CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 5774.M6 
 
 Mr. Britling sees it through 
 
 3 1924 011 386 970 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924011386970 
 
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 HlW TOKK • BOSTON ■ CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON ■ BOMBAY ■ CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
MR. BRITLING 
 SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 BY 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 Author, of "The Wife op Sir Isaac Harm an,' 
 "The Research Magnificent," "What 
 Is Coming," etc. 
 
 WITH FRONTISPIECE 
 
 2fan fork 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1016 
 By P. F. COLLIER & SON, Inc. 
 
 Copyright, 1916, 
 By H. G. WELLS 
 
 Published, September, 1016. 
 
 Reprinted. September, 1916, Twice. 
 October, 1916. Twice. November, 1916. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 MATCHING'S EASY AT BASE 
 
 OHAPTEB PA€I 
 
 I Me. Dieeck Visits Me. Beitling 3 
 
 II Me. Beitling Continues His Exposition . . 34 
 
 III The Enteetainment op Me. Dieeck Beaches a 
 
 Climax 74 
 
 IV Me. Beitling in Soliloquy 98 
 
 V The Coming of the Day 125 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 MATCHING'S EASY AT WAB 
 
 I Onlookers 189 
 
 II Taking Paet 230 
 
 III Malignity 273 
 
 IV In the Web of the Ineffective 305 
 
 BOOK III 
 
 THE TESTAMENT OP MATCHING'S EASY 
 
 I Mes. Teddy Goes foe a Walk 383 
 
 II Me. Britling Weites Until Suneise . . .417 
 
BOOK I 
 
 MATCHING'S EAST AT EASE 
 
MR. BRITLING SEES IT 
 THROUGH 
 
 CHAPTEK THE FIEST 
 
 MR. DIKECK VISITS ME. BBITLING 
 § 1 
 
 It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck's first visit to Eng- 
 land, and he was at his acutest perception of differences. 
 He found England in every way gratifying and satis- 
 factory, 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 con- 
 vince himself and everybody else that there were other in- 
 terests 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 Mar- 
 ket Saffron church, where the dear old lady had been con- 
 firmed? And generally he wanted to see Europe. As 
 an interesting side show to the excursion he hoped, in his 
 
4 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 capacity of the rather underworked and rather over-sal- 
 aried 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 adver- 
 tisements 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 say- 
 ing, still with the same firm smile, " Good. It's Eng- 
 lish." 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 compart- 
 ment 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 ab- 
 sence of telephone, of steam-heat, of any dependent bath- 
 room. 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 pic- 
 tures 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 Biver 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 " American- 
 
ME. DIKECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 5 
 
 isms " 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 role. 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 thunder- 
 ing 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 Eailway, on his way to Matching's 
 Easy in Essex, and he was suddenly in the heart of Wash- 
 ington living'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-fea- 
 tured, 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 be- 
 tween its shield-surmounted pillars, and in the distance, 
 beyond all question, was Bracebridge Hall nestling among 
 
6 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 great trees. He had seen thatched and timhered cottages, 
 and half-a-dozen inns with creaking signs. He had seen 
 a fat vicar driving himself along a grassy lane in a govern- 
 ess cart drawn by a fat grey pony. It wasn't like any real- 
 ity 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, co mm uters 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 sub- 
 urbs of London. The suburbs of London stretch west 
 and south and even west by north, but to the north-east- 
 ward there are no suburbs ; instead there is Essex. Essex 
 is not a suburban county; it is a characteristic and in- 
 dividualised county which wins the heart. Between dear 
 Essex and the centre of things lie two great barriers, the 
 East End of London and Epping Eorest. Before a train 
 could get to any villadom with a cargo of season-ticket 
 holders it would have to circle about this rescued wood- 
 land 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 Lon- 
 don, the modern Babylon, is, like the stars, just a light 
 in the nocturnal sky. In Matching's Easy, as Mr. Brit- 
 ling 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. Eobinson, 'e went to Lon J , 'e did. That's 'ow 
 'e 'urt 'is fut." 
 
 Mr. Direck had learnt at the main-line junction that 
 
MR. DIRECK VISITS MR. BRITLING 7 
 
 he had to tell the guard to stop the train for Matohing's 
 Easy; it only stopped "by request"; the thing was get- 
 ting 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 every- 
 thing, 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 ex- 
 pectation 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 stri- 
 dent 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 sec- 
 retary of this society of thoughtful Massachusetts busi- 
 ness 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 
 
8 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 rec- 
 ognition, and then, rather than toil through recondite 
 and possibly already reconsidered books and writings gen- 
 erally, 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 him- 
 self — in a highly concentrated form. In this way a num- 
 ber 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 Match- 
 ing's Easy. He had already sent Mr. Britling a letter 
 of introduction, not indeed intimating his precise pur- 
 pose, 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. Brit- 
 ling'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 ex- 
 pected 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 fa- 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 9 
 
 miliarised 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 mous- 
 tache, his hair, his eyebrows bristled ; his naming 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 Brit- 
 lingness 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 martyr- 
 dom Mr. Direck knew. And Mr. Direck was altogether 
 unprepared for a certain casualness of costume that some- 
 times overtook Mr. Britling. He was wearing now a very 
 old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of knicker- 
 bockers, not tweed breeches but tweed knickerbockers of 
 a remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtu- 
 ous socialistic homespun tweeds that drag out into woolly 
 knots and strings wherever there is attrition. His stock- 
 ings were worsted and wrinkled, and on his feet were those 
 extraordinary slippers of bright-coloured bast-like inter- 
 woven 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 distinc- 
 tion 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 rec- 
 
10 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 ognised 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 phil- 
 anthropist — to acquire the international spirit. Previ- 
 ously 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 re- 
 flective yet original corner of The Times and to the pro- 
 duction 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 obsti- 
 nate 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 hav- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 pressed opiniativeness of Mr. Britling: he found it en- 
 tertaining and stimulating stuff, and it was with genu- 
 ine enthusiasm that he had come over to encounter the man 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITUNG 11 
 
 himself. On his way across the Atlantic and during the 
 intervening days, he had rehearsed this meeting in vary- 
 ing 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 meet- 
 ing and listen. So Mr. Direck had prepared quite a num- 
 ber 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, re- 
 sumed 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 waa 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 every- 
 thing '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 
 
12 ,MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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. Brit- 
 ling 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 suf- 
 fered 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 hesi- 
 tation, 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 com- 
 plication was to defeat this intention. Mr. Direck per- 
 ceived almost at once that Mr. Britling was probably driv- 
 ing 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 nar- 
 rowly missed a collision with a baker's cart at a corner. 
 " I pressed the accelerator," he .explained afterwards, " in- 
 
ME. DIRECK VISITS MR. BRITLING 13 
 
 stead 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 open- 
 ings. 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 con- 
 sidered 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." 
 
14 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 He seemed to feel some explanation was due to Mr. 
 Direct " 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 ef- 
 forts. 
 
 " 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 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 15 
 
 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. 
 
 lie 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 com- 
 pacter 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 conver- 
 sations between Englishmen and Americans. It is a source 
 of many misunderstandings. The two conceptions of con- 
 versation 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 role 
 of auditors wondering when their turn will begin. Their 
 turn never does begin. Mr. Direck sat deeply in his slant- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 pect him to use, realising this only very gradually. 
 
 Mr. Britling, from his praise of the enterprise that had 
 at last brought a ear he could drive within his reach, went 
 on to that favourite topic of all intelligent Englishmen, 
 
16 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 ex- 
 traordinary 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 sys- 
 tematic 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. Brit- 
 ling, 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 cap- 
 turing the entire American and European market in the 
 class of the thousand-dollar car " 
 
 " There's no end of such little incidents," said Mr. Brit- 
 ling, 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 en- 
 terprise and natural radicalism. As soon as it prospered 
 and sent its boys to Oxford it was lost. Our manufactur- 
 uring class was assimilated in no time to the conservative 
 
MK, DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 17 
 
 classes, V nose 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 hut "Whigs and Eadicals. 
 But our peculiar bad luck has been to get a sort of revolu- 
 tionary who is a Tory mandarin too. Euskin and Mor- 
 ris, for example, were as reactionary and anti-scientific 
 as the dukes and the bishops. Machine haters. Science 
 haters. Eule of Thumbites to the bone. So are our cur- 
 rent 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 individu- 
 ally, 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 elec- 
 tricity 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 con- 
 servatism isn't an ultimate thing. After all, we and your 
 
18 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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 in- 
 dicates pretty clearly that he was of genuine English 
 stock, and, if I may say so, quite of your build and com- 
 plexion ; racially, I should say, he was, well — very much 
 what you are. . . ." 
 
 § 1 
 
 This rally of Mr. Direck's mind was suddenly inter- 
 rupted. 
 
 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 mani- 
 fest 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 as- 
 sisted 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 dis- 
 tantly 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 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 19 
 
 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 ap- 
 peared 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 Eobinson — for when he 
 had begun a thing he liked to finish it — found Mr. Brit- 
 ling'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 in- 
 stance, 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-cov- 
 ered 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 
 
20 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 and stuffed birds comforted the landing outside his bed- 
 room. He descended to find the hall occupied by a small 
 bright bristling boy in white flannel shirt and knicker- 
 bockers and bare legs and feet. He stood before the va- 
 cant open fireplace in an attitude that Mr. Direck knew 
 instantly was also Mr. Britling's. " Lunch is in the gar- 
 den," 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 — Gol darn you ! Ouch. Gee-whizz ! 
 Soak him, Maud ! It's up to you, Duke. . . ." 
 
 " Now where did you learn all that ? " asked Mr. Di- 
 reck 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 de- 
 tested the way he wore his hair and the peculiar cut of 
 his knickerbockers and — him. He thought Buster 
 Brown the one drop of paraifin in the otherwise delicious 
 feast of the Sunday Supplement. But he was a diplo- 
 matic 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 Ameri- 
 can jests. He had never dreamt that the fine wine of 
 Maud and Buster could travel. 
 
ME. DIRECK VISITS MR. BRITLING 21 
 
 " Maud's a treat," said the youthful Britling, relapsing 
 Jnto 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 tahle under the big sycamores be- 
 tween 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 house- 
 hold 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 ap- 
 peared from what was presumably the kitchen direction, 
 wheeling a curious wicker erection, which his small guide 
 informed him was called Aunt Clatter — manifestly de- 
 servedly — and which bore on its shelves the substance 
 of the meal. And while the maids at this migratory side- 
 board 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 
 
22 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 and with that look about his arms and legs that suggests 
 overnight growth; and there was an unmistakahle 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." Eor 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. Brit- 
 ling, 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 pa- 
 ternity 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. . . . 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 23 
 
 Eealising 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. Brit- 
 ling and his essays. He found that with a slight change of 
 person, one of his premeditated openings was entirely serv- 
 iceable 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 stand- 
 ardised and systematised the making of such things as au- 
 tomobiles 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 Eobinson 
 — a man who curiously enough in general build and ap- 
 pearance 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 puz- 
 zle 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 associ- 
 ates 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 sud- 
 denly at her elbows. " Shall we take the plates and get 
 
24 MR BKITLING- SEES IT THKOTJGH 
 
 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 Kobinson's illuminating experi- 
 ence was not for her ears. A little baffled, but quite 
 understanding how things were, he turned to his neigh- 
 bour 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 for- 
 tune. 
 
 " 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 con- 
 versation. 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 con- 
 fidential undertone beside a pretty ear with a pretty wave 
 of hair above it.) 
 
ME. DIKECK VISITS MR. BRITLING 25 
 
 " 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 tahle as though she expected to see something 
 purple with yellow spots. " Oh, that is one of Mr. Law- 
 rence 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 indi- 
 cated 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 compli- 
 ment. So that was all right. . . . But the girl on the left 
 of him was speaking across the table to the German tutor, 
 
26 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 daguer- 
 reotype of a cousin of his grandmother's that he had fallen 
 in love with when he was a hoy. 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 pos- 
 sible 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 in- 
 deed. . . . 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 Es- 
 sex 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, flow are the old 
 folks at home?" 
 
 § 10 
 
 The bright interest of this cousinship helped Mr. Direck 
 more than anything to get the better of his Kobinson-anee- 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 27 
 
 dote 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 sup- 
 pose," 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 some- 
 thing about them in the parish registers. Lots of our reg- 
 isters 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 Har- 
 borough 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 round- 
 about." 
 
 " 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. 
 
28 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 "You'd hardly believe me," lie 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 de- 
 parted Washingtons. I doubt though if you'll still find 
 the name about there. Nor will you find many Hinkin- 
 sons 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 Eng- 
 land 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 in- 
 stead of northward it's all different. You're in a differ- 
 ent period, a different society. You're in London sub- 
 urbs 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-pro- 
 moters, 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. 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 29 
 
 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 gramo- 
 phones. This Essex and yonder Surrey are as different 
 as Eussia and Germany. But for one American who 
 comes to look at Essex, twenty go to Godalming and Guild- 
 ford 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 cor- 
 rect costume — or doesn't go. They've got a special scien- 
 tific 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, ex- 
 pensive, thorough way because it's the thing to do. . . . 
 Now here in Essex we're as lax as the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. 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 finger- 
 posts 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 lon- 
 gevity Surrey can't touch us. I want you to be clear on 
 these points, because they really will affect your impres- 
 
30 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 sions. 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 " col- 
 oured" — and the large-nosed lady and all the other in- 
 explicables would get up to. Instead of which Mr. Brit- 
 ling was leading him off alone with . an air of showing 
 him round the premises, and talking too rapidly and va- 
 riously 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 vege- 
 table garden with an abundance of fruit trees, and through 
 a door into a terraced square that had once been a farm- 
 yard, 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 casu- 
 ally that " everybody " bathed when the weather was hot. 
 Thyme and rosemary and suchlike sweet-scented things 
 
ME. DIEECK VISITS ME. BEITLING 31 
 
 grew on the terrace about the tank, and ten trimmed little 
 trees of Arbor vitae stood sentinel. Mr. Direck was tan- 
 talisingly 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 perambu- 
 lator. 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 ap- 
 preciation 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 turn- 
 ings, 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 com- 
 plete; it was various and delightful without being in the 
 least opulent; that was one of the little secrets America 
 
32 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 had to learn. It didn't look as though it had been made 
 or bought or cost anything, it looked as though it had hap- 
 pened rather luckily. . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling's talk became like a wide stream flowing 
 through Mr. Direck's mind, bearing along momentary im- 
 pressions 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 pur- 
 port 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 de- 
 termined to say it even if Mr. Britling went on talking 
 all the time. 
 
MR. DIRECK VISITS MR. BRITLING 33 
 
 "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 farm- 
 yard 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 tremen- 
 dous 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 
 
 ME. BBITLING CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 
 § 1 
 
 Me. Dibeck 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 cha- 
 otic, than any one could have anticipated, and entirely 
 inexplicable by any recognised code of English relation- 
 ships. ... 
 
 " You think that John Bull is dead and a strange gener- 
 ation 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. . . . ." 
 
 34 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 35 
 
 § 2 
 
 He left it at that for the time, but throughout the after- 
 noon Mr. Direck had the gratification of seeing his thought 
 floating round and round in the back-waters of Mr. Brit- 
 ling's mental current. If it didn't itself get into the 
 stream again its reflection at any rate appeared and re- 
 appeared. He was taken about with great assiduity 
 throughout the afternoon, and he got no more than oc- 
 casional 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 
 encyclopaedic 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." Es- 
 sex was the county he knew. He took Mr. Direck out 
 from his walled garden by a little door into a trim pad- 
 dock 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 ex- 
 ercise, 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 ou 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 
36 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 painted sign of the Clavering Arms ; it bad 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 mediaeval brasses of parish priests, and 
 a marble crusader and his lady of some extinguished 
 family which had ruled Matching's Easy before the Main- 
 stays 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 en- 
 veloping 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 any- 
 where 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 do- 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 37 
 
 mesticated 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 do- 
 mestication 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." 
 
 " Keady 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 ap- 
 proached the entrance. 
 
 " I expect we shall find Philbert from the Home Of- 
 fice — or is it the Local Government Board ? — and Sir 
 
38 ME. SETTLING SEES IT THEOTJGH 
 
 Thomas Loot, the Treasury man. There may be some 
 other people of that sort, the people we call the Govern- 
 ing Class. Wives also. And I rather fancy the Countess 
 of Frensham is coming, she's strong on the Irish Ques- 
 tion, and Lady Venetia Trumpingtpn, 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 al- 
 ways asks me to lunch on Sunday and I always refuse — 
 because of the hockey. So you see I put in an appear- 
 ance 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. Brit- 
 lihg 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 bad a lead from Mr. 
 Britiingf Mr. Britling presently called her " Lady Ho- 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION" S9 
 
 martyn." 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 biit 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 
 Tellowplush. But here the only servants werfe 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 hot so 
 much tailored as unobtrusively and yet grammatically 
 clothed. 
 
 § 4 
 
 He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversa- 
 tion when everything was thrown into commotion by the 
 important arrival, of Lady Frensham, and there was a 
 general reshuffling of places. Lady Frensham had ar- 
 rived froni London_by automobile; she appeared in veils 
 and sWathings and a tremendous dust clqak, with a sort of 
 nephew in her train who had driven the car. She was 
 manifestly a constitutionally triumphant woman. A cer- 
 
40 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 tain afternoon lassitude vanished in the swirl of her ar- 
 rival. 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 Eedmond 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 conversa- 
 tion. 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 Eng- 
 land 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. Hum- 
 phry 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. 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 41 
 
 " 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 ener- 
 getic 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 Brit- 
 ish 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 in- 
 credible 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 London- 
 derry sitting opposite " that old rascal, the Prime Minis- 
 ter," at a performance of Mozart's Zauberflbte. 
 
 " 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. . . ." 
 
42 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 " Where did they get those machine-guns and ammuni- 
 tion?" asked Mr. Britling suddenly. 
 
 "Ah! that's a, secret," cried Lady Frensham. 
 
 " Urn," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " You see," said Lady Frensham ; " it will be civil war ! 
 And yet you writing people who have influence do noth- 
 ing to prevent it ! " 
 
 " What are we to do, Lady Erensham ? " 
 
 " 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 sud- 
 denly reminded of a girl cousin of his who had been ex- 
 pelled 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 govern- 
 ment. It's the fault of your Socialists and sentimental- 
 ists. 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 advan- 
 tages? You 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, sup- 
 pose 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 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 43 
 
 a month ago — but when men have loaded guns in their 
 hands they sometimes go off. And then people see red. 
 Eew 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 rebel- 
 lion 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 Eedmondites who invite them now, any- 
 how," 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 Em- 
 peror 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." 
 
44 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " What does it matter if it is ? " said Lady Fren- 
 sham, allowing a belligerent eye to rest for the first time on 
 Philbert. " You drove us to it. One thing we are re- 
 solved upon at any cost. Johnny Redmond may rule Eng- 
 land if he likes ; he shan't rule Ireland. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling shrugged his shoulders, and his face be- 
 trayed 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 de- 
 cided 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 fr*t 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 reconcilia- 
 tion 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 hope- 
 less, Mr. Britling. You're hopeless." 
 
 And Lady Homartyn, seeing that the phase of mere per- 
 sonal verdicts drew near, created a diversion by giving 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 45 
 
 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 — wres- 
 tling with the problem, and Mr. Direck got the conversa- 
 tional initiative. 
 
 " To an American mind it's a little — startling," said 
 Mr. Direck, " to hear ladies expressing such vigorous po- 
 litical 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 discred- 
 itable. There's no good in denying it. Those people you 
 have heard and seen are a not unfair sample of our gov- 
 erning 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." 
 
46 MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " 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 re- 
 spect. And when Mr. Britling took up the thread of 
 speech again it had little or no relation to Mr. Direck's ob- 
 servations. 
 
 " 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 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 47 
 
 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 imagina- 
 tion goes to the point of supposing that some day she won't 
 be there to receive the tea, it means merely that she sup- 
 poses 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 im- 
 possible 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 hap- 
 pen. We are everlasting children in an everlasting nurs- 
 ery. ..." 
 
 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 — 
 
48 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THBOUGH 
 
 like any old scandal — at school. Eor all practical pur- 
 poses 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 par- 
 cel with certain unstable chemicals and a curious arrange- 
 ment of detonators therein, a black parcel destined ulti- 
 mately to shatter nearly every landmark of Mr. Britling's 
 and Lady Erensham'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 vexa- 
 tion 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. . . . 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 49 
 
 "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. 
 " Campanula'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 
 
50 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 in- 
 teresting 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 cer- 
 tain 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. Some- 
 times 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 !'*... 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 51 
 
 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 prepar- 
 ing 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 in- 
 quired. 
 
 " No, I do not do that. But I ask Mr. Carmine and 
 Mrs. Britling and the boys many questions. And some- 
 times 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 phil- 
 ology, 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 Es- 
 peranto and Ido and universal languages and such-like at- 
 tacks 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. No- 
 body here seemed to have a title and nobody seemed to have 
 a definite place. There was Mr. Lawrence Carmine; he 
 
52 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 Coun- 
 cil." 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 " Bight 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 gentle- 
 man, 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. Car- 
 mine 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 inter- 
 change 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 ar- 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 5S 
 
 hour in which the evening light must now be getting a 
 little too soft for Miss Corner's hook. 
 
 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 hoys 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." 
 
54 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 " I found Miss Comer reading — what was it ? the Sun 
 People ? — some old classical Italian work." 
 
 " Campanella," said Hugh, without betraying the slight- 
 est interest in Miss Corner. " Nothing changes in Eng- 
 land, 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 some- 
 thing 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-pos- 
 
 Before Mr. Direck could begin a proper inquiry into 
 the young man's work and outlook, he had got the conversa- 
 tion 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 coun- 
 try 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, 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION" 55 
 
 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'U I come as ? " asked Mr. Direct 
 
 " 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 
 
56 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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. Erom this his head and neck 
 projected, he felt, with a tolerable dignity. Teddy sug- 
 gested 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. <d -.-? 
 
 "Wa-a-a-1," he said with a quaver of laughter, "now 
 who'd have thought it ? " and smiled a consciously Ameri- 
 can 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 ; 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 57 
 
 the feeling of the company was that Mr. Carmine was a 
 mullah. The aunt-like lady with the nohle 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 wrap- 
 pings with the assistance of host and hostess. 
 
 It was all just exactly what Mr. Direck had never ex- 
 pected 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 as- 
 sisted 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 
 had escaped from the stern square imperatives of his 
 
58 MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 Ruf us." 
 
 " 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 your- 
 selves in romantic pursuits and repulsions with other cou- 
 ples. There was no objection to your dancing alone. 
 Teddy, for example, danced alone in order to develop cer- 
 tain 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 under- 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION" 59 
 
 stand 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 as- 
 tonished 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 vis- 
 itor wife. In which Mr. Lawrence Carmine suddenly 
 mingled. 
 
 " In Germany," said Herr Heinrich, " we do not dance 
 
60 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 sweet- 
 est 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 ran- 
 kling 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 some- 
 thing 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. 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 61 
 
 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 ap- 
 peared 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 mysteri- 
 ous 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. Brit- 
 ling 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 mys- 
 terious 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 
 
62 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 solicitude. Letty was away changing; she reappeared 
 jauntily taking leave, disregarding the baby absolutely, 
 and Teddy departed bigamously, wheeling the perambu- 
 lator between the two sisters into the hazes of the moon- 
 light. There was much crying of good nights. Mr. Di- 
 reck's curiosities narrowed down to a point of great inten- 
 sity. . . . 
 
 Of course, Mr. Britling's circle must be a very "Ad- 
 vanced " circle. . . . 
 
 § 10 
 
 Mr. Direck found he had taken leave of the rest of the 
 company, and drifted into a little parlour with Mr. Brit- 
 ling 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 stimu- 
 lants 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 some- 
 thing 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 fire- 
 place 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 whole- 
 some," he said. " That and our Sunday hockey. One 
 starts the new week clear and bright about the mind. 
 Eriday is always my worst working day." 
 
 Mr. Direck leant against the table, wrapped in his 
 golden pheasants, and appreciated the point. 
 
 " Tour young people dance very cheerfully," he said: 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION" 63 
 
 " 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 equiva- 
 lent 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 sud- 
 denly appeared the young lady." 
 
 " Miss Corner's sister ? " 
 
 " Exactly. The village was a little startled. The cot- 
 tager 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. Al- 
 most 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. Direek, startled. 
 
64 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " 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 in- 
 deed," 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 up- 
 stairs, and afterwards asks you another like it in order to 
 perplex himself by the variety of your answers. He re- 
 gards 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 con- 
 trast 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 Olaverings Park and expecting to find it 
 a month later — being carefully taken care of by a squir- 
 rel, 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. 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 65 
 
 " 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 addi- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 tinctive national stamp a German has. He wouldn't be 
 plainly Erench or Italian or Eussian. Other peoples are 
 not made; they are neither made nor created but pro- 
 ceeding — out of a thousand indefinable causes. The Ger- 
 mans 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 re- 
 flected, ' 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 Ted- 
 dy's easy-goingness, come to look at it, is I suppose one of 
 the most fundamental in the world. It reaches to every- 
 thing. It mixes up with education, statecraft, morals. 
 Will you make or will you take ? Those are the two ex- 
 
66 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 treme 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 sud- 
 den 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 weak- 
 ness. . . . 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 unfamiliar- 
 ity and transitoriness of his visitor a freedom he might 
 have failed to find in a close friend. 
 
 w I am frightened at times at all I don't know about in 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 6T 
 
 that boy's mind. I know nothing of his religiosities. 
 He's my son and he must have religiosities. I know noth- 
 ing of his ideas or of his knowledge about sex and all that 
 side of life. I do not know of the things he finds beau- 
 tiful. 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. In- 
 deed 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 dis- 
 tresses. Mr. Prussian respects and fears his father; re- 
 spects 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 prob- 
 lem 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 
 
68 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 your general philosophy. It implies an assured end. 
 Heinrich has his assured end, his philological professor- 
 ship or thereabouts as a part of the Germanic machine. 
 And that too has its assured end in German national as- 
 sertion. Here, we have none of those convictions. We 
 know we haven't finality, and so we are open and apolo- 
 getic 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. Organi- 
 sation 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 continua- 
 tion; 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 fore- 
 sight and fence them about with ' Verbof en ' 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 Eussians, 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 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 69 
 
 believes in Law. He likes to obey. Tbat 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 Kussian and you get the Tartar. Educate 
 the Kussian or the American or the Englishman or the 
 Irishman or Erenchman or any real northern European ex- 
 cept 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, perceiv- 
 ing 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 com- 
 plicated 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 quin* 
 tessential 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 cer- 
 tain 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. 
 
70 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 " 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 Amer- 
 ica 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 Amer- 
 ica we pay much more attention to personal character. 
 Here people, I notice, are not talked to about their per- 
 sonal 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 popu- 
 lar 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. . . . 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION 71 
 
 " Of course Mamie Nelson was a very brilliant girl in- 
 deed. 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. . . . 
 
72 MB. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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? . . . 
 
 Eor 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 ahout 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 pri- 
 vate 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 every- 
 thing mellowed and nothing was destroyed. A soft coun- 
 try. A country with a passion for imperfection. A pad- 
 ded 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 fam- 
 ily? 
 
 Massachusetts — but in heaven. . . . 
 
CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION" 73 
 
 Harps playing two-steps, and kind angels wrapped in 
 moonlight. 
 
 Very softly I and you, 
 
 One turn, Wo turn, three turn, too. 
 
 Off we go! . . . 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 THE EHTEBTAINMENT OF ME. DIEECK BEACHES A CLIMAX 
 
 § 1 
 
 Beeakfast 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. Brit- 
 ling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, talking rather in- 
 tently. 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 expe- 
 rience. It was a tall, lean, sun-bitten youngish man of 
 forty perhaps, in brown tweeds, looking more like the Eng- 
 lishman 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. 
 
 74 
 
ENTEETAINMENT BEACHES A CLIMAX 75 
 
 " Going to have three thousand of 'em," said the Colonel. 
 " Good show." 
 
 His steely eyes seemed to search the cover of Mr. Brit- 
 ling's garden for the missing Manning, and then he de- 
 cided 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 Bendezvous has found out he isn't fit. And every- 
 body ought to be fit. That is the beginning and end of 
 life for Bendezvous. Fitness. An almost mineral qual- 
 ity, an insatiable activity of body, great mental simplicity. 
 So he takes possession of poor old Manning and trots him 
 i for that fourteen miles — at four miles an hour. Mann- 
 ing 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 Ben- 
 dezvous' theory. He is to be found in the afternoon in a 
 hammock suffering from blistered feet, but otherwise un- 
 usually well. But if he can escape it, he does. He 
 hides." 
 
 " But if he doesn't want to go with Bendezvous, why 
 does he ? " said Mr. Direck. 
 
 "Well, Bendezvous 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 Match- 
 ing's Easy. Ah ! behold ! " 
 
 Ear away across the lawn between two blue cedars there-. 
 
76 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 s<vrrv tc > 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, " Rendez- 
 vous 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 Rendez- 
 vous 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 pop- 
 lar,' 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-goingnesb. 
 "He's done wonderful work for the local Boy Scout 
 movement," said Manning. 
 
 " It's Kitchenerism," said Britling. 
 
ENTERTAINMENT REACHES A CLIMAX 77 
 
 " It's the army side of the efficiency stunt," said Mann- 
 ing. 
 
 There followed a digression upon the Boy Scout move- 
 ment, and Mr. Direck made comparisons with the propa- 
 ganda of Seton Thompson in America. " Colonel Teddy- 
 ism," 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. Brit- 
 ling. 
 
 " If there wasn't such a thing as decadence," said Man- 
 ning, " 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 lip, 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 blood- 
 
78 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 shed! 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 Ger- 
 many 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 com- 
 ing like Rendezvous on a Sunday morning, and looking 
 stiffly over Austria's fence. ' Come for a good hard walk, 
 man. Keep Eit.' ..." * 
 
 " 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 Erance — perhaps taking 
 Belgium on the way." 
 
 " Oh 1 — 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 alto- 
 gether 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 school- 
 boy 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 de- 
 gree 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. 
 
ENTEKTAINMENT BEACHES A CLIMAX 79 
 
 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 automo- 
 bile and injured the aide-de-camp who was in it and sev- 
 eral 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 Hatching's Easy. . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling, to whom the explosion was altogether in- 
 audible, 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 sis- 
 ters 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. Di- 
 reck's consciousness ever since his arrival, thickened and 
 multiplied. ... It crept into his mind that he was ex- 
 pected to play. . . . 
 
 He decided he would not play. He took various peo- 
 ple 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 yoiir 
 stick and not raise it above your shoulders." He told 
 
80 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 al- 
 most 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 peram- 
 bulator. Then came further arrivals. At the earliest op- 
 portunity 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 fee! 
 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 sidej" said Cecily, " mind you pasa 
 to me." 
 
 It became evident to Mr. Direck that he was goiiw to 
 play this hockey after all. 
 
ENTEETAINMENT BEACHES A CLIMAX 81 
 
 " Well," lie 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 prac- 
 tice 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 wear- 
 ing 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. 
 
 Hockey as it was played at the Dower House at Match- 
 ing'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 out- 
 wardly 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 for- 
 ward, the less well-informed played a defensive game be- 
 hind 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, ad- 
 vancing 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 
 
82 ME. BRITLING- SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 Manning's weekly paper, The Sectarian, in which a bittei 
 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 com- 
 pletest 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 gentle- 
 men, said, " You, Sir." 
 
 " I'm going to speculate on Mr. Dinks," said Mr. Brit- 
 ling'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 
 
ENTEETAINMENT REACHES A CLIMAX 83 
 
 disposition or maturer years. They included Mr. Eae~ 
 burn, who was considered to have great natural abilities 
 for hockey but little experience. Mr. Eaeburn 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 Car- 
 mine, stripped to the braces, which were richly ornamented 
 with Oriental embroidery, kept goal for our team. 
 
 The centre forwards went through a rapid little cere- 
 mony. 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. Eaeburn. 
 
