened. “One can’t work somehow, with all these big things going
on,” he apologised. He secured the Daily News while his
father and mother read The Times. The voices of the younger
boys came from the shade of the trees; they had brought all their
toy soldiers out of doors, and were making entrenched camps in the
garden.

“The financial situation is an extraordinary one,” said Mr. Britling, concentrating his attention…. “All
sorts of staggering things may happen. In a social and economic
system that has grown just anyhow…. Never been planned…. In a
world full of Mrs. Fabers….”

“Moratorium?” said Hugh over his Daily News. “In relation
to debts and so on? Modern side you sent me to, Daddy. I live at
hand to mouth in etymology. Mors and crematorium—do we burn
our bills instead of paying them?”

“Moratorium,” reflected Mr. Britling; “Moratorium. What nonsense
you talk! It’s something that delays, of course. Nothing to do with
death. Just a temporary stoppage of payments…. Of course there’s
bound to be a tremendous change in values….”

§ 4

“There’s bound to be a tremendous change in values.”

On that text Mr. Britling’s mind enlarged very rapidly. It
produced a wonderful crop of possibilities before he got back to
his study. He sat down to his desk, but he did not immediately take
up his work. He had discovered something so revolutionary in his
personal affairs that even the war issue remained for a time in
suspense.

Tucked away in the back of Mr. Britling’s consciousness was
something that had not always been there, something warm and
comforting that made life and his general thoughts about life much
easier and pleasanter than they would otherwise have been, the
sense of a neatly arranged investment list, a shrewdly and
geographically distributed system of holdings in national loans,
municipal investments, railway debentures, that had amounted
altogether to rather over five-and-twenty thousand pounds; his and
Mrs. Britling’s, a joint accumulation. This was, so to speak, his
economic viscera. It sustained him, and kept him going and
comfortable. When all was well he did not feel its existence; he
had merely a pleasant sense of general well-being. When here or
there a security got a little disarranged he
felt a vague discomfort. Now he became aware of grave disorders. It
was as if he discovered he had been accidentally eating toadstools,
and didn’t quite know whether they weren’t a highly poisonous sort.
But an analogy may be carried too far….

At any rate, when Mr. Britling got back to his writing-desk he
was much too disturbed to resume “And Now War Ends.”

“There’s bound to be a tremendous change in values!”

He had never felt quite so sure as most people about the
stability of the modern financial system. He did not, he felt,
understand the working of this moratorium, or the peculiar
advantage of prolonging the bank holidays. It meant, he supposed, a
stoppage of payment all round, and a cutting off of the supply of
ready money. And Hickson the grocer, according to Mrs. Faber, was
already looking askance at cheques.

Even if the bank did reopen Mr. Britling was aware that his
current balance was low; at the utmost it amounted to twenty or
thirty pounds. He had been expecting cheques from his English and
American publishers, and the usual Times cheque. Suppose
these payments were intercepted!

All these people might, so far as he could understand, stop
payment under this moratorium! That hadn’t at first occurred to
him. But, of course, quite probably they might refuse to pay his
account when it fell due.

And suppose The Times felt his peculiar vein of
thoughtfulness unnecessary in these stirring days!

And then if the bank really did lock up his deposit account, and
his securities became unsaleable!

Mr. Britling felt like an oyster that is invited to leave its
shell….

He sat back from his desk contemplating these things. His
imagination made a weak attempt to picture a world in which credit
has vanished and money is of doubtful value. He supposed a large
number of people would just go on buying and
selling at or near the old prices by force of habit.

His mind and conscience made a valiant attempt to pick up “And
Now War Ends” and go on with it, but before five minutes were out
he was back at the thoughts of food panic and bankruptcy….

§ 5

The conflict of interests at Mr. Britling’s desk became
unendurable. He felt he must settle the personal question first. He
wandered out upon the lawn and smoked cigarettes.

His first conception of a great convergent movement of the
nations to make a world peace and an end to militant Germany was
being obscured by this second, entirely incompatible, vision of a
world confused and disorganised. Mrs. Fabers in great multitudes
hoarding provisions, riotous crowds attacking shops, moratorium,
shut banks and waiting queues. Was it possible for the whole system
to break down through a shock to its confidence? Without any sense
of incongruity the dignified pacification of the planet had given
place in his mind to these more intimate possibilities. He heard a
rustle behind him, and turned to face his wife.

“Do you think,” she asked, “that there is any chance of a
shortage of food?”

“If all the Mrs. Fabers in the world run and grab—”

“Then every one must grab. I haven’t much in the way of stores
in the house.”

“H’m,” said Mr. Britling, and reflected…. “I don’t think we
must buy stores now.”

“But if we are short.”

“It’s the chances of war,” said Mr. Britling.

He reflected. “Those who join a panic make a panic. After all,
there is just as much food in the world as there was last month.
And short of burning it the only way of
getting rid of it is to eat it. And the harvests are good. Why
begin a scramble at a groaning board?”

“But people are scrambling! It would be
awkward—with the children and everything—if we ran
short.”

“We shan’t. And anyhow, you mustn’t begin hoarding, even if it
means hardship.”

“Yes. But you won’t like it if suddenly there’s no sugar for
your tea.”

Mr. Britling ignored this personal application.

“What is far more serious than a food shortage is the
possibility of a money panic.”

He paced the lawn with her and talked. He said that even now
very few people realised the flimsiness of the credit system by
which the modern world was sustained. It was a huge growth of
confidence, due very largely to the uninquiring indolence
of—everybody. It was sound so long as mankind did, on the
whole, believe in it; give only a sufficient loss of faith and it
might suffer any sort of collapse. It might vanish
altogether—as the credit system vanished at the breaking up
of Italy by the Goths—and leave us nothing but tangible
things, real property, possession nine points of the law, and that
sort of thing. Did she remember that last novel of
Gissing’s?—”Veranilda,” it was called. It was a picture of
the world when there was no wealth at all except what one could
carry hidden or guarded about with one. That sort of thing came to
the Roman Empire slowly, in the course of lifetimes, but nowadays
we lived in a rapider world—with flimsier institutions.
Nobody knew the strength or the weakness of credit; nobody knew
whether even the present shock might not send it smashing down….
And then all the little life we had lived so far would roll
away….

Mrs. Britling, he noted, glanced ever and again at her sunlit
house—there were new sunblinds, and she had been happy in her
choice of a colour—and listened with a sceptical expression
to this disquisition.

“A few days ago,” said Mr. Britling, trying to make things
concrete for her, “you and I together were worth five-and-twenty
thousand pounds. Now we don’t know what we are worth; whether we
have lost a thousand or ten thousand….”

He examined his sovereign purse and announced he had six pounds.
“What have you?”

She had about eighteen pounds in the house.

“We may have to get along with that for an indefinite time.”

“But the bank will open again presently,” she said. “And people
about here trust us.”

“Suppose they don’t?”

She did not trouble about the hypothesis. “And our investments
will recover. They always do recover.”

“Everything may recover,” he admitted. “But also nothing may
recover. All this life of ours which has seemed so settled and
secure—isn’t secure. I have felt that we were fixed here and
rooted—for all our lives. Suppose presently things sweep us
out of it? It’s a possibility we may have to face. I feel this
morning as if two enormous gates had opened in our lives, like the
gates that give upon an arena, gates giving on a
darkness—through which anything might come. Even death.
Suppose suddenly we were to see one of those great Zeppelins in the
air, or hear the thunder of guns away towards the coast. And if a
messenger came upon a bicycle telling us to leave everything and go
inland….”

“I see no reason why one should go out to meet things like
that.”

“But there is no reason why one should not envisage
them….”

“The curious thing,” said Mr. Britling, pursuing his examination
of the matter, “is that, looking at these things as one does now,
as things quite possible, they are not nearly so terrifying and
devastating to the mind as they would have seemed—last week.
I believe I should load you all into Gladys
and start off westward with a kind of exhilaration….”

She looked at him as if she would speak, and said nothing. She
suspected him of hating his home and affecting to care for it out
of politeness to her….

“Perhaps mankind tries too much to settle down. Perhaps these
stirrings up have to occur to save us from our disposition to
stuffy comfort. There’s the magic call of the unknown experience,
of dangers and hardships. One wants to go. But unless some push
comes one does not go. There is a spell that keeps one to the lair
and the old familiar ways. Now I am afraid—and at the same
time I feel that the spell is broken. The magic prison is suddenly
all doors. You may call this ruin, bankruptcy, invasion, flight;
they are doors out of habit and routine…. I have been doing
nothing for so long, except idle things and discursive things.”

“I thought that you managed to be happy here. You have done a
lot of work.”

“Writing is recording, not living. But now I feel suddenly that
we are living intensely. It is as if the whole quality of life was
changing. There are such times. There are times when the spirit of
life changes altogether. The old world knew that better than we do.
It made a distinction between weekdays and Sabbaths, and between
feasts and fasts and days of devotion. That is just what has
happened now. Week-day rules must be put aside. Before—oh!
three days ago, competition was fair, it was fair and tolerable to
get the best food one could and hold on to one’s own. But that
isn’t right now. War makes a Sabbath, and we shut the shops. The
banks are shut, and the world still feels as though Sunday was
keeping on….”

He saw his own way clear.

“The scale has altered. It does not matter now in the least if
we are ruined. It does not matter in the least if we have to live
upon potatoes and run into debt for our
rent. These now are the most incidental of things. A week ago they
would have been of the first importance. Here we are face to face
with the greatest catastrophe and the greatest opportunity in
history. We have to plunge through catastrophe to opportunity.
There is nothing to be done now in the whole world except to get
the best out of this tremendous fusing up of all the settled things
of life.” He had got what he wanted. He left her standing upon the
lawn and hurried back to his desk….

§ 6

When Mr. Britling, after a strenuous morning among high ideals,
descended for lunch, he found Mr. Lawrence Carmine had come over to
join him at that meal. Mr. Carmine was standing in the hall with
his legs very wide apart reading The Times for the fourth
time. “I can do no work,” he said, turning round. “I can’t fix my
mind. I suppose we are going to war. I’d got so used to the war
with Germany that I never imagined it would happen. Gods! what a
bore it will be…. And Maxse and all those scaremongers
cock-a-hoop and ‘I told you so.’ Damn these Germans!”

He looked despondent and worried. He followed Mr. Britling
towards the dining-room with his hands deep in his pockets.

“It’s going to be a tremendous thing,” he said, after he had
greeted Mrs. Britling and Hugh and Aunt Wilshire and Teddy, and
seated himself at Mr. Britling’s hospitable board. “It’s going to
upset everything. We don’t begin to imagine all the mischief it is
going to do.”

Mr. Britling was full of the heady draught of liberal optimism
he had been brewing upstairs. “I am not sorry I have lived to see
this war,” he said. “It may be a tremendous catastrophe in one
sense, but in another it is a huge step forward in human life. It
is the end of forty years of evil suspense. It is crisis and
solution.”

“I wish I could see it like that,” said Mr. Carmine.

“It is like a thaw—everything has been in a frozen
confusion since that Jew-German Treaty of Berlin. And since
1871.”

“Why not since Schleswig-Holstein?” said Mr. Carmine.

“Why not? Or since the Treaty of Vienna?”

“Or since—One might go back.”

“To the Roman Empire,” said Hugh.

“To the first conquest of all,” said Teddy….

“I couldn’t work this morning,” said Hugh. “I have been reading
in the Encyclopædia about races and religions in the
Balkans…. It’s very mixed.”

“So long as it could only be dealt with piecemeal,” said Mr.
Britling. “And that is just where the tremendous opportunity of
this war comes in. Now everything becomes fluid. We can redraw the
map of the world. A week ago we were all quarrelling bitterly about
things too little for human impatience. Now suddenly we face an
epoch. This is an epoch. The world is plastic for men to do what
they will with it. This is the end and the beginning of an age.
This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the
Reformation…. And we live in it….”

He paused impressively.

“I wonder what will happen to Albania?” said Hugh, but his
comment was disregarded.

“War makes men bitter and narrow,” said Mr. Carmine.

“War narrowly conceived,” said Mr. Britling. “But this is an
indignant and generous war.”

They speculated about the possible intervention of the United
States. Mr. Britling thought that the attack on Belgium demanded
the intervention of every civilised power, that all the best
instincts of America would be for intervention. “The more,” he
said, “the quicker.”

“It would be strange if the last power left out to mediate were
to be China,” said Mr. Carmine. “The one
people in the world who really believe in peace…. I wish I had
your confidence, Britling.”

For a time they contemplated a sort of Grand Inquest on Germany
and militarism, presided over by the Wisdom of the East. Militarism
was, as it were, to be buried as a suicide at four cross-roads,
with a stake through its body to prevent any untimely
resuscitation.

§ 7

Mr. Britling was in a phase of imaginative release. Such a
release was one of the first effects of the war upon many educated
minds. Things that had seemed solid forever were visibly in flux;
things that had seemed stone were alive. Every boundary, every
government, was seen for the provisional thing it was. He talked of
his World Congress meeting year by year, until it ceased to be a
speculation and became a mere intelligent anticipation; he talked
of the “manifest necessity” of a Supreme Court for the world. He
beheld that vision at the Hague, but Mr. Carmine preferred Delhi or
Samarkand or Alexandria or Nankin. “Let us get away from the
delusion of Europe anyhow,” said Mr. Carmine….

As Mr. Britling had sat at his desk that morning and surveyed
the stupendous vistas of possibility that war was opening, the
catastrophe had taken on a more and more beneficial quality. “I
suppose that it is only through such crises as these that the world
can reconstruct itself,” I said. And, on the whole that afternoon
he was disposed to hope that the great military machine would not
smash itself too easily. “We want the nations to feel the need of
one another,” he said. “Too brief a campaign might lead to a
squabble for plunder. The Englishman has to learn his dependence on
the Irishman, the Russian has to be taught the value of education
and the friendship of the Pole…. Europe will now have to look to
Asia, and recognise that Indians and Chinamem are also
‘white.’… But these lessons require time
and stresses if they are to be learnt properly….”

They discussed the possible duration of the war.

Mr. Carmine thought it would be a long struggle; Mr. Britling
thought that the Russians would be in Berlin by the next May. He
was afraid they might get there before the end of the year. He
thought that the Germans would beat out their strength upon the
French and Belgian lines, and never be free to turn upon the
Russian at all. He was sure they had underrated the strength and
energy of the French and of ourselves. “The Russians meanwhile,” he
said, “will come on, slowly, steadily, inevitably….”

§ 8

That day of vast anticipations drew out into the afternoon. It
was a day—obsessed. It was the precursor of a relentless
series of doomed and fettered days. There was a sense of enormous
occurrences going on just out of sound and sight—behind the
mask of Essex peacefulness. From this there was no escape. It made
all other interests fitful. Games of Badminton were begun and
abruptly truncated by the arrival of the evening papers;
conversations started upon any topic whatever returned to the war
by the third and fourth remark….

After lunch Mr. Britling and Mr. Carmine went on talking.
Nothing else was possible. They repeated things they had already
said. They went into things more thoroughly. They sat still for a
time, and then suddenly broke out with some new
consideration….

It had been their custom to play skat with Herr Heinrich, who
had shown them the game very explicitly and thoroughly. But there
was no longer any Herr Heinrich—and somehow German games were
already out of fashion. The two philosophers admitted that they had
already considered skat to be complicated without subtlety, and
that its chief delight for them had been the pink earnestness of Herr Heinrich, his inability to
grasp their complete but tacit comprehension of its innocent
strategy, and his invariable ill-success to bring off the coups
that flashed before his imagination.

He would survey the destructive counter-stroke with unconcealed
surprise. He would verify his first impression by craning towards
it and adjusting his glasses on his nose. He had a characteristic
way of doing this with one stiff finger on either side of his
sturdy nose.