 " Hey ! " cried Mr. Eaeburn, " stop ! " and advanced, 
 as it seemed to Mr. Direck, with unseemly and threaten- 
 ing gestures towards Cissie. 
 
 But before Mr. Direck could adjust his mind to this 
 new phase of affairs, Cecily had passed the right honour- 
 able 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 ex- 
 traordinarily active in pursuit, administering great lengths 
 of arm and leg with a centralised efficiency he had not 
 hitherto displayed. 
 
84 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 de- 
 cide. 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 
 
ENTEKTAINMENT BEACHES A CLIMAX 85 
 
 aware of him just before his impact. There was a sort 
 of collision from which Mr. Direck emerged with a feel- 
 ing that one side of his face was permanently flattened, 
 but still gallantly resolved to hit the comparatively le- 
 thargic 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 side- 
 car ladies and the gallant Indian had shifted their activi- 
 ties 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 hur- 
 ried 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. 
 
86 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 The crowd became inactive, and then began to drift 
 back to loosely conceived positions. 
 
 " It's no good swarming into goal like that," Mr. Brit- 
 ling, 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 activi- 
 ties. 
 
 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. Direct 
 
 "No. We call him Sunny Jim," said Cecily. 
 " They're bullying off again." 
 
 " Sunny Jim's American too," said Mr. Direck, return- 
 ing 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. Rae- 
 burn 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. Baeburn's that sent the ball within an inch of the 
 
ENTERTAINMENT REACHES A CLIMAX 87 
 
 youngest Britling's head and right across the field; the 
 third resulted in a swift pass from Cecily to the elder Brit- 
 ling son away on her right, and he shot the goal neatly 
 and swiftly through the lattice of Mr. Lawrence Car- 
 mine's defensive movements. And after that very rapidly 
 came another goal for Mr. Britling's side and then an- 
 other. 
 
 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 be- 
 fore, 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 oppor- 
 tunity of some respite from the game to turn up a fresh 
 six inches or so of this accumulation. Naturally Mr. Di- 
 reck 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 
 
88 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 in the course of ten minutes her side had won the two re- 
 maining goals with a score of Five-One; and five goals is 
 " game " by the standards of Hatching's Easy. 
 
 And then with the very slightest of delays these in- 
 satiable 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 understand- 
 ings with her. Ideas of protecting her had gone to the 
 four winds of Heaven. Against them Teddy and a side- 
 car girl with Kaeburn in support made a memorable strug- 
 gle. 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 Kaeburn and then dodged and 
 passed to Cecily. There was a lively struggle to the left ; 
 the ball was hit out by Mr. Kaeburn 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. Kaeburn 
 once more. Teddy, realising that things were serious, 
 was tearing back to attack her. 
 
 Mr. Direck supported with silent intentness. " Cen- 
 tre ! " cried Mr. Britling. " Cen-tre ! " 
 
ENTERTAINMENT REACHES A CLIMAX 89 
 
 " 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 th6 
 perambulator, and went spinning into a border of antir- 
 rhinums. 
 
 " Good ! " cried Cecily. " Splendid shot ! " 
 
 He'd shot a goal. He'd done it well. The perambu- 
 lator it seemed didn't matter. Though apparently the im- 
 pact had awakened the baby. In the margin of his con- 
 sciousness 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. 
 
90 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 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 her- 
 self 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. Kaeburn, they played again, with fewer 
 inefficients and greater skill and swiftness, and Mr. Di- 
 reck 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 embro- 
 cation 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 — hu- 
 mid. 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 
 ores she smiled. He'd caught her style now, he felt; he 
 
ENTERTAINMENT EEACHES A CLIMAX 91 
 
 attempted no more compliments and was frankly her pupil 
 at hockey and Badminton. After supper Mr. Britling re- 
 newed his suggestion of an automobile excursion on the 
 Monday. 
 
 " There's nothing to take you hack 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 niir. and were 
 full of the Sarajevo Murders. Mr. Direck ot the Daily 
 Chronicle and found quite l imated headli ies for a Brit- 
 ish 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 
 
92 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 of the Adriatic? Imagine some one assassinating the 
 American Vice-President, and the bombs being at 6nce 
 ascribed to the arsenal at Toronto ! . . . We take our poli- 
 tics 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 tak- 
 ing tickets for my holidays at an Esperanto Conference 
 at Boulogne." 
 
 § 7 
 
 " There is only one way to master such a thing as driv- 
 ing 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 delibera- 
 tion. Indeed twice they stopped dead in the act of turn- 
 ing into the road, and the engine had to be restarted. 
 
ENTEKTALNMENT BEACHES A CLI MAX 93 
 
 t 
 
 " 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. Di- 
 reck. 
 
 " If 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 village 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. Brit- 
 ling. So much had happened 
 
 The car halted abruptly and the engine stopped. 
 
 " I thought that confounded hen was thinking of cross- 
 ing 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. Di- 
 reck. "And this sort of thing enables one to see the 
 country better." . . . 
 
 Beyond the village Mr. Britling seemed to gather con- 
 fidence. The pace quickened. But whenever other traffic 
 or any indication of a side way appeared discretion re- 
 turned. Mr. Britling stalked his sign posts, crawling to- 
 wards 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. Eor 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. 
 
94 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 Turn- 
 ing." 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 steer- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 plored the church and the churchyard and the parish reg- 
 ister. . . . 
 
 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 Eoman 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 
 
ENTERTAINMENT REACHES A CLIMAX 95 
 
 road like this nothing can happen," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " Unless you broke an axle or burst a tyre," said Mr. 
 Direct 
 
 " 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. Eirst 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 de- 
 mentedly. 
 
 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 stillat a good speed. 
 The motor cyclist smacked against something and van- 
 ished from the problem. The wall seemed to rush up at 
 them and then — collapse. There was a tremendous con- 
 cussion. Mr. Direck gripped at his friend the emer- 
 gency brake, but had only time to touch it before his head 
 hit against the frame of the glass wind-screen, and a cur- 
 tain fell upon everything. . . . 
 
 He opened his eyes upon a broken wall, a crumpled 
 motpr car, and an undamaged motor cyclist in the aviator's 
 
96 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 grati- 
 fying- 
 
 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 lit- 
 tle. . . ." 
 
 Gladys had been abandoned in the ditch, and they had 
 been very kindly brought home by a passing automobile. 
 
ENTEETATNMENT EEACHES A CLIMAX 97 
 
 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 tod 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 particu- 
 larly to her, when they told him he must stay at the Dower 
 House until his arm was cured. He had looked the ap- 
 plication 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 misfor- 
 tune. 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 sua. 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. 
 
CHAPTEE THE FOURTH 
 
 ME. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY 
 § 1 
 
 Veby 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 sleep- 
 less without exaltation. The day had been too much for 
 him altogether; his head, to borrow an admirable Ameri- 
 can expression, was "busy." 
 
 How busy it was, a whole chapter will be needed to 
 describe. . . . 
 
 The impression Mr. Britling had made upon Mr. Di- 
 reck 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 ex- 
 ceptional excitement and nervous activity — when the 
 reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would 
 welter prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of un- 
 happiness — 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 damna- 
 tion 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 in- 
 
 98 
 
MR. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY 99 
 
 supportable 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 thou- 
 sand 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. Brit- 
 ling 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, cohe- 
 rently, 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 
 
100 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 to such fundamental charge and go through phases of 
 the severest discipline. Always at last to be taken by sur- 
 prise 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 pur- 
 pose. 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 per- 
 haps 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 ap- 
 proach of the motor bicycle, and then through a long in- 
 stant 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. 
 
MR. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY 101 
 
 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. Brit- 
 ling. 
 
 !N"o longer did he ask why am I such a fool, but why 
 are we all such fools? He became Man on the automo- 
 bile 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 him- 
 self 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 
 
102 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 or satisfy, but indeed when he was most pitiless about the 
 faults of his race or nation he was really reproaching him- 
 self, 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 con- 
 centrated 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 pri- 
 vate 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 sus- 
 picion 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 fo go on 
 to the task which originally brought Mr. Direck to Match- 
 ing'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 atten- 
 tion towards Miss Cecily Corner. We may see him rather 
 more clearly in the darkness, without any distraction ex- 
 cept his own. 
 
MR. BRITLING IN" SOLILOQUY 103 
 
 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 con- 
 sequences, which were also banging and blundering their 
 way through the Britling mind. It was extraordinarily 
 inconvenient in quite another direction that the automo- 
 bile 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 mat- 
 ters 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 natu- 
 rally 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. Espe- 
 cially 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 quar- 
 
104 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 rels. Something went out of him into all that, which 
 could not he 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 furtive- 
 ness 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 to- 
 gether; 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 in- 
 vade 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 
 Tmm'TrmTn 3 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 dis- 
 cover their extensive difficulties of sympathy. Mr. Brit- 
 
ME. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY 105 
 
 ling's play was characterised by a superficial brilliance, 
 much generosity and extreme unsoundness; he always 
 moved directly his opponent had done so — and then re- 
 flected 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 spe- 
 cious explanation. Temperamentally they were incom- 
 patible. 
 
 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 griev- 
 ance. For several unhappy years she thwarted him and 
 disappointed him, while he filled her with dumb inexpli- 
 cable 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 rela- 
 
106 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 tionship 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 re- 
 lations. 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 flower- 
 ing 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 at- 
 tention to her dignity, and his confidence by a franker and 
 franker emotional neglect. Because she expressed so lit- 
 tle 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 
 
ME. BEETLING IN SOLILOQUY 107 
 
 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 week- 
 end at Pontings that had promised to he 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 to- 
 wards this youngster; it is possible that she did not per- 
 ceive the necessity for any such examination. . . . 
 
 So she went through life, outwardly serene and digni- 
 fied, one of a great company of rather fastidious, rather 
 Unenterprising women who have turned for their happi- 
 ness to secondary things, to those fair inanimate things 
 of household and garden which do not turn again 
 and rend one, to sestheticisms 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 ur- 
 gently 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 
 
108 HE. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 wait- 
 ing for him, he knew not where, a completeness of under- 
 standing, 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 relation- 
 ship 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 per- 
 suasion 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 sueh a spring that it 
 would never thirst again. For the most part Mr. Brit- 
 ling ignored its presence in his mind, and resisted the im- 
 pulses 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 ex- 
 pectation 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 reck- 
 
ME. BKITLING IN SOLILOQUY 109 
 
 coring of it — be 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 deso- 
 late seas, they involved the most startling interventions 
 and the most inconvenient consequences — there were in- 
 terludes 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 mysteri- 
 ous 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 repeti- 
 tions, 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 suf- 
 ficient 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 fa- 
 miliar, a very extensive system of distresses arising out 
 of the latest, the eighth of these digressional adven- 
 tures. ... 
 
 Mr. Britling had got into it very much as he bad got 
 into the ditch on the morning before his smash. He 
 hadn't thought the affair out and he hadn't looked care- 
 fully enough. And it kept on developing in just the ways 
 be would rather that it didn't. 
 
 The seventh affair had been very disconcerting. He 
 bad 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 bis nocturnal reflections so. disagreeable that 
 he had — by no means for the first time — definitely and 
 
110 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 Scrw- 
 tator and the Sectarian, and occasionally poetry in the 
 Bight 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 prim- 
 rose 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. Brit- 
 ling, and then he and she met in London, and went off 
 together with a fine sense of adventure for a day at Rich- 
 mond, 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 ar- 
 dent intimacies were so rapid and impulsive that each 
 
ME. BKITLING IN SOLILOQUY 111 
 
 phase obliterated its predecessor, and it was only -with a 
 vague perplexity that Mr. Britling found himself trans- 
 ferred from the role 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 irrepa- 
 rable loss. " One must love, and all things in life are im- 
 perfect," was how Mr. Britling expressed his reasons for 
 submission. And she had a hold upon him too in a cer- 
 tain 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 ten- 
 der and true. And considerably younger than Mr. Brit- 
 ling. He asked nothing but to love. He offered honour- 
 able marriage. And when one's heart was swelling un- 
 endurably one could weep in safety on his patient shoul- 
 der. 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 
 
112 MK. BRITLING. SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 out- 
 rageous 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 appre- 
 ciation. 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 sac- 
 rifice, 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 1 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 dem- 
 onstrated affection? 
 
 So Mr. Britling trod the path of his eighth digression, 
 rather overworked in the matter of flowers and the selec- 
 tion of small jewellery, stalked by the invisible and inde- 
 fatigable Oliver, haunted into an unwilling industry of 
 attentions — attentions on the model of the professional 
 lover of the Erench novels — by the memory and expecta- 
 tion 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 beauti- 
 fully. ..." 
 
ME. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY 113 
 
 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 coun- 
 try, 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 communi- 
 cations between Matching's Easy and her station at Pye- 
 crafts, 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 unreason- 
 able 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. Brit- 
 ling 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 disloy- 
 alty. 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. 
 
114 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 bril- 
 liant letters. . . . On the other hand she professed a 
 steadily increasing passion for Mr. Britling. And to pro- 
 fess 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 prede- 
 cessors — God rest the ashes of those fires ! — had not been 
 so discreet. Yet one could not have this sort of thing go- 
 ing 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. Noth- 
 ing 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 think- 
 ing over all that you have said," and after that he had 
 scarcely thought about her at all. Or at least he had al- 
 ways contrived to be much more vividly thinking about 
 something else. But now in these night silences the sup- 
 pressed 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. 
 
MK. BKITLING IN SOLILOQUY 115 
 
 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 de- 
 faulter. And there again he should have stuck to his dis- 
 appointment. He had stuck to it — nine days out of 
 every ten. It's the tenth day, it's the odd seductive mo- 
 ment, 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 steer- 
 ing. For example there was that tremendous Siddons af- 
 fair. He had been taking the corner of a girlish friend- 
 ship 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 Mar- 
 quise — 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 can- 
 not end at thirty. It comes to one clean and in perfect 
 order. . . . 
 
116 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 tan- 
 gled and tainted, and scarred the private pride of his 
 father? And how was it possible for Mr. Britling, dis- 
 figured by heedless misadventures, embarrassed by com- 
 plications 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 bed- 
 clothes 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 impos- 
 sible. 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. Brit- 
 ling's mind that while he was deploring his inefficiency in 
 
ME. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY 117 
 
 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 pre- 
 sent England as a great and amiable spectacle of careless- 
 ness and relaxation, but was it indeed an amiable specta- 
 cle ? 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 spend- 
 thrift heir of toiling generations. Not only was he a pam- 
 pered, 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 to- 
 wards 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 exam- 
 ple! 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 Eng- 
 land. He hated alarmists. He hated disagreeable pos- 
 sibilities. 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 
 
118 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 ■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 Eaeburn and his 
 friends to defend us ! Or if the shock tumbled them out 
 of power, then with these vituperative Tories, these spite- 
 ful advocates of weak tyrannies and privileged pretences 
 in the place of them. There was no leadership in Eng- 
 land. 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 aristo- 
 crats and organising our national capitulation on that un- 
 derstanding. 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 Ger- 
 many 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 
 
MK. BKITLING IN SOLILOQUY 119 
 
 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 friendli- 
 ness, all these things were being left to the Ulster politi- 
 cians 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 fa- 
 voured 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 fa- 
 voured 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 confi- 
 dence. In the night that dear persuasion left him alto- 
 gether. ... 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 
 
120 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 things that suited him. That at any rate was the essence 
 of it. And these lucky chances had heen no incentive to 
 further effort. Because things had gone easily and rap- 
 idly with him he had developed indolence into a philoso- 
 phy. Here, he was just over forty, and explaining to the 
 world, explaining all through the week-end to this Ameri- 
 can — 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 com- 
 promise. He had truckled to no " domesticated God," but 
 talked of the " pitiless truth " ; he had tolerated no easy- 
 going 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, 
 
ME. BKITLING IN SOLILOQUY 121 
 
 reputably known; he prospered. Much had come, oh ! by 
 a mysterious luck, but everything was doomed by his in- 
 vincible defects. Beneath that hollow, enviable show 
 there ached waste. "Waste, waste, waste — his heart, his 
 imagination, his wife, his son, his country — his automo- 
 bile. . . . 
 
 Then there flashed into his mind a last straw of dis- 
 agreeable realisation. 
 
 He hadn't as yet insured his automobile! He had 
 meant to do so. The papers were on his writing-desk. 
 
 § n 
 
 On these black nights, when the personal Mr. Britling 
 would lie awake thinking how unsatisfactorily Mr. Brit- 
 ling 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 de- 
 plored the melancholy destinies of the race while the pic- 
 colo 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 gate- 
 post. . . . 
 
 The organ motif battled its way to complete predomi- 
 nance. The lesser themes were drowned or absorbed. 
 Mr. Britling returned from the role of an incompetent 
 automobilist to the role of a soul naked in space and time 
 wrestling with giant questions. These cosmic solicitudes, 
 
122 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 it may be, are the last penalty of irreligion. Was Huxley 
 right, and was all humanity, even as Mr. Britling, a care- 
 less, fitful thing, playing a tragically hopeless game, think- 
 ing 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 wisej and merely 
 refusing to pamper us? Is there somewhere in the im- 
 mensities 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 
 
ME. BKITLING IN SOLILOQUY 123 
 
 had become a whirring torment in his skull. Previous 
 experiences had led to the most careful provision for ex- 
 actly 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. Direek's 
 room. He was pink from his morning bath, he was wear- 
 ing a cheerful green-ahd-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. 
 
124 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " 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 out- 
 side. 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," 
 be 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 witb that arm and fell a man. Listen I " 
 
 Mr. Direck could not distinguish any definite sound. 
 
 " The smell of frying rashers, I mean," said Mr. Brit- 
 ling. " It's the clarion of the morn in every proper Eng- 
 lish 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 to- 
 gether. " I suppose I wrote nearly two thousand words. 
 So quiet one is, so concentrated. And as soon as I have 
 bad my breakfast I shall go on with it again." 
 
CHAPTEE THE EIFTH 
 
 THE COMING OF THE DAT 
 § 1 
 
 It was quite characteristic of the state of mind of Eng- 
 land in the summer of 1914 that Mr. Britling should be 
 mightily concerned about the conflict in Ireland, and al- 
 most 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 Eendezvous 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 na- 
 tional service ridiculous, and quite subconsciously it af- 
 fected 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 
 
126 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 weakness and folly would ever let the mine actually ex- 
 plode 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 enor- 
 mously 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 ob- 
 stinate 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 con- 
 dition, and was much afflicted by a series of questions from 
 Herr Heinrich. For it was an incurable characteristic 
 of Herr Heinrich that he asked quesions; 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 liter- 
 ary 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 shat- 
 tered 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. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 127 
 
 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 Bussia may make war on Austria." 
 
 " That may happen. But I think it improbable." 
 " If Bussia makes war on Austria, Germany will make 
 war on Bussia, 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 Bussia. 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 can- 
 not 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 Frince, 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 con- 
 fidence in the sound common sense of the mass of the Ger- 
 man 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 
 
128 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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 re- 
 membered 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 learn- 
 ing to write, his left hand, all unsuspected, had been pick- 
 ing up the same lesson, and that by taking a pencil in his 
 left hand and writing from right to left, without watch- 
 ing 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 amus- 
 ing themselves with these experiments, and after that Ce- 
 cily 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 sum- 
 mer holidays in the Adirondacks and how he loved to 
 travel. She said she would love to travel. He said that 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 129 
 
 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." 
 
130 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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 strok- 
 ing 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 pres- 
 ently 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 ? " 
 "Wo." 
 
 " 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. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 1-31 
 
 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 him- 
 self." ' 
 
 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 com- 
 bated by Herr Heinrich, who held that a certain brusque- 
 ness 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 sud- 
 denly reminded of that lugubrious old ballad, " The Mis- 
 tletoe 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 imagina- 
 tion. " Let us now," he said, " make an examination of 
 every box and cupboard and drawer. Marking each as 
 we go. . . ." 
 
132 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 Hein- 
 rich. 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 minute- 
 ness, 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 133 
 
 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 im- 
 potence. 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 Ire- 
 land 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 An- 
 glian agricultural labourers were in revolt, and the building 
 trade throughout the country was on the verge of a lock- 
 out. Eussia seemed to be in the crisis of a social revolution. 
 Erom Baku to St. Petersburg there were insurrection- 
 ary 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 dis- 
 organisation because of a' vast mysterious selling of se- 
 curities from abroad. And France, France it seemed was 
 lost to all other consideration in the enthralling confronta- 
 tions 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 Eeporter of the Army Com- 
 mittee, proclaiming that the artillery was short of ammu- 
 
134 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 nition, that her infantry had boots " thirty years old " and 
 not enough of those. ..." 
 
 Such were the appearances of things. Can it be won- 
 dered 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. Eor a week Europe was occupied by proceedings 
 that were little more than the recital of a formula. Aus- 
 tria could not withdraw her unqualified threats without 
 admitting error and defeat, Eussia could not desert Serbia 
 without disgrace, Germany stood behind Austria, France 
 was bound to Eussia by a long confederacy of mutual sup- 
 port, and it was impossible for England to witness the 
 destruction of Erance or the further strengthening of a 
 loud and threatening rival. It may be that Germany 
 counted on Eussia 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 pur- 
 poses. 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 let- 
 ter-writing and of God and evil and a thousand perplexi- 
 ties, 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 cafes or smoking- 
 rooms or pacing the bridges of battleships or walking 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 135 
 
 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 approach- 
 ing 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 strapds, 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 de- 
 flections. One man decided to say this because if be 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 stum- 
 bled 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 pre- 
 tentious 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 Csesar'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 par- 
 ticularly poor quality, imagined no doubt certain women 
 onlookers, certain humiliated and astonished friends,, and 
 
136 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 Eabhit." 
 He was the backbone of the war party at court. And 
 presently he stole bric-a-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 skuil must have enacted anticipatory dreams 
 of his personal success and marshalled his willing and un- 
 willing admirers. Eeaders 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 vindica- 
 tions and interesting documents. Some of them perhaps 
 saw difficulties, but few foresaw failure. Eor 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 intelli- 
 gence of Germany and Austria saw anything so plain. 
 The initiative was with Germany. The Eussian brains 
 and the Erench 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 pro- 
 founder uncertainties. To Mr. Britling's mind the 
 Eound Table Conference at Buckingham Palace was typi- 
 cal of the disunion and indecision that lasted up to the very 
 outbreak of hostilities. The solemn violence of Sir Ed- 
 ward 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 dan- 
 ger. .. . 
 
 Mr. Britling had no mercy in his mind for the- treason 
 of obstinate egotism and for persistence in a mistaken 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 137 
 
 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, trust- 
 ing to the essentials of his character for an ultimate con- 
 sistency. He hated Carson in those days as a Scotch 
 terrier might hate a bloodhound, as something at once 
 more effective and impressive, and exasperatingly, infi- 
 nitely 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 interna- 
 tional 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 de- 
 light 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 Easputin was stabbed 
 and became the subject of much lively gossip about the 
 Eussian Court; and Ulivi, the Italian impostor who 
 claimed he could explode mines by means of an "ultra- 
 ^ed " ray, was exposed and fled with a lady, very amus- 
 
138 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 ingly. For a few days all the work at Woolwich Arsenal 
 was held up because a certain Mr. Entwhistle, having re- 
 fused 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 Ger- 
 many 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 fair- 
 ness 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 dis- 
 tressing 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 — ex- 
 cursions, the theory that he had expounded to Mr. Direck 
 that it is only through our children that we are able to 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 139 
 
 thieve disinterested love, real love. But that left unex- 
 plained 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 num- 
 ber of intelligent people, and yet there were quite a num- 
 ber 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 in- 
 credible to them that there had ever been a creature 
 so delicate and sweet, and they brought considerable im> 
 agination 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 — 
 
140 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 eiEcient business than Mary's in- 
 stinctive 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 pre- 
 tending 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 some- 
 thing 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 vir- 
 tue. 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 rough- 
 ness and a remarkable expressiveness. That he was some- 
 limes 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 criti- 
 cisms, the implied contrasts with the very jolly, very un- 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 141 
 
 inspired younger family, kept up a nervous desire in Mr. 
 Britling for evidences and manifestations of Hugh's qual- 
 ity. 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 re- 
 sisted humorous treatment. ... 
 
 Now the trouble that he had been hesitating to bring 
 before his father was concerned with that very grave in- 
 terest 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 expres- 
 sion. 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 noth- 
 ing in life but absurdities and a lark that one could rep- 
 resent 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 
 
142 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 school he had refused Camhridge and gone to University 
 College, London, to work under the great and inspiring 
 Professor Cardinal ; simultaneously Cardinal had been ar- 
 ranging to go to Cambridge, and Hugh had scarcely em- 
 barked upon his London work when Cardinal was suc- 
 ceeded by the dull, conscientious and depressing Pelking- 
 ham, 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 degen- 
 erated 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 broach- 
 ing 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 dis- 
 pelled, his mind remained curiously apprehensive through- 
 out July. He had a feeling that things were not going 
 well with the world, a feeling he tried in vain to dispel 
 
THE COMING OE THE DAY 143 
 
 by various distractions. Perhaps some subtler subcon- 
 scious analysis of the situation was working out probabili- 
 ties that his conscious self would not face. And when 
 presently he bicycled off to Mrs. Harrowdean for flat- 
 tery, 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 role 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 sum- 
 mer-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 pam- 
 phlet." 
 
 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, el- 
 bow. 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 alto- 
 gether preposterous while it was going on, answered feebly 
 and self-consciously. 
 
144 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 " 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 wip« 
 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. Brit- 
 ling, rolling along by the side of her like a full moon be- 
 side 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 with- 
 drawn from the tarred highways of the earth. . . . 
 
 And yet the very next day this angel enemy of contro- 
 versies 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 reconcilia- 
 tion and talked of exalted things, and in the evening he 
 worked quite well upon " The Silent Places " and thought 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 145 
 
 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 comple- 
 tion 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 irri- 
 tated 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 to- 
 gether. ... 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 pas- 
 sion and the praises of " The Silent Places," that beauti- 
 ful work of art that was so free from any taint of appli- 
 cation, 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, pa- 
 tient 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 at- 
 
146 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 tentions, little presents. Did he think she could settle 
 down to her poor work, such as it was, in neglect and lone- 
 liness ? 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 indig- 
 nant sorrow and declared that he had come over to Pye- 
 crafts 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 impos- 
 sible. ... 
 
 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 qual- 
 ity in the world that he had hoped Mrs. Harrowdean 
 would assuage. And the further he went from Mrs. Har- 
 rowdean the harsher and unjuster it seemed to him that 
 he had been to her. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 147 
 
 But he went on because he did not see how he could 
 very well go back. 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 'ipwards 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 af- 
 fairs; 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. Di- 
 reck 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 pres- 
 ents 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 pro- 
 
148 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 vided 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 Ameri- 
 can 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 disserta- 
 tions 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 secretary- 
 ship of the Massachusetts Modern Thought Society, any- 
 how," 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 her- 
 self 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 de- 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 149 
 
 lightf ul 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 alto- 
 gether, 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 ex- 
 actly it ! Mr. Direck is overdoing the development of per- 
 sonalities.' " 
 
 "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 them- 
 selves 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 ? " 
 
150 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " 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 atten- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 A considerable nervousness betrayed itself in his voice 
 and manner when at last he carried out his determina- 
 tion. 
 
 " There's just a lil' thing," he said to her, taking ad- 
 vantage 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 re- 
 member when I'm away from it." 
 
 He was a little short of breath, and there was a quite dis- 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 151 
 
 proportionate 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 after- 
 noons," 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 diplomati- 
 cally 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 oppor- 
 tunity 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 pos- 
 sible. . . . 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 par- 
 ticularly. But I can assure you I've never felt the depth 
 and height or anything like the sort of Quiet Clear Con- 
 viction. . . . 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 
 
152 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 I ever had as well as my last. I've had sent over — I 
 got it only yesterday — this lil' photograph of a minia- 
 ture 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 pres- 
 ently, with a note of earnest helpfulness. " I'd be very 
 glad if you could." 
 
 " Not exactly," said Cecily, more careful than ever. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 153 
 
 "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," 
 aaid 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 dear- 
 est husband. And they have a sweet little house and a 
 most amusing baby. And they play hockey every Sun- 
 day. 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 
 
154 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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 sud- 
 denly 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 say- 
 ing 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 155 
 
 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 sponta- 
 neous to Cecily. And he felt even when he did open his 
 case that the effect of it was platitudinous and disappoint- 
 ing. 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 pitch- 
 ing anything a note or two higher than it ought legiti- 
 mately 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 Re- 
 ligion — I don't mean this Religion or that Religion but 
 
156 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 Ger- 
 many 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 some- 
 where 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 157 
 
 a thoroughly artistic maimer, 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 pro- 
 fess to put it as clearly as she puts it. She's got a real 1 
 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 nod- 
 ding of the head. 
 
 He allowed a certain interval to elapse. Then a 
 vaguely apprehended purpose that had been for a time for- 
 gotten 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 — some- 
 day ?" 
 
 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 
 
158 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 si- 
 lence. " But I shan't be giving so much attention to Ger- 
 many 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 Mttle covert, with its 
 pathway of soft moss and its sheltering screen of inter- 
 lacing 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 hei 
 clear eyes. He took her soft cool face between his trem- 
 bling 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 be- 
 yond 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." 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 159 
 
 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 ex- 
 actly as if his American deliberation had hitherto kept 
 things waiting. Before his postcard from Eotterdam 
 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 mak- 
 ing 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 in- 
 sistent 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 incredu- 
 lous, 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 dis- 
 interested 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 rela- 
 tions with Mrs. Harrowdean disappearing in a perplex- 
 ing irrational quarrel. He did not want to lose Mrs. Har- 
 
160 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 rowdean; he contemplated their breach with a profound 
 and profoundly selfish dismay. It seemed the wanton 
 termination of an arrangement of which he was only be- 
 ginning to perceive the extreme and irreplaceable satis- 
 factoriness. 
 
 It wasn't that he was in love with her. He knew almost 
 as cleanly as though he had told himself as much that he 
 was not. But then, on the other hand, it was equally man- 
 ifest in its subdued and ignored way that as a matter of 
 fact she was hardly more in love with him. What con- 
 stituted 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 reali- 
 ties, 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 re- 
 conciliation 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 amuse- 
 ment dreadfully upon his own hands. He would be tor- 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 161 
 
 mented 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 un- 
 assuaged. 
 
 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 ob- 
 jection 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 hus- 
 band, 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 
 
162 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 better of her, she expanded her thesis into a general de- 
 nunciation 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 con-, 
 ciliatory, 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 correspond- 
 ence had a kiiid 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 Bel- 
 gium that made Britain's participation in the war in- 
 evitable, 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 163 
 
 ■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 col- 
 ourless and unattractive of ohligations. 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 for- 
 getfulness 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 re- 
 flecting more and more vividly and coherently the 
 spectacle of civilisation casting aside the thousand dis- 
 persed activities of peace, clutching its weapons and set- 
 ting 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 securi- 
 ties of England looked out upon the world. It was a dis- 
 play 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 clash- 
 ing 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. 
 
164 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 People talked of these things always with an underlying' 
 feeling that they romanced and intellectualised. 
 
 On Thursday, July 23rd, the Austro-Hungarian min- 
 ister 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 Sara- 
 jevo 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 happen- 
 ing 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 Cos- 
 sacks. Herr Heinrich's questions at lunch time received 
 reassuring replies. 
 
 On Saturday Sir Edward Carson was still in the cen- 
 tral 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 Hein- 
 rich. 
 
 " But at last there did come a wolf," said Herr Hein- 
 rich. " 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 Blood- 
 shed in Dublin " had squeezed the " War Cloud Lifting " 
 into a quite subordinate position. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 165 
 
 "What did we tell you?" said Mrs. Britling. "No- 
 body wants a European war." 
 
 But Wednesday's paper vindicated his fears. Ger- 
 many 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 Hein- 
 rich, " 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 bombard- 
 ing Belgrade, contrary to the rules of war hitherto ac- 
 cepted; Russia was mobilising; Mr. Asquith was, he de- 
 clared, 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 Erance." 
 
 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 
 
166 MR BKITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 Vienna, and the news that Belgrade was burning. Young 
 men in straw hats very like English or French or Bel- 
 gian young men in straw hats were shown parading the 
 streets of Vienna, carrying flags and banners portent- 
 ously, 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 equip- 
 ment 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 Bedland and Blueland, according to the colour of their 
 prevailing uniforms. Meanwhile Herr Heinrich con- 
 fessed almost promiscuously the complication of his dis- 
 tresses by a hitherto unexpected emotional interest in the 
 daughter of the village publican. She was a placid re- 
 ceptive 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 as- 
 sured Mrs. Britling. " And now it must all end. She' 
 loves flowers, she loves birds. She is most sweet and in- 
 nocent. 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 167 
 
 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 port- 
 manteau ! 
 
 "And there is Billy! Who will now go on with the 
 education of Billy ? " 
 
 The hands of fate paused not for Herr Heinrich's em- 
 barrassments and distresses. He fretted from his room 
 downstairs and back to his room, he went out upon mys- 
 terious 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 Lon- 
 don, seemed to be fumbling and feeling after Herr Hein- 
 rich, 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 Lon- 
 don 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." 
 
168 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 "But then I shall lose all my country. I shall lose 
 my papers. I shall he 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 he no English, no Germans, no Russians." 
 
 " Just Esperantists," said Teddy. 
 
 " Or Idoists," said Herr Heinrich. " I am not con- 
 vinced of which. In some ways Ido is much better." 
 
 " Perhaps there would have to he 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 mo- 
 bilised 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 morn- 
 ing on Teddy's complaisant machine, came presently to 
 carry him off, and the whole family and the first con- 
 tingent of the usual hockey players gathered about it to 
 see him off. The elder boy of the two juniors put a dis- 
 tended rucksack upon the seat. Herr Heinrich then 
 shook hands with every one. 
 
 " Write and tell us how you get on," cried Mrs. Brit- 
 ling. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 169 
 
 " But if England also makes war ! " 
 
 " Write to Keynplds — 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 Hein- 
 rich," cried the hoys. 
 
 " No," said Herr Heinrich, sitting down into the auto- 
 mobile, "I will part with you altogether. It is too 
 much. . . ." 
 
 "Auf Wiedersehen! " cried Mr. Britling. "Remem- 
 ber, whatever happens there will be peace at last ! " 
 
 " Then why not at the beginning ? " Herr Heinrich de- 
 manded with a reasonable exasperation and repeated his 
 maturer verdict on the whole European situation ; " Ver- 
 dammte 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 Wied- 
 ersehen!" 
 
 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 sun- 
 stroke. . . . 
 
 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 fight- 
 ing 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." 
 
170 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 "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, care- 
 less 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 sedu- 
 lously 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 emo- 
 tional 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 card- 
 board 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 pen- 
 cil sketch of a girl's face, torn across. . . . 
 
 Husband and wife regarded the abandoned room in si- 
 lence 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, turn- 
 ing away from this first intimation of coming desolations, 
 " let us go down to our hockey ! He had. to go, you 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 171 
 
 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 cus- 
 tom to the Matching's Easy Flower Show in Olaverings 
 Park. The day was to live in Mr. Britling's memory 
 with a harsh brightness like the brightness of that sun- 
 shine one sees at times at the edge of a thunderstorm. 
 There were tents with the exhibits, and a tent for " Popu- 
 lar 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 va- 
 rious 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 Olaverings gardens, and the sixpence would be doubled 
 by Lady Homartyn and devoted next winter to the Match- 
 ing'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 com- 
 ing out to the festivities. They said that if for no other 
 
172 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 reason he must come to witness Aunt Wilshire's extraor- 
 dinary skill at the cocoanut shy. She could beat every- 
 body. Well, one must not miss a thing like that. The 
 headlines proclaimed, "The Great Powers at War; 
 France Invaded by Germany; Germany invaded by Rus- 
 sia ; 100,000 Germans march into Luxemburg ; Can Eng- 
 land 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 win- 
 nings. 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 Cover- 
 ings 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 Liege more 
 than a million and a quarter of grey-clad men, the greatest 
 and best-equipped host the world had ever seen, were pour- 
 ing 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 organ- 
 isation, from the motor kitchens that rumbled in their 
 wake to the telescopic sights of the sharp-shooters, the in- 
 numerable 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 173 
 
 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, bicy- 
 clists .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. 
 
174 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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 out- 
 side 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 
 Homaftyn hiding away in the walled Dutch garden be- 
 hind 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 175 
 
 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, try- 
 ing 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 sui- 
 cide of Germany. They cannot possibly fight against 
 Kussia 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." 
 
176 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " 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 in- 
 solent arming and marching, this forty years of national 
 blustering; sooner or later it had to topple over into ac- 
 tion. . . ." 
 
 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 op- 
 pressed 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 imag- 
 ine. I'm quite prepared to hear that they have got a thou- 
 sand 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 mo- 
 'ment 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. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 177 
 
 " Then you think it will be a long war, Mr. Britling ? " 
 said Lady Meade. 
 
 "Long or short, it will end in the downfall of Ger- 
 many. 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 al- 
 most 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 
 
178 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 action of the Teutonic militarism that had so long men- 
 aced 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 si- 
 lent, devising fiercely denunciatory phrases against 
 Krupp and Kaiser. " Krupp and Kaiser," he grasped 
 that obvious, convenient alliteration. " It is all that is 
 bad in medievalism 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 im- 
 patience, and snapped the sticks together. 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 179 
 
 § 14 
 
 Mr. Britling started for his moonlight ride ahout 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 elec- 
 tric 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 coastj 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 busi- 
 ness 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 de- 
 serted. Out beyond, a coruscation of lights burnt like a 
 group of topaz and rubies set in the silver shield of the 
 
180 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 night. The festivities of the Elower Show were still in 
 full progress, and the reduction of the entrance fee after 
 seven had drawn in every lingering outsider. The round- 
 abouts churned out their relentless music, and the bottle- 
 shooting galleries popped and crashed. The well-patron- 
 ised 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 Arma- 
 geddon," 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. Eor 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 con- 
 vey 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 181 
 
 away there marching, the wide river valleys, villages, 
 cities, mountain-ranges, ports and seas inaudibly busy. 
 
 " Even now," he said, " the battleships may be fight- 
 ing." 
 
 He listened, but the sound was only the low intermit- 
 tent 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 Kodwell 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 dis- 
 cussion in private. We had the heavier vessels, the big- 
 ger guns, but it was not certain that we had the pre- 
 eminence 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 hu- 
 man 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 
 
182 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 Eng- 
 lishman say that, but in his heart he held the dear be- 
 lief. . . . 
 
 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 whis- 
 pered. " 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 
 
 Eor 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 colour- 
 less 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 tri- 
 angle 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 draw- 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 183 
 
 ing 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. Eour 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 trace- 
 able 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 'con- 
 sciousness, 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 
 
184 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 startled out of the dust of the road before him, and flut- 
 tered 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 strug- 
 gle of mankind against national dominance and national 
 aggression; or else it was a mere struggle of nationalities 
 and pure destruction and catastrophe. Its enormous sig- 
 nificances, 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-un- 
 spoken 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 
 
THE COMING OF THE DAY 185 
 
 a policeman standing quite stiff and still at the corner by 
 the church. 
 
 " Hatching'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 fin- 
 ished 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^ Easy, as it 
 
186 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 
 HATCHING'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 some- 
 thing 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. . . „ 
 
 189 
 
190 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 un- 
 answerable 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. News- 
 papers 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 automo- 
 bile. It was an old, resolute-looking machine painted 
 red, and driven by a trusted gardener; there was no mis- 
 taking it. 
 
 Mrs. Faber was in it, and she stopped it outside the 
 gate and made signals. Mrs. Britling, attracted by the 
 
ONLOOKEES . 191 
 
 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 re- 
 
192 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 fused 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 in- 
 quiring 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 black- 
 ing ? " 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. Eor 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 
 
ONLOOKEKS 193 
 
 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 let- 
 ters, appeared gliding along the top of the hedge as he 
 cycled down the road towards the Dower House corner. 
 
 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 myste- 
 rious origin, implored Great Britain not to play into the 
 hands of Kussia, Kussia 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. Eaber 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 
 
194 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 Mr. Britling, concentrating his attention. ..." All sorts 
 of staggering things may happen. In a social and eco- 
 nomic system that has grown just anyhow. . . . Never 
 been planned. ... In a world full of Mrs. Fabers. . . ." 
 
 " Moratorium ? " said Hugh over his Daily News. 
 u 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 conscious- 
 ness was something that had not always been there, some- 
 thing 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 invest- 
 ments, 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 
 
ONLOOKERS 195 
 
 little disarranged he felt a vague discomfort. Now lie 
 became aware of grave disorders. It was as if he discov- 
 ered 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 thought- 
 fulness unnecessary in tbese stirring days ! 
 
 And then if the bank really did lock up his deposit ac- 
 count, 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 
 
196 MR BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 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 be- 
 fore 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 ques- 
 tion 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. Eabers in great multitudes hoarding provisions, riot- 
 ous 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 
 
ONLOOKERS 197 
 
 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 hoard- 
 ing, 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 Koman 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 
 
 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. 
 
198 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 " 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 ahout eighteen pounds in the house. 
 
 " We may have to get along with that for an indefinite 
 time." 
 
 "But the hank will open again presently," she said. 
 " And people ahout here trust us." 
 
 " Suppose they don't ? " 
 
 She did not trouble ahout 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 possi- 
 bility 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 sud- 
 denly 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 
 
ONLOOKEKS 199 
 
 you all into Gladys and start off westward with a kind of 
 exhilaration. ..." 
 
 She looked at him as if she would speak, and said noth- 
 ing. 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. Per- 
 haps 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 fa- 
 miliar ways. Now I am afraid — and at the same time 
 I feel that the spell is hroken. The magic prison is sud- 
 denly all doors. You may call this ruin, bankruptcy, in- 
 vasion, 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 
 
200 MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 rent. These now are the most incidental of things. A 
 week ago they would have heen 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. . . . 
 
 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 Wil- 
 shire 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 tre- 
 mendous 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. 
 
ONLOOKEES 201 
 
 " 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. Car- 
 mine. 
 
 " 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 Encyclopaedia 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 be- 
 comes 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. Car- 
 mine. 
 
 " 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 medi- 
 ate were to be China," said Mr. Carmine. " The one 
 
202 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 for- 
 ever 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 Alexan- 
 dria 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," lie 
 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 Eussian 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 Chinamen are also ' white.' 
 
ONLOOKERS 203 
 
 . . . 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 Eussians 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 Trench 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 after- 
 noon. 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. 
 Erom this there was no escape. It made all other inter- 
 ests fitful. Games of Badminton were begun and abruptly 
 truncated by the arrival of the evening papers ; conversa- 
 tions 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 Hein- 
 rich, 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 fash- 
 ion. The two philosophers admitted that they had al- 
 ready considered skat to be complicated without subtlety, 
 and that its chief delight for them had been the pink 
 
204 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 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 impres- 
 sion 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 mul- 
 titude of such links were snapping that day between hun- 
 dreds 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 rela- 
 tives. Mr. Britling's earlier memories presented her as a 
 
(MLOOKEKS 205 
 
 slender young woman of thirty, with a nose upon which 
 small boys were forbidden to comment. Yet she com- 
 mented upon it herself, and called his attention to its 
 marked resemblance to that of the great Duke of Welling- 
 ton. " He was, I am told," said Cousin Wilshire to the 
 attentive youth, " a great friend of your great-grand- 
 mother'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. Hritling'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 man- 
 ner 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 cer- 
 tain 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 disap- 
 
206 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 prove of the tone and quality of her treatment. It was 
 quite co mm on 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. Al- 
 ways after an interval during which she was never men- 
 tioned, 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 " sto,od 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 ev- 
 erything. And Mr. Britling hated to think of her knock- 
 ing about alone in boarding-houses and hydropathic es- 
 tablishments with only the most casual chances for con- 
 tradiction. 
 
 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 be- 
 yond 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. 
 
ONLOOKEKS 207 
 
 He was a delicate child, difficult to rear and given to 
 screaming fits. Consequently he was never crossed, al- 
 lowed 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 Hol- 
 land 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 Ex- 
 press 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 im- 
 pressive 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 piivate. . . . 
 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 
 
208 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 Eng- 
 lish 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 Brit- 
 ish conviction that he was making a fool of himself. 
 
 And this disposition kept coming to the surface through- 
 out the afternoon, now in a casual allusion, now in some 
 
ONLOOKEKS 209 
 
 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 Oissie 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 sway- 
 ing, 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. Zol" 
 
 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. Brit- 
 ling 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 won- 
 derful 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 
 Prance. 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 unani- 
 mously 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, 
 
210 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 just as in England, the mass of people were kindly, pacific, 
 and detached. That had been the English mistake. Ger- 
 many was really and truly what Germany had been pro- 
 fessing 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 Eate 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 Patching's Easy — to 
 all the Matching^ 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 Eng- 
 land 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 peo- 
 ple 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 his- 
 torical epoch rather than a personal experience; only by 
 slow degrees did it and its consequences invade the com- 
 
ONLOOKEES 211 
 
 mon texture of English life. If this story could be repre- 
 sented 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, expand- 
 ing, 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 be- 
 came dissertations upon the German point of view ; his re- 
 views 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 writ- 
 ing 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 
 
212 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 it impossible, but even now with bis country figbting be 
 was still far from realising tbat tbis 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 bis peaceful view. 
 War had not been a reality of the daily life of Eng- 
 land for more than a thousand years. The mental habit 
 of the nation for fifty generations was against its emo- 
 tional 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 
 Erance had threatened in turn, but never even crossed the 
 seas. It is true that England had bad her civil dissen- 
 sions 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 be was, as it were, a more and more 
 excited spectator at a show, a show like a baseball match, 
 
ONLOOKEKS 213 
 
 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. Peo- 
 ple 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 de- 
 manded five hundred thousand men; the War Office ar- 
 rangements 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 
 
214 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 by raising the physical standard far above the national 
 average, and recruiting died down to manageable propor- 
 tions. 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 after- 
 noon to the mysteries of Little-go Greek, and for the rest of 
 his time he was either working at matbematics and math- 
 ematical 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. Hith- 
 erto contemporary history had happened without his per- 
 sonal intervention. He did not see why it should not con- 
 tinue to happen with the same detachment. The last elec- 
 tions — 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 
 
 Eor a time it was believed in Matching's Easy that the 
 German armies had been defeated and very largely de- 
 
OKLOOKEES 215 
 
 stroyed at Liege. It was a mistake not confined to Matcb- 
 ing'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 
 Liege 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 Eussians 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 possi- 
 ble 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 tele- 
 gram. 
 
 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 
 
216 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 dislo- 
 cated. . . . 
 
 " 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 Ger- 
 man 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, thor- 
 oughly 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 expres- 
 sion 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; 
 
ONLOOKERS 217 
 
 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 Vise near the Dutch frontier j 
 some old chap got fooling there with 3. 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 Liege. 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. Peo- 
 ple 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 Hatching'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 Prov- 
 idential law against such things happening to English 
 
218 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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. Tou 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 cock- 
 sure 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 Eng- 
 land 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 obser- 
 rations, remarked after a perceptible interval, " I wonder 
 now." 
 
ONLOOKEES 219 
 
 He reverted to the fact that had most struck" upon hia 
 imagination. 
 
 " Grown-up people, ordinary intelligent experienced 
 people, taking war seriously, talking of punishing Eng- 
 land; it's a revelation. A sort of solemn enthusiasm. 
 High and low. . . . 
 
 " And the trainloads of men and the trainloads of 
 guns. . . ." 
 
 " Liege," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " Liege was just a scratch on the paint," said Mr. Di- 
 reck. " 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 Brus- 
 sels. 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 Cor- 
 ner — 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 lit- 
 tle 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 after- 
 n<;Jn, and so Mr. Direck, after some vague and trans- 
 parent excuses, made his way to the cottage. 
 
220 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 disagree- 
 able 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 re- 
 sumed. " 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. 
 
ONLOOKERS 221 
 
 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 feel- 
 ing 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, Cis- 
 sie, 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. Di- 
 reck'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 
 
222 ME. BRITLESTG SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 was already beckoning to them in the cottage, and draw- 
 ing 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 civili- 
 sation 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 mur- 
 der. It is like watching a dog killing a kitten. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Direck's expression was that of a man who is sud- 
 denly 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 tremen- 
 dous, decisive demonstration of the inherent unsoundness 
 of militarist monarchy, to be followed by a world confer- 
 ence of chastened but hopeful nations, and — the Mil- 
 lennium. He tried now to think that Mr. Direck had ob- 
 served badly and misconceived what he saw. An Ameri- 
 can, unused to any sort of military occurrences, might 
 easily mistake tens of thousands for millions, and the ex- 
 citement 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 — Char- 
 leroi. 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, stem- 
 
ONLOOKERS 223 
 
 ming the onrush ; somewhere perhaps in Brabant or East 
 Flanders. It gave Mr. Britling an unpleasant night 
 to hear at Claverings that the Erench were very ill- 
 equipped; had no good nlodern 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 some- 
 where 
 
 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 south- 
 ward 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 Erench. 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 com- 
 fort his friend. A reassuring despatch from General 
 French had been published and — all was well — practi- 
 cally — - 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 
 
224 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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 unmo- 
 lested, 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 pre- 
 siding over the teas of the usUal casual Sunday gather- 
 ing. . . . The despatch was read aloud twice over. After 
 that there was hockey and high spirits, and then Mr. Brit- 
 ling 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 pa- 
 tient 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 strength- 
 ening 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 per- 
 fectly horrible the way that people were being kept in the 
 dark. The stories one heard, " often from quite trust- 
 worthy sources" were enough to depress and terrify any 
 
(XNXOOKEKS 225 
 
 one. Battleship after battleship had been sunk by Ger- 
 man torpedoes, a thing kept secret from us for no earthly 
 reason, and Prince Louis of Battenberg had been discov- 
 ered 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 de- 
 sire 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 culti- 
 vate her simple garden there — as Voltaire had done. . . . 
 Sometimes at night she was afraid to undress. She imag- 
 ined the' sound of guns, she imagined landings and fright- 
 ful scouts " in masks " rushing inland on motor bi- 
 cycles. . . . 
 
 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 suf- 
 ficient disposition to believe such tales as to find their 
 importunity exasperating. The idea of going over to Pye- 
 crafts 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 doubt- 
 ing 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 state- 
 
226 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 ments and unsubstantial arguments. He was indeed in a 
 state of extreme intellectual worry. He was moreover ex- 
 traordinarily 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. Prob- 
 ably 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 unnec- 
 essary and tiresome feebleness. He came almost to the 
 pitch of writing that to her. 
 
 The despatch from General French put him into a kind- 
 lier frame of mind. He wrote instead briefly but affec- 
 tionately. 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 Pye- 
 crafts 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 Compiegne. " 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. 
 
ONLOOKEKS 227 
 
 He stood in the sunshine reading the Observer which 
 the gardener's hoy had just hrought from the May 
 Tree. He had spread it open on a garden tahle 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 Trance, a story of further German ad- 
 vances, fighting at Senlis — "But that is quite close to 
 Paris ! " — and the appearance of German forces at No- 
 gent-sur-Seine. " Sur Seine ! " cried Mr. Britling. 
 " But where can that he ? South of the Marne ? Or 
 below Paris perhaps ? " 
 
 It was not marked upon the Observers 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 Bouen," he told Hugh. 
 " Our base is to be moved round to La Bochelle. . . ." 
 
 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. 
 
 " Eussia," 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 big- 
 gest thing that has happened in history. I said that this 
 
228 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 was the supreme call upon the will and resources of Eng- 
 land. I said there was not a life in all our empire that 
 would not he vitally changed hy 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 ex- 
 ertion. Eor 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 quali- 
 fications 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 gen- 
 eralisations when we ought to have been drilling and 
 
ONLOOKERS 229 
 
 working. Because we've been doing ' business as usual ' 
 and all the rest of that sort of thing, while Western civil- 
 isation has been in its death agony. If this is to be an- 
 other "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 mur- 
 dered, 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. 
 
CHAPTEE THE SECOND 
 
 TAKING PAET 
 
 § 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 in- 
 clined to the figure of a volunteer in an improvised uni- 
 form 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 morn- 
 ing 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 
 
 230 
 
TAKING PAET 231 
 
 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 every- 
 body. . . . 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, ob- 
 sessed 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 domi- 
 nate 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. 
 
232 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " JMy eldest boy is barely seventeen," be said. " He's 
 keen to go, and I'd be sorry if be wasn't. He'll get into 
 some cadet corps of course — be's already done something 
 of that kind at school. Or they'll take him into the Ter- 
 ritorials. 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. Erom 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 accord- 
 ingly 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 indi- 
 vidual 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 Kaeburn, the prim, atten- 
 tive 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 imagina- 
 tive effort; he forgot the dreary debates, the floundering 
 newspapers, the " biuffs," the intrigues, the sly bargains 
 of the week-end party, the " schoolboy bonour " of grown 
 men, the universal weak dishonesty in thinking ; he thought 
 simply of a simplified and ideal government that gov- 
 erned. He thought vaguely of something behind and be- 
 
TAKING PAET 233 
 
 yond them, England, the ruling genius of the land ; some- 
 thing 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 proba- 
 bility 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 calcula- 
 tion. 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 man- 
 ageable details. . . . 
 
 Such lapses from knowledge to faith are perhaps neces- 
 sary 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 foot- 
 note to reality; he had no trick of command over men, 
 his role 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. Brit- 
 ling, he was still young enough, to produce such dreams 
 of personal service, of sudden emergencies swiftly and 
 bravely met, of conspicuous daring and exceptional re- 
 wards, such dreams as hover in the brains of every imagi- 
 native 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 
 
234 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 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, tele- 
 phoning, 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 proc- 
 ess of the interval had been the correction of Mr. Brit- 
 ling's temporary delusion that the government of the Brit- 
 ish Empire is either intelligent, instructed, or wise. 
 
 The great " Business as Usual " phase was already pass- 
 ing 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 dig- 
 nified and overbearing, sat in dirty little rooms and snarled 
 at this unheard-of England that pressed at door and win- 
 dow 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 les- 
 son." 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 Trafal- 
 gar 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 
 
TAKING PART 235 
 
 been so suddenly called upon to organise victory. He 
 was to be more fully informed when be reached bis club. 
 
 His impression of tbe streets through which he passed 
 was an impression of great unrest. There were notice- 
 ably fewer omnibuses and less road traffic generally, but 
 there was a quite unusual number of drifting pedestrians. 
 The current on the pavements was irritatingly sluggish. 
 There were more people standing about, and fewer going 
 upon their business. This was particularly the case with 
 the women he saw. Many of them seemed to have drifted 
 in from the suburbs and outskirts of London in a state of 
 vague expectation, unable to stay in their homes. 
 
 Everywhere there were the flags of the Allies ; in shop 
 windows, over doors, on the bonnets of automobiles, on 
 people's breasts, and there was a great quantity of re- 
 cruiting posters on the hoardings and in windows : " Your 
 King and Country Need You " was the chief text, and 
 they still called for "A Hundred Thousand Men" al- 
 though the demand of Lord Kitchener had risen to half 
 a million. There were also placards calling for men on 
 nearly all the taxicabs. The big windows of the offices 
 of the Norddeutscher Lloyd in Cockspur Street were 
 boarded up, and plastered thickly with recruiting appeals. 
 
 At his club Mr. Britling found much talk and bel- 
 ligerent stir. In the hall Wilkins the author was dis- 
 playing a dummy rifle of bent iron rod to several inter- 
 ested members. It was to be used for drilling until rifles 
 could be got, and it could be made for eighteenpence. 
 This was the first intimation Mr. Britling got that the 
 want of foresight of the War Office only began with its 
 unpreparedness for recruits. Men were talking very 
 freely in the club ; one of the temporary effects of tbe war 
 in its earlier stages was to produce a partial thaw in the 
 constitutional British shyness ; and men who had glowered 
 at Mr. Britling over their lunches and had been glowered 
 at by Mr. Britling in silence for years now started con- 
 versations with him. 
 
236 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " What is a man of my sort to do ? " asked a clean- 
 shaven barrister. 
 
 " Exactly what I have been asking," said Mr. Britling. 
 " They are fixing the upward age for recruits at thirty ; 
 it's absurdly low. A man well over forty like myself is 
 quite fit to line a trench or guard a bridge. I'm not so 
 bad a shot. . . ." 
 
 " We've been discussing home defence volunteers," said 
 the barrister. "Anyhow we ought to be drilling. But 
 the War Office sets its face as sternly against our doing 
 anything of the sort as though we were going to join the 
 Germans. It's absurd. Even if we older men aren't fit 
 to go abroad, we could at least release troops who could." 
 
 " If you had the rifles," said a sharp-featured man in 
 grey to the right of Mr. Britling. 
 
 " I suppose they are to be got," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 The sharp-featured man indicated by appropriate facial 
 action and head-shaking that this was by no means the 
 case. 
 
 " Every dead man, many wounded men, most prisoners," 
 he said, " mean each one a rifle lost. We have lost five- 
 and-twenty thousand rifles alone since the war began. 
 Quite apart from arming new troops we have to replace 
 those rifles with the drafts we send out. Do you know 
 what is the maximum weekly output of rifles at the pres- 
 ent time in this country ? " 
 
 Mr. Britling did not know. 
 
 " Nine thousand." 
 
 Mr. Britling suddenly understood the significance of 
 Wilkins and his dummy gun. 
 
 The sharp-featured man added with an air of conclud- 
 ing the matter : " It's the barrels are the trouble. Com- 
 plicated machinery. We haven't got it and we can't make 
 it in a hurry. And there you are ! " 
 
 The sharp-featured man had a way of speaking almost 
 as if he was throwing bombs. He threw one now. 
 " Zinc," he said. 
 
TAKING PAET 237 
 
 " We're not short of zinc ? " said the lawyer. 
 
 The sharp-featured man nodded, and then "became ex- 
 plicit. 
 
 Zinc was necessary for cartridges; it had to he refined 
 zinc and very pure, or the shooting went wrong. Well, 
 we had let the refining business drift away from England 
 to Belgium and Germany. There were just one or two 
 British firms still left. . . . Unless we bucked up tre- 
 mendously we should get caught short of cartridges. . . . 
 At any rate of cartridges so made as to ensure good shoot- 
 ing. " And there you are ! " said the sharp-featured man. 
 
 But the sharp-featured man did not at that time repre- 
 sent any considerable section of public thought. " I sup- 
 pose after all we can get rifles from America," said the 
 lawyer. " And as for zinc, if the shortage is known the 
 shortage will be provided for. . . ." 
 
 The prevailing topic in the smoking-room upstairs was 
 the inability of the War Office to deal with the flood of 
 recruits that was pouring in, and its hostility to any such 
 volunteering as Mr. Britling had in mind. Quite a num- 
 ber of members wanted to volunteer ; there was much talk 
 of their fitness ; " I'm fifty-four," said one, " and I could 
 do my twenty-five miles in marching kit far better than 
 half those boys of nineteen." Another was thirty-eight. 
 " I must hold the business together," he said ; " but why 
 anyhow shouldn't I learn to shoot and use a bayonet ? " 
 The personal pique of the rejected lent force to their 
 criticisms of the recruiting and general organisation. 
 " The War Office has one incurable system," said a big 
 mine-owner. " During peace time it runs all its home 
 administration with men who will certainly be wanted at 
 the front directly there is a war. Directly war comes, 
 therefore, there is a shift all round, and a new untried 
 man — usually a dug-out in an advanced state of decay — 
 is stuck into the job. Chaos follows automatically. The 
 War Office always has done this, and so far as one can see 
 it always will. It seems incapable of realising that an- 
 
238 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 other man will be wanted until the first is taken away. 
 Its imagination doesn't even run to that." 
 
 Mr. Britling found a kindred spirit in Wilkins. 
 
 Wilkins was expounding his tremendous scheme for 
 universal volunteering. Everybody was to be accepted. 
 Everybody was to be assigned and registered and — 
 badged. 
 
 " A brassard," said Mr. Eritling. 
 
 " It doesn't matter whether we really produce a fight- 
 ing force or not," said Wilkins. " Everybody now is en- 
 thusiastic — and serious. Everybody is willing to put on 
 some kind of uniform and submit to some sort of orders. 
 And the thing to do is to catch them in the willing stage. 
 Now is the time to get the country lined up and organised, 
 ready to meet the internal stresses that are bound to come 
 later. But there's no disposition whatever to welcome this 
 universal offering. It's just as though this war was a 
 treat to which only the very select friends of the War Of- 
 fice were to be admitted. And I don't admit that the na- 
 tional volunteers would be ineffective — even from a mili- 
 tary point of view. There are plenty of fit men of our age, 
 and men of proper age who are better employed at home 
 — armament workers for example, and there are all the 
 boys under the age. They may not be under the age 
 before things are over. . . ." 
 
 He was even prepared to plan uniforms. 
 
 " A brassard," repeated Mr. Britling, " and perhaps col- 
 oured strips on the revers of a coat." 
 
 " Colours for the counties," said Wilkins, " and if there 
 isn't coloured cloth to be got there's — red flannel. Any- 
 thing is better than leaving the mass of people to mob 
 about. . . ." 
 
 A momentary vision danced before Mr. Britling's eyes 
 of red flannel petticoats being torn up in a rapid improv- 
 isation of soldiers to resist a sudden invasion. Passing 
 washerwomen suddenly requisitioned. But one must not 
 let oneself be laughed out of good intentions because of 
 
TAKING PART 239 
 
 ridiculous accessories. The idea at any rate was the sound 
 one. . . . 
 
 The vision of what ought to be done shone brightly 
 while Mr. Britling and Mr. Wilkins maintained it. But 
 presently under discouraging reminders that there were 
 no rifles, no instructors, and, above all, the open hostility 
 of the established authorities, it faded again. . . . 
 
 Afterwards in other conversations Mr. Britling reverted 
 to more modest ambitions. 
 
 " Is there no clerical work, no minor administrative 
 work, a man might be used for ? " he 'asked. 
 
 " Any old dug-out," said the man with the thin face, 
 " any old doddering Colonel Newcome, is preferred to you 
 in that matter. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling emerged from his club about half-past three 
 with his mind rather dishevelled and with his private de- 
 termination to do something promptly for his country's 
 needs blunted by a perplexing " How ? " His search for 
 doors and ways where no doors and ways existed went on 
 with a gathering sense of futility. 
 
 He had a ridiculous sense of pique at being left out, 
 like a child shut out from a room in which a vitally in- 
 teresting game is being played. 
 
 " After all, it is our war," he said. 
 
 He caught the phrase as it dropped from his lips with 
 a feeling that it said more than he intended. He turned 
 it over and examined it, and the more he did so the more 
 he was convinced of its truth and soundness. . . . 
 
 § 2 
 By night there was a new strangeness about London. 
 The authorities were trying to suppress the more brilliant 
 illumination of the chief thoroughfares, on account of 
 the possibility of an air raid. Shopkeepers were being 
 compelled to pull down their blinds, and many of the big 
 standard lights were unlit. Mr. Britling thought these 
 precautions were very fussy and unnecessary, and likely 
 
240 MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 to lead to accidents amidst the traffic. But it gave a 
 Rembrandtesque quality to the London scene, turned it 
 into mysterious arrangements of brown shadows and cones 
 and bars of light. At first many people were recalcitrant, 
 and here and there a restaurant or a draper's window still 
 blazed out and broke the gloom. There were also a num- 
 ber of insubordinate automobiles with big head-lights. 
 But the police were being unusually firm. . . . 
 
 " It will all glitter again in a little time," he told him- 
 self. 
 