“It is very fortunate for you that you have played that card,”
he would say, growing pinker and pinker with hasty cerebration. “Or
else—yes”—a glance at his own cards—”it would
have been altogether bad for you. I had taken only a very small
risk…. Now I must—”

He would reconsider his hand.

“Zo!” he would say, dashing down a card….

Well, he had gone and skat had gone. A countless multitude of
such links were snapping that day between hundreds of thousands of
English and German homes.

§ 9

The imminence of war produced a peculiar exaltation in Aunt
Wilshire. She developed a point of view that was entirely her
own.

It was Mr. Britling’s habit, a habit he had set himself to
acquire after much irritating experience, to disregard Aunt
Wilshire. She was not, strictly speaking, his aunt; she was one of
those distant cousins we find already woven into our lives when we
attain to years of responsibility. She had been a presence in his
father’s household when Mr. Britling was a boy. Then she had been
called “Jane,” or “Cousin Jane,” or “Your cousin Wilshire.” It had
been a kindly freak of Mr. Britling’s to promote her to Aunty
rank.

She eked out a small inheritance by staying with relatives. Mr.
Britling’s earlier memories presented her as a slender young woman of thirty, with a nose upon
which small boys were forbidden to comment. Yet she commented upon
it herself, and called his attention to its marked resemblance to
that of the great Duke of Wellington. “He was, I am told,” said
Cousin Wilshire to the attentive youth, “a great friend of your
great-grandmother’s. At any rate, they were contemporaries. Since
then this nose has been in the family. He would have been the last
to draw a veil over it, but other times, other manners. ‘Publish,’
he said, ‘and be damned.'”

She had a knack of exasperating Mr. Britling’s father, a knack
which to a less marked degree she also possessed in relation to the
son. But Mr. Britling senior never acquired the art of disregarding
her. Her method—if one may call the natural expression of a
personality a method—was an invincibly superior knowledge, a
firm and ill-concealed belief that all statements made in her
hearing were wrong and most of them absurd, and a manner calm,
assured, restrained. She may have been born with it; it is on
record that at the age of ten she was pronounced a singularly
trying child. She may have been born with the air of thinking the
doctor a muff and knowing how to manage all this business better.
Mr. Britling had known her only in her ripeness. As a boy, he had
enjoyed her confidences—about other people and the general
neglect of her advice. He grew up rather to like her—most
people rather liked her—and to attach a certain importance to
her unattainable approval. She was sometimes kind, she was
frequently absurd….

With very little children she was quite wise and Jolly….

So she circulated about a number of houses which at any rate
always welcomed her coming. In the opening days of each visit she
performed marvels of tact, and set a watch upon her lips. Then the
demons of controversy and dignity would get the better of her. She
would begin to correct, quietly but firmly, she would begin to
disapprove of the tone and quality of her
treatment. It was quite common for her visit to terminate in
speechless rage both on the side of host and of visitor. The
remarkable thing was that this speechless rage never endured.
Though she could exasperate she could never offend. Always after an
interval during which she was never mentioned, people began to
wonder how Cousin Jane was getting on…. A tentative
correspondence would begin, leading slowly up to a fresh
invitation.

She spent more time in Mr. Britling’s house than in any other.
There was a legend that she had “drawn out” his mind, and that she
had “stood up” for him against his father. She had certainly
contradicted quite a number of those unfavourable comments that
fathers are wont to make about their sons. Though certainly she
contradicted everything. And Mr. Britling hated to think of her
knocking about alone in boarding-houses and hydropathic
establishments with only the most casual chances for
contradiction.

Moreover, he liked to see her casting her eye over the morning
paper. She did it with a manner as though she thought the
terrestrial globe a great fool, and quite beyond the reach of
advice. And as though she understood and was rather amused at the
way in which the newspaper people tried to keep back the real facts
of the case from her.

And now she was scornfully entertained at the behaviour of
everybody in the war crisis.

She confided various secrets of state to the elder of the
younger Britlings—preferably when his father was within
earshot.

“None of these things they are saying about the war,” she said,
“really matter in the slightest degree. It is all about a spoilt
carpet and nothing else in the world—a madman and a spoilt
carpet. If people had paid the slightest attention to common sense
none of this war would have happened. The thing was perfectly well
known. He was a delicate child, difficult to
rear and given to screaming fits. Consequently he was never
crossed, allowed to do everything. Nobody but his grandmother had
the slightest influence with him. And she prevented him spoiling
this carpet as completely as he wished to do. The story is
perfectly well known. It was at Windsor—at the age of eight.
After that he had but one thought: war with England….

“Everybody seemed surprised,” she said suddenly at tea to Mr.
Carmine. “I at least am not surprised. I am only surprised it did
not come sooner. If any one had asked me I could have told them,
three years, five years ago.”

The day was one of flying rumours, Germany was said to have
declared war on Italy, and to have invaded Holland as well as
Belgium.

“They’ll declare war against the moon next!” said Aunt
Wilshire.

“And send a lot of Zeppelins,” said the smallest boy. “Herr
Heinrich told us they can fly thousands of miles.”

“He will go on declaring war until there is nothing left to
declare war against. That is exactly what he has always done. Once
started he cannot desist. Often he has had to be removed from the
dinner-table for fear of injury. Now, it is ultimatums.”

She was much pleased by a headline in the Daily Express
that streamed right across the page: “The Mad Dog of Europe.”
Nothing else, she said, had come so near her feelings about the
war.

“Mark my words,” said Aunt Wilshire in her most impressive
tones. “He is insane. It will be proved to be so. He will end his
days in an asylum—as a lunatic. I have felt it myself for
years and said so in private…. Knowing what I did…. To such
friends as I could trust not to misunderstand me…. Now at least I
can speak out.

“With his moustaches turned up!” exclaimed Aunt Wilshire after an interval of accumulation….
“They say he has completely lost the use of the joint in his left
arm, he carries it stiff like a Punch and Judy—and he wants
to conquer Europe…. While his grandmother lived there was some
one to keep him in order. He stood in Awe of her. He hated her, but
he did not dare defy her. Even his uncle had some influence. Now,
nothing restrains him.

“A double-headed mad dog,” said Aunt Wilshire. “Him and his
eagles!… A man like that ought never to have been allowed to make
a war…. Not even a little war…. If he had been put under
restraint when I said so, none of these things would have happened.
But, of course I am nobody…. It was not considered worth
attending to.”

§ 10

One remarkable aspect of the English attitude towards the war
was the disposition to treat it as a monstrous joke. It is a
disposition traceable in a vast proportion of the British
literature of the time. In spite of violence, cruelty, injustice,
and the vast destruction and still vaster dangers of the struggles,
that disposition held. The English mind refused flatly to see
anything magnificent or terrible in the German attack, or to regard
the German Emperor or the Crown Prince as anything more than
figures of fun. From first to last their conception of the enemy
was an overstrenuous, foolish man, red with effort, with protruding
eyes and a forced frightfulness of demeanour. That he might be
tremendously lethal did not in the least obscure the fact that he
was essentially ridiculous. And if as the war went on the joke grew
grimmer, still it remained a joke. The German might make a desert
of the world; that could not alter the British conviction that he
was making a fool of himself.

And this disposition kept coming to the surface throughout the
afternoon, now in a casual allusion, now in some deliberate jest. The small boys had discovered the
goose step, and it filled their little souls with amazement and
delight. That human beings should consent to those ridiculous paces
seemed to them almost incredibly funny. They tried it themselves,
and then set out upon a goose-step propaganda. Letty and Cissie had
come up to the Dower House for tea and news, and they were enrolled
with Teddy and Hugh. The six of them, chuckling and swaying,
marched, in vast scissor strides across the lawn. “Left,” cried
Hugh. “Left.”

“Toes out more,” said Mr. Lawrence Carmine.

“Keep stiffer,” said the youngest Britling.