 He heard an old lady who was projecting from an 
 offending automobile at Piccadilly Circus in hot dispute 
 with a police officer. " Zeppelins indeed ! " she said. 
 " What nonsense ! As if they would dare to come here ! 
 Who would let them, I should like to know ? " 
 
 Probably a friend of Lady Frensham's, he thought. 
 Still — the idea of Zeppelins over London did seem 
 rather ridiculous to Mr. Britling. He would not have 
 liked to have been caught talking of it himself. . . . 
 There never had been Zeppelins over London. They were 
 
 § 3 
 
 On Wednesday morning Mr. Britling returned to the 
 Dower House, and he was still a civilian unassigned. 
 
 In the hall he found a tall figure in khaki standing 
 and reading The Times that usually lay upon the hall 
 table. The figure turned at Mr. Britling's entry, and 
 revealed the aquiline features of Mr. Lawrence Carmine. 
 It was as if his friend had stolen a march on him. 
 
 But Carmine's face showed nothing of the excitement 
 and patriotic satisfaction that would have seemed natural 
 to Mr. Britling. He was white and jaded, as if he had 
 not slept for many nights. "You see," he explained 
 almost apologetically of the three stars upon his sleeve, 
 " I used to be a captain of volunteers." He had been put 
 
TAKING PAET 241 
 
 in charge of a volunteer force which had heen re-embodied 
 and entrusted with the care of the bridges, gasworks, fac- 
 tories and railway tunnels, and with a number of other 
 minor but necessary duties round about Easinghampton. 
 " I've just got to shut up my house," said Captain Car- 
 mine, " and go into lodgings. I confess I hate it. . . . 
 But anyhow it can't last six months. . . . But it's 
 beastly. . . . Ugh! . . ." 
 
 He seemed disposed to expand that " Ugh," and then 
 thought better of it. And presently Mr. Britling took 
 control of the conversation. 
 
 His two days in London had filled him with matter, 
 and he was glad to have something more than Hugh and 
 Teddy and Mrs. Britling to talk it upon. What was 
 happening now in Great Britain, he declared, was adjust- 
 ment. It was an attempt on the part of a great unor- 
 ganised nation, an attempt, instinctive at present rather 
 than intelligent, to readjust its government and par- 
 ticularly its military organisation to the new scale of 
 warfare that Germany had imposed upon the world. For 
 two strenuous decades the British navy had been growing 
 enormously under the pressure of German naval prepara- 
 tions, but the British military establishment had experi- 
 enced no corresponding expansion. It was true there had 
 been a futile, rather foolishly conducted agitation for 
 universal military service, bat there had been no accumu- 
 lation of material, no preparation of armament-making 
 machinery, no planning and no foundations for any sort 
 of organisation that would have facilitated the rapid ex- 
 pansion of the fighting forces of a country in a time of 
 crisis. • Such an idea was absolutely antagonistic to the 
 mental habits of the British military caste. The German 
 method of incorporating all the strength and resources 
 of the country into one national fighting machine was 
 quite strange to the British military mind — still. Even 
 after a month of war. War had become the compre- 
 hensive business of the German nation; to the British it 
 
242 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 •was an incidental adventure. In Germany the nation waa 
 militarised, in England the army was specialised. The 
 nation for nearly every practical purpose got along with- 
 out it. Just as political life had also become specialised. 
 . . . Now suddenly we wanted a government to speak 
 for every one, and an army of the whole people. How 
 were we to find it? 
 
 Mr. Britling dwelt upon this idea of the specialised 
 character of the British army and navy and government. 
 It seemed to him to he the clue to everything that was 
 jarring in the London spectacle. The army had been a 
 thing aloof, for a special end. It had developed all the 
 characteristics of a caste. It had very high standards 
 along the lines of its specialisation, but it was inadaptable 
 and conservative. Its exclusiveness was not so much a de- 
 liberate culture as a consequence of its detached function. 
 It touched the ordinary social body chiefly through three 
 other specialised bodies, the court, the church, and the 
 stage. Apart from that it saw the great unofficial civilian 
 world as something vague, something unsympathetic, 
 something possibly antagonistic, which it comforted itself 
 by snubbing when it dared and tricking when it could, 
 something that projected members of Parliament towards 
 it and was stingy about money. Directly one grasped 
 how apart the army lived from the ordinary life of the 
 community, from industrialism or from economic neces- 
 sities, directly one understood that the great mass of Eng- 
 lishmen were simply " outsiders " to the War Office mind, 
 just as they were " outsiders " to the political clique, one 
 began to realise the complete unfitness of either govern- 
 ment or War Office for the conduct of so great a national 
 effort as was now needed. These people " up there " did 
 not know anything of the broad mass of English life at 
 all, they did not know how or where things were made; 
 when they wanted things they just went to a shop some- 
 where and got them. This was the necessary psychology 
 of a small army under a clique government. Nothing 
 
TAKING PAKT 243 
 
 else was to be expected. But now — somehow — the 
 nation had to take hold of the government that it had 
 neglected so long. . . . 
 
 " You see," said Mr. Britling, repeating a phrase that 
 was becoming more and more essential to his thoughts, 
 " this is our war. . . . 
 
 " Of course," said Mr. Britling, " these things are not 
 going to be done without a conflict. We aren't going 
 to take hold of our country which we have neglected so 
 long without a lot of internal friction. But in England 
 we can make these readjustments without revolution. It 
 is our strength. . . . 
 
 " At present England is confused — but it's a healthy 
 confusion. It's astir. We have more things to defeat 
 than just Germany. . . . 
 
 " These hosts of recruits — weary, uncared for, be- 
 sieging the recruiting stations. It's symbolical. . . . 
 Our tremendous reserves of will and manhood. Our 
 almost incredible insufficiency of direction. . . . 
 
 " Those people up there have no idea of the Will 
 that surges up in England. They are timid little 
 manoeuvring people, afraid of property, afraid of news- 
 papers, afraid of trade-unions. They aren't leading us 
 against the Germans; they are just being shoved against 
 the Germans by necessity. . . ." 
 
 Erom this Mr. Britling broke away into a fresh addi- 
 tion to his already large collection of contrasts between 
 England and Germany. Germany was a nation which 
 has been swallowed up and incorporated by an army and 
 an administration; the Prussian military system had 
 assimilated to itself the whole German life. It was a 
 State in a state of repletion, a State that had swallowed 
 all its people. Britain was not a State. It was an unin- 
 corporated people. The British army, the British War 
 Office, and the British administration had assimilated 
 nothing; they were little old partial things; the British 
 nation lay outside them, beyond their understanding and 
 
244 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 tradition; a formless new thing, but a great thing; and 
 now this British nation, this real nation, the " outsiders," 
 had to take up arms. Suddenly all the underlying ideas 
 of that outer, greater English life beyond politics, beyond 
 the services, were challenged, its tolerant good humour, 
 its freedom, and its irresponsibility. It was not simply 
 English life that was threatened; it was all the latitudes 
 of democracy, it was every liberal idea and every liberty. 
 It was civilisation in danger. The uncharted liberal 
 system had been taken by the throat ; it had to " make 
 good " or perish. . . . 
 
 "I went up to' London expecting to be told what to 
 do. There is no one to tell any one what to do. . . . 
 Much less is there any one to compel us what to do. . . . 
 
 " There's a War Office like a college during a riot, 
 with its doors and windows barred; there's a government 
 like a cockle boat in an Atlantic gale. . . . 
 
 " One feels the thing ought to have come upon us like 
 the sound of a trumpet. Instead, until now, it has been 
 like a great noise, that we just listened to, in the next 
 house. . . . And now slowly the nation awakes. London 
 is just like a dazed sleeper waking up out of a deep sleep 
 to fire and danger, tumult and cries for help, near at 
 hand. The streets give you exactly that effect. People 
 are looking about and listening. One feels that at any 
 moment, in a pause, in a silence, there may come, from 
 far away, over the houses, faint and little, the boom of 
 guns or the small outcries of little French or Belgian vil 
 lages in agony. . . ." 
 
 Such was the gist of Mr. Britling's discourse. 
 
 He did most of the table talk, and all that mattered. 
 Teddy was an assenting voice, Hugh was silent and ap- 
 parently a little inattentive, Mrs. Britling was thinking 
 of the courses and the servants and the boys, and giving 
 her husband 'only half an ear, Captain Carmine said little 
 and seemed to be troubled by some disagreeable preoc- 
 cupation. Now and then he would endorse or supple- 
 
TAKING PART 245 
 
 ment the things Mr. Britling was saying. Thrice he re- 
 marked: "People still do not begin to understand." . . . 
 
 § 4 
 
 It was only when they sat together in the barn court 
 out of the way of Mrs. Britling and the children that 
 Captain Carmine was able to explain his listless bearing 
 and jaded appearance. He was suffering from a bad 
 nervous shock. He had hardly taken over his command 
 before one of his men had been killed — and killed in a 
 manner that had left a scar upon his mind. 
 
 The man had been guarding a tunnel, and he had been 
 knocked down by one train when crossing the line behind 
 another. So it was that the bomb of Sarajevo killed its 
 first victim in Essex. Captain Carmine had found the 
 body. He had found the body in a cloudy moonlight; 
 he had almost fallen over it ; and his sensations and emo- 
 tions had been eminently disagreeable. He had had to 
 drag the body — it was very dreadfully mangled — off 
 the permanent way, the damaged, almost severed head had 
 twisted about very horribly in the uncertain light, and 
 afterwards he had found his sleeves saturated with blood. 
 He had not noted this at the time, and when he had dis- 
 covered it he had been sick. He had thought the whole 
 thing more horrible and hateful than any nightmare, but 
 he had succeeded in behaving with a sufficient practicality 
 to set an example to his men. Since this had happened 
 he had not had an hour of dreamless sleep. 
 
 " One doesn't expect to be called upon like that," said 
 Captain Carmine, " suddenly here in England. . . . 
 When one is smoking after supper. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling listened to this experience with distressed 
 brows. All his talking and thinking became to him like 
 the open page of a monthly magazine. Across it this 
 bloody smear, this thing of red and black, was 
 dragged. . . . 
 
246 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 § 5 
 
 The smear was still bright red in Mr. Britling's 
 thoughts when Teddy came to him. 
 
 " I must go," said Teddy, " I can't stop here any 
 longer." 
 
 "Go where?" 
 
 " Into khaki. I've been thinking of it ever since the 
 war began. Do you remember what you said when we 
 were bullying off at hockey on Bank Holiday — the day 
 before war was declared ? " 
 
 Mr. Britling had forgotten completely; he made an 
 effort. "What did I say?" 
 
 " You said, ' What the devil are we doing at this 
 hockey? We ought to be drilling or shooting against 
 those confounded Germans ! ' . . . I've never forgotten 
 it. ... I ought to have done it before. I've been a 
 scout-master. In a little while they will want officers. 
 In London, I'm told, there are a lot of officers' training 
 corps putting men through the work as quickly as pos- 
 sible. ... If I could go. . . ." 
 
 "What does Letty think?" said Mr. Britling after 
 a pause. This was right, of course — the only right 
 thing — and yet he was surprised. 
 
 " She says if you'd let her try to do my work for a 
 time. . . ." 
 
 " She wants you to go ? " 
 
 " Of course she does," said Teddy. " She wouldn't 
 like me to be a shirker. . . . But I can't unless you 
 help." 
 
 " I'm quite ready to do that," said Mr. Britling. 
 " But somehow I didn't think it of you. I hadn't some- 
 how thought of you " 
 
 " What did you think of me ? " asked Teddy. 
 
 "It's bringing the war home to us. . . . Of course 
 you ought to go — if you want to go." 
 
TAKING PAET 247 
 
 He reflected. It was odd to find Teddy in this mood, 
 strung up and serious and businesslike. He felt that 
 in the past he had done Teddy injustice ; this young man 
 wasn't as trivial as he had thought him. . . . 
 
 They fell to discussing ways and means; there might 
 have to be a loan for Teddy's outfit, if he did presently 
 secure a commission. And there were one or two other 
 little matters. . . . Mr. Britling dismissed a ridiculous 
 fancy that he was paying to send Teddy away to some- 
 thing that neither that young man nor Letty understood 
 properly. . . . 
 
 The next day Teddy vanished Londonward on his 
 bicycle. He was going to lodge in London in order to 
 be near his training. He was zealous. Never before 
 had Teddy been zealous. Mrs. Teddy came to the Dower 
 House for the correspondence, trying not to look self- 
 conscious and important. 
 
 Two Mondays later a very bright-eyed, excited little 
 boy came running to Mr. Britling, who was smoking 
 after lunch in the rose garden. " Daddy ! " squealed the 
 small boy. "Teddy! In khaki!" 
 
 The other junior Britling danced in front of the hero, 
 who was walking beside Mrs. Britling and trying not 
 to be too aggressively a soldierly figure. He looked a 
 very man in khaki and more of a boy than ever. Mrs. 
 Teddy came behind, quietly elated. 
 
 Mr. Britling had a recurrence of that same disagree- 
 able fancy that these young people didn't know exactly 
 what they were going into. He wished he was in khaki 
 himself; then he fancied this compunction wouldn't 
 trouble him quite so much. 
 
 The afternoon with them deepened his conviction that 
 they really didn't in the slightest degree understand. 
 Life had been so good to them hitherto, that even the 
 idea of Teddy's going off to the war seemed a sort of fun 
 to them. It was just a thing he was doing, a serious, 
 
248 MR. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 seriously amusing, and very creditable thing. It in- 
 volved his dressing up in these unusual clothes, and re- 
 ceiving salutes in the street. . . . They discussed every 
 possible aspect of his military outlook with the zest of 
 children "who recount the merits of a new game. They 
 were putting Teddy through his stages at a tremendous 
 pace. In quite a little time he thought he would be given 
 the chance of a commission. 
 
 " They want subalterns badly. Already they've taken 
 nearly a third of our people," he said, and added with 
 the wistfulness of one who glances at inaccessible de- 
 lights : " one or two may get out to the front quite soon." 
 
 He spoke as a young actor might speak of a star part. 
 And with a touch of the quality of one who longs to travel 
 in strange lands. . . . One must be patient. Things 
 come at last. . . . 
 
 " If I'm killed she gets eighty pounds a year," Teddy 
 explained among many other particulars. 
 
 He smiled — the smile of a confident immortal at this 
 amusing idea. 
 
 " He's my little annuity," said Letty, also smiling, 
 " dead or alive." 
 
 "We'll miss Teddy in all sorts of ways," said Mr, 
 Britling. 
 
 " It's only for the duration of the war," said Teddy. 
 " And Lefty's very intelligent. I've done my best to 
 chasten the evil in her." 
 
 " If you think you're going to get back your job after 
 the war," said Letty, " you're very much mistaken. I'm 
 going to raise the standard." 
 
 " You! " said Teddy, regarding her coldly, and pro- 
 ceeded ostentatiously to talk of other things. 
 
 § 6 
 
 "Hugh's going to be in khaki too," the elder junior 
 told Teddy. "He's too young to go out in Kitchener's 
 
TAKING PAET 249 
 
 army, but he's joined the Territorials. He went off on 
 Thursday. ... I wish Gilbert and me was older. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling had known his son's purpose since the 
 evening of Teddy's announcement! 
 
 Hugh had come to his father's study as he was sitting 
 musing at his writing-desk over the important question 
 whether he should continue his " Examination of War " 
 uninterruptedly, or whether he should not put that on 
 one side for a time and set himself to state as clearly as 
 possible the not too generally recognised misfit between 
 the will and strength of Britain on the one hand and her 
 administrative and military organisation on the other. 
 He felt that an enormous amount of human enthusiasm 
 and energy was being refused and wasted ; that if things 
 went on as they were going there would continue to be a 
 quite disastrous shortage of gear, and that some broaden- 
 ing change was needed immediately if the swift exem- 
 plary victory over Germany that his soul demanded was 
 to be ensured. Suppose he were to write some noisy 
 articles at once, an article, for instance, to be called " The 
 War of the Mechanics" or "The War of Gear," and 
 another on " Without Civil Strength there is no Victory." 
 If he wrote such things would they be noted or would 
 they just vanish indistinguishably into the general men- 
 tal tumult? Would they be audible and helpful shouts, 
 or just waste of shouting? . . . That at least was 
 what he supposed himself to be thinking; it was, at any 
 rate, the main current of his thinking ; but all the same, 
 just outside the circle of his attention a number of 
 other things were dimly apprehended, bobbing up and 
 down in the flood and ready at the slightest chance to 
 swirl into the centre of his thoughts. There was, for 
 instance, Captain Carmine in the moonlight lugging up 
 a railway embankment something horrible, something 
 loose and wet and warm that had very recently been a 
 man. There was Teddy, serious and patriotic — filling 
 a futile penman with incredulous respect. There was 
 
250 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 the thin-faced man at the club, and a curious satisfaction 
 he had betrayed in the public disarrangement. And there 
 was Hugh. Particularly there was Hugh, silent but 
 watchful. The boy never babbled. He had his mother's 
 gift of deep dark silences. Out of which she was wont 
 to flash, a Black Princess waving a sword. He wandered 
 for a little while among memories. . . . But Hugh 
 didn't come out like that, though it always seemed pos- 
 sible he might — perhaps he didn't come out because he 
 was a son. Revelation to his father wasn't his busi- 
 ness. . . . What was he thinking of it all? What was 
 he going to do? Mr. Britling was acutely anxious that 
 his son should volunteer; he was almost certain that he 
 would volunteer, but there was just a little shadow of 
 doubt whether some extraordinary subtlety of mind 
 mightn't have carried the boy into a pacifist attitude. 
 No ! that was impossible. In the face of Belgium. . . . 
 But as greatly — and far more deeply in the warm flesh 
 of his being — did Mr. Britling desire that no harm, no 
 evil should happen to Hugh. . . . 
 
 The door opened, and Hugh came in. . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling glanced over his shoulder with an affec- 
 tation of indifference. "TL&l-lo!" he said. "What do 
 you want ? " 
 
 Hugh walked awkwardly to the hearthrug. 
 
 " Oh ! " he said in an off-hand tone ; " I suppose I've 
 
 got to go soldiering for a bit. I just thought I'd 
 
 rather like to go off with a man I know to-morrow. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling's manner remained casual. 
 
 " It's the only thing to do now, I'm afraid," he said. 
 
 He turned in his chair and regarded his son. " What 
 do you mean to do ? O.T.C. ? " 
 
 " I don't think I should make much of an officer. I 
 hate giving orders to other people. We thought we'd just 
 go together into the Essex Regiment as privates. . . ." 
 
 There was a little pause. Both father and son had 
 rehearsed this scene in their minds several times, and 
 
TAKING PART 251 
 
 now they found that they had no use for a number of 
 sentences that had been most effective in these rehearsals. 
 Mr. Britling scratched his cheek with the end of his pen. 
 " I'm glad you want to go, Hugh," he said. 
 
 " I don't want to go," said Hugh with his hands deep 
 in his pockets. " I want to go and work with Cardinal. 
 But this job has to be done by every one. Haven't you 
 been saying as much all day? . . . It's like turning out 
 to chase a burglar or suppress a mad dog. It's like nec- 
 essary sanitation. . . ." 
 
 " You aren't attracted by soldiering ? " 
 
 " Not a bit. I won't pretend it, Daddy. I think the 
 whole business is a bore. Germany seems to me now just 
 like some heavy horrible dirty mass that has fallen across 
 Belgium and France. We've got to shove the stuff back 
 again. That's all. . . ." 
 
 He volunteered some further remarks to his father's 
 silence. 
 
 " You know I can't get up a bit of tootle about this 
 business," he said. " I think killing people or getting 
 killed is a thoroughly nasty habit. ... I expect my 
 share will be just drilling and fatigue duties and route 
 marches, and loafing here in England. . . ." 
 
 " You can't possibly go out for two years," said Mr. 
 Britling, as if he regretted it. 
 
 A slight hesitation appeared in Hugh's eyes. " I sup- 
 pose not," he said. 
 
 " Things ought to be over by then — anyhow," Mr. 
 Britling added, betraying his real feelings. 
 
 " So it's really just helping at the furthest end of the 
 shove," Hugh endorsed, but still with that touch of reser- 
 vation in his manner. ... 
 
 The pause had the effect of closing the theoretical side 
 of the question. " Where do you propose to enlist ? " 
 said Mr. Britling, coming down to practical details. 
 
252 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 § 7 
 
 The battle of the Marne passed into the battle of the 
 Aisne, and then the long lines of the struggle streamed 
 north-westward until the British were back in Belgium 
 failing to clutch Menin and then defending Ypres. The 
 elation of September followed the bedazzlement and dis- 
 may of August into the chapter of forgotten moods; and 
 Mr. Britling's sense of the magnitude, the weight and 
 duration of this war beyond all wars, increased steadily. 
 The feel of it was less and less a feeling of crisis and 
 more and more a feeling of new conditions. It wasn't 
 as it had seemed at first, the end of one human phase and 
 the beginning of another; it was in itself a phase. It 
 was a new way of living. And still he could find no real 
 point of contact for himself with it all except the point 
 of his pen. Only at his writing-desk, and more par- 
 ticularly at night, were the great presences of the con- 
 flict his. Tet he was always desiring some more personal 
 and physical participation. 
 
 Hugh came along one day in October in an ill-fitting 
 uniform, looking already coarser in fibre and with a nose 
 scorched red by the autumnal sun. He said the life was 
 rough, but it made him feel extraordinarily well; per- 
 haps man was made to toil until he dropped asleep from 
 exhaustion, to fast for ten or twelve hours and then eat 
 like a wolf. He was acquiring a taste for Woodbine 
 cigarettes, and a heady variety of mineral waters called 
 Monsters. He feared promotion; he felt he could never 
 take the hjgh line with other human beings demanded 
 of a corporal. He was still trying to read a little chem- 
 istry and crystallography, but it didn't " go with the life." 
 In the scanty leisure of a recruit in training it was more 
 agreeable to lie about and write doggerel verses and draw 
 caricatures of the men in one's platoon. Invited to 
 choose what he liked by his family, he demanded a large 
 tuckbox such as he used to have at school, only "much 
 
TAKING PAKT 253 
 
 larger," and a big tin of insect powder. It must be able 
 to kill ticks. . . . 
 
 Wben he had gone, the craving for a personal share 
 in the nation's physical exertions became overpowering 
 in Mr. Britling. He wanted, he felt, to "get his skin 
 into it." He had decided that the volunteer movement 
 was a hopeless one. The War Office, after a stout re- 
 sistance to any volunteer movement at all, decided to 
 recognise it in such a manner as to make it ridiculous. 
 The volunteers were to have no officers and no uniforms 
 that could be remotely mistaken for those of the regulars, 
 so that in the event of an invasion the Germans would 
 be able to tell what they had to deal with miles away. 
 Wilkins found his conception of a whole nation, all en- 
 rolled, all listed and badged according to capacity, his 
 dream of every one falling into place in one great volun- 
 tary national effort, treated as the childish dreaming of 
 that most ignorant of all human types, a " novelist." 
 Punch was delicately funny about him; he was repre- 
 sented as wearing a preposterous cocked hat of his own 
 design, designing cocked hats for every one. Wilkins 
 was told to " shut up " in a multitude of anonymous let- 
 ters, and publicly and privately to "leave things to 
 Kitchener." To bellow in loud clear tones " leave things 
 to Kitchener," and to depart for the theatre or the river 
 or an automobile tour, was felt very generally at that time 
 to be the proper conduct for a patriot. There was a very 
 general persuasion that to become a volunteer when one 
 ought to be just modestly doing nothing at all, was in 
 some obscure way a form of disloyalty. . . . 
 
 So Mr. Britling was out of conceit with volunteering, 
 and instead he went and was duly sworn and entrusted 
 with the badge of a special constable. The duties of a 
 special constable were chiefly not to understand what was 
 going on in the military sphere, and to do what he was 
 told in the way of watching and warding conceivably vul- 
 nerable points. He had also to be available in the event 
 
254 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 of civil disorder. Mr. Britling was provided with a 
 truncheon and sent out to guard various culverts, bridges, 
 and fords in the hilly country to the north-westward of 
 Matching^ Easy. It was never very clear to him what 
 he would do if he found a motor-car full of armed enemies 
 engaged in undermining a culvert, or treacherously deep- 
 ening some strategic ford. He supposed he would either 
 engage them in conversation, or hit them with his 
 truncheon, or perhaps do both things simultaneously. 
 But as he really did not believe for a moment that any 
 human being was likely to tamper with the telegraphs, 
 telephones, ways and appliances committed to hia care, 
 his uncertainty did not trouble him very much. He 
 jjrowled the lonely lanes and paths in the darkness, and 
 became better acquainted with a multitude of intriguing 
 little cries and noises that came from the hedges and 
 coverts at night. One night he rescued a young leveret 
 from a stoat, who seemed more than half inclined to give 
 him battle for its prey until he cowed and defeated it 
 with the glare of his electric torch. . . . 
 
 As he prowled the countryside under the great hemi- 
 sphere of Essex sky, or leant against fences or sat drowsily 
 upon gates or sheltered from wind and rain under ricks 
 or sheds, he had much time for meditation, and his 
 thoughts went down and down below his first surface im- 
 pressions of the war. He thought no longer of the rights 
 and wrongs of this particular conflict but of the under- 
 lying forces in mankind that made war possible; he 
 planned no more ingenious treaties and conventions be- 
 tween the nations, and instead he faced the deeper riddles 
 of essential evil and of conceivable changes in the heart 
 ■of man. And the rain assailed him and thorns tore him, 
 and the soaked soft meadows bogged and betrayed his 
 ■wandering feet, and the little underworld of the hedges 
 and ditches hissed and squealed in the darkness and pur- 
 sued and fled, and devoured or were slain. 
 
 And one night in April he was perplexed by a com- 
 
TAKING PAKT 255- 
 
 motion among the pheasants and a barking of distant 
 dogs, and then to his great astonishment he heard noises- 
 like a distant firework display and saw something like a. 
 phantom yellowish fountain-pen in the sky far away to- 
 the east lit intermittently by a quivering search-light and 
 going very swiftly. And after he had rubbed his eyes 
 and looked again, he realised that he was looking at a 
 Zeppelin — a Zeppelin flying Londonward over Essex. 
 And all that night was wonder. . . . 
 
 § 8 
 
 While Mr. Britling was trying to find his duty in the 
 routine of a special constable, Mrs. Britling set to work 
 with great energy to attend various classes and qualify 
 herself for Bed Cross work. And early in October came- 
 the great drive of the Germans towards Antwerp and the 
 sea, the great drive that was apparently designed to reach 
 Calais, and which swept before it multitudes of Flemish 
 refugees. There was an exodus of all classes from Ant- 
 werp into Hollaild and England, and then a huge process- 
 of depopulation in Elanders and the Pas de Calais. This 
 flood came to the eastern and southern parts of England 
 and particularly to London, and there hastily improvised 
 organisations distributed it to a number of local com- 
 mittees, each of which took a share of the refugees, hired 
 and furnished unoccupied houses for the use of the penni- 
 less, and assisted those who had means into comfortable 
 quarters. The Matcbing's Easy committee found itself 
 with accommodation for sixty people, and with a miscel- 
 laneous bag of thirty individuals entrusted to its care, 
 who had been part of the load of a little pirate steam-boat 
 from Ostend. There were two Flemish peasant families, 
 and the rest were more or less middle-class refugees from 
 Antwerp. They were brought from the station to the- 
 Tithe barn at Claverings, and there distributed, under 
 the personal supervision of Lady Homartyn and her 
 
256 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 agent, among those who were prepared for their enter- 
 tainment. There was something like competition among 
 the would-be hosts; everybody was glad of the chance of 
 " doing something," and anxious to show these Belgians 
 what England thought of their plucky little country. 
 Mr. Britling was proud to lead off a Mr. Van der Pant, 
 a neat little bearded man in a black tail-coat, a black 
 bowler hat, and a knitted muffler, with a large rucksack 
 and a conspicuously foreign-looking bicycle, to the hos- 
 pitalities of Dower House. Mr. Van der Pant had 
 escaped from Antwerp at the eleventh hour, he had caught 
 a severe cold and, it would seem, lost his wife and family 
 in the process ; he had much to tell Mr. Britling, and in 
 his zeal to tell it he did not at once discover that though 
 Mr. Britling knew French quite well he did not know it 
 very rapidly. 
 
 The dinner that night at the Dower House marked a 
 distinct fresh step in the approach of the Great War to 
 the old habits and securities of Matching's Easy. The 
 war had indeed filled every one's mind to the exclusion 
 of all other topics since its very beginning ; it had carried 
 off Herr Heinrich to Germany, Teddy to London, and 
 Hugh to Colchester, it had put a special brassard round 
 Mr. Britling's arm and carried him out into the night, 
 given Mrs. Britling several certificates, and interrupted 
 the frequent visits and gossip of Mr. Lawrence Carmine ; 
 but so far it had not established a direct contact between 
 the life of Matching's Easy and the grim business of shot, 
 shell, and bayonet at the front. But now here was the 
 Dower House accomplishing wonderful idioms in Anglo- 
 French, and an animated guest telling them — sometimes 
 one understood clearly and sometimes the meaning was 
 clouded — of men blown to pieces under his eyes, of frag- 
 ments of human beings lying about in the streets; there 
 was trouble over the expression omoplate d'une femme, 
 until one of the youngsters got the dictionary and found 
 out it was the shoulder-blade of a woman; of pools 
 
TAKING PAET 25T 
 
 of blood — everywhere — and of flight in the darkness. 
 
 Mr. Van der Pant had been in charge of the dynamos, 
 at the Antwerp Power Station, he had been keeping the 
 electrified wires in the entanglements " alive," and he had 
 stuck to his post until the German high explosives had 
 shattered his wires and rendered his dynamos useless. 
 He gave vivid little pictures of the noises of the bombard- 
 ment, of the dead lying casually in the open spaces, of 
 the failure of the German guns to hit the bridge of boats, 
 across which the bulk of the defenders and refugees- 
 escaped. He produced a little tourist's map of the city 
 of Antwerp, and dotted at it with a pencil-case. " The 
 — what do you call ? — obus, ah, shells ! fell, so and so 
 and so." Across here he had fled on his becane, and 
 along here and here. He had carried off his rifle, and 
 hid it with the rifles of various other Belgians between 
 floor and ceiling of a house in Zeebrugge. He had found, 
 the pirate steamer in the harbour, its captain resolved to 
 extract the uttermost fare out of every refugee he took 
 to London. When they were all aboard and started they 
 found there was no food except the hard ration biscuits 
 of some Belgian soldiers. They had portioned this out 
 like shipwrecked people on a raft. . . . The mer had 
 been calme; thank Heaven! All night they had been 
 pumping. He had helped with the pumps. But Mr. 
 Van der Pant hoped still to get a reckoning with the 
 captain of that ship. 
 
 Mr. Van der Pant had had shots at various Zeppelins. 
 When the Zeppelins came to Antwerp everybody turned 
 out on the roofs and shot at them. He was contemptuous, 
 of Zeppelins. He made derisive gestures to express his 
 opinion of them. They could do nothing unless they 
 came low, and if they came low you could hit them. One 
 which ventured down had been riddled; it had had to 
 drop all its bombs — luckily they fell in an open field — 
 in order to make its lame escape. It was all nonsense 
 to say, as the English papers did, that they took part in 
 
258 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 the final bombardment. Not a Zeppelin. ... So he 
 talked, and the Britling family listened and understood 
 as much as they could, and replied and questioned in 
 Anglo-French. Here was a man who but a few days 
 ago had been steering his bicycle in the streets of Ant- 
 werp to avoid shell craters, pools of blood, and the torn- 
 off arms and shoulder-blades of women. He had seen 
 houses flaring, set afire by incendiary bombs, and once at 
 a corner he had been knocked off his bicycle by the pouff 
 of a bursting shell. . . . Not only were these things in 
 the same world with us, they were sitting at our table. 
 
 He told one grim story of an invalid woman unable to 
 move, lying in bed in her appartement, and of how her 
 husband went out on the balcony to look at the Zeppelin. 
 There was a great noise of shooting. Ever and again he 
 would put his head back into the room and tell her things, 
 and then after a time he was silent and looked in no more. 
 She called to him, and called again. Becoming fright- 
 «ned, she raised herself by a great effort and peered 
 -through the glass. At first she was too puzzled to under- 
 stand what had happened. He was hanging over the 
 front of the balcony, with his head twisted oddly. 
 Twisted and shattered. He had been killed by shrapnel 
 fired from the outer fortifications. . . . 
 