“Watch the Zeppelins and look proud,” said Hugh. “With the chest
out. Zo!“

Mrs. Britling was so much amused that she went in for her
camera, and took a snapshot of the detachment. It was a very
successful snapshot, and a year later Mr. Britling was to find a
print of it among his papers, and recall the sunshine and the
merriment….

§ 11

That night brought the British declaration of war against
Germany. To nearly every Englishman that came as a matter of
course, and it is one of the most wonderful facts in history that
the Germans were surprised by it. When Mr. Britling, as a sample
Englishman, had said that there would never be war between Germany
and England, he had always meant that it was inconceivable to him
that Germany should ever attack Belgium or France. If Germany had
been content to fight a merely defensive war upon her western
frontier and let Belgium alone, there would scarcely have been such
a thing as a war party in Great Britain. But the attack upon
Belgium, the westward thrust, made the whole nation flame
unanimously into war. It settled a question that was in open debate
up to the very outbreak of the conflict. Up to the last the English
had cherished the idea that in Germany, just
as in England, the mass of people were kindly, pacific, and
detached. That had been the English mistake. Germany was really and
truly what Germany had been professing to be for forty years, a War
State. With a sigh—and a long-forgotten thrill—England
roused herself to fight. Even now she still roused herself
sluggishly. It was going to be an immense thing, but just how
immense it was going to be no one in England had yet imagined.

Countless men that day whom Fate had marked for death and wounds
stared open-mouthed at the news, and smiled with the excitement of
the headlines, not dreaming that any of these things would come
within three hundred miles of them. What was war to Matching’s
Easy—to all the Matching’s Easies great and small that make
up England? The last home that was ever burnt by an enemy within a
hundred miles of Matching’s Easy was burnt by the Danes rather more
than a thousand years ago…. And the last trace of those
particular Danes in England were certain horny scraps of indurated
skin under the heads of the nails in the door of St. Clement Danes
in London….

Now again, England was to fight in a war which was to light
fires in England and bring death to English people on English soil.
There were inconceivable ideas in August, 1914. Such things must
happen before they can be comprehended as possible.

§ 12

This story is essentially the history of the opening and of the
realisation of the Great War as it happened to one small group of
people in Essex, and more particularly as it happened to one human
brain. It came at first to all these people in a spectacular
manner, as a thing happening dramatically and internationally, as a
show, as something in the newspapers, something in the character of
an historical epoch rather than a personal experience; only by slow
degrees did it and its consequences invade the common texture of English life. If this story could be
represented by sketches or pictures the central figure would be Mr.
Britling, now sitting at his desk by day or by night and writing
first at his tract “And Now War Ends” and then at other things, now
walking about his garden or in Claverings park or going to and fro
in London, in his club reading the ticker or in his hall reading
the newspaper, with ideas and impressions continually clustering,
expanding, developing more and more abundantly in his mind,
arranging themselves, reacting upon one another, building
themselves into generalisations and conclusions….

All Mr. Britling’s mental existence was soon threaded on the
war. His more or less weekly Times leader became
dissertations upon the German point of view; his reviews of books
and Literary Supplement articles were all oriented more and more
exactly to that one supreme fact….

It was rare that he really seemed to be seeing the war; few
people saw it; for most of the world it came as an illimitable
multitude of incoherent, loud, and confusing impressions. But all
the time he was at least doing his utmost to see the war, to
simplify it and extract the essence of it until it could be
apprehended as something epic and explicable, as a stateable
issue….

Most typical picture of all would be Mr. Britling writing in a
little circle of orange lamplight, with the blinds of his room open
for the sake of the moonlight, but the window shut to keep out the
moths that beat against it. Outside would be the moon and the high
summer sky and the old church tower dim above the black trees half
a mile away, with its clock—which Mr. Britling heard at night
but never noted by day—beating its way round the slow
semicircle of the nocturnal hours. He had always hated conflict and
destruction, and felt that war between civilised states was the
quintessential expression of human failure, it was a stupidity that
stopped progress and all the free variation of humanity, a thousand
times he had declared it impossible, but
even now with his country fighting he was still far from realising
that this was a thing that could possibly touch him more than
intellectually. He did not really believe with his eyes and
finger-tips and backbone that murder, destruction, and agony on a
scale monstrous beyond precedent was going on in the same world as
that which slumbered outside the black ivy and silver shining
window-sill that framed his peaceful view.

War had not been a reality of the daily life of England for more
than a thousand years. The mental habit of the nation for fifty
generations was against its emotional recognition. The English were
the spoilt children of peace. They had never been wholly at war for
three hundred years, and for over eight hundred years they had not
fought for life against a foreign power. Spain and France had
threatened in turn, but never even crossed the seas. It is true
that England had had her civil dissensions and had made wars and
conquests in every part of the globe and established an immense
empire, but that last, as Mr. Britling had told Mr. Direck, was “an
excursion.” She had just sent out younger sons and surplus people,
emigrants and expeditionary forces. Her own soil had never seen any
successful foreign invasion; her homeland, the bulk of her
households, her general life, had gone on untouched by these
things. Nineteen people out of twenty, the middle class and most of
the lower class, knew no more of the empire than they did of the
Argentine Republic or the Italian Renaissance. It did not concern
them. War that calls upon every man and threatens every life in the
land, war of the whole national being, was a thing altogether
outside English experience and the scope of the British
imagination. It was still incredible, it was still outside the
range of Mr. Britling’s thoughts all through the tremendous onrush
and check of the German attack in the west that opened the great
war. Through those two months he was, as it were, a more and more
excited spectator at a show, a show like a baseball match, a spectator with money on the event, rather than a
really participating citizen of a nation thoroughly at war….

§ 13

After the jolt of the food panic and a brief, financial scare,
the vast inertia of everyday life in England asserted itself. When
the public went to the banks for the new paper money, the banks
tendered gold—apologetically. The supply of the new notes was
very insufficient, and there was plenty of gold. After the first
impression that a universal catastrophe had happened there was an
effect as if nothing had happened.

Shops re-opened after the Bank Holiday, in a tentative spirit
that speedily became assurance; people went about their business
again, and the war, so far as the mass of British folk were
concerned, was for some weeks a fever of the mind and intelligence
rather than a physical and personal actuality. There was a keen
demand for news, and for a time there was very little news. The
press did its best to cope with this immense occasion. Led by the
Daily Express, all the halfpenny newspapers adopted a new
and more resonant sort of headline, the streamer, a band of
emphatic type that ran clean across the page and announced
victories or disconcerting happenings. They did this every day,
whether there was a great battle or the loss of a trawler to
announce, and the public mind speedily adapted itself to the new
pitch.

There was no invitation from the government and no organisation
for any general participation in war. People talked unrestrictedly;
every one seemed to be talking; they waved flags and displayed much
vague willingness to do something. Any opportunity of service was
taken very eagerly. Lord Kitchener was understood to have demanded
five hundred thousand men; the War Office arrangements for
recruiting, arrangements conceived on a scale altogether too small,
were speedily overwhelmed by a rush of willing young men. The flow
had to be checked by raising the physical
standard far above the national average, and recruiting died down
to manageable proportions. There was a quite genuine belief that
the war might easily be too exclusively considered; that for the
great mass of people it was a disturbing and distracting rather
than a vital interest. The phase “Business as Usual” ran about the
world, and the papers abounded in articles in which going on as
though there was no war at all was demonstrated to be the truest
form of patriotism. “Leave things to Kitchener” was another
watchword with a strong appeal to the national quality. “Business
as usual during Alterations to the Map of Europe” was the
advertisement of one cheerful barber, widely quoted….

Hugh was at home all through August. He had thrown up his rooms
in London with his artistic ambitions, and his father was making
all the necessary arrangements for him to follow Cardinal to
Cambridge. Meanwhile Hugh was taking up his scientific work where
he had laid it down. He gave a reluctant couple of hours in the
afternoon to the mysteries of Little-go Greek, and for the rest of
his time he was either working at mathematics and mathematical
physics or experimenting in a little upstairs room that had been
carved out of the general space of the barn. It was only at the
very end of August that it dawned upon him or Mr. Britling that the
war might have more than a spectacular and sympathetic appeal for
him. Hitherto contemporary history had happened without his
personal intervention. He did not see why it should not continue to
happen with the same detachment. The last elections—and a
general election is really the only point at which the life of the
reasonable Englishman becomes in any way public—had happened
four years ago, when he was thirteen.

§ 14

For a time it was believed in Matching’s Easy that the German
armies had been defeated and very largely
destroyed at Liège. It was a mistake not confined to
Matching’s Easy.

The first raiding attack was certainly repulsed with heavy
losses, and so were the more systematic assaults on August the
sixth and seventh. After that the news from Liège became
uncertain, but it was believed in England that some or all of the
forts were still holding out right up to the German entry into
Brussels. Meanwhile the French were pushing into their lost
provinces, occupying Altkirch, Mulhausen and Saarburg; the Russians
were invading Bukovina and East Prussia; the Goeben, the
Breslau and the Panther had been sunk by the
newspapers in an imaginary battle in the Mediterranean, and
Togoland was captured by the French and British. Neither the force
nor the magnitude of the German attack through Belgium was
appreciated by the general mind, and it was possible for Mr.
Britling to reiterate his fear that the war would be over too soon,
long before the full measure of its possible benefits could be
secured. But these apprehensions were unfounded; the lessons the
war had in store for Mr. Britling were far more drastic than
anything he was yet able to imagine even in his most exalted
moods.

He resisted the intimations of the fall of Brussels and the
appearance of the Germans at Dinant. The first real check to his
excessive anticipations of victory for the Allies came with the
sudden reappearance of Mr. Direck in a state of astonishment and
dismay at Matching’s Easy. He wired from the Strand office, “Coming
to tell you about things,” and arrived on the heels of his
telegram.

He professed to be calling upon Mr. and Mrs. Britling, and to a
certain extent he was; but he had a quick eye for the door or
windows; his glance roved irrelevantly as he talked. A faint
expectation of Cissie came in with him and hovered about him, as
the scent of violets follows the flower.

He was, however, able to say quite a number of things before Mr. Britling’s natural tendency to do the
telling asserted itself.

“My word,” said Mr. Direck, “but this is some war. It is
going on regardless of every decent consideration. As an American
citizen I naturally expected to be treated with some respect, war
or no war. That expectation has not been realised…. Europe is
dislocated…. You have no idea here yet how completely Europe is
dislocated….

“I came to Europe in a perfectly friendly spirit—and I
must say I am surprised. Practically I have been thrown out, neck
and crop. All my luggage is lost. Away at some one-horse junction
near the Dutch frontier that I can’t even learn the name of.
There’s joy in some German home, I guess, over my shirts; they were
real good shirts. This tweed suit I have is all the wardrobe I’ve
got in the world. All my money—good American
notes—well, they laughed at them. And when I produced English
gold they suspected me of being English and put me under arrest….
I can assure you that the English are most unpopular in Germany at
the present time, thoroughly unpopular…. Considering that they
are getting exactly what they were asking for, these Germans are
really remarkably annoyed…. Well, I had to get the American
consul to advance me money, and I’ve done more waiting about and
irregular fasting and travelling on an empty stomach and viewing
the world, so far as it was permitted, from railway
sidings—for usually they made us pull the blinds down when
anything important was on the track—than any cow that ever
came to Chicago…. I was handed as freight—low grade
freight…. It doesn’t bear recalling.”

Mr. Direck assumed as grave and gloomy an expression as the
facial habits of years would permit.

“I tell you I never knew there was such a thing as war until
this happened to me. In America we don’t know there is such a
thing. It’s like pestilence and famine;
something in the story books. We’ve forgotten it for anything real.
There’s just a few grandfathers go around talking about it. Judge
Holmes and sage old fellows like him. Otherwise it’s just a game
the kids play at…. And then suddenly here’s everybody running
about in the streets—hating and threatening—and nice
old gentlemen with white moustaches and fathers of families
scheming and planning to burn houses and kill and hurt and terrify.
And nice young women, too, looking for an Englishman to spit at; I
tell you I’ve been within range and very uncomfortable several
times…. And what one can’t believe is that they are really doing
these things. There’s a little village called Visé near the
Dutch frontier; some old chap got fooling there with a
fowling-piece; and they’ve wiped it out. Shot the people by the
dozen, put them out in rows three deep and shot them, and burnt the
place. Short of scalping, Red Indians couldn’t have done worse.
Respectable German soldiers….

“No one in England really seems to have any suspicion what is
going on in Belgium. You hear stories—People tell them in
Holland. It takes your breath away. They have set out just to cow
those Belgians. They have started in to be deliberately frightful.
You do not begin to understand…. Well…. Outrages. The sort of
outrages Americans have never heard of. That one doesn’t speak
of…. Well…. Rape…. They have been raping women for
disciplinary purposes on tables in the market-place of
Liège. Yes, sir. It’s a fact. I was told it by a man who had
just come out of Belgium. Knew the people, knew the place, knew
everything. People over here do not seem to realise that those
women are the same sort of women that you might find in Chester or
Yarmouth, or in Matching’s Easy for the matter of that. They still
seem to think that Continental women are a different sort of
women—more amenable to that sort of treatment. They seem to
think there is some special Providential law against such things
happening to English people. And it’s within
two hundred miles of you—even now. And as far as I can see
there’s precious little to prevent it coming nearer….”

Mr. Britling thought there were a few little obstacles.

“I’ve seen the new British army drilling in London, Mr.
Britling. I don’t know if you have. I saw a whole battalion. And
they hadn’t got half-a-dozen uniforms, and not a single rifle to
the whole battalion.

“You don’t begin to realise in England what you are up against.
You have no idea what it means to be in a country where everybody,
the women, the elderly people, the steady middle-aged men, are
taking war as seriously as business. They haven’t the slightest
compunction. I don’t know what Germany was like before the war, I
had hardly gotten out of my train before the war began; but Germany
to-day is one big armed camp. It’s all crawling with soldiers. And
every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his
kit.

“And they’re as sure of winning as if they had got London now.
They mean to get London. They’re cocksure they are going to walk
through Belgium, cocksure they will get to Paris by Sedan day, and
then they are going to destroy your fleet with Zeppelins and
submarines and make a dash across the Channel. They say it’s
England they are after, in this invasion of Belgium. They’ll just
down France by the way. They say they’ve got guns to bombard Dover
from Calais. They make a boast of it. They know for certain you
can’t arm your troops. They know you can’t turn out ten thousand
rifles a week. They come and talk to any one in the trains, and
explain just how your defeat is going to be managed. It’s just as
though they were talking of rounding up cattle.”

Mr. Britling said they would soon be disillusioned.

Mr. Direck, with the confidence of his authentic observations,
remarked after a perceptible interval, “I wonder how.”

He reverted to the fact that had most struck upon his
imagination.

“Grown-up people, ordinary intelligent experienced people,
taking war seriously, talking of punishing England; it’s a
revelation. A sort of solemn enthusiasm. High and low….

“And the trainloads of men and the trainloads of guns….”

“Liège,” said Mr. Britling.

“Liège was just a scratch on the paint,” said Mr. Direck.
“A few thousand dead, a few score thousand dead, doesn’t
matter—not a red cent to them. There’s a man arrived at the
Cecil who saw them marching into Brussels. He sat at table with me
at lunch yesterday. All day it went on, a vast unending river of
men in grey. Endless waggons, endless guns, the whole manhood of a
nation and all its stuff, marching….