 These are the things that happen in histories and 
 stories. They do not happen at Hatching's Easy. . . . 
 
 Mr. Van der Pant did not seem to be angry with the 
 Germans. But he manifestly regarded them as people 
 to be killed. He denounced nothing that they had done ; 
 he related. They were just an evil accident that had hap- 
 pened to Belgium and mankind. They had to be de- 
 stroyed. He gave Mr. Britling an extraordinary per- 
 suasion that knives were being sharpened in every cellai? 
 in Brussels and Antwerp against the day of inevitable 
 retreat, of a resolution to exterminate the invader that 
 was far too deep to be vindictive. . . . And the man waa 
 most amazingly unconquered. Mr. Britling perceived 
 
TAKING PAET 259 
 
 the label on his habitual dinner wine with a slight em- 
 barrassment. " Do you care," he asked, " to drink a Ger< 
 man wine? This is Berncasteler from the Moselle." 
 Mr. Van der Pant reflected. " But it is a good wine," 
 he said. " After the peace it will be Belgian. . c . Yes, 
 if we are to be safe in the future from such a war as this, 
 we must have our boundaries right up to the Ehine." 
 
 So he sat and talked, flushed and, as it were, elated by 
 the vividness of all that he had undergone. He had no 
 trace of tragic quality, no hint of subjugation. But for 
 his costume and his trimmed beard and bis language he 
 might have been a Dubliner or a Cockney. 
 
 He was astonishingly cut off from all his belongings. 
 His house in Antwerp was abandoned to the invader; 
 valuables and cherished objects very skilfully buried in 
 the garden ; he had no change of clothing except wbat the 
 rucksack held. His only footwear were the boots he came 
 in. He could not get on any of the slippers in the bouse, 
 they were all too small for him, until suddenly Mrs. Brit- 
 ling bethought herself of Herr Heinrich's pair, still left 
 unpacked upstairs. She produced them, and they fitted 
 exactly. It seemed only poetical justice, a foretaste of 
 national compensations, to annex them to Belgium forth- 
 with. . . . 
 
 Also it became manifest that Mr. Van der Pant was 
 cut off from all his family. And suddenly he became 
 briskly critical of the English way of doing things. His 
 wife and child had preceded him to England, crossing 
 by Ostend and Folkestone a fortnight ago; her parents 
 had come in August; both groups had been seized upon 
 by improvised British organisations and very thoroughly 
 and completely lost. He had written to the Belgian Em- 
 bassy and they had referred him to a committee in Lon- 
 don, and the committee had begun its services by 
 discovering a Madame Van der Pant hitherto unknown 
 to him at Camberwell, and displaying a certain suspicion 
 and hostility when he said she would not do. There had 
 
260 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 been some futile telegrams. " What," asked Mr. Van 
 der Pant, " ought one to do ? " 
 
 Mr. Britling temporised by saying he would "make 
 inquiries," and put Mr. Van der Pant off for two days. 
 Then he decided to go up to London with him and " make 
 inquiries on the spot." Mr. Van der Pant did not dis- 
 cover his family, but Mr. Britling discovered the pro- 
 found truth of a comment of Herr Heinrich's which he 
 had hitherto considered utterly trivial, but which had 
 nevertheless stuck in his memory. " The English," Herr 
 Heinrich had said, " do not understanding indexing. It 
 is the root of all good organisation." 
 
 Finally, Mr. Van der Pant adopted the irregular 
 course of asking every Belgian he met if they had seen 
 any one from his district in Antwerp, if they had heard 
 of the name of " Van der Pant," if they had encountered 
 So-and-so or So-and-so. And by obstinacy and good 
 fortune he really got on to the track of Madame Van der 
 Pant ; she had been carried off into Kent, and a day later 
 the Dower House was the scene of a happy reunion. 
 Madame was a slender lady, dressed well and plainly, 
 with a Belgian common sense and a Catholic reserve, and 
 Andre was like a child of wax, delicate and charming 
 and unsubstantial. It seemed incredible that he could 
 ever grow into anything so buoyant and incessant as his 
 father. The Britling boys had to be warned not to dam- 
 age him. A sitting-room was handed over to the Bel- 
 gians for their private use, and for a time the two fam- 
 ilies settled into the Dower House side by side. Anglo- 
 French became the table language of the household. It 
 hampered Mr. Britling very considerably. And both 
 families set themselves to much unrecorded observation, 
 much unspoken mutual criticism, and the exercise of 
 great patience. It was tiresome for the English to be 
 tied to a language that crippled all spontaneous talk; 
 these linguistic gymnastics were fun to begin with, but 
 soon they became very troublesome; and the Belgians 
 
TAKING PAET 261 
 
 suspected sensibilities in their hosts and a vast unwritten 
 code of etiquette that did not exist; at first they were 
 always waiting, as it were, to be invited or told or in- 
 cluded ; they seemed always deferentially backing out 
 from intrusions. Moreover, they would not at first re- 
 veal what food they liked or what they didn't like, or 
 whether they wanted more or less. . ■. . But these diffi- 
 culties were soon smoothed away, they Anglicised quickly 
 and cleverly. Andre grew bold and cheerful, and lost 
 his first distrust of his rather older English playmates. 
 Every day at lunch he produced a new, carefully pre- 
 pared piece of English, though for some time he retained 
 a marked preference for " Good morning, Saire," and 
 " Thank you very mush," over all other locutions, and fell 
 back upon them on all possible and many impossible oc- 
 casions. And he could do some sleight-of-hand tricks 
 with remarkable skill and humour, and fold paper with 
 quite astonishing results. Meanwhile Mr. Van der Pant 
 sought temporary employment in England, went for long 
 rides upon his bicycle, exchanged views with Mr. Brit- 
 ling upon a variety of subjects, and became a wonderful 
 player of hockey. 
 
 He played hockey with an extraordinary zest and 
 nimbleness. Always he played in the tail coat, and the 
 knitted muffler was never relinquished; he treated the 
 game entirely as an occasion for quick tricks and persona] 
 agility; he bounded about the field like a kitten, he 
 pirouetted suddenly, he leapt into the air and came down 
 in new directions; his fresh-coloured face was alive with 
 delight, the coat tails and the muffler trailed and swished 
 about breathlessly behind his agility. He never passed 
 to other players; he never realised his appointed place 
 in the game ; he sought simply to make himself a leaping 
 screen about the ball as he drove it towards the goal. 
 But Andre he would not permit to play at all, and Ma- 
 dame played like a lady, like a Madonna, like a saint 
 carrying the instrument of her martyrdom. The game 
 
262 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 and its enthusiasms flowed round her and receded from 
 her; she remained quite valiant but tolerant, restrained; 
 doing her best to do the extraordinary things required 
 of her, but essentially a being of passive dignities, living 
 chiefly for them ; Letty careering by her, keen and swift, 
 was like a creature of a different species. . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling cerebrated abundantly about these con- 
 trasts. 
 
 " What has been blown in among us by these German 
 shells," he said, " is essentially a Catholic family. 
 Blown clean out of its setting. . . . We who are really 
 — Keo-Europeans. . . . 
 
 " At first you imagine there is nothing separating us 
 but language. Presently you find that language is the 
 least of our separations. These people are people living 
 upon fundamentally different ideas from ours, ideas far 
 more definite and complete than ours. You imagine 
 that home in Antwerp as something much more rounded 
 off, much more closed in, a cell, a real social unit, a dif- 
 ferent thing altogether from this place of meeting. Our 
 boys play cheerfully with all comers; little Andre hasn't 
 learnt to play with any outside children at all. We must 
 seem incredibly open to these Van der Pants. A house 
 without sides. . . . Last Sunday I could not find out the 
 names of the two girls who came on bicycles and played 
 so well. They came with Kitty Westropp. And Van 
 der Pant wanted to know how they were related to us. 
 Or how was it they came? . . . 
 
 " Look at Madame. She's built on a fundamentally 
 different plan from any of our womenkind here. Tennis, 
 the bicycle, co-education, the two-step, the higher educa- 
 tion of women. . . . Say these things over to yourself, 
 and think of her. It's like talking of a nun in riding 
 breeches. She's a specialised woman, specialising in 
 womanhood, her sphere is the home. Soft, trailing, drap- 
 ing skirts, slow movements, a veiled face; for no Orien- 
 tal veil could be more effectual than her beautiful Cath- 
 
TAKING PAET 263 
 
 olic quiet. Catholicism invented the invisible purdah. 
 She is far more akin to that sweet little Indian lady 
 with the wonderful robes whom Carmine brought over 
 with her tall husband last summer, than she is to Letty 
 or Cissie. She, too, undertook to play hockey. And 
 played it very much as Madame Van der Pant played 
 it. . . . 
 
 " The more I see of our hockey," said Mr. Britling, 
 " the more wonderful it seems to me as a touchstone of 
 character and culture and breeding. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Manning, to whom he was delivering this discourse, 
 switched him on to a new track by asking what he meant 
 by " Neo-European." 
 
 "It's a bad phrase," said Mr. Britling. "I'll with- 
 draw it. Let me try and state exactly what I have in 
 mind. I mean something that is coming up in America 
 and here and the Scandinavian countries and Bussia, a 
 new culture, an escape from the Levantine religion and 
 the Catholic culture that came to us from the Mediter- 
 ranean. Let me drop Neo-European; let me say North- 
 ern. We are Northerners. The key, the heart, the 
 nucleus and essence of every culture is its conception of 
 the relations of men and women; and this new culture 
 tends to diminish the specialisation of women as women, 
 to let them out from the cell of the home into common 
 citizenship with men. It's a new culture, still in process 
 of development, which will make men more social and 
 co-operative and women bolder, swifter, more responsible 
 1 and less cloistered. It minimises instead of exaggerating 
 ,the importance of sex. . . . 
 
 " And," said Mr. Britling, in very much the tones in 
 which a preacher might say " Sixthly," " it is just all this 
 Northern tendency that this world struggle is going to 
 release. This war is pounding through Europe, smash- 
 ing up homes, dispersing and mixing homes, setting 
 Madame Van der Pant playing hockey, and Andre climb- 
 ing trees with my young ruffians ; it is killing young men 
 
264 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 by the million, altering the proportions of the sexes for 
 a generation, bringing women into business and office and 
 industry, destroying the accumulated wealth that kept so 
 many of them in refined idleness, flooding the world with 
 strange doubts and novel ideas. . . ." 
 
 § 9 
 
 But the conflict of manners and customs that fol- 
 lowed the invasion of the English villages by French and 
 Belgian refugees did not always present the immigrants 
 as Catholics and the hosts as " Neo-European." In the 
 case of Mr. Dimple it was the other way round. He met 
 Mr. Britling in Claverings park and told him his 
 troubles. . . . 
 
 " Of course," he said, " we have to do our Utmost for 
 Brave Little Belgium. I would be the last to complain 
 of any little inconvenience one may experience in doing 
 that. Still, I must confess I think you and dear Mrs. 
 Britling are fortunate, exceptionally fortunate, in the 
 Belgians you have got. My guests — it's unfortunate — 
 the man is some sort of journalist and quite — oh ! much 
 too much — an Atheist. An open positive one. Not 
 simply Honest Doubt. I'm quite prepared for honest 
 doubt nowadays. You and I have no quarrel over that. 
 But he is aggressive. He makes remarks about miracles, 
 quite derogatory remarks, and not always in French. 
 Sometimes he almost speaks English. And in front of 
 my sister. And he goes out, he says, looking for a Cafe. 
 He never finds a Cafe, but he certainly finds every public 
 house within a radius of miles. And he comes back 
 smelling dreadfully of beer. When I drop a Little Hint, 
 he blames the beer. He says it is not good beer — our 
 good Essex beer! He doesn't understand any of our 
 simple ways. He's sophisticated. The girls about here 
 wear Belgian flags — and air their little bits of French. 
 And he takes it as an encouragement. Only yesterday 
 
TAKING PART 265 
 
 there was a scene. It seems he tried to kiss the Hickson 
 girl at the inn — Maudie. . . . And his wife; a great 
 big slow woman — in every way she is — Ample ; it's 
 dreadful even to seem to criticise, but I do so wish she 
 would not see fit to sit down and nourish her baby in my 
 poor old bachelor drawing-room — often at the most un- 
 seasonable times. And — so lavishly. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling attempted consolations. 
 
 " But anyhow," said Mr. Dimple, " I'm better off than 
 poor dear Mrs. Bynne. She secured two milliners. She 
 insisted upon them. And their clothes were certainly 
 beautifully made — even my poor old unworldly eye 
 could tell that. And she thought two milliners would be 
 so useful with a large family like hers. They certainly 
 said they were milliners. But it seems — I don't know 
 what we shall do about them. . . . My dear Mr. Britling, 
 those young women are anything but milliners — any- 
 thing but milliners. . . ." 
 
 A faint gleam of amusement was only too perceptible 
 through the good man's horror. 
 
 " Sirens, my dear Mr. Britling. Sirens. By pro- 
 fession." . . . 
 
 § 10 
 
 October passed into November, and day by day Mr. 
 Britling was forced to apprehend new aspects of the war, 
 to think and rethink the war, to have his first conclusions 
 checked and tested, twisted askew, replaced. His 
 thoughts went far and wide and deeper — until all his 
 earlier writing seemed painfully shallow to him, seemed 
 a mere automatic response of obvious comments to the 
 stimulus of the war's surprise. As his ideas became 
 subtler and profounder, they became more difficult to ex- 
 press; he talked less; he became abstracted and irritable 
 at table. To two people in particular Mr. Britling found 
 his real ideas inexpressible, to Mr. Direck and to Mr. 
 Van der Pant. 
 
26G MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 Each of these gentlemen brought with him the implica- 
 tion or the intimation of a optical attitude towards Eng- 
 land. It was all very well for Mr. Britling himself to 
 be critical of England ; that is an Englishman's privilege. 
 To hear Mr. Van der Pant questioning British efficiency 
 or to suspect Mr. Direck of high, thin American superior- 
 ities to war, was almost worse than to hear Mrs. Harrow- 
 dean saying hostile things about Edith. It roused an 
 even acuter protective emotion. 
 
 In the case of Mr. Van der Pant matters were compli- 
 cated by the difficulty of the language, which made any- 
 thing but the crudest statements subject to incalculable 
 misconception. 
 
 Mr. Van der Pant had not the extreme tactfulness of 
 his so typically Catholic wife ; he made it only too plain 
 that he thought the British postal and telegraph service 
 slow and slack, and the management of the Great Eastern 
 branch lines wasteful and inefficient. He said the work- 
 men in the fields and the workmen he saw upon some cot- 
 tages near the junction worked slowlier and with less 
 interest than he had ever seen any workman display in 
 all his life before. He marvelled that Mr. Britling lit 
 his house with acetylene and not electric light. He 
 thought fresh eggs were insanely dear, and his opinion of 
 Matching's Easy pig-keeping was uncomplimentary. 
 The roads, he said, were not a means of getting from place 
 to place, they were a dedale; he drew derisive maps with 
 his finger on the table-cloth of the lane system about the 
 Dower House. He was astonished that there was no 
 Cafe in Matching's Easy; he declared that the "public 
 house " to which he went with considerable expectation 
 was no public house at all ; . it was just a sly place for 
 drinking beer. . . . All these were things Mr. Britling 
 might have remarked himself ; . from a Belgian refugee 
 he found them intolerable. 
 
 He set himself to explain to Mr. Van der Pant firstly 
 that these things did not matter in the slightest degree, the 
 
TAKING PAET 267 
 
 national attention, the national interest ran in other 
 directions; and secondly that they were, as a matter of 
 fact and on the whole, merits slightly disguised. He pro- 
 duced a pleasant theory that England is really not the 
 Englishman's field, it is his breeding place, his resting 
 place, a place not for efficiency but good humour. If Mr. 
 Van der Pant were to make inquiries he would find there 
 was scarcely a home in Matching's Easy that had not sent 
 some energetic representative out of England to become 
 one of the English of the world. England was the last 
 place in which English energy was spent. These hedges, 
 these dilatory roads were full of associations. There was 
 a road that turned aside near Market Saffron to avoid 
 Turk's wood; it had been called Turk's wood first in the 
 fourteenth century after a man of that name. He quoted 
 Chesterton's happy verses to justify these winding lanes. 
 
 " The road turned first towards the left, 
 Where Perkin's quarry made the cleft; , 
 The path turned next towards the right, 
 Because the mastiff used to bite. . . ," 
 
 And again: 
 
 "And I should say they wound about 
 To find the town of Roundabout, 
 The merry town of Roundabout 
 That makes the world go round." 
 
 If our easy-going ways hampered a hard efficiency, they 
 did at least develop humour and humanity. Our diplo- 
 macy at any rate had not failed us. . . . 
 
 He did not believe a word of this stuff. His deep irra- 
 tional love for England made him say these things. . . . 
 For years he had been getting himself into hot water be- 
 cause he had been writing and hinting just such criticisms 
 as Mr. Van der Pant expressed so bluntly. . . . But he 
 wasn't going to accept foreign help in dissecting his 
 mother. . . . 
 
 And another curious effect that Mr. Van der Pant had 
 upon Mr. Britling was to produce an obstinate confidence 
 
268 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 about the war and the nearness of the German collapse. 
 He would promise Mr. Van der Pant that he should be 
 back in Antwerp before May; that the Germans would 
 be over the Rhine by July. He knew perfectly well that 
 his ignorance of all the military conditions was unquali- 
 fied, but still he could not restrain himself from this kind 
 of thing so soon as he began to speak Entente Cordiale — 
 Anglo-French, that is to say. Something in his relation- 
 ship to Mr. Van der Pant obliged him to be acutely and 
 absurdly the protecting British. ... At times he felt 
 like a conscious bankrupt talking off the hour of dis- 
 closure. But indeed all that Mr. Britling was trying to 
 say against the difficulties of a strange language and an 
 alien temperament, was that the honour of England would 
 never be cleared until Belgium was restored and 
 avenged. ... 
 
 While Mr. Britling was patrolling unimportant roads 
 and entertaining Mr. Van der Pant with discourses upon 
 the nearness of victory and the subtle estimableness of all 
 that was indolent, wasteful and evasive in English life, 
 the war was passing from its first swift phases into a 
 slower, grimmer struggle. The German retreat ended at 
 the Aisne, . and the long outflanking manoeuvres of both 
 hosts towards the Channel began. The English attempts 
 to assist Belgium in October came too late for the preser- 
 vation of Antwerp, and after a long and complicated 
 struggle in Elanders the British failed to outflank the 
 German right, lost Ghent, Menin and the Belgian coast, 
 but held Ypres and beat back every attempt of the enemy 
 to reach Dunkirk and Calais. Meanwhile the smaller 
 German colonies and islands were falling to the navy, 
 the Australian battleship Sydney smashed the Emden at 
 Cocos Island, and the British naval disaster of Coronel 
 was wiped out by the battle of the Ealklands. The Rus- 
 sians were victorious upon their left and took Lemberg, 
 and after some vicissitudes of fortune advanced to 
 Przemysl, occupying the larger part of Galicia; but the 
 
TAKING PART 269 
 
 disaster of Tannenberg had broken their progress in East 
 Prussia, and the Germans were pressing towards War- 
 saw. Turkey had joined the war, and suffered enormous 
 losses in the Caucasus. The Dardanelles had been shelled 
 for the first time, and the British were at Basra on the 
 Euphrates. 
 
 § 11 
 
 The Christmas of 1914 found England, whose land- 
 scape had hitherto been almost as peaceful and soldierless 
 as Massachusetts, already far gone along the path of 
 transformation into a country full of soldiers and muni- 
 tion makers and military supplies. The soldiers came 
 first, on the well-known and greatly admired British prin- 
 ciple of "first catch your hare" and then build your 
 kitchen. Always before, Christmas had been a time of 
 much gaiety and dressing up and prancing and two- 
 stepping at the Dower House, but this year everything 
 was too uncertain to allow of any gathering of guests. 
 Hugh got leave for the day after Christmas, but Teddy 
 was tied; and Cissie and Letty went off with the small 
 boy to take lodgings near him. The Van der Pants had 
 hoped to see an English Christmas at Matching's Easy, 
 but within three weeks of Christmas Day Mr. Van der 
 Pant found a job that he could do in Nottingham, and 
 carried off his family. The two small boys cheered their 
 hearts with paper decorations, but the Christmas Tree was 
 condemned as too German, and it was discovered that 
 Santa Claus had suddenly become Old Father Christmas 
 again. The small boys discovered that the price of lead 
 soldiers had risen, and were unable to buy electric 
 torches, on which they had set their hearts. There was 
 to have been a Christmas party at Claverings, but at the 
 last moment Lady Homartyn had to hurry off to an 
 orphan nephew who had been seriously wounded near 
 Ypres, and the light of Claverings was darkened. 
 
 Soon after Christmas there were rumours of an im-? 
 
270 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 pending descent of the Headquarters staff of the South- 
 Eastern army upon Claverings. Then Mr. Britling 
 found Lady Homartyn back from France, and very indig- 
 nant because after all the Headquarters were to go to 
 Lady Wensleydale at Ladyholt. It was, she felt, a re- 
 flection upon Claverings. Lady Homartyn became still 
 more indignant when presently the new armies, which 
 were gathering now all over England like floods in a low- 
 lying meadow, came pouring into the parishes about Clav- 
 erings to the extent of a battalion and a Territorial bat- 
 tery. Mr. Britling heard of their advent only a day or 
 two before they arrived ; there came a bright young officer 
 with an orderly, billeting; he was much exercised to get, 
 as he expressed it several times, a quart into a pint bottle. 
 He was greatly pleased with the barn. He asked the size 
 of it and did calculations. He could " stick twenty-five 
 men into it — easy." It would go far to solve his prob- 
 lems. He could manage without coming into the house 
 at all. It was a ripping place. " No end." 
 
 " But beds," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " Lord ! they don't want beds," said the young 
 officer. . . . 
 
 The whole Britling family, who were lamenting the 
 loss of their Belgians, welcomed the coming of the twenty- 
 five with great enthusiasm. It made them feel that they 
 were doing something useful once more. For three days 
 Mrs. Britling had to feed her new lodgers — the kitchen 
 motors had as usual gone astray — and she did so in a 
 style that made their boastings about their billet almost 
 insufferable to the rest of their battery. The billeting 
 allowance at that time was ninepence a head, and Mr. 
 Britling, ashamed of making a profit out of his country, 
 supplied not only generous firing and lighting, but un- 
 limited cigarettes, cards and games, illustrated news- 
 papers, a cocoa supper with such little surprises as sprats 
 and jam roly-poly, and a number of more incidental com- 
 forts. The men arrived fasting under the command of 
 
TAKING PAET 271 
 
 two very sage middle-aged corporals, and responded to Mrs. 
 Britling's hospitalities by a number of good resolutions, 
 many of which they kept. They never made noises after 
 half-past ten, or at least only now and then when a sing- 
 song broke out with unusual violence; they got up and 
 went out at five or six in the morning without a sound; 
 they were almost inconveniently helpful with washing-up 
 and tidying round. 
 
 In quite a little time Mrs. Britling's mind had adapted 
 itself to the spectacle of half-a-dozen young men in khaki 
 breeches and shirts performing their toilets in and about 
 her scullery, or improvising an unsanctioned game of foot- 
 ball between the hockey goals. These men were not the 
 miscellaneous men of the new armies ; they were the earlier 
 Territorial type with no heroics about them; they came 
 from the midlands; and their two middle-aged corporals, 
 kept them well in hand and ruled them like a band of 
 brothers. But they had an illegal side, that developed 
 in directions that set Mr. Britling theorising. They 
 seemed, for example, to poach by nature, as children play 
 and sing. They possessed a promiscuous white dog. 
 They began to add rabbits .to their supper menu, unac- 
 countable rabbits. One night there was a mighty smell 
 of frying fish from the kitchen, and the cook reported 
 trout. " Trout ! " said Mr. Britling to one of the cor- 
 porals ; " now where did you chaps get trout ? " 
 
 The " fisherman," they said, had got them with a hair 
 noose. They produced the fisherman, of whom they were 
 manifestly proud. It was, he explained, a method of fish- 
 ing he had learnt when in New York Harbour. He had 
 been a stoker. He displayed a confidence in Mr. Britling 
 that made that gentleman an accessory after his offence, 
 his very serious offence against pre-war laws and customs. 
 It was plain that the trout were the trout that Mr. Pum- 
 shock, the stock-broker and amateur gentleman, had pre- 
 served so carefully in the Easy. Hitherto the country- 
 side had been forced to regard Mr. Pumshock's trout with 
 
272 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 an almost- superstitious respect. A year ago young 
 Snooker had done a month for one of those very trout. 
 But now things were different. 
 
 " But I don't really fancy fresh-water fish," said the 
 fisherman. " It's just the ketchin' of 'em I like. . . ." 
 
 And a few weeks later the trumpeter, an angel-faced 
 freckled child with deep-hlue eyes, brought in a dozen 
 partridge eggs which he wanted Mary to cook for 
 him. . . . 
 
 The domesticity of the sacred birds, it was clear, was 
 no longer safe in England. . . . 
 
 Then again the big guns would go swinging down the 
 road and into Claverings park, and perform various ex- 
 ercises with commendable smartness and a profound dis- 
 regard for Lady Homartyn's known objection to any de- 
 parture from the public footpath. . . . 
 
 And one afternoon as Mr. Britling took his constitu- 
 tional walk, a reverie was set going in his mind by the 
 sight of a neglected-looking pheasant with a white collar. 
 The world of Matching's Easy was getting full now of 
 such elderly birds. Would that go on again after the 
 war \ He imagined his son Hugh as a grandfather, telling 
 the little ones about parks and preserves and game laws, 
 and footmen and butlers and the marvellous game of golf, 
 and how, suddenly, Mars came tramping through the land 
 in khaki and all these things faded and vanished, so that 
 presently it was discovered they were gone. . , . 
 
CHAPTEK THE THIRD 
 
 MALIGNITY 
 
 And while the countryside of England changed steadily 
 from its lax pacific amenity to the likeness of a rather 
 slovenly armed camp, while long-fixed boundaries shifted 
 and dissolved and a great irreparable wasting of the world's 
 resources gathered way, Mr. Britling did his duty as a 
 special constable, gave his eldest son to the Territorials, 
 entertained Belgians, petted his soldiers in the barn, helped 
 Teddy to his commission, contributed to war charities, 
 sold out securities at a loss and subscribed to the War 
 Loan, and thought, thought endlessly about the war. 
 
 He could think continuously day by day of nothing 
 else. His mind was as caught as a galley slave, as unable 
 to escape from tugging at this oar. All his universe was 
 a magnetic field which oriented everything, whether he 
 would have it so or not, to this one polar question. 
 
 His thoughts grew firmer and clearer ; they went deeper 
 
 and wider. His first superficial judgments were endorsed 
 
 and deepened or replaced by others. He thought along 
 
 the lonely lanes at night; he thought at his desk; he 
 
 thought in bed ; he thought in his bath ; he tried over his 
 
 thoughts in essays and leading articles and reviewed them 
 
 and corrected them. Now and then came relaxation and 
 
 lassitude, but never release. The war towered over him 
 
 like a vigilant teacher, day after day, week after week, 
 
 regardless of fatigue and impatience, holding a rod in its 
 
 hand. 
 
 273 
 
274 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 2 
 
 Certain things had to be forced upon Mr. Britling be- 
 cause they jarred so greatly with his habits of mind that 
 he would never have accepted them if he could have 
 avoided doing so. 
 
 Notably he would not recognise at first the extreme 
 bitterness of this war. He would not believe that the 
 attack upon Britain and Western Europe generally ex- 
 pressed the concentrated emotion of a whole nation. He 
 thought that the Allies were in conflict with a system and 
 not with a national will. He fought against the per- 
 suasion that the whole mass of a great civilised nation 
 could be inspired by a genuine aud sustained hatred. 
 Hostility was an uncongenial thing to him ; he would not 
 recognise that the greater proportion of human beings are 
 more readily hostile than friendly. He did his best to 
 believe — in his " And Now War Ends " he did his best 
 to make other people believe — that this war was the 
 perverse exploit of a small group of people, of limited but 
 powerful influences, an outrage upon the general geniality 
 of mankind. The cruelty, mischief, and futility of war 
 were so obvious to him that he was almost apologetic in 
 asserting them. He believed that war had but to begin 
 and demonstrate its quality among the Western nations 
 in order to unify them all against its repetition. They 
 would exclaim : " But we can't do things like this to one 
 another!" He saw the aggressive imperialism of Ger- 
 many called to account even by its own people ; a struggle, 
 a collapse, a liberal-minded conference of world powers, 
 and a universal resumption of amiability upon a more 
 assured basis of security. He believed — and many peo- 
 ple in England believed with him — that a great section 
 of the Germans would welcome triumphant Allies as their 
 liberators from intolerable political obsessions. 
 
 The English because of their insularity had been po- 
 litical amateurs for endless generations. It was their 
 
MALIGNITY 275 
 
 supreme vice, it was their supreme virtue, to be easy- 
 going. They had lived in an atmosphere of <somedy, and 
 denied in the whole tenor of their lives that life is tragic. 
 Not even the Americans had been more isolated. The 
 Americans had had their Indians, their negroes, their War 
 of Secession. Until the Great War the Channel was as 
 broad as the Atlantic for holding off every vital challenge. 
 Even Ireland was away — a four-hour crossing. And so 
 the English had developed to the fullest extent the virtues 
 and vices of safety and comfort; they had a hatred of 
 science and dramatic behaviour ; they could see no reason 
 for exactness or intensity ; they disliked proceeding " to 
 extremes." Ultimately everything would turn out all 
 right. But they knew what it is to be carried into con- 
 flicts by energetic minorities and the trick of circum- 
 stances, and they were ready to understand the case of 
 any other country which has suffered that fate. All 
 their habits inclined them to fight good-temperedly and 
 comfortably, to quarrel with a government and not with 
 a people. It took Mr. Britling at least a couple of months 
 of warfare to understand that the Germans were fighting 
 in an altogether different spirit. 
 
 The. first intimations of this that struck upon his mind 
 were the news of the behaviour of the Kaiser and the 
 Berlin crowd upon the declaration of war, and the violent 
 treatment of the British subjects seeking to return to their 
 homes. Everywhere such people had been insulted and 
 ill-treated. It was the spontaneous expression of a long- 
 gathered bitterness. While the British ambassador was 
 being howled out of Berlin, the German ambassador to 
 England was taking a farewell stroll, quite unmolested, 
 in St. James's Park. . . . One item that struck partic- 
 ularly upon Mr. Britling's imagination was the story of 
 the chorus of young women who assembled on the railway 
 platform of the station through which the British am- 
 bassador was passing to sing — to his drawn blinds — 
 " Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles." Mr. Britling 
 
276 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 could imagine those young people, probably dressed more 
 or less uniformly in white, with flushed faces and shining 
 eyes, letting their voices go, full throated, in the modern 
 German way. . . . 
 
 And then came stories of atrocities, stories of the shoot- 
 ing of old men and the butchery of children by the way- 
 side, stories of wounded men bayoneted or burnt alive, of 
 massacres of harmless citizens, of looting and filthy out- 
 rages. ... 
 
 Mr. Britling did his utmost not to believe these things. 
 They contradicted his habitual world. They produced 
 horrible strains in his mind. They might, he hoped, be 
 misreported so as to seem more violent or less justifiable 
 than they were. They might be the acts of stray crim- 
 inals, and quite disconnected from the normal operations 
 of the war. Here and there some weak-minded officer 
 may have sought to make himself terrible. . . . And as 
 for the bombardment of cathedrals and the crime of 
 Louvain, well, Mr. Britling was prepared to argue that 
 Gothic architecture is not sacrosanct if military necessity 
 cuts through it. . . . It was only after the war had been 
 going on some months that Mr. Britling's fluttering, un- 
 willing mind was pinned down by official reports and a 
 cloud of witnesses to a definite belief in the grim reality 
 of systematic rape and murder, destruction, dirtiness and 
 abominable compulsions that blackened the first rush of 
 the Prussians into Belgium and Champagne. . . . 
 
 They came hating and threatening the lands they out- 
 raged. They sought occasion to do frightful deeds. . . . 
 When they could not be frightful in the houses they oc- 
 cupied, then to the best of their ability they were destruc- 
 tive and filthy. The facts took Mr. Britling by the 
 throat. . . . 
 
 The first thing that really pierced Mr. Britling with 
 the conviction that there was something essentially dif- 
 ferent in the English and the German attitude towards 
 the war was the sight of a bale of German comic papers 
 
MALIGNITY 277 
 
 in the study of a friend in London. They were filled 
 with caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of 
 the English, and they displayed a force and quality of 
 passion — an incredible force and quality of passion. 
 Their amazing hate and their amazing filthiness alike 
 overwhelmed Mr. Britling. There was no appearance of 
 national pride or national dignity, but a bellowing pa- 
 triotism and a limitless desire to hurt and humiliate. 
 They spat. They were red in the face and they spat. 
 He sat with these violent sheets in his hands — 
 ashamed. 
 
 " But I say! " he said feebly.. " It's the sort of thing 
 that might come out of a lunatic asylum. . . ." 
 
 One incredible craving was manifest in every one of 
 them. The German caricaturist seemed unable to repre- 
 sent his enemies except in extremely tight trousers or in 
 none; he was equally unable to represent them without 
 thrusting a sword or bayonet, spluttering blood, into the 
 more indelicate parts of their persons. This was the leit- 
 motif of the war as the German humorists presented it. 
 "But," said Mr. Britling, "these things can't represent 
 anything like the general state of mind in Germany." 
 
 " They do," said his friend. 
 
 " But it's blind fury — at the dirt-throwing stage." 
 
 " The whole of Germany is in that blind fury," said 
 his friend. "While we are going about astonished and 
 rather incredulous about this war, and still rather inclined 
 to laugh, that's the state of mind of Germany. . . . 
 There's a sort of deliberation in it. • They think it gives 
 them strength. They want to foam at the mouth. They 
 do their utmost to foam more. They write themselves up. 
 Have you heard of the ' Hymn of Hate ' ? " 
 
 Mr. Britling had not. 
 
 " There was a translation of it in last week's Specta- 
 tor. . . . This is the sort of thing we are trying to fight 
 in good temper and without extravagance. Listen, Brit- 
 ling! 
 
278 MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " You will we hate with a lasting hate; 
 We will never forgo our hate — 
 Hate by water and hate by land, 
 Hate of the head and hate of the hand, 
 Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, 
 Hate of seventy millions, choking down; 
 We love as one, we hate as one, 
 We have one foe, and one alone — 
 
 ENGLAND! " 
 
 He read on to the end. 
 
 " Well," he said when he had finished reading, " what 
 do you think of it ? " 
 
 " I want to feel his bumps," said Mr. Britling after a 
 pause. " It's incomprehensible." 
 
 " They're singing that up and down Germany. Lis- 
 sauer, I hear, has been decorated. . . ." 
 
 " It's — stark malignity," said Mr. Britling. " What 
 have we done ? " 
 
 " It's colossal. What is to happen to the world if these 
 people prevail ? " 
 
 " I can't believe it — even with this evidence before 
 me. . . . No ! I want to feel their bumps. 
 
 » 
 
 § 3 
 
 "You see," said Mr. Britling, trying to get it into 
 focus, " I have known quite decent Germans. There must 
 be some sort of misunderstanding. ... I wonder what 
 makes them hate us. There seems to me no reason in it." 
 
 " I think it is just thoroughness," said his friend. 
 * They are at war. To be at war is to hate." 
 
 " That isn't at all my idea." 
 
 " We're not a thorough people. When we think of any- 
 thing, we also think of its opposite. When we adopt an 
 opinion we also take in a provisional idea that it is prob- 
 ably nearly as wrong as it is right. We are — atmos- 
 pheric. They are concrete. . . . All this filthy, vile, un- 
 just and cruel stuff is honest genuine war. We pretend 
 war does not hurt. They know better. . . . The Ger- 
 
MALIGNITY 279 
 
 mans are a simple honest people. It is their virtue. Pos- 
 sibly it is their only virtue. . . ." 
 
 § 4 
 
 Mr. Britling was only one of a multitude who wanted 
 to feel the bumps of Germany at that time. The effort 
 to understand a people who had suddenly become incred- 
 ible was indeed one of the most remarkable facts in Eng- 
 lish intellectual life during the opening phases of the war. 
 The English state of mind was unlimited astonishment. 
 There was an enormous sale of any German books that 
 seemed likely to illuminate the mystery of this amazing 
 concentration of hostility; the works of Bernhardi, 
 Treitschke, Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, be- 
 came the material of countless articles and interminable 
 discussions. One saw little clerks on the way to the office 
 and workmen going home after their work earnestly read- 
 ing these remarkable writers. They were asking, just as 
 Mr. Britling was asking, what it was the British Empire 
 had struck against. They were trying to account for this 
 wild storm of hostility that was coming at them out of 
 Central Europe. 
 
 It was a natural next stage to this, when after all it 
 became manifest that instead of there being a liberal and 
 reluctant Germany at the back of imperialism and Junk- 
 erdom, there was apparently one solid and enthusiastic 
 people, to suppose that the Germans were in some dis- 
 tinctive way evil, that they were racially more envious, 
 arrogant, and aggressive than the rest of mankind. Upon 
 that supposition a great number of English people settled. 
 They concluded that the Germans had a peculiar devil of 
 their own — and had to be treated accordingly. That was 
 the second stage in the process of national, apprehension, 
 and it was marked by the first beginnings of a spy hunt, 
 by the first denunciation of naturalised aliens, and by 
 some anti-German rioting among the mixed alien popula- 
 
280 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 tion in the East End. Most of the bakers in the East 
 End of London were Germans, and for some months after 
 the war began they went on with their trade unmolested. 
 Now many of these shops were wrecked. ... It was only 
 in October that the British gave these first signs of a sense 
 that they were fighting not merely political Germany but 
 the Germans. 
 
 But the idea of a peculiar malignity in the German 
 quality as a key to the broad issue of the war was even 
 less satisfactory and less permanent in Mr. Britling's mind 
 than his first crude opposition of militarism and a peace- 
 ful humanity as embodied respectively in the Central 
 Powers and the Russo-Westem alliance. It led logically 
 to the conclusion that the extermination of the German 
 peoples was the only security for the general amiability 
 of the world, a conclusion that appealed but weakly to his 
 essential kindliness. After all, the Germans he had met 
 and seen were neither cruel nor hate-inspired. He came 
 back to that obstinately. From the harshness and vileness 
 of the printed word and the unclean picture, he fell back 
 upon the flesh and blood, the humanity and sterling worth, 
 of — as a sample — young Heinrich. 
 
 Who was moreover a thoroughly German young Ger- 
 man — a thoroughly Prussian young Prussian. 
 
 At times young Heinrich alone stood between Mr. Brit- 
 ling and the belief that Germany and the whole German 
 race was essentially wicked, essentially a canting robber 
 nation. Young Heinrich became a sort of advocate for 
 his people before the tribunal of Mr. Britling's mind. 
 (And on his shoulder sat an absurdly pampered squirrel.) 
 Heinrich's fresh, pink, sedulous face, very earnest, ad- 
 justing his glasses, saying "Please," intervened and in- 
 sisted upon an arrest of judgment. . . . 
 
 Since the young man's departure he had sent two post- 
 cards of greeting directly to the " Eamilie Britling," and 
 one letter through the friendly intervention of Mr. Brit- 
 ling's American publisher. Once also he sent a message 
 
MALIGNITY 281 
 
 through a friend in Norway. The postcards simply 
 recorded stages in the passage of a distraught pacifist 
 across Holland to his enrolment. The letter by way of 
 America came two months later. He had been converted 
 into a combatant with extreme rapidity. He had been 
 trained for three weeks, had spent a fortnight in hospital 
 with a severe cold, and had then gone to Belgium as a 
 transport driver — his father had been a horse-dealer and 
 he was familiar with horses. " If anything happens to 
 me," he wrote, " please send my violin at least very care- 
 fully to my mother." It was characteristic that he re- 
 ported himself as very comfortably quartered in Courtrai 
 with "very nice people." The niceness involved re- 
 straints'. " Only never," he added, " do we talk about the 
 war. It is better not to do so." He mentioned the violin 
 also in the later communication through Norway. Therein 
 he lamented the lost fleshpots of Courtrai. He had been 
 in Posen, and now he was in the Carpathians, up to his 
 knees in snow and " very uncomfortable. . . ." 
 
 And then abruptly all news from him ceased. 
 
 Month followed month, and no further letter came. 
 
 " Something has happened to him. Perhaps he is a 
 prisoner. ..." 
 
 " I hope our little Heinrich hasn't got seriously dam- 
 aged. . . . He may be wounded. . . ." 
 
 " Or perhaps they stop his letters. . . . Very probably 
 they stop his letters." 
 
 § 5 
 
 Mr. Britling would sit in his armchair and stare at his 
 fire, and recall conflicting memories of Germany — of a 
 pleasant land, of friendly people. He had spent many a 
 jolly holiday there. So recently as 1911 all the Britling 
 family had gone up the Ehine from Eotterdam, had visited 
 a string of great cities and stayed for a cheerful month of 
 sunshine at Neunkirchen in the Odenwald- 
 
 The little village perches high among the hills and 
 
2S2 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 woods, and at its very centre is the inn and the linden 
 tree and — Adam Meyer. Or at least Adam Meyer was 
 there. Whether he is there now, only the spirit of change 
 can tell; if he live to be a hundred no friendly English 
 will ever again come tramping along by the track of the 
 Blaue Breiecke or the Weisse Streiche to enjoy his hos- 
 pitality ; there are rivers of blood between, and a thousand 
 memories of hate. . . . 
 
 It was a village distended with hospitalities. Not only 
 the inn but all the houses about the place of the linden 
 tree, the shoe-maker's, the post-mistress's, the white house 
 beyond, every house indeed except the pastor's house, were 
 full of Adam Meyer's summer guests. And about it and 
 over it went and soared Adam Meyer, seeing they ate well, 
 seeing they rested well, seeing they had music and did not 
 miss the moonlight — a host who forgot profit in hospital- 
 ity, an inn-keeper with the passion of an artist for his inn. 
 
 Music, moonlight, the simple German sentiment, the 
 hearty German voices, the great picnic in a Stuhl Wagen, 
 the orderly round games the boys played with the Ger- 
 man children, and the tramps and confidences Hugh had 
 with Kurt and Karl, and at last a crowning jollification, 
 a dance, with some gipsy musicians whom Mr. Britling 
 discovered, when the Germans taught the English various 
 entertaining sports with baskets and potatoes and forfeits 
 and the English introduced the Germans to the licence of 
 the two-step. And everybody sang " Britannia, Rule the 
 Waves," and " Deutsehland, Deutschland fiber Alles," and 
 Adam Meyer got on a chair and made a tremendous speech 
 more in dialect than ever, and there was much drinking of 
 beer and sirops in the moonlight under the linden. . . . 
 
 Afterwards there had been a periodic sending of post- 
 cards and greetings, which indeed only the war had ended. 
 
 Right pleasant people those Germans had been, sun and 
 green-leaf lovers, for whom "Frisch Auf" seemed the 
 most natural of national cries. Mr. Britling thought of 
 the individual Germans who had made up the assembly, 
 
MALIGNITY 283 
 
 of the men's amusingly fierce little hats of green and blue 
 with an inevitable feather thrust perkily into the hatband 
 behind, of the kindly plumpnesses behind their turned-up 
 moustaches, of the blonde, sedentary women, very wise 
 about the comforts of life and very kind to the children, 
 of their earnest pleasure in landscape and Art and Great 
 Writers, of their general frequent desire to sing, of their 
 plasticity under the directing hands of Adam Meyer. He 
 thought of the mellow south German landscape, rolling 
 away broad and fair, of the little clean red-roofed town- 
 ships, the old castles, the big prosperous farms, the neatly 
 marked pedestrian routes, the hospitable inns, and the 
 artless abundant Aussichtthurms. . . . 
 
 He saw all those memories now through a veil of in- 
 describable sadness — as of a world lost, gone down like 
 the cities of Lyonesse beneath deep seas. . . . 
 
 Eight pleasant people in a sunny land ! Yet here press- 
 ing relentlessly upon his mind were the murders of Vise, 
 the massacres of Dinant, the massacres of Louvain, mur- 
 der red-handed and horrible upon an inoffensive people, 
 foully invaded, foully treated; murder done with a sick- 
 ening cant of righteousness and racial pretension. . . . 
 
 The two pictures would not stay steadily in his mind 
 together. When he thought of the broken faith that had 
 poured those slaughtering hosts into the decent peace of 
 Belgium, that had smashed her cities, burnt her villages 
 and filled the pretty gorges of the Ardennes with blood and 
 smoke and terror, he was flooded with self-righteous in- 
 dignation, a self-righteous indignation that was indeed 
 entirely Teutonic in its quality, that for a time drowned 
 out his former friendship and every kindly disposition 
 towards Germany, that inspired him with destructive im- 
 pulses, and obsessed him with a desire to hear of death 
 and more death and yet death in every German town and 
 home. . . . 
 
284 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 6 
 
 It will be an incredible tbing to tbe bappier reader of 
 a coming age — if ever tbis poor record of experience 
 reacbea a reader in tbe days to come — to learn bow mucb 
 of tbe mental life of Mr. Britling was occupied at tbis 
 time witb tbe mere borror and atrocity of warfare. It is 
 idle and bopeless to speculate now bow tbat future reader 
 will envisage this war; it may take on broad dramatic 
 outlines, it may seem a thing, just, logical, necessary, tbe 
 burning of many barriers, the destruction of many ob- 
 stacles. Mr. Britling was too near to the dirt and pain and 
 heat for any such broad landscape consolations. Every 
 day some new detail of evil beat into bis mind. Now it 
 would be the artless story of some Belgian refugee. There 
 was a girl from Alost in the village for example, who had 
 beard tbe fusillade that meant the shooting of citizens, 
 the shooting of people she had known, she had seen the 
 still blood-stained wall against which two murdered cousins 
 had died, the streaked sand along which their bodies had 
 been dragged; three German soldiers had been quartered 
 in her house with her and her invalid mother, and had 
 talked freely of the massacres in which they had been 
 employed. One of them was in civil life a young school- 
 master, and he had had, he said, to kill a woman and a 
 baby. The girl had been incredulous. Yes, be had done 
 so! Of course he had done so! His officer had made 
 him do it, had stood over him. He could do nothing but 
 obey. But since then he had been unable to sleep, un- 
 able to forget. 
 
 " We bad to punish the people," he said. " They had 
 fired on us." 
 
 And besides, his officer had been drunk. It bad been 
 impossible to argue. His officer had an unrelenting 
 character at all times. . . . 
 
 Over and over again Mr. Britling would try to imagine 
 that young schoolmaster soldier at Alost. He imagined 
 
MALIGNITY 285 
 
 him with a weak staring face and watery blue eyes be- 
 hind bis glasses, and that memory of murder. . . . 
 
 Then again it would be some incident of death and 
 mutilation in Antwerp, tbat Van der Pant described to 
 him. Tbe Germans in Belgium were shooting women fre- 
 quently, not simply for grave spying but for trivial of- 
 fences. . . . Then came tbe battleship raid on Whitby and 
 Scarborough, and tbe killing among otber victims of a 
 number of children on their way to school. This shocked 
 Mr. Britling absurdly, much more than the Belgian crimes 
 had done. They were English children. At home ! . . . 
 The drowning of a great number of people on a torpedoed 
 ship full of refugees from Flanders filled his mind with 
 pitiful imaginings for days. The Zeppelin raids, with 
 their slow crescendo of blood-stained futility, began before 
 the end of 1914. ... It was small consolation for Mr. 
 Britling to reflect that English homes and women and 
 children were, after all, undergoing only the same kind 
 of experience that our ships have inflicted scores of times 
 in the past upon innocent people in the villages of Africa 
 and Polynesia. . . . 
 
 Each month the war grew bitterer and more cruel. 
 Early in 1915 the Germans began their submarine war, 
 and' for a time Mr. Britling's concern was chiefly for the 
 sailors and passengers of tbe ships destroyed. He noted 
 with horror tbe increasing indisposition of the German 
 submarines to give any notice to their victims ; he did not 
 understand the grim reasons that were turning every sub- 
 marine attack into a desperate challenge of death. For 
 the Germans under tbe seas had pitted themselves against 
 a sea power far more resourceful, more steadfast and skil- 
 ful, sterner and more silent, than their own. It was not 
 for many months that Mr. Britling learnt the realities of 
 the submarine blockade. Submarine after submarine 
 went out of the German harbours into tbe North Sea, 
 never to return. No prisoners were reported, no boast- 
 ing was published by the British fishers of men ; U boat 
 
286 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 after U boat vanished into a chilling mystery. . . . Only 
 later did Mr. Britling begin to hear whispers and form 
 ideas of the noiseless, suffocating grip that sought through 
 the waters for its prey. 
 
 The Falaba crime, in which the German sailors were 
 reported to have jeered at the drowning victims in the 
 water, was followed by the sinking of the Lusitcmia. At 
 that a wave of real anger swept through the Empire. 
 Hate was begetting hate at last. There were violent riots 
 in Great Britain and in South Africa. Wretched little 
 German hairdressers and bakers and so forth fled for their 
 lives, to pay for the momentary satisfaction of the Kaiser 
 and Herr Ballin. Scores of German homes in England 
 /were wrecked and looted; hundreds of Germans mal- 
 treated. War is war. Hard upon the Lusitania storm 
 came the publication of the Bryce Report, with its relent- 
 less array of witnesses, its particulars of countless acts of 
 cruelty and arrogant unreason and uncleanness in Belgium 
 and the occupied territory of France. Came also the gasp- 
 ing torture of " gas," the use of flame jets, and a new 
 exacerbation of the savagery of the actual fighting. Eor 
 a time it seemed as though the taking of prisoners along 
 the western front would cease. Tales of torture and 
 mutilation, tales of the kind that arise nowhere and out 
 of nothing, and poison men's minds to the most pitiless 
 retaliations, drifted along the opposing fronts. ... 
 
 The realities were evil enough without any rumours. 
 Over various dinner-tables Mr. Britling heard this and 
 that first-hand testimony of harshness and spite. One 
 story that stuck in his memory was of British prisoners 
 on the journey into Germany being put apart at a station 
 from their French companions in misfortune, and forced 
 to " run the gauntlet " back to their train between the fists 
 and bayonets of files of German soldiers. And there were 
 convincing stories of the same prisoners robbed of over- 
 coats in bitter weather, baited with dogs, separated from 
 their countrymen, and thrust among Russians and Poles 
 
MALIGNITY 287 
 
 with whom they could hold no speech. So Lissauer's 
 Hate Song hore its fruit in a thousand cruelties to wounded 
 and defenceless men. The English had cheated great Ger- 
 many of another easy victory like that of '71. They had 
 to be punished. That was all too plainly the psychologic 
 cal process. At one German station a woman had got out 
 of a train and crossed a platform to spit on the face of a 
 wounded Englishman. . . . And there was no monopoly 
 of such things on either side. At some journalistic gath- 
 ering Mr. Britling met a little white-faced, resolute lady 
 who had recently been nursing in the north of France. 
 She told of wounded men lying among the coal of coal- 
 sheds, of a shortage of nurses and every sort of material, 
 of an absolute refusal to permit any share in such things 
 to reach the German " swine." ..." Why have they 
 come here? Let our own boys have it first. Why 
 couldn't they stay in their own country? Let the filth 
 die." 
 
 Two soldiers impressed to carry a wounded German 
 officer on a stretcher had given him a " joy ride," pitch- 
 ing him up and down as one tosses a man in a blanket. 
 " He was lucky to get off with that." . . . 
 
 " All our men aren't angels," said a cheerful young 
 captain back from the front. " If you had heard a little 
 group of our East London boys talking of what they meant 
 to do when they got into Germany, you'd feel anx- 
 ious. . . ." 
 
 "But that was just talk," said Mr. Britling weakly, 
 after a pause. . . . 
 
 There were times when Mr. Britling's mind was im- 
 prisoned beyond any hope of escape amidst such monstrous 
 realities. . . . 
 
 He was ashamed of his one secret consolation. Eor 
 nearly two years yet Hugh could not go out to it. There 
 would surely be peace before that. . . . 
 
288 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 1 
 
 Tormenting the thought of Mr. Britling almost more 
 acutely than this growing tale of stupidly inflicted suffer- 
 ing and waste and sheer destruction was the collapse of 
 the British mind from its first fine phase of braced-up 
 effort into a state of bickering futility. 
 
 Too long had British life been corrupted by the fictions 
 of loyalty to an uninspiring and alien Court, of national 
 piety in an official Church, of freedom in a politician- 
 rigged State, of justice in an economic system where the 
 advertiser, the sweater and usurer had a hundred ad- 
 vantages over the producer and artisan, to maintain itself 
 now steadily at any high pitch of heroic endeavour. It 
 had bought its comfort with the demoralisation of its serv- 
 ants. It had no completely honest organs; its spirit was 
 clogged by its accumulated insincerities. Brought at last 
 face to face with a bitter hostility and a powerful and un- 
 scrupulous enemy, an enemy socialistic, scientific and effi- 
 cient to an unexampled degree, it seemed indeed to be 
 inspired for a time by an unwonted energy and unanimity. 
 Youth and the common people shone. The sons of every 
 class went out to fight and die, full of a splendid dream of 
 this war. Easy-going vanished from the foreground of 
 the picture. But only to creep back again as the first 
 inspiration passed. Presently the older men, the seasoned 
 politicians, the owners and hucksters, the charming women 
 and the habitual consumers, began to recover from this 
 blaze of moral exaltation. Old habits of mind and pro- 
 cedure reasserted themselves. The war which had begun 
 so dramatically missed its climax ; there was neither heroic 
 swift defeat nor heroic swift victory. There was inde- 
 cision; the most trying test of all for an undisciplined 
 people. There were great spaces of uneventful fatigue. 
 Before the Battle of the Yser had fully developed the 
 dramatic quality had gone out of the war. It had ceased 
 to be either a tragedy or a triumph; for both sides it be 
 
MALIGNITY 289 
 
 came a monstrous strain and wasting. It had become a 
 wearisome thrusting against a pressure of evils. . . . 
 
 Under that strain the dignity of England broke, and 
 revealed a malignity less focussed and intense than the 
 German, but perhaps even more distressing. No paternal 
 government had organised the British spirit for patriotic 
 ends; it became now peevish and impatient, like some 
 ill-trained man who is sick, it directed itself no longer 
 against the enemy alone but fitfully against imagined trai- 
 tors and shirkers ; it wasted its energies in a deepening and 
 spreading net of internal squabbles and accusations. Now 
 it was the wily indolence of the Prime Minister, now it 
 was the German culture of the Lord Chancellor, now the 
 imaginative enterprise of the First Lord of the Admiralty 
 that focussed a vindictive campaign. There began a hunt 
 for spies and of suspects of German origin in every quarter 
 except the highest; a denunciation now of "traitors," 
 now of people with imaginations, now of scientific men, 
 now of the personal friend of the Commander-in-Chief, 
 now of this group and then of that group. . . . Every 
 day Mr. Britling read his three or four newspapers with 
 a deepening disappointment. 
 
 When he turned from the newspaper to his post, he 
 would find the anonymous letter-writer had been 
 busy. . . • 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Britling had remarked that Germans were 
 after all human beings, or that if England had listened 
 to Matthew Arnold in the 'eighties our officers by this 
 time might have added efficiency to their courage and good 
 temper. Perhaps he had himself put a touch of irritant 
 acid into his comment. Back flared the hate. " Who are 
 you, Sir? What are you, Sir? What right have you, 
 Sir ? What claim have you, Sir ? " . . . 
 
290 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 8 
 
 " Life had a wrangling birth. On the head of every 
 one of us rests the ancestral curse of fifty million mur- 
 ders." 
 
 So Mr. Britling's thoughts shaped themselves in -words 
 as he prowled one night in March, chill and melancholy, 
 across a rushy meadow under an overcast sky. The death 
 squeal of some little beast caught suddenly in a distant 
 copse had set loose this train of thought. " Life strug- 
 gling under a birth curse ? " he thought. " How nearly I 
 come back at times to the Christian theology! . . . And 
 then, Redemption by the shedding of blood." 
 
 " Life, like a rebellious child, struggling out of the con- 
 trol of the hate which made it what it is." 
 
 But that was Mr. Britling's idea of Gnosticism, not of 
 orthodox Christianity. He went off for a time into faded 
 reminiscences of theological reading. What had been the 
 Gnostic idea? That the God of the Old Testament was 
 the Devil of the New ? But that had been the idea of the 
 Manichseans! . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling, between the black hedges, came back pres- 
 ently from his attempts to recall his youthful inquiries 
 into man's ancient speculations, to the enduring riddles 
 that have outlasted a thousand speculations. Has hate 
 been necessary, and is it still necessary, and will it always 
 be necessary? Is all life a war forever? The rabbit 
 is nimble, lives keenly, is prevented from degenerating into 
 a diseased crawling eater of herbs by the incessant ferret. 
 Without the ferret of war, what would life become ? . . . 
 War is murder truly, but is not Peace decay ? 
 
 It was during these prowling nights in the first winter 
 of the war that Mr. Britling planned a new writing that 
 was to go whole abysses beneath the facile superficiality 
 of "And Now War Ends." It was to be called the 
 " Anatomy of Hate." It was to deal very faithfully with 
 the function of hate as a corrective to inefficiency. So 
 
MALIGNITY 291 
 
 long as men were slack, men must be fierce. This convic- 
 tion pressed upon him. . . . 
 
 In spite of his detestation of war Mr. Britling found 
 it impossible to maintain that any sort of peace state was 
 better than a state of war. If wars produced destructions 
 and cruelties, peace could produce indolence, perversity, 
 greedy accumulation and selfish indulgences. War is dis- 
 cipline for evil, but peace may be relaxation from good. 
 The poor man may be as wretched in peace time as in war 
 time. The gathering forces of an evil peace, the malignity 
 and waste of war, are but obverse and reverse of the medal 
 of ill-adjusted human relationships. Was there no Greater 
 Peace possible ; not a mere recuperative pause in killing 
 and destruction, but a phase of noble and creative living, 
 a phase of building, of discovery, of beauty and research ? 
 He remembered, as one remembers the dead, dreams he 
 had once dreamt of the great cities, the splendid freedoms, 
 of a coming age, of marvellous enlargements of human 
 faculty, of a coming science that would be light and of art 
 that could be power. . . . 
 
 But would that former peace have ever risen to 
 that? ... 
 
 After all, had such visions ever been more than idle 
 dreams? Had the war done more than unmask real- 
 ity? . . . 
 
 He came to a gate and leant over it. 
 
 The darkness drizzled about him; he turned up his 
 collar and watched the dim shapes of trees and hedges 
 gather out of the night to meet the dismal dawn. He was 
 cold and hungry and weary. 
 
 He may have drowsed; at least he had a vision, very 
 real and plain, a vision very different from any dream of 
 Utopia. 
 
 It seemed to him that suddenly a mine burst under a 
 great ship at sea, that men shouted and women sobbed and 
 cowered, and flares played upon the rain-pitted black 
 waves ; and then the picture changed and showed a battle 
 
292 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 upon land, and searchlights were flickering through the 
 rain and shells flashed luridly, and men darkly seen in 
 silhouette against red flames ran with fixed bayonets and 
 slipped and floundered over the mud, and at last, shouting 
 thinly through the wind, leapt down into the enemy 
 trenches. . . . 
 
 And then he was alone again staring over a wet black 
 field towards a dim crest of shapeless trees. 
 
 § 9 
 
 Abruptly and shockingly, this malignity of warfare, 
 which had been so far only a festering cluster of reports 
 and stories aud rumours and suspicions, stretched out its 
 arm into Essex and struck a barb of grotesque cruelty into 
 the very heart of Mr. Britling. Late one afternoon came 
 a telegram from Filmington-on-Sea, where Aunt Wilshire 
 had been recovering her temper in a boarding-house after 
 a round of visits in Yorkshire and the moorlands. And 
 she had been " very seriously injured " by an overnight 
 German air raid. It was a raid that had not been even 
 mentioned in the morning's papers. She had asked to 
 see him. 
 
 It was, ran the compressed telegraphic phrase, " ad- 
 visable to come at once." 
 
 Mrs. Britling helped him pack a bag, and came with 
 him to the station in order to drive the car back to the 
 Dower House; for the gardener's boy who had hitherto 
 attended to these small duties had now gone off as an un- 
 skilled labourer to some munition works at Chelmsford. 
 Mr. Britling sat in the slow train that carried him across 
 country to the junction for Eilmington, and failed alto- 
 gether to realise what had happened to the old lady. He 
 had an absurd feeling that it was characteristic of her to 
 intervene in affairs in this manner. She had always been 
 so tough and unbent an old lady that until he saw her he 
 could not imagine her as being really seriously and piti- 
 fully hurt. . . . 
 
MALIGNITY 293 
 
 But he found her in the hospital very much hurt in- 
 deed. She had been smashed in some complicated man- 
 ner that left the upper part of her body intact, and lying 
 slantingly upon pillows. Over the horror of bandaged 
 broken limbs and tormented flesh below sheets and a coun- 
 terpane were drawn. Morphia had been injected, he un- 
 derstood, to save her from pain, but presently it might be 
 necessary for her to suffer. She lay up in her bed with 
 an effect of being enthroned, very white and still, her 
 strong profile with its big nose and her straggling hair 
 and a certain dignity gave her the appearance of some 
 very important, very old man, of an aged pope for in- 
 stance, rather than of an old woman. She had made no 
 remark after they had set her and dressed her and put 
 her to bed except " send for Hughie Britling, The Dower 
 House, Matching's Easy. He is the best of the bunch." 
 She had repeated the address and this commendation 
 firmly over and over again, in large print as it were, even 
 after they had assured her that a telegram had been de- 
 spatched. 
 
 In the night, they said, she had talked of him. 
 
 He was not sure at first that she knew of his presence. 
 
 " Here I am, Aunt Wilshire," he said. 
 
 She gave no sign. 
 
 " Your nephew Hugh." 
 
 " Mean and preposterous," she said very distinctly. 
 
 But she was not thinking of Mr. Britling. She was 
 talking of something else. 
 
 She was saying : " It should not have been known I 
 was here. There are spies everywhere. Everywhere. 
 There is a spy now — or a lump very like a spy. They 
 pretend it is a hot-water bottle. Pretext. . . . Oh, yes! 
 I admit — absurd. But I have been pursued by spies. 
 Endless spies. Endless, endless spies. Their devices are 
 almost incredible. ... He has never forgiven me. . . . 
 
 " All this on account of a carpet. A palace carpet. 
 Over which I had no control. I spoke my mind. He 
 
294: MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 knew I knew of it. I never concealed it. So I was 
 hunted. Eor years he had meditated revenge. Now he 
 has it. But at what a cost ! And they call him Emperor. 
 Emperor ! 
 
 " His arm is withered ; his son — imbecile. He will 
 die — without dignity. . . ." 
 
 Her voice weakened, but it was evident she wanted to 
 say something more. 
 
 " I'm here," said Mr. Britling. " Your nephew 
 Hughie." 
 
 She listened. 
 
 " Can you understand me ? " he asked. 
 
 She became suddenly an earnest, tender human being. 
 " My dear ! " she said, and seemed to search for something 
 in her mind and failed to find it. 
 
 " You have always understood me," she tried. 
 
 "You have always been a good boy to me, Hughie," 
 she said, rather vacantly, and added after some moments 
 of still reflection, " au fond." 
 
 After that she was silent for some minutes, and took 
 no notice of his whispers. 
 