“I thought war,” said Mr. Direck, “was a thing when most people
stood about and did the shouting, and a sort of special team did
the fighting. Well, Germany isn’t fighting like that…. I confess
it, I’m scared…. It’s the very biggest thing on record; it’s the
very limit in wars…. I dreamt last night of a grey flood washing
everything in front of it. You and me—and Miss
Corner—curious thing, isn’t it? that she came into
it—were scrambling up a hill higher and higher, with that
flood pouring after us. Sort of splashing into a foam of faces and
helmets and bayonets—and clutching hands—and red
stuff…. Well, Mr. Britling, I admit I’m a little bit overwrought
about it, but I can assure you you don’t begin to realise in
England what it is you’ve butted against….”

§ 15

Cissie did not come up to the Dower House that afternoon, and so
Mr. Direck, after some vague and transparent excuses, made his way
to the cottage.

Here his report become even more impressive. Teddy sat on the
writing desk beside the typewriter and swung his legs slowly. Letty
brooded in the armchair. Cissie presided over certain limited
crawling operations of the young heir.

“They could have the equal of the whole British Army killed
three times over and scarcely know it had happened. They’re
all in it. It’s a whole country in arms.”

Teddy nodded thoughtfully.

“There’s our fleet,” said Letty.

“Well, that won’t save Paris, will it?”

Mr. Direck didn’t, he declared, want to make disagreeable talk,
but this was a thing people in England had to face. He felt like
one of them himself—”naturally.” He’d sort of hurried home to
them—it was just like hurrying home—to tell them of the
tremendous thing that was going to hit them. He felt like a man in
front of a flood, a great grey flood. He couldn’t hide what he had
been thinking. “Where’s our army?” asked Letty suddenly.

“Lost somewhere in France,” said Teddy. “Like a needle in a
bottle of hay.”

“What I keep on worrying at is this,” Mr. Direck resumed.
“Suppose they did come, suppose somehow they scrambled over, sixty
or seventy thousand men perhaps.”

“Every man would turn out and take a shot at them,” said
Letty.

“But there’s no rifles!”

“There’s shot guns.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” said Mr. Direck. “They’d
massacre….

“You may be the bravest people on earth,” said Mr. Direck, “but
if you haven’t got arms and the other chaps have—you’re just
as if you were sheep.”

He became gloomily pensive.

He roused himself to describe his experiences at some length,
and the extraordinary disturbance of his mind. He related more particularly his attempts to see
the sights of Cologne during the stir of mobilisation. After a time
his narrative flow lost force, and there was a general feeling that
he ought to be left alone with Cissie. Teddy had a letter that must
be posted; Letty took the infant to crawl on the mossy stones under
the pear tree. Mr. Direck leant against the window-sill and became
silent for some moments after the door had closed on Letty.

“As for you, Cissie,” he began at last, “I’m anxious. I’m real
anxious. I wish you’d let me throw the mantle of Old Glory over
you.”

He looked at her earnestly.

“Old Glory?” asked Cissie.

“Well—the Stars and Stripes. I want you to be able to
claim American citizenship—in certain eventualities. It
wouldn’t be so very difficult. All the world over, Cissie,
Americans are respected…. Nobody dares touch an American citizen.
We are—an inviolate people.”

He paused. “But how?” asked Cissie.

“It would be perfectly easy—perfectly.”

“How?”

“Just marry an American citizen,” said Mr. Direck, with his face
beaming with ingenuous self-approval. “Then you’d be safe, and I’d
not have to worry.”

“Because we’re in for a stiff war!” cried Cissie, and Direck
perceived he had blundered.

“Because we may be invaded!” she said, and Mr. Direck’s sense of
error deepened.

“I vow—” she began.

“No!” cried Mr. Direck, and held out a hand.

There was a moment of crisis.

“Never will I desert my country—while she is at war,” said
Cissie, reducing her first fierce intention, and adding as though
she regretted her concession, “Anyhow.”

“Then it’s up to me to end the war, Cissie,” said Mr. Direck,
trying to get her back to a less spirited attitude.

But Cissie wasn’t to be got back so easily. The war was already beckoning to them in the cottage, and
drawing them down from the auditorium into the arena.

“This is the rightest war in history,” she said. “If I was an
American I should be sorry to be one now and to have to stand out
of it. I wish I was a man now so that I could do something for all
the decency and civilisation the Germans have outraged. I can’t
understand how any man can be content to keep out of this, and
watch Belgium being destroyed. It is like looking on at a murder.
It is like watching a dog killing a kitten….”

Mr. Direck’s expression was that of a man who is suddenly shown
strange lights upon the world.

§ 16

Mr. Britling found Mr. Direck’s talk very indigestible.

He was parting very reluctantly from his dream of a disastrous
collapse of German imperialism, of a tremendous, decisive
demonstration of the inherent unsoundness of militarist monarchy,
to be followed by a world conference of chastened but hopeful
nations, and—the Millennium. He tried now to think that Mr.
Direck had observed badly and misconceived what he saw. An
American, unused to any sort of military occurrences, might easily
mistake tens of thousands for millions, and the excitement of a few
commercial travellers for the enthusiasm of a united people. But
the newspapers now, with a kindred reluctance, were beginning to
qualify, bit by bit, their first representation of the German
attack through Belgium as a vast and already partly thwarted parade
of incompetence. The Germans, he gathered, were being continually
beaten in Belgium; but just as continually they advanced. Each
fresh newspaper name he looked up on the map marked an oncoming
tide. Alost—Charleroi. Farther east the French were
retreating from the Saales Pass. Surely the British, who had now
been in France for a fortnight, would presently be
manifest, stemming the onrush; somewhere
perhaps in Brabant or East Flanders. It gave Mr. Britling an
unpleasant night to hear at Claverings that the French were very
ill-equipped; had no good modern guns either at Lille or Maubeuge,
were short of boots and equipment generally, and rather depressed
already at the trend of things. Mr. Britling dismissed this as
pessimistic talk, and built his hopes on the still invisible
British army, hovering somewhere—

He would sit over the map of Belgium, choosing where he would
prefer to have the British hover….

Namur fell. The place names continued to shift southward and
westward. The British army or a part of it came to light abruptly
at Mons. It had been fighting for thirty-eight hours and defeating
enormously superior forces of the enemy. That was reassuring until
a day or so later “the Cambray—Le Cateau line” made Mr.
Britling realise that the victorious British had recoiled five and
twenty miles….

And then came the Sunday of The Times telegram, which
spoke of a “retreating and a broken army.” Mr. Britling did not see
this, but Mr. Manning brought over the report of it in a state of
profound consternation. Things, he said, seemed to be about as bad
as they could be. The English were retreating towards the coast and
in much disorder. They were “in the air” and already separated from
the Trench. They had narrowly escaped “a Sedan” under the
fortifications of Maubeuge…. Mr. Britling was stunned. He went to
his study and stared helplessly at maps. It was as if David had
flung his pebble—and missed!

But in the afternoon Mr. Manning telephoned to comfort his
friend. A reassuring despatch from General French had been
published and—all was well—practically—and the
British had been splendid. They had been fighting continuously for
several days round and about Mons; they had been attacked at odds
of six to one, and they had repulsed and
inflicted enormous losses on the enemy. They had established an
incontestable personal superiority over the Germans. The Germans
had been mown down in heaps; the British had charged through their
cavalry like charging through paper. So at last and very gloriously
for the British, British and German had met in battle. After the
hard fighting of the 26th about Landrecies, the British had been
comparatively unmolested, reinforcements covering double the losses
had joined them and the German advance was definitely checked …
Mr. Britling’s mind swung back to elation. He took down the entire
despatch from Mr. Manning’s dictation, and ran out with it into the
garden where Mrs. Britling, with an unwonted expression of anxiety,
was presiding over the teas of the usual casual Sunday
gathering…. The despatch was read aloud twice over. After that
there was hockey and high spirits, and then Mr. Britling went up to
his study to answer a letter from Mrs. Harrowdean, the first letter
that had come from her since their breach at the outbreak of the
war, and which he was now in a better mood to answer than he had
been hitherto.

She had written ignoring his silence and absence, or rather
treating it as if it were an incident of no particular importance.
Apparently she had not called upon the patient and devoted Oliver
as she had threatened; at any rate, there were no signs of Oliver
in her communication. But she reproached Mr. Britling for deserting
her, and she clamoured for his presence and for kind and
strengthening words. She was, she said, scared by this war. She was
only a little thing, and it was all too dreadful, and there was not
a soul in the world to hold her hand, at least no one who
understood in the slightest degree how she felt. (But why was not
Oliver holding her hand?) She was like a child left alone in the
dark. It was perfectly horrible the way that people were being kept
in the dark. The stories one heard, “often from quite
trustworthy sources,” were enough to depress and terrify
any one. Battleship after battleship had
been sunk by German torpedoes, a thing kept secret from us for no
earthly reason, and Prince Louis of Battenberg had been discovered
to be a spy and had been sent to the Tower. Haldane too was a spy.
Our army in France had been “practically sold” by the
French. Almost all the French generals were in German pay. The
censorship and the press were keeping all this back, but what good
was it to keep it back? It was folly not to trust people! But it
was all too dreadful for a poor little soul whose only desire was
to live happily. Why didn’t he come along to her and make her feel
she had protecting arms round her? She couldn’t think in the
daytime: she couldn’t sleep at night….

Then she broke away into the praises of serenity. Never had she
thought so much of his beautiful “Silent Places” as she did now.
How she longed to take refuge in some such dreamland from violence
and treachery and foolish rumours! She was weary of every reality.
She wanted to fly away into some secret hiding-place and cultivate
her simple garden there—as Voltaire had done…. Sometimes at
night she was afraid to undress. She imagined the sound of guns,
she imagined landings and frightful scouts “in masks” rushing
inland on motor bicycles….

It was an ill-timed letter. The nonsense about Prince Louis of
Battenberg and Lord Haldane and the torpedoed battleships annoyed
him extravagantly. He had just sufficient disposition to believe
such tales as to find their importunity exasperating. The idea of
going over to Pyecrafts to spend his days in comforting a timid
little dear obsessed by such fears, attracted him not at all. He
had already heard enough adverse rumours at Claverings to make him
thoroughly uncomfortable. He had been doubting whether after all
his “Examination of War” was really much less of a futility than
“And Now War Ends”; his mind was full of a sense of
incomplete statements and unsubstantial
arguments. He was indeed in a state of extreme intellectual worry.
He was moreover extraordinarily out of love with Mrs. Harrowdean.
Never had any affection in the whole history of Mr. Britling’s
heart collapsed so swiftly and completely. He was left incredulous
of ever having cared for her at all. Probably he hadn’t. Probably
the whole business had been deliberate illusion from first to last.
The “dear little thing” business, he felt, was all very well as a
game of petting, but times were serious now, and a woman of her
intelligence should do something better than wallow in fears and
elaborate a winsome feebleness. A very unnecessary and tiresome
feebleness. He came almost to the pitch of writing that to her.

The despatch from General French put him into a kindlier frame
of mind. He wrote instead briefly but affectionately. As a
gentleman should. “How could you doubt our fleet or our army?” was
the gist of his letter. He ignored completely every suggestion of a
visit to Pyecrafts that her letter had conveyed. He pretended that
it had contained nothing of the sort…. And with that she passed
out of his mind again under the stress of more commanding
interests….

Mr. Britling’s mood of relief did not last through the week. The
defeated Germans continued to advance. Through a week of deepening
disillusionment the main tide of battle rolled back steadily
towards Paris. Lille was lost without a struggle. It was lost with
mysterious ease…. The next name to startle Mr. Britling as he sat
with newspaper and atlas following these great events was
Compiègne. “Here!” Manifestly the British were still in
retreat. Then the Germans were in possession of Laon and Rheims and
still pressing south. Maubeuge surrounded and cut off for some
days, had apparently fallen….

It was on Sunday, September the sixth, that the final
capitulation of Mr. Britling’s facile optimism occurred.

He stood in the sunshine reading the Observer which the
gardener’s boy had just brought from the May Tree. He had spread it
open on a garden table under the blue cedar, and father and son
were both reading it, each as much as the other would let him.
There was fresh news from France, a story of further German
advances, fighting at Senlis—”But that is quite close to
Paris!”—and the appearance of German forces at
Nogent-sur-Seine. “Sur Seine!” cried Mr. Britling. “But where can
that be? South of the Marne? Or below Paris perhaps?”

It was not marked upon the Observer’s map, and Hugh ran
into the house for the atlas.

When he returned Mr. Manning was with his father, and they both
looked grave.

Hugh opened the map of northern France. “Here it is,” he
said.

Mr. Britling considered the position.

“Manning says they are at Rouen,” he told Hugh. “Our base is to
be moved round to La Rochelle….”

He paused before the last distasteful conclusion.

“Practically,” he admitted, taking his dose, “they have got
Paris. It is almost surrounded now.”

He sat down to the map. Mr. Manning and Hugh stood regarding
him. He made a last effort to imagine some tremendous strategic
reversal, some stone from an unexpected sling that should fell this
Goliath in the midst of his triumph.

“Russia,” he said, without any genuine hope….

§ 17

And then it was that Mr. Britling accepted the truth.

“One talks,” he said, “and then weeks and months later one
learns the meaning of the things one has been saying. I was saying
a month ago that this is the biggest thing that has happened in
history. I said that this was the supreme
call upon the will and resources of England. I said there was not a
life in all our empire that would not be vitally changed by this
war. I said all these things; they came through my mouth; I suppose
there was a sort of thought behind them…. Only at this moment do
I understand what it is that I said. Now—let me say it over
as if I had never said it before; this is the biggest thing
in history, that we are all called upon to do our utmost to
resist this tremendous attack upon the peace and freedom of the
world. Well, doing our utmost does not mean standing about in
pleasant gardens waiting for the newspaper…. It means the
abandonment of ease and security….

“How lazy we English are nowadays! How readily we grasp the
comforting delusion that excuses us from exertion. For the last
three weeks I have been deliberately believing that a little
British army—they say it is scarcely a hundred thousand
men—would somehow break this rush of millions. But it has
been driven back, as any one not in love with easy dreams might
have known it would be driven back—here and then here and
then here. It has been fighting night and day. It has made the most
splendid fight—and the most ineffectual fight…. You see the
vast swing of the German flail through Belgium. And meanwhile we
have been standing about talking of the use we would make of our
victory….

“We have been asleep,” he said. “This country has been
asleep….

“At the back of our minds,” he went on bitterly, “I suppose we
thought the French would do the heavy work on land—while we
stood by at sea. So far as we thought at all. We’re so
temperate-minded; we’re so full of qualifications and
discretions…. And so leisurely…. Well, France is down. We’ve
got to fight for France now over the ruins of Paris. Because you
and I, Manning, didn’t grasp the scale of it, because we indulged
in generalisations when we ought to have been drilling and working. Because we’ve been doing ‘business as
usual’ and all the rest of that sort of thing, while Western
civilisation has been in its death agony. If this is to be another
’71, on a larger scale and against not merely France but all
Europe, if Prussianism is to walk rough-shod over civilisation, if
France is to be crushed and Belgium murdered, then life is not
worth having. Compared with such an issue as that no other issue,
no other interest matters. Yet what are we doing to decide
it—you and I? How can it end in anything but a German triumph
if you and I, by the million, stand by….”

He paused despairfully and stared at the map.

“What ought we to be doing?” asked Mr. Manning.

“Every man ought to be in training,” said Mr. Britling. “Every
one ought to be participating…. In some way…. At any rate we
ought not to be taking our ease at Matching’s Easy any
more….”

§ 18

“It interrupts everything,” said Hugh suddenly. “These Prussians
are the biggest nuisance the world has ever seen.”

He considered. “It’s like every one having to run out because
the house catches fire. But of course we have to beat them. It has
to be done. And every one has to take a share.

“Then we can get on with our work again.”