 Then she recollected what had been in her mind. She 
 put out a hand that sought for Mr. Britling's sleeve. 
 
 "Hughie!" 
 
 " I'm here, Auntie," said Mr. Britling. " I'm here." 
 
 " Don't let him get at your Hughie. . . . Too good 
 for it, dear. Oh! much — much too good. . . . People 
 let these wars and excitements run away with them. . . . 
 They put too much into them. . . . They aren't — they 
 aren't worth it. Don't let him get at your Hughie." 
 
 "No!." 
 
 " You understand me, Hughie ? " 
 
 " Perfectly, Auntie." 
 
 " Then don't forget it. Ever." 
 
 She had said what she wanted to say. She had made 
 her testament. She closed her eyes. He was amazed to 
 find this grotesque old creature had suddenly become beau- 
 
I MALIGNITY 295 
 
 tiful, in that silvery vein of beauty one sometimes finds 
 in very old men. She was exalted as great artists will 
 sometimes exalt the portraits of the aged. He was moved 
 to kiss her forehead. 
 
 There came a little tug at his sleeve. 
 
 " I think that is enough," said the nurse, who had stood 
 forgotten at his elbow. 
 
 " But I can come again ? " 
 
 " Perhaps." 
 
 She indicated departure by a movement of her hand. 
 
 § 10 
 
 The next day Aunt Wilshire was unconscious of her 
 visitor. 
 
 . They had altered her position so that she lay now 
 'horizontally, staring inflexibly at the ceiling and mutter- 
 ing queer old disconnected things. 
 
 The Windsor Castle carpet story was still running 
 through her mind, but mixed up with it now were scraps 
 of the current newspaper controversies about the conduct 
 of the war. And she was still thinking of the dynas- 
 tic aspects of the war. And of spies'. She had some- 
 thing upon her mind about the King's more German 
 aunts. 
 
 " As a precaution," she said, " as a precaution. Watch 
 them all. . . . The Princess Christian. . . . Laying 
 foundation stones. . . . Cement. . . . Guns. Or else 
 why should they always be laying foundation stones ? . . . 
 Always. . . . Why? . . . Hushed up. . . . 
 
 " None of these things," she said, " in the newspapers. 
 They ought to be." 
 
 And then after an interval, very distinctly, " The Duke 
 of Wellington. My ancestor — in reality. . . . Publish 
 and be damned." 
 
 After that she lay still. . . . 
 
 The doctors and nurses could hold out only very faint 
 
296 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 hopes to Mr. Britling's inquiries ; they said indeed it was 
 astonishing that she was still alive. 
 
 And about seven o'clock that evening she died. . . . 
 
 § 11 
 
 Mr. Britling, after he had looked at his dead cousin 
 for the last time, wandered for an hour or so about the 
 silent little watering-place before he returned to his hotel. 
 There was no one to talk to and nothing else to do but to 
 think of her death. 
 
 The night was cold and bleak, but full of stars. He 
 had already mastered the local topography, and he knew 
 now exactly where all the bombs that had been showered 
 upon the place had fallen. Here was the corner of black- 
 ened walls and roasted beams where three wounded horses 
 had been burnt alive in a barn, here the row of houses, 
 some smashed, some almost intact, where a mutilated child 
 had screamed for two hours before she could be rescued 
 from the debris that had pinned her down, and taken to 
 the hospital. Everywhere by the dim light of the shaded 
 street lamps he could see the black holes and gaps of broken 
 windows ; sometimes abundant, sometimes rare and excep- 
 tional, among otherwise uninjured dwellings. Many of 
 the victims he had visited in the little cottage hospital 
 where Aunt Wilshire had just died. She was the eleventh 
 dead. Altogether fifty-seven people had been killed or in- 
 jured in this brilliant German action. They were all 
 civilians, and only twelve were men. 
 
 Two Zeppelins had come in from over the sea, and 
 had been fired at by an anti-aircraft gun coming on an 
 automobile from Ipswich. The first intimation the peo- 
 ple of the town had had of the raid was the report of this 
 gun. Many had run out to see what was happening. It 
 was doubtful if any one had really seen the Zeppelins, 
 though every one testified to the sound of their engines. 
 Then suddenly the bombs had come streaming down. 
 
MALIGNITY 297 
 
 Only six had made hits upon houses or people; the rest 
 had fallen ruinously and very close together on the local 
 golf links, and at least half had not exploded at all and 
 did not seem to have heen released to explode. 
 
 A third at least of the injured people had heen in hed 
 when destruction came upon them. 
 
 The story was like a page from some fantastic romance 
 of Jules Verne's; the peace of the little old town, the 
 people going to bed, the quiet streets, the quiet starry sky, 
 and then for ten minutes an uproar of guns and shells, a 
 clatter of breaking glass, and then a fire here, a fire there, 
 a child's voice pitched high by pain and terror, scared 
 people going to and fro with lanterns, and the sky empty 
 again, the raiders gone. . . . 
 
 Five minutes before, Aunt Wilshire had been sitting 
 in the boarding-house drawing-room playing a great stern 
 *' Patience," the Emperor Patience (" Napoleon, my dear ! 
 — not that Potsdam creature") that took hours to do. 
 Five minutes later she was a thing of elemental terror and 
 agony, bleeding wounds and shattered bones, plunging 
 about in the darkness amidst a heap of wreckage. And 
 already the German airmen were buzzing away to sea 
 again, proud of themselves, pleased no doubt — like boys 
 who have thrown a stone through a window, beating 
 their way back to thanks and rewards, to iron crosses 
 and the proud embraces of delighted Fraus and Frau- 
 leins. . . . 
 
 Por the first time it seemed to Mr. Britling he really 
 saw the immediate horror of war, the dense cruel stupidity 
 of the business, plain and close. It was as if he had never 
 perceived anything of the sort before, as if he had been 
 dealing with stories, pictures, shows and representations 
 that he knew to be shams. But that this dear, absurd old 
 creature, this thing of home, this being of familiar 
 humours and familiar irritations, should be torn to pieces, 
 left in torment like a smashed mouse over which an auto- 
 mobile has passed, brought the whole business to a raw 
 
298 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 and quivering focus. Not a soul among all those who had 
 been rent and torn and tortured in this agony of millions, 
 but was to any one who understood and had been near to 
 it, in some way lovable, in some way laughable, in some 
 way worthy of respect and care. Poor Aunt Wilshire 
 was but the sample thrust in his face of all this mangled 
 multitude, whose green-white lips had sweated in anguish, 
 whose broken bones had thrust raggedly through red drip- 
 ping flesh. . . . The detested features of the German 
 Crown Prince jerked into the centre of Mr. Britling's 
 picture. The young man stood in his dapper uniform 
 and grinned under his long nose, carrying himself jauntily, 
 proud of his extreme importance to so many lives. . . . 
 
 And for a while Mr. Britling could do nothing but rage. 
 
 " Devils they are ! " he cried to the stars. 
 
 " Devils ! Devilish fools rather. Cruel blockheads. 
 Apes with all science in their hands! My Go&! but we 
 will teach them a lesson yet! . . /' 
 
 That was the key of his mood for an hour of aimless 
 wandering, wandering that was only checked at last by a 
 sentinel who turned him back towards the town. . . . 
 
 He wandered, muttering. He found great comfort in 
 scheming vindictive destruction for countless Germans. 
 He dreamt of swift armoured aeroplanes swooping down 
 upon the flying airship, and sending it reeling earthward, 
 the men screaming. He imagined a shattered Zeppelin 
 staggering earthward in the fields behind the Dower 
 House, and how he would himself run out with a spade 
 and smite the Germans down. " Quarter indeed ! Kam- 
 erad ! Take that, you foul murderer ! " 
 
 In the dim light the sentinel saw the retreating figure 
 of Mr. Britling make an extravagant gesture, and won- 
 dered what it might mean. Signalling ? What ought an 
 intelligent sentry to do? Let fly at him? Arrest him? 
 . . . Take no notice? . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling was at that moment killing Count Zep- 
 pelin and beating out his brains. Count Zeppelin was 
 
MALIGNITY 299 
 
 killed that night and the German Emperor was assassin- 
 ated; a score of lesser victims were offered up to the 
 manes of Aunt Wilshire; there were memorable cruelties 
 before the wrath and bitterness of Mr. Britling was ap- 
 peased. And then suddenly he had had enough of these 
 thoughts; they were thrust aside, they vanished out of 
 his mind. 
 
 § 12 
 
 All the while that Mr. Britling had been indulging in 
 these imaginative slaughterings and spending the tears 
 and hate that had gathered in his heart, his reason had 
 been sitting apart and above the storm, like the sun wait- 
 ing above thunder, like a wise nurse watching and patient 
 above the wild passions of a child. And all the time his 
 reason had been maintaining silently and firmly, without 
 shouting, without speech, that the men who had made this 
 hour were indeed not devils, were no more devils than Mr. 
 Britling was a devil, but sinful men of like nature with 
 himself, hard, stupid, caught in the same web of circum- 
 stance. "Kill them in your passion if you will," said 
 reason, "but understand. This thing was done neither 
 by devils nor fools, but by a conspiracy of foolish motives, 
 by the weak acquiescences of the clever, by a crime that- 
 was no man's crime but the natural necessary outcome of 
 the ineffectiveness, the blind motives and muddleheaded- 
 ness of all mankind." 
 
 So reason maintained her thesis, like a light above the 
 head of Mr. Britling at which he would not look, while 
 he hewed airmen to quivering rags with a spade that he 
 had sharpened, and stifled German princes with their own 
 poison gas, given slowly and as painfully as possible. 
 " And what of the towns our ships have bombarded ? '' 
 asked reason unheeded. " What of those Tasmanians our 
 people utterly swept away ? " 
 
 " What of French maohine-guns in the Atlas ? " reason 
 pressed the case. " Of Himalayan villages burning ? 
 
300 MK. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 Of the things we did in China ? Especially of the things 
 ■we did in China. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Britling gave no heed to that. 
 
 " The Germans in China were worse than we were," 
 he threw out. . . . 
 
 He was maddened by the thought of the Zeppelin mak- 
 ing off, high and far in the sky, a thing dwindling to 
 nothing among the stars, and the thought of those mur- 
 derers escaping him. Time after time he stood still and 
 shook his fist at Bootes, slowly sweeping up the sky. . . . 
 
 And at last, sick and wretched, he sat down on a seat 
 upon the deserted parade under the stars, close to the 
 soughing of the invisible sea below. . . . 
 
 His mind drifted back once more to those ancient 
 heresies of the Gnostics and the Manichseans which saw 
 the God of the World as altogether evil, which sought 
 only to escape by the utmost abstinences and evasions and 
 perversions from the black wickedness of being. Eor a 
 while his soul sank down into the uncongenial darknesses 
 of these creeds of despair. " I who have loved life," he 
 murmured, and could have believed for a time that he 
 wished he had never had a son. . . . 
 
 Is the whole scheme of nature evil? Is life in its 
 essence cruel ? Is man stretched quivering upon the table 
 of the eternal vivisector for no end — and without pity ? 
 
 These were thoughts that Mr. Britling had never faced 
 before the war. They came to him now, and they came 
 only to be rejected by the inherent quality of his mind. 
 For weeks, consciously and subconsciously, his mind had 
 been grappling with this riddle. He had thought of it 
 during his lonely prowlings as a special constable; it 
 had flung itself in monstrous symbols across the dark can- 
 vas of his dreams. " Is there indeed a devil of pure 
 cruelty ? Does any creature, even the very cruellest of 
 creatures, really apprehend the pain it causes, or inflict 
 it for the sake of the infliction ? " He summoned a score 
 of memories, a score of imaginations, to bear their wit- 
 
MALIGNITY 301 
 
 ness before the tribunal of his mind. He forgot cold 
 and loneliness in this speculation. He sat, trying all 
 Being, on this score, under the cold indifferent stars. 
 
 He thought of certain instances of hoyish cruelty that 
 had horrified him in his own boyhood, and it was clear 
 to him that indeed it was not cruelty, it was curiosity, 
 dense textured, thick skinned, so that it could not feel 
 even the anguish of a blinded cat. Those boys who had 
 wrung his childish soul to nigh intolerable misery, had 
 not indeed been tormenting so much as observing torment, 
 testing life as wantonly as one breaks thin ice in the early 
 days of winter. In very much cruelty the real motive 
 is surely no worse than that obtuse curiosity ; a mere step 
 of understanding, a mere quickening of the nerves and 
 mind, makes it impossible. But that is not true of all or 
 most cruelty. Most cruelty has something else in it, 
 something more than the clumsy plunging into experience 
 of the hobbledehoy; it is vindictive or indignant; it is 
 never tranquil and sensuous; it draws its incentive, how- 
 ever crippled and monstrous the justification may be, from 
 something punitive in man's instinct, something there- 
 fore that implies a sense, however misguided, of righteous- 
 ness and vindication. That factor is present even in 
 spite; when some vile or atrocious thing is done out of 
 envy or malice, that envy and malice has in it always — 
 always? Yes, always — a genuine condemnation of the 
 hated thing as an unrighteous thing, as an unjust usurpa- 
 tion, as an inexcusable privilege, as a sinful overcon- 
 fidence. Those men in the airship ? — he was coming to 
 that. He found himself asking himself whether it was 
 possible for a human being to do any cruel act without 
 an excuse — or, at least, without the feeling of excusabil- 
 ity. And in the case of these Germans and the outrages 
 they had committed and the retaliations they had pro- 
 voked, he perceived that always there was the element of 
 a perceptible if inadequate justification. Just as there 
 would be if presently he were to maltreat a fallen German 
 
302 ME. BRITLLNTG SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 airman. There was anger in their vileness. These Ger- 
 mans were an unsubtle people, a people in the worst and 
 best sense of the words, plain and honest ; they were prone 
 to moral indignation ; and moral indignation is the mother 
 of most of the cruelty in the world. They perceived the 
 indolence of the English and Russians, they perceived 
 their disregard of science and system, they could not per- 
 ceive the longer reach of these greater races, and it seemed 
 to them that the mission of Germany was to chastise and 
 correct this laxity. Surely, they had argued, God was 
 not on the side of those who kept an untilled field. So 
 they had butchered these old ladies and slaughtered these 
 children just to show us the consequences: 
 
 " AH along of dirtiness, all along of mess, 
 All along of doing things rather more or less." 
 
 The very justification our English poet has found for 
 a thousand overbearing actions in the East ! " Forget 
 not order and the real," that was the underlying message 
 of bomb and gas and submarine. After all, what right 
 had we English not to have a gun or an aeroplane fit to 
 bring down that Zeppelin ignominiously and conclusively ? 
 Had we not undertaken Empire? Were we not the lead- 
 ers of great nations? Had we indeed much right to 
 complain if our imperial pose was flouted ? " There, at 
 least," said Mr. Britling's reason, "is one of the lines 
 of thought that brought that unseen cruelty out of the 
 night high over the houses of Filmington-on-Sea. That, 
 in a sense, is the' cause of this killing. Cruel it is and 
 abominable, yes, but is it altogether cruel? Hasn't it, 
 after all, a sort of stupid Tightness? — isn't it a stupid 
 reaction to an indolence at least equally stupid ? " 
 
 What was this Tightness that lurked below cruelty ? 
 What was the inspiration of this pressure of spite, this 
 anger that was aroused by ineffective gentleness and 
 kindliness ? Was it indeed an altogether evil thing ; was 
 it not rather an impulse, blind as yet, but in its ultimate 
 
MALIGNITY 303 
 
 quality as good as mercy, greater perhaps in its ultimate 
 values than mercy ? 
 
 This idea had been gathering in Mr. Britling's mind 
 for many weeks; it had been growing and taking shape 
 as he wrote, making experimental beginnings for his 
 essay, " The Anatomy of Hate." Is there not, he now 
 asked himself plainly, a creative and corrective impulse 
 behind all hate? Is not this malignity indeed only the 
 ape-like precursor of the great disciplines of a creative 
 state ? 
 
 The invincible hopefulness of his sanguine tempera- 
 ment had now got Mr. Britling well out of the pessimistic 
 pit again. Already he had been on the verge of his phrase 
 while wandering across the rushy fields towards Market 
 Saffron ; now it came to him again like a legitimate mon- 
 arch returning from exile. 
 
 " When hate shall have become creative energy. . . . 
 
 " Hate which passes into creative power ; gentleness 
 which is indolence and the herald of euthanasia. . . . 
 
 "Pity is but a passing grace; for mankind will not 
 always be pitiful." 
 
 But meanwhile, meanwhile. . . . How long were men 
 so to mingle wrong with right, to be energetic without 
 mercy and kindly without energy? . . . 
 
 For a time Mr. Britling sat on the lonely parade under 
 the stars and in the sound of the sea, brooding upon 
 these ideas. 
 
 His mind could mstke no further steps. It had worked 
 for its spell. His rage had ebbed away now altogether. 
 His despair was no longer infinite. But the world was 
 dark and dreadful still. It seemed none the less dark 
 because at the end there was a gleam of light. It was a 
 gleam of light far beyond the limits of his own life, far 
 beyond the life of his son. It had no balm for these suf- 
 ferings'. Between it and himself stretched the weary 
 generations still to come, generations of bickering ana 
 accusation, greed and faintheartedness, and half truth and 
 
304 ME. BRITL1NG SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 the hasty blow. And all those years would be full of 
 pitiful things, such pitiful things as the blackened ruins 
 in the town behind, the little grey-faced corpses, the lives 
 torn and wasted, the hopes extinguished and the gladness 
 gone. . . . 
 
 He was no longer thinking of the Germans as diabolical. 
 They were human; they had a case. It was a stupid 
 case, but our case, too, was a stupid case. How stupid 
 were all our cases ! What was it we missed ? Something, 
 he felt, very close to us, and very elusive. Something 
 that would resolve a hundred tangled oppositions. . . . 
 
 His mind hung at that. Back upon his consciousness 
 came crowding the horrors and desolations that had been 
 his daily food now for three quarters of a year. He 
 groaned aloud. He struggled against that renewed en- 
 velopment of his spirit. " Oh, blood-stained fools ! " he 
 cried, " oh, pitiful, tormented fools ! 
 
 " Even that vile airship was a ship of fools ! 
 
 " We are all fools still. Striving apes, irritated beyond 
 measure by our own striving, easily moved to anger." 
 
 Some train of subconscious suggestion brought a long- 
 forgotten speech back into Mr. Britling's mind, a speech 
 that is full of that light which still seeks so mysteriously 
 and indefatigably to break through the darkness and thick- 
 ness of the human mind. 
 
 He whispered the words. No unfamiliar words could 
 have had the same effect of comfort and conviction. 
 
 He whispered it of those men whom he still imagined 
 flying far away there eastward, through the clear freezing 
 air beneath the stars, those muffled sailors and engineers 
 who had caused so much pain and agony in this little town. 
 
 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they 
 do." 
 
CHAPTER THE EOUETH 
 
 rN THE WEB OB" THE INEFFECTIVE 
 
 Hugh's letters were becoming a very important influ- 
 ence upon Mr. Britling's thought. Hugh had always been 
 something of a letter-writer, and now what was perhaps 
 an inherited desire to set things down was manifest. 
 He had been accustomed to decorate his letters from 
 school with absurd little sketches — sometimes his letters 
 had been all sketches — and now he broke from drawing 
 to writing and back to drawing in a way that pleased his 
 father mightily. The father loved this queer trick of cari- 
 cature ; he did not possess it himself, and so it seemed to 
 him the most wonderful of all Hugh's little equipment of 
 gifts. Mr. Britling used to carry these letters about until 
 their edges got grimy ; he would show them to any one he 
 felt capable of appreciating their youthful freshness; he 
 would quote them as final and conclusive evidence to estab- 
 lish this or that. He did not dream how many thousands 
 of mothers and fathers were treasuring such documents. 
 He thought other sons were dull young men by comparison 
 with Hugh. 
 
 The earlier letters told much of the charms of disci- 
 pline and the open air. " All the bother about what one 
 has to do with oneself is over," wrote Hugh. " One has 
 disposed of oneself. That has the effect of a great relief. 
 Instead of telling oneself that one ought to get up in the 
 morning, a bugle tells you that. . . . And there's no non- 
 sense about it, no chance of lying and arguing about it 
 with oneself. ... I begin to see the sense of men going 
 
 into monasteries and putting themselves under rules. One 
 
 305 
 
306 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 is carried along in a sort of moral automobile instead o£ 
 trudging the road. . . ." 
 
 And he was also sounding new physical experiences. 
 
 " Never before," he declared, " have I known what 
 fatigue is. It's a miraculous thing. One drops down in 
 one's clothes on any hard old thing and sleeps. . . ." 
 
 And in his early letters he was greatly exercised by 
 the elementary science of drill and discipline, and the 
 discussion of whether these things were necessary. He 
 began by assuming that their importance was overrated. 
 He went on to discover that they constituted the very es- 
 sentials of all good soldiering. " In a crisis," he con- 
 cluded, " there is no telling what will get hold of a man, 
 his higher instincts or his lower. He may show courage 
 of a very splendid sort — or a hasty discretion. A habit 
 is much more trustworthy than an instinct. So disci- 
 pline sets up a habit of steady and courageous bearing. 
 If you keep your head you are at liberty to be splendid. 
 If you lose it, the habit will carry you through." 
 
 The young man was also very profound upon the effects 
 of the suggestion of various exercises upon the mind. 
 
 " It is. surprising how bloodthirsty one feels in a 
 bayonet charge. We have to shout; we are encouraged 
 to shout. The effect is to paralyse one's higher centres. 
 One ceases to question — anything. One becomes a 
 ' bayoneteer.' As I go bounding forward I imagine fat 
 men, succulent men ahead, and I am filled with the desire 
 to do them in neatly. This sort of thing " 
 
 A sketch of slaughter followed, with a large and valiant 
 Hugh leaving a train of fallen behind him. 
 
 " Not like this. This is how I used to draw it in my 
 innocent childhood, but it is incorrect. More than one 
 German on the bayonet at a time is an incumbrance. And 
 it would be swank — a thing we detest in the army." 
 
 The second sketch showed the same brave hero with 
 half a dozen of the enemy skewered like cat's-meat. 
 
 " As for the widows* and children, I disregard 'em." 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 307 
 
 § 2 
 
 But presently Hugh began to be bored. 
 
 " Boute marching again," he wrote. " For no earthly 
 reason than that they can do nothing else with us. We 
 are getting no decent musketry training because there are 
 no rifles. We are wasting half our time. If you multi- 
 ply half a week by the number of men in the army you 
 will see we waste centuries weekly. ... If most of these 
 men here had just been enrolled and left to go about their 
 business while we trained officers and instructors and got 
 equipment for . them, and if they had then been put 
 through their paces as rapidly as possible, it would have 
 been infinitely better for the country. ... In a sort of 
 way we are keeping raw ; in a sort of way we are getting 
 stale. ... I get irritated by this. I feel we are not be- 
 ing properly done by. 
 
 " Half our men are educated men, reasonably educated, 
 but we are always being treated as though we were too 
 stupid for words, . . . 
 
 " No good grousing, I suppose, but after Statesminster 
 and a glimpse of old Cardinal's way of doing things, one 
 gets a kind of toothache in the mind at the sight of every- 
 thing being done twice as slowly and half as well as it 
 need be." 
 
 He went off at a tangent to describe the men in his 
 platoon. " The best man in our lot is an ex-grocer's 
 assistant, but in order to save us from vain generalisations 
 it happens that the worst man — a moon-faced creature, 
 almost incapable of lacing up his boots without help and 
 objurgation — is also an ex-grocer's assistant. Our most 
 offensive member is a little cad with a snub nose, who 
 has read Kipling and imagines he is the nearest thing 
 that ever has been to Private Ortheris. He goes about 
 looking for the other two of the Soldiers Three; it is 
 rather like an unpopular politician trying to form a min- 
 istry. And he is conscientiously foul-mouthed. He feels 
 
308 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 losing a chance of saying 'bloody' as acutely as a snob 
 feels dropping an H. He goes back sometimes and says 
 the sentence over again and puts the ' bloody ' in. I used 
 to swear a little out of the range of your parental ear, 
 but Ortheris has cured me. When he is about I am minc- 
 ing in my speech. I perceive now that cursing is a way 
 of chewing one's own dirt. In a platoon there is no elbow- 
 room for indifference; you must either love or hate. I 
 have a feeling that my first taste of battle will not be 
 with Germans, but with Private Ortheris. . . ." 
 
 And one letter was just a picture, a parody of the well- 
 known picture of the bivouac below and the soldier's dream 
 of return to his beloved above. But Master Hugh in the 
 dream was embracing an enormous retort, while a con- 
 venient galvanometer registered his emotion and little 
 tripods danced around him. 
 
 § 3 
 
 Then came a letter which plunged abruptly into 
 criticism. 
 
 " My dear Parent, this is a swearing letter. I must let 
 go to somebody. And somehow none of the other chaps 
 are convenient. I don't know if I ought to be put against 
 a wall and shot for it, but I hereby declare that all the 
 officers of this battalion oyer and above the rank of cap- 
 tain are a constellation of incapables — and several of the 
 captains are herewith included. Some of them are men 
 of a pleasant disposition and carefully aborted mental 
 powers, and some are men of an unpleasant disposition 
 and no mental powers at all. And I believe — a little 
 enlightened by your recent letter to The Times — that 
 they are a fair sample of the entire ' army ' class which 
 has got to win this war. Usually they are indolent, but 
 when they are thoroughly roused they are fussy. The 
 time they should spend in enlarging their minds and in- 
 creasing their military efficiency they devote to keeping 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 309 
 
 fit. They are, roughly speaking, fit — for nothing. 
 They cannot move us thirty miles without getting half of 
 us left about, without losing touch with food and shelter, 
 and starving us for thirty-six hours or so in the process, 
 and they cannot count beyond the fingers of one hand, 
 not having learnt to use the nose for arithmetical oper- 
 ations. ... I conclude this war is going to be a sort of 
 Battle of Inkerman on a large scale. We chaps in the 
 ranks will have to do the job. Leading is ' off.' . . . 
 
 " All of this, my dear Parent, is just a blow off. I 
 have been needlessly starved, and fagged to death and ex- 
 asperated. We have moved five-and-twenty miles across 
 country — in fifty-seven hours. And without food for 
 about eighteen hours. I have been with my Captain, who 
 has been billeting us here in Cheasingholt. Oh, he is a 
 MUFF! Oh God! oh God of Heaven! what a MUFF! 
 He is afraid of printed matter, but he controls himself 
 heroically. He prides himself upon having no ' sense of 
 locality, confound it ! ' Prides himself ! He went about 
 this village, which is a little dispersed, at a slight trot, 
 and wouldn't avail himself of the one-inch map I hap- 
 pened to have. He judged the capacity of each room with 
 his eye and wouldn't let me measure, even with God's 
 own paces. Not with the legs I inherit. ' We'll put five 
 fellahs hea ! ' he said. ' What d'you want to measure the 
 room for ? We haven't come to lay down carpets.' Then, 
 having assigned men by coup d'ceil, so as to congest half 
 the village miserably, he found the other half unoccupied 
 and had to begin all over again. ' If you measured the 
 floor space first, sir,' I said, ' and made a list of the 
 
 houses ' ' That isn't the way I'm going to do it,' 
 
 he said, fixing me with a pitiless eye. . . . 
 
 " That isn't the way they are going to do it, Daddy ! 
 The sort of thing that is done over here in the green army 
 will be done over there in the dry. They won't be in 
 time; they'll lose their guns where now they lose our 
 kitchens. I'm a mute soldier; I've got to do what I'm 
 
310 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 told; still, I begin to understand the Battle of JTeuve 
 Chapelle. 
 
 " They say the relations of men and officers in the new 
 army are beautiful. Some day I may learn to love my 
 officer — but not just yet. Not till I've forgotten the 
 operations leading up to the occupation of Cheasingholt. 
 . . . He muffs his real job without a blush, and yet he 
 would rather be shot than do his bootlaces up criss-cross. 
 What I say about officers applies only and solely to him 
 really. . . . How well I understand now the shooting of 
 officers by their men. . . . But indeed, fatigue and 
 exasperation apart, this shift has been done atro- 
 ciously. . . ." 
 
 The young man returned to these criticisms in a later 
 letter. 
 
 " You will think I am always carping, but it does seem 
 to me that nearly everything is being done here in the 
 most wasteful way possible. We waste time, we waste 
 labour, we waste material, oh Lord! how we waste our 
 country's money. These aren't, I can assure you, the 
 opinions of a conceited young man. It's nothing to be 
 conceited about. . . . We're bored to death by standing 
 about this infernal little village. There is nothing to do 
 — except trail after a small number of slatternly young 
 women we despise and hate. I don't, Daddy. And I 
 don't drink. ■ Why have I inherited no vices ? We had 
 a fight here yesterday — sheer boredom. Ortheris has a 
 swollen lip, and another private has a bad black eye. 
 There is to be a return match. I perceive the chief horror 
 of warfare is boredom. . . . 
 
 " Our feeding here is typical of the whole system. It 
 is a system invented not with any idea of getting the best 
 results — that does not enter into the War Office phi- 
 losophy — but to have a rule for everything, and avoid 
 arguments. There is rather too generous an allowance of 
 bread and stuff per man, and there is a very fierce but not 
 very efficient system of weighing and checking. A rather 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 311 
 
 too generous allowance is, of course, a direct incentive to 
 waste or stealing — as any one but our silly old duffer of a 
 War Office would know. The checking is for quantity, 
 which any fool can understand, rather than for quality. 
 The test for the quality of army meat is the smell. If it 
 doesn't smell bad, it is good. . . . 
 
 " Then the raw material is handed over to a cook. He 
 is a common soldier who has been made into a cook by a 
 simple seremony. He is told, ' Tou are a cook/ He 
 does his best to be. Usually he roasts or bakes to begin 
 with, guessing when the joint is done, afterwards he hacks 
 up what is left of his joints and makes a stew for next day. 
 A stew is hacked meat boiled up in a big pot. It has much 
 fat floating on the top. After you have eaten your fill 
 you want to sit about quiet. The men are fed usually 
 in a large tent or barn. We have a barn. It is not a clean 
 barn, and just to make it more like a picnic there are 
 insufficient plates, knives and forks. (I tell you, no 
 army people can count beyond eight or ten.) The cor- 
 porals after their morning's work have to carve. When 
 they have done carving they tell me they feel they have 
 had enough dinner. They sit about looking pale, and 
 wander off afterwards to the village pub. (I snail prob- 
 ably become a corporal soon.) In these islands before 
 the war began there was a surplus of women over men of 
 about a million. (See the publications of the Fabian 
 Society, now so popular among the young.) None of 
 these women have been trusted by the government with the 
 difficult task of cooking and giving out food to our soldiers. 
 No man of the ordinary soldier class ever cooks anything 
 until he is a soldier. . . . All food left over after the stew 
 or otherwise rendered uneatable by the cook is thrown 
 away. We throw away pail-loads. We bury meat. . . . 
 
 "Also we get three pairs of socks. We work pretty 
 hard. We don't know how to darn socks. When the heels 
 wear through, come blisters. Bad blisters disable a man. 
 Of the million of surplus women (see above) the govern- 
 
S12 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 ment has not had the intelligence to get any to darn our 
 socks. So a certain percentage of us go lame. And so 
 on. And so on. 
 
 " You will think all this is awful grousing, but the point 
 I want to make — I hereby to ease my feelings make it 
 now in a fair round hand — is that all this business 
 could be done far better and far cheaper if it wasn't left 
 to these absolutely inexperienced and extremely exclusive 
 military gentlemen. They think they are leading Eng- 
 land and showing us all how; instead of which they are 
 just keeping us back. Why in thunder are they doing 
 everything? Not one of them, when he is at home, is 
 allowed to order the dinner or poke his nose into his own 
 kitchen or check the household books. . . . The ordinary 
 British colonel is a helpless old gentleman ; he ought to have 
 a nurse. . . . This is not merely the trivial grievance of 
 my insulted stomach, it is a serious matter for the country. 
 Sooner or later the country may want the food that is being 
 wasted in all these capers. In the aggregate it must 
 amount to a daily destruction of tons of stuff of all sorts. 
 Tons. . . . Suppose the war lasts longer than we 
 reckon ! " 
 
 From this point Hugh's letter jumped to a general dis- 
 cussion of the military mind. 
 