Mr. Britling turned his eyes to his eldest son with a startled
expression. He had been speaking—generally. For the moment he
had forgotten Hugh.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

TAKING PART

§ 1

There were now two chief things in the mind of Mr. Britling. One
was a large and valiant thing, a thing of heroic and processional
quality, the idea of taking up one’s share in the great conflict,
of leaving the Dower House and its circle of habits and activities
and going out—. From that point he wasn’t quite sure where he
was to go, nor exactly what he meant to do. His imagination
inclined to the figure of a volunteer in an improvised uniform
inflicting great damage upon a raiding invader from behind a hedge.
The uniform, one presumes, would have been something in the vein of
the costume in which he met Mr. Direck. With a “brassard.” Or he
thought of himself as working at a telephone or in an office
engaged upon any useful quasi-administrative work that called for
intelligence rather than training. Still, of course, with a
“brassard.” A month ago he would have had doubts about the meaning
of “brassard”; now it seemed to be the very keyword for national
organisation. He had started for London by the early train on
Monday morning with the intention of immediate enrolment in any
such service that offered; of getting, in fact, into his brassard
at once. The morning papers he bought at the station dashed his
conviction of the inevitable fall of Paris into hopeful doubts, but
did not shake his resolution. The effect of rout and pursuit and
retreat and retreat and retreat had disappeared from the news. The
German right was being counter-attacked, and seemed in danger of
getting pinched between Paris and Verdun with the British on its flank. This relieved his mind, but
it did nothing to modify his new realisation of the tremendous
gravity of the war. Even if the enemy were held and repulsed a
little there was still work for every man in the task of forcing
them back upon their own country. This war was an immense thing, it
would touch everybody…. That meant that every man must give
himself. That he had to give himself. He must let nothing stand
between him and that clear understanding. It was utterly shameful
now to hold back and not to do one’s utmost for civilisation, for
England, for all the ease and safety one had been
given—against these drilled, commanded, obsessed
millions.

Mr. Britling was a flame of exalted voluntaryism, of patriotic
devotion, that day.

But behind all this bravery was the other thing, the second
thing in the mind of Mr. Britling, a fear. He was prepared now to
spread himself like some valiant turkey-gobbler, every feather at
its utmost, against the aggressor. He was prepared to go out and
flourish bayonets, march and dig to the limit of his power, shoot,
die in a ditch if needful, rather than permit German militarism to
dominate the world. He had no fear for himself. He was prepared to
perish upon the battlefield or cut a valiant figure in the military
hospital. But what he perceived very clearly and did his utmost not
to perceive was this qualifying and discouraging fact, that the war
monster was not nearly so disposed to meet him as he was to meet
the war, and that its eyes were fixed on something beside and
behind him, that it was already only too evidently stretching out a
long and shadowy arm past him towards Teddy—and towards
Hugh….

The young are the food of war….

Teddy wasn’t Mr. Britling’s business anyhow. Teddy must do as he
thought proper. Mr. Britling would not even advise upon that. And
as for Hugh—

Mr. Britling did his best to brazen it out.

“My eldest boy is barely seventeen,” he said. “He’s keen to go,
and I’d be sorry if he wasn’t. He’ll get into some cadet corps of
course—he’s already done something of that kind at school. Or
they’ll take him into the Territorials. But before he’s nineteen
everything will be over, one way or another. I’m afraid, poor chap,
he’ll feel sold….”

And having thrust Hugh safely into the background of his mind
as—juvenile, doing a juvenile share, no sort of man
yet—Mr. Britling could give a free rein to his generous
imaginations of a national uprising. From the idea of a universal
participation in the struggle he passed by an easy transition to an
anticipation of all Britain armed and gravely embattled. Across
gulfs of obstinate reality. He himself was prepared to say, and
accordingly he felt that the great mass of the British must be
prepared to say to the government: “Here we are at your disposal.
This is not a diplomatists’ war nor a War Office war; this is a war
of the whole people. We are all willing and ready to lay aside our
usual occupations and offer our property and ourselves. Whim and
individual action are for peace times. Take us and use us as you
think fit. Take all we possess.” When he thought of the government
in this way, he forgot the governing class he knew. The
slack-trousered Raeburn, the prim, attentive Philbert, Lady
Frensham at the top of her voice, stern, preposterous Carson, boozy
Bandershoot and artful Taper, wily Asquith, the eloquent yet
unsubstantial George, and the immobile Grey, vanished out of his
mind; all those representative exponents of the way things are done
in Great Britain faded in the glow of his imaginative effort; he
forgot the dreary debates, the floundering newspapers, the
“bluffs,” the intrigues, the sly bargains of the week-end party,
the “schoolboy honour” of grown men, the universal weak dishonesty
in thinking; he thought simply of a simplified and ideal government
that governed. He thought vaguely of something behind and beyond them, England, the ruling genius of the
land; something with a dignified assurance and a stable will. He
imagined this shadowy ruler miraculously provided with schemes and
statistics against this supreme occasion which had for so many
years been the most conspicuous probability before the country. His
mind leaping forwards to the conception of a great nation
reluctantly turning its vast resources to the prosecution of a
righteous defensive war, filled in the obvious corollaries of plan
and calculation. He thought that somewhere “up there” there must be
people who could count and who had counted everything that we might
need for such a struggle, and organisers who had schemed and
estimated down to practicable and manageable details….

Such lapses from knowledge to faith are perhaps necessary that
human heroism may be possible….

His conception of his own share in the great national uprising
was a very modest one. He was a writer, a footnote to reality; he
had no trick of command over men, his rôle was observation
rather than organisation, and he saw himself only as an
insignificant individual dropping from his individuality into his
place in a great machine, taking a rifle in a trench, guarding a
bridge, filling a cartridge—just with a brassard or something
like that on—until the great task was done. Sunday night was
full of imaginations of order, of the countryside standing up to
its task, of roads cleared and resources marshalled, of the petty
interests of the private life altogether set aside. And mingling
with that it was still possible for Mr. Britling, he was still
young enough, to produce such dreams of personal service, of sudden
emergencies swiftly and bravely met, of conspicuous daring and
exceptional rewards, such dreams as hover in the brains of every
imaginative recruit….

The detailed story of Mr. Britling’s two days’ search for some
easy and convenient ladder into the service of his threatened
country would be a voluminous one. It would
begin with the figure of a neatly brushed patriot, with an intent
expression upon his intelligent face, seated in the Londonward
train, reading the war news—the first comforting war news for
many days—and trying not to look as though his life was torn
up by the roots and all his being aflame with devotion; and it
would conclude after forty-eight hours of fuss, inquiry, talk,
waiting, telephoning, with the same gentleman, a little fagged and
with a kind of weary apathy in his eyes, returning by the short cut
from the station across Claverings park to resume his connection
with his abandoned roots. The essential process of the interval had
been the correction of Mr. Britling’s temporary delusion that the
government of the British Empire is either intelligent, instructed,
or wise.

The great “Business as Usual” phase was already passing away,
and London was in the full tide of recruiting enthusiasm. That tide
was breaking against the most miserable arrangements for enlistment
it is possible to imagine. Overtaxed and not very competent
officers, whose one idea of being very efficient was to refuse
civilian help and be very, very slow and circumspect and very
dignified and overbearing, sat in dirty little rooms and snarled at
this unheard-of England that pressed at door and window for
enrolment. Outside every recruiting office crowds of men and youths
waited, leaning against walls, sitting upon the pavements, waited
for long hours, waiting to the end of the day and returning next
morning, without shelter, without food, many sick with hunger; men
who had hurried up from the country, men who had thrown up jobs of
every kind, clerks, shopmen, anxious only to serve England and
“teach those damned Germans a lesson.” Between them and this object
they had discovered a perplexing barrier; an inattention. As Mr.
Britling made his way by St. Martin’s Church and across Trafalgar
Square and marked the weary accumulation of this magnificently
patriotic stuff, he had his first inkling of the imaginative
insufficiency of the War Office that had
been so suddenly called upon to organise victory. He was to be more
fully informed when he reached his club.