 " Our officers are beastly good chaps, nearly all of them. 
 That's where the perplexity of the whole thing comes in. 
 If only they weren't such good chaps ! If only they were 
 like the Prussian officers to their men, then we'd just take 
 on a revolution as well as the war, and make everything 
 tidy at once. But they are decent, they are charming. 
 . . . Only they do not think hard, and they do not under- 
 stand that doing a job properly means doing it as directly 
 and thought-outly as you possibly can. They won't worry 
 about things. If their tempers were worse perhaps their 
 work might be better. They won't use maps or time- 
 tables or books of reference. When we move to a new 
 place they pick up what they can about it by hearsay ; not 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 313 
 
 one of our lot has the gumption to possess a contoured map 
 or a Michelin guide. They have hearsay minds. They 
 are fussy and petty and wasteful — and, in the way of 
 getting things done, pretentious. By their code they're 
 paragons of honour. Courage — they're all right about 
 that; no end of it; honesty, truthfulness, and so on — 
 high. They have a kind of horsey standard of smart- 
 ness and pluck, too, that isn't bad, and they have a fine 
 horror of whiskers and being unbuttoned. But the mis- 
 take they make is to class thinking with whiskers, as a 
 sort of fussy sidegrowth. Instead of classing it with un- 
 buttonedupness. They hate economy. And prepara- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 " They won't see that inefficiency is a sort of dishon- 
 esty. If a man doesn't steal sixpence, they think it a light 
 matter if he wastes half a crown. Here follows wisdom ! 
 From the point of view of a nation at war, sixpence is just 
 a fifth part of half a crown. . . . 
 
 " When I began this letter I was boiling with indig- 
 nation, complicated, I suspect, by this morning's ' stew ' ; 
 now I have written thus far I feel I'm an ungenerous 
 grumbler. ... It is remarkable, my dear Parent, that 
 I let off these things to you. I like writing to you. I 
 couldn't possibly say the things I can write. Heinrich 
 had a confidential friend at Breslau to whom he used to 
 write about his Soul. I never had one of those Teutonic 
 friendships. And I haven't got a Soul. But I have to 
 write. One must write to some one — and in this place 
 there is nothing else to do. And now the old lady down- 
 stairs is turning down the gas ; she always does at half- 
 past ten. She didn't ought. She gets — ninepence each. 
 Excuse the pencil. . . ." 
 
 That letter ended abruptly. The next two were brief 
 and cheerful. Then suddenly came a new note. 
 
 " We've got rifles ! We're real armed soldiers at last. 
 Every blessed man has got a rifle. And they come from 
 Japan ! They are of a sort of light wood that is like new 
 
314 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 oak and art furniture, and makes one feel that one belongs 
 to the Eirst Garden Suburb Regiment; but I believe much 
 can be done with linseed oil. And they are real rifles, 
 they go bang. We are a little light-headed about them. 
 Only our training and discipline prevent our letting fly 
 at incautious spectators on the skyline. I saw a man yes- 
 terday about half a mile off. I was possessed by the idea 
 that I could get him — right in the middle. . . . Ortheris, 
 the little beast, has got a motor-bicycle, which he calls his 
 
 ' b- y oto ' — no one knows why — and only death or 
 
 dishonourable conduct will save me, I gather, from be- 
 coming a corporal in the course of the next month. . . ." 
 
 § 4 
 
 A subsequent letter threw fresh light on the career of 
 the young man with the " oto." Before the rifle and the 
 " oto," and in spite of his fights with some person or 
 persons unknown, Ortheris found trouble. Hugh told the 
 story with the unblushing savoir-faire of the very young. 
 
 " By the by, Ortheris, following the indications of his 
 creator and succumbing to the universal boredom before 
 the rifles came, forgot Lord Kitchener's advice and at- 
 tempted ' seduktion.' With painful results which he 
 insists upon confiding to the entire platoon. He has 
 been severely smacked and scratched by the proposed 
 victim, and warned off the premises (licensed prem- 
 ises) by her father and mother — ■ both formidable per- 
 sons. They did more than warn him off the premises. 
 They had displayed neither a proper horror of Don Juan 
 nor a proper respect for the King's uniform. Mother, 
 we realise, got hold of him and cuffed him severely. 
 'What the 'ell's a chap to do?' cried Ortheris. 'You 
 can't go 'itting a woman back.' Father had set a dog on 
 him. A less ingenuous character would be silent about 
 such passages — I should be too egotistical and humil- 
 iated altogether — but that is not his quality. He tells 
 
IN THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 315 
 
 us in tones of naive wonder. He talks about it and talks 
 about it. * I don't care what the old woman did,' he 
 
 says, 'not reely. What 'urts me about it is that I 
 
 jest made a sort of mistake 'ow she'd tike it. You see, 
 I sort of feel I've 'urt and insulted 'er. And reely I didn't 
 mean to. Swap me, I didn't mean to. Gawd 'elp me. 
 I wouldn't 'ave 'ad it 'appened as it 'as 'appened, not for 
 worlds. And now I can't get round to 'er, or anyfing, 
 not to explain. . . . You chaps may laugh, but you don't 
 know what there is in it. ... I tell you it worries me 
 something frightful. You think I'm just a little cad who 
 took liberties he didn't ought to. (Note of anger drown- 
 ing uncharitable grunts of assent.) 'Ow the 'ell is 'e to 
 know when 'e didn't ought to ? ... I swear she liked 
 me. . . .' 
 
 " This kind of thing goes on for hours — in the 
 darkness. 
 
 " ' I'd got regular sort of fond of 'er.' 
 
 "And the extraordinary thing is it makes me begin 
 to get regular fond of Ortheris. 
 
 " I think it is because the affair has surprised him right, 
 out of acting Ortheris and Tommy Atkins for a bit, into 
 his proper self. He's frightfully like some sort of mon- 
 grel with a lot of wiry-haired terrier and a touch of Aire- 
 dale in it. A mongrel you like in spite of the flavour of 
 all the horrid things he's been nosing into. And he's as 
 hard as nails and, my dear daddy! he can't box for nuts." 
 
 § 5 
 
 Mr. Britling, with an understanding much quickened 
 by Hugh's letters, went about Essex in his automobile,, 
 and on one or two journeys into Berkshire and Bucking- 
 hamshire, and marked the steady conversion of the old 
 pacific countryside into an armed camp. He was disposed 
 to minimise Hugh's criticisms. He found in them some- 
 thing of the harshness of youth, which is far too keen- 
 
316 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 edged to be tolerant with half performance and our poor 
 human evasion of perfection's overstrain. " Our poor 
 human evasion of perfection's overstrain " ; this phrase was 
 Mr. Britling's. To Mr. Britling, looking less closely and 
 more broadly, the new army was a pride and a marvel. 
 
 He liked to come into some quiet village and note the 
 clusters of sturdy khaki-clad youngsters going about their 
 business, the tethered horses, the air of subdued bustle, 
 the occasional glimpses of guns and ammunition trains. 
 Wherever one went now there were soldiers and still more 
 soldiers. There was a steady flow of men into Elanders, 
 and presently to Gallipoli, but it seemed to have no effect 
 upon the multitude in training at home. He was pleas- 
 antly excited by the evident increase in the proportion of 
 military material upon the railways ; he liked the promise 
 and mystery of the long lines of trucks bearing tarpaulin- 
 covered wagons and carts and guns that he would pass on 
 his way to Liverpool Street station. He could apprehend 
 defeat in the. silence of the night, but when he saw the 
 men, when he went about the land, then it was impossible 
 to believe in any end but victory. . . . 
 
 But through the spring and summer there was no vic- 
 tory. The " great offensive " of May was checked and 
 abandoned after a series of ineffective and very costly 
 attacks between Ypres and Soissons. The Germans had 
 developed a highly scientific defensive in which machine- 
 guns replaced rifles and a maximum of punishment was 
 inflicted upon an assaulting force with a minimum of 
 human loss. The War Office had never thought much of 
 machine-guns before, but now it thought a good deal. 
 Moreover, the energies of Britain were being turned more 
 and more towards the Dardanelles. 
 
 The idea of an attack upon the Dardanelles had a tra- 
 ditional attractiveness for the British mind. Old men 
 had been brought up from childhood with " forcing the 
 Dardanelles " as a familiar phrase ; it had none of the 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 317 
 
 flighty novelty and vulgarity about it that made an " aerial 
 offensive " seem so unwarrantable a proceeding. Forcing 
 the Dardanelles was historically British. It made no 
 break with tradition. Soon after Turkey entered the war 
 British submarines appeared in the Sea of Marmora, and 
 in February a systematic bombardment of the Dardanelles 
 began ; this was continued intermittently for a month, the 
 defenders profiting by their experiences and by spells of 
 bad weather to strengthen their works. This first phase 
 of the attack culminated in the loss of the Irresistible, 
 Ocean, and Bouvet, when on the 17th of March the at- 
 tacking fleet closed in upon the Narrows. After an inter- 
 lude of six weeks to allow of further preparations on the 
 part of the defenders, who were now thoroughly alive to 
 what was coming, the Allied armies gathered upon the 
 scene, and a difficult and costly landing was achieved at 
 two points upon the peninsula of Gallipoli. With that 
 began a slow and bloody siege of the defences of the Darda- 
 nelles, clambering up to the surprise landing of a fresh 
 British army in Suvla Bay in August, and its failure in 
 the battle of Anafarta, through incompetent commanders 
 and a general sloppiness of leading, to cut' off and capture 
 Maidos and the Narrows defences. . . . Meanwhile the 
 Russian hosts, which had reached their high-water mark 
 in the capture of Przemysl, were being forced back first 
 in the south and then in the north. The Germans recap- 
 tured Lemberg, entered Warsaw, and pressed on to take 
 Brest Litowsk. The Russian lines rolled back with an 
 impressive effect of defeat, and the Germans thrust to- 
 wards Riga and Petrograd, reaching Vilna about the 
 middle of September. . . . 
 
 Day after day Mr. Britling traced the swaying fortunes 
 of the conflict, with impatience, with perplexity, but with 
 no loss of confidence in the ultimate success of Britain. 
 The country was still swarming with troops, and still under 
 summer sunshine. A second hay harvest redeemed the 
 
318 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 scantiness of the first, the wheat crops were wonderful, and 
 the great fig tree at the corner of the Dower House had 
 never borne so bountifully nor such excellent juicy 
 figs. . . . 
 
 And one day in early June while those figs were still 
 only a hope, Teddy appeared at the Dower House with 
 Letty, to say good-bye before going to the front. He was 
 going out in a draft to fill up various gaps and losses; 
 he did not know where. Essex was doing well but bloodily 
 over there. Mrs. Britling had tea set out upon the lawn 
 under the blue cedar, and Mr. Britling found himself at 
 a loss for appropriate sayings, and talked in his confusion 
 almost as though Teddy's departure was of no significance 
 at all. He was still haunted by that odd sense of responsi- 
 bility for Teddy. Teddy was not nearly so animated as 
 he had been in his pre-khaki days; there was a quiet ex- 
 altation in his manner rather than a lively excitement. 
 He knew now what he was in for. He knew now that war 
 was not a lark, that for him it was to be the gravest ex- 
 perience he had ever had or was likely to have. There 
 were no more jokes about Letty's pension, and a general 
 avoidance of the topics of high explosives and asphyxi- 
 ating gas. . . . 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Britling took the young people to the 
 gate. 
 
 " Good luck ! " cried Mr. Britling as they receded. 
 
 Teddy replied with a wave of the hand. 
 
 Mr. Britling stood watching them for some moments as 
 they walked towards the little- cottage which was to be the 
 scene of their private parting. 
 
 " I don't like his going," he said. " I hope it will be 
 all right with him. . . . Teddy's so grave nowadays. It's 
 a mean thing, I know, it has none of the Roman touch, 
 
 but I am glad that this can't happen with Hugh " 
 
 He computed. " Not for a year and three months, even 
 if they march him into it upon his very birthday. . . . 
 
 " It may all be over by then. . . ." 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 319 
 
 § 6 
 
 In that computation he reckoned without Hugh. 
 
 Within a month Hugh was also saying " Good-bye." 
 
 " But how's this ? " protested Mr. Britling, who had 
 already guessed the answer. " You're not nineteen." 
 
 " I'm nineteen enough for this job," said Hugh. " In 
 fact, I enlisted as nineteen." 
 
 Mr. Britling said nothing for a little while. Then he 
 spoke with a catch in his breath. " I don't blame you," 
 he said. " It was — the right spirit." 
 
 Drill and responsibilities of non-commissioned rank 
 had imposed a novel manliness upon the bearing of Cor- 
 poral Britling. "I always classified a little above my 
 age at Statesminster," he said as though that cleared up 
 everything. 
 
 He looked at a rosebud as though it interested him. 
 Then he remarked rather casually: 
 
 " I thought," he said, " that if I was to go to war I'd 
 better do the thing properly. It seemed — sort of half 
 and half — not to be eligible for the trenches. ... I 
 ought to have told you. . . ." 
 
 " Yes," Mr. Britling decided. 
 
 " I was shy about it at first. ... I thought perhaps 
 the war would be over before it was necessary to discuss 
 anything. . . . Didn't want to go into it." 
 
 "Exactly," said Mr. Britling as though that was a 
 complete explanation. 
 
 " It's been a good year for your roses," said Hugh. 
 
 § 7 
 
 Hugh was to stop the night. He spent what seemed 
 to him and every one a long, shy, inexpressive evening. 
 Only the small boys were really natural and animated. 
 They were much impressed and excited by his departure, 
 and wanted to ask a hundred questions about the life in 
 
320 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 the trenches. Many of them Hugh had to promise to 
 answer when he got there. Then he would see just ex- 
 actly how things were. Mrs. Britling was motherly and 
 intelligent about his outfit. "Will you want winter 
 things ? " she asked. . . . 
 
 But when he was alone with his father after every one 
 had gone to bed they found themselves able to talk. 
 
 " This sort of thing seems more to us than it would be 
 to a French family," Hugh remarked, standing on the 
 hearthrug. 
 
 " Yes," agreed Mr. Britling. " Their minds would be 
 better prepared. . . . They'd have their appropriate 
 things to say. They have been educated by the tradition 
 of service — and "II." 
 
 Then he spoke — almost resentfully. 
 
 " The older men ought to go before you boys. Who is 
 to carry on if a lot of you get killed ? " 
 
 Hugh reflected. " In the stiffest battle that ever can 
 be the odds are against getting killed," he said. 
 
 " I suppose they are." 
 
 " One in three or four in the very hottest corners." 
 
 Mr. Britling expressed no satisfaction. 
 
 " Every one is going through something of this sort." 
 
 " All the decent people, at any rate," said Mr. Brit- 
 ling. . . . 
 
 " It will be an extraordinary experience. Somehow it 
 seems out of proportion " 
 
 "With what?" 
 
 " With life generally. As one has known it." 
 
 " It isn't in proportion," Mr. Britling admitted. 
 
 " Incommensurables," said Hugh. 
 
 He considered his phrasing. " It's not," he said, " as 
 though one was going into another part of the same world, 
 or turning up another side of the world one was used to. 
 It is just as if one had been living in a room and one h»d 
 been asked to step outside. ... It makes me think of a 
 queer little thing that happened when I was in London 
 
IN THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 321 
 
 last winter. I got into Queer Company. I don't think 
 I told you. I went to have supper with some students in 
 Chelsea. I hadn't been to the place before, but they 
 seemed all right — just people like me — and everybody. 
 And after supper they took me on to some people they 
 didn't know very well; people who had to do with some 
 School of Dramatic Art. There were two or three young 
 actresses there and a singer and people of that sort, sitting 
 about smoking cigarettes, and we began talking plays and 
 books and picture shows and all that stuff; and suddenly 
 there was a knocking at the door and some one went out 
 and found a policeman with a warrant on the landing. 
 They took off our host's son. ... It had to do with a 
 murder. . . ." 
 
 Hugh paused. " It was the Bedford Mansions mys- 
 tery. I don't suppose you remember about it or read 
 about it at the time. He'd killed a man. ... It doesn't 
 matter about the particulars anyhow, but what I mean is 
 the effect. The effect of a comfortable well-lit orderly 
 room and the sense of harmless people — and then the 
 door opening and the policeman and the cold draught 
 flowing in. Murder! A girl who seemed to know the 
 people well explained to me in whispers what was happen- 
 ing. It was like the opening of a trap-door going down 
 into some pit you have always known was there, but never 
 really believed in." 
 
 " I know," said Mr. Britling. " I know." 
 
 " That's just how I feel about this war business. 
 There's no real death over here. It's laid out and boxed 
 up. And accidents are all padded about. If one got a 
 toss from a horse here, you'd be in bed and comfortable in 
 no time. . . . And there; it's like another planet. It's 
 outside. . . . I'm going outside. . . . Instead of there 
 being no death anywhere, it is death everywhere, outside 
 there. We shall be using our utmost wits to kill each 
 other. A kind of reverse to this world." 
 
 Mr. Britling nodded. 
 
322 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " I've never seen a dead body yet. In Dower-House- 
 land there aren't dead bodies." 
 
 " We've kept things from you — horrid things of that 
 sort." 
 
 " I'm not complaining," said Hugh. ..." But — 
 Master Hugh — the Master Hugh you kept things from 
 — will never come back." 
 
 He went on quickly as his father raised distressed eyes 
 to him. " I mean that anyhow this Hugh will never come 
 back. Another one may. But I shall have been outside, 
 and it will all be different. . . ." 
 
 He paused. Never had Mr. Britling been so little dis- 
 posed to take up the discourse. 
 
 " Like a man," he said, seeking an image and doing 
 no more than imitate his son's ; " who goes out of a busy 
 lighted room through a trap-door into a blizzard, to mend 
 the roof. . . ." 
 
 For some moments neither father nor son said anything 
 more. They had a queer sense of insurmountable in- 
 sufficiency. Neither was saying what he had wanted to 
 say to the other, but it was not clear to them now what 
 they had to say to one another. . . . 
 
 " It's wonderful," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 Hugh could only manage : " The world has turned right 
 over. . . ." 
 
 " The job has to be done," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " The job has to be done," said Hugh. 
 
 The pause lengthened. 
 
 " You'll be getting up early to-morrow," said Mr. 
 Britling. . . . 
 
 § 8 
 
 When Mr. Britling was alone in hie own room all the 
 thoughts and feelings that had been held up downstairs 
 began to run more and more rapidly and abundantly 
 through his mind. 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 323 
 
 He had a feeling — every now and again in the last 
 few years he had had the same feeling — as though he 
 was only just Beginning to discover Hugh. This per- 
 petual rediscovery of one's children is the experience of 
 every ohservant parent. He had always considered Hugh 
 as a youth, and now a man stood over him and talked, as 
 one man to another. And this man, this very new man, 
 mint new and clean and clear, filled Mr. Britling with 
 surprise and admiration. 
 
 It was as if he perceived the beauty of youth for the 
 first time in Hugh's slender, well balanced, khaki-clad 
 body. There was infinite delicacy in his clear com- 
 plexion, his clear eyes; the delicately pencilled eyebrow 
 that was so exactly like his mother's. And this thing of 
 brightness and bravery talked as gravely and as wisely as 
 any weather-worn, shop-soiled, old fellow. . . . 
 
 The boy was wise. 
 
 Hugh thought for himself; he thought round and 
 through his position, not egotistically but with a quality 
 of responsibility. He wasn't just hero-worshipping and 
 imitating, just spinning some self-centred romance. If 
 he was a fair sample of his generation then it was a better 
 generation than Mr. Britling's had been. . . . 
 
 At that Mr. Britling's mind went off at a tangent to 
 the grievance of the rejected volunteer. It was acutely 
 shameful to him that all these fine lads should be going 
 off to death and wounds while the men of forty and over 
 lay snug at home. How stupid it was to fix things like 
 that ! Here were the fathers, who had done their work, 
 shot their bolts, returned some value for the costs of their 
 education, unable to get training, unable to be of any 
 service, shamefully safe, doing April fool work as special 
 constables ; while their young innocents, untried, all their 
 gathering possibilities of service unbroached, went down 
 into the deadly trenches. . . . The war would leave the 
 world a world of cripples and old men and children. ... 
 
 He felt himself as a cowardly brute, fat, wheezy, out of 
 
324 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 training, sheltering behind this dear one branch of Mary's 
 life. 
 
 He ^rithed with impotent humiliation. . . . 
 
 How stupidly the world is managed. 
 
 He began to fret and rage. He could not lie in peace 
 in his bed; he got up and prowled about his room, 
 blundering against chairs and tables in the darkness. . . . 
 We were too stupid to do the most obvious things; we 
 were sending all these boys into hardship and pitiless 
 danger; we were sending them ill-equipped, insufficiently 
 supported, we were sending our children through the fires 
 to Moloch, because essentially we English were a world 
 of indolent, pampered, sham good-humoured, old and 
 middle-aged men. (So he distributed the intolerable load 
 of self-accusation.) Why was he doing nothing to change 
 things, to get them better ? What was the good of an as- 
 sumed modesty, an effort at tolerance for and confidence 
 in these boozy old lawyers, these ranting platform men, 
 these stiff-witted officers and hide-bound officials? They 
 were butchering the youth of England. Old men sat out 
 of danger contriving death for the lads in the trenches. 
 That was the reality of the thing. " My son ! " he cried 
 sharply in the darkness. His sense of our national de- 
 ficiencies became tormentingly, fantastically acute. It 
 was as if all his cherished delusions had fallen from the 
 scheme of things. . . . What was the good of making be- 
 lieve that up there they were planning some great counter- 
 stroke that would end in victory ? It was as plain as day- 
 light that they had neither the power of imagination nor 
 the collective intelligence even to conceive of a counter- 
 stroke. Any dull mass may resist, but only imagination 
 can strike. Imagination! To the end we should not 
 strike. We might strike through the air. We might 
 strike across the sea. We might strike hard at Gallipoli 
 instead of dribbling inadequate armies thither as our 
 fathers dribbled men at the Redan. . . . But the old men 
 would sit at their tables, replete and sleepy, and shake 
 
m THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 325 
 
 their cunning old heads. The press would chatter and 
 make odd ambiguous sounds like a shipload of monkeys 
 in a storm. The political harridans would get the wrong 
 men appointed, would attack every possible leader with 
 scandal and abuse and falsehood. . . . 
 
 The spirit and honour and drama had gone out of this 
 war. 
 
 Our only hope now was exhaustion. Our only strategy 
 was to barter blood for blood — trusting that our tank 
 would prove the deeper. . . . 
 
 While into this tank stepped Hugh, young and 
 smiling. ... ' 
 
 The war became a nightmare vision. . . . 
 
 § 9 
 
 In the morning Mr. Britling's face was white from his 
 overnight brain storm, and Hugh's was fresh from whole- 
 some sleep. They walked about the lawn, and Mr. Brit- 
 ling talked hopefully of the general outlook until it was 
 time for them to start to the station. . . . 
 
 The little old station-master grasped the situation at 
 once, and presided over their last hand-clasp. 
 
 " Good luck, Hugh ! " cried Mr. Britling. 
 
 " Good luck ! " cried the little old station-master. 
 
 " It's not easy a-parting," he said to Mr. Britling as 
 the train slipped down the line. " There's been many a 
 parting hea' since this here old war began. Many. And 
 some as won't come back again neether." 
 
 § 10 
 
 For some days Mr. Britling could think of nothing but 
 Hugh, and always with a dull pain at his heart. He felt 
 as he had felt long ago while he had waited downstairs 
 and Hugh upstairs had been under the knife of a surgeon. 
 But this time the operation went on and still went on. 
 
326 MR. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 At the worst his boy had but one chance in five of death 
 or serious injury, but for a time he could think of nothing 
 but that one chance. He felt it pressing upon his mind, 
 pressing him down. . . . 
 
 Then instead of breaking under that pressure, he was 
 released by the trick of the sanguine temperament. His 
 mind turned over, abruptly, to the four chances out of 
 five. It was like a dislocated joint slipping back into 
 place. It was as sudden as that. He found he had 
 adapted himself to the prospect of Hugh in mortal danger. 
 It had become a fact established, a usual thing. He could 
 bear with it and go about his affairs. 
 
 He went up to London, and met other men at the club 
 in the same emotional predicament. He realised that it 
 was neither very wonderful nor exceptionally tragic now 
 to have a son at the front. 
 
 " My boy is in Gallipoli," said one. " It's tough work 
 there." 
 
 " My lad's in Elanders," said Mr. Britling. " Nothing 
 would satisfy him but the front. He's three months short 
 of eighteen. He misstated his age." 
 
 And they went on to talk newspaper just as if the 
 world was where it had always been. 
 
 But until a post card came from Hugh Mr. Britling 
 watched the postman like a lovesick girl. 
 
 Hugh wrote more frequently than his father had dared 
 to hope, pencilled letters for the most part. It was as if 
 he was beginning to feel an inherited need for talk, and 
 was a little at a loss for a sympathetic ear. Park, his 
 schoolmate, who had enlisted with him, wasn't, it seemed, 
 a theoriser. " Park becomes a martinet," Hugh wrote. 
 " Also he is a sergeant now, and this makes rather a gulf 
 between us." Mr. Britling had the greatest difficulty in 
 writing back. There were many grave deep things he 
 wanted to say, and never did. Instead he gave elaborate 
 details of the small affairs of the Dower House. Once 
 or twice, with a half-unconscious imitation of his boy's 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 327 
 
 style, he took a shot at the theological and philosophical 
 hares that Hugh had started. But the exemplary letters 
 that he composed of nights from a Father to a Son at 
 War were never written down. It was just as well, for 
 there are many things of that sort that are good to think 
 and bad to say. . . . 
 
 Hugh was not very explicit about his position or daily 
 duties. What he wrote now had to pass through the hands 
 of a Censor, and any sort of definite information might 
 cause the suppression of his letter. Mr. Britling con- 
 ceived him for the most part as quartered some way be* 
 hind the front, but in a fiat, desolated country and within 
 hearing of great guns. He assisted his imagination with 
 the illustrated papers. Sometimes he put him farther 
 back into pleasant old towns after the fashion of Beauvais, 
 and imagined loitering groups in the front of cafes ; some- 
 times he filled in the obvious suggestions of the phrase that 
 all the Pas de Calais was now one vast British camp. 
 Then he crowded the picture with tethered horses and tents 
 and grey-painted wagons, and Hugh in the foreground — ■ 
 bare-armed, with a bucket. . . . 
 
 Hugh's letters divided themselves pretty fairly between 
 two main topics; the first was the interest of the art of 
 war, the second the reaction against warfare. " After 
 one has got over the emotion of it," he wrote, " and when 
 one's mind has just accepted and forgotten (as it does) 
 the horrors and waste of it all, then I begin to perceive 
 that war is absolutely the best game in the world. Th^t 
 is the real strength of war, I submit. Not as you put 
 it in that early pamphlet of yours ; ambition, cruelty, and 
 all those things. Those things give an excuse for war, 
 they rush timid and base people into war, but the essential 
 matter is the hold of the thing itself upon an active imag- 
 ination. It's such a big game. Instead of being fenced 
 into a field and tied down to one set of tools as you are in 
 almost every other game, you have all the world to play 
 with, and you may use whatever you can use: You can 
 
328 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 use every scrap of imagination and invention that is in 
 you. And it's wonderful. . . . But real soldiers aren't 
 cruel. And war isn't cruel in its essence. Only in its 
 consequences. Over here one gets hold of scraps of talk 
 that light up things. Most of the barbarities were done 
 — it is quite clear — by an excited civilian sort of men, 
 men in a kind of inflamed state. The great part of the 
 German army in the early stage of the war was really an 
 army of demented civilians. Trained civilians no doubt, 
 but civilians in soul. They were nice orderly clean law- 
 abiding men suddenly torn up by the roots and flung into 
 quite shocking conditions. They felt they were rushing 
 at death, and that decency was at an end. They thought 
 every Belgian had a gun behind the hedge and a knife in 
 his trouser leg. They saw villages burning and dead peo- 
 ple, and men smashed to bits. They lived in a kind of 
 nightmare. They didn't know what they were doing. 
 They did horrible things just as one does them sometimes 
 in dreams. . . ." 
 
 . He flung out his conclusion with just his mother's leap- 
 ing consecutiveness. " Conscript soldiers are the ruin of 
 war. . . . Half the Germans and a lot of the Erench 
 ought never to have been brought within ten miles of a 
 battlefield. 
 
 " What makes all this so plain are the diaries the Erench 
 and English have been finding on the dead. You know 
 at the early state of the war every German soldier was 
 expected to keep a diary. He was ordered to do it. 
 The idea was to keep him interested in the war. Conse- 
 quently, from the dead and wounded our people have 
 got thousands. ... It helps one to realise that the Ger- 
 mans aren't really soldiers at all. Not as our men 
 are. They are obedient, law-abiding, intelligent people, 
 who have been shoved into this. They have to see the 
 war as something romantic and melodramatic, or as 
 something moral, or as tragic fate. They have to bellow 
 songs about ' Deutschland,' or drag in ' Gott.' They 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 329 
 
 don't take to the game as our men take to the game. . . . 
 
 " I confess I'm taking to the game. I wish at times 
 I had gone into the O.T.C. with Teddy, and got a 
 better hold of it. I was too high-browed about 
 this war business. I dream now of getting a commis- 
 sion. . . . 
 
 " That diary-hunting strategy is just the sort of thing 
 that makes this war intellectually fascinating. Every- 
 thing is being thought out and then tried over that can 
 possibly make victory. The Germans go in for psychology 
 much more than we do, just as they go in for war more 
 than we do, but they don't seem to be really clever about 
 it. So they set out to make all their men understand the 
 war, while our chaps are singing ' Tipperary.' But what 
 the men put down aren't the beautiful things they ought 
 to put down ; most of them shove down lists of their meals, 
 some of the diaries are all just lists of things eaten, and 
 a lot of them have written the most damning stuff about 
 outrages and looting. Which the French are translating 
 and publishing. The Germans would give anything now 
 to get back these silly diaries. And now they have made 
 an order that no one shall go into battle with any written 
 papers at all. . . . Our people got so keen on document- 
 ing and the value of chance writings that one of the prin- 
 cipal things to do after a German attack had failed had 
 been to hook in the documentary dead, and find out what 
 they had on them. . . . It's a curious sport, this body 
 fishing. You have a sort of triple hook on a rope, and 
 you throw it and drag. They do the same. The other 
 day one body near Hooghe was hooked by both sides, and 
 they had a tug-of-war. With a sharpshooter or so cutting 
 in whenever our men got too excited. Several men were 
 hit. The Irish — it was an Irish regiment — got him 
 — or at least they got the better part of him. . . . 
 
 " Now that I am a sergeant, Park talks to me again 
 about all these things, and we have a first lieutenant too 
 keen to resist such technical details. They are purely 
 
330 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 technical details. You must take them as that. One 
 does not think of the dead body as a man recently deceased, 
 who had perhaps a wife and business connections and a 
 weakness for oysters or pale brandy. Or as something 
 that laughed and cried and didn't like getting hurt. That 
 would spoil everything. One thinks of him merely as 
 a uniform with marks upon it that will tell us what kind 
 of stuff we have against us, and possibly with papers that 
 will give us a hint of how far he and his lot are getting 
 sick of the whole affair. . . . 
 
 " There's a kind of hardening not only of the body but 
 of the mind through all this life out here. One is living 
 on a different level. You know — just before I came 
 away — you talked of Dower-House-land — and outside. 
 This is outside. It's different. Our men here are kind 
 enough still to little things — kittens or birds or flowers. 
 Behind the front, for example, everywhere there are 
 Tommy gardens. Some are quite bright little patches. 
 But it's just nonsense to suppose we are tender to the 
 wounded up here — and, putting it plainly, there isn't a 
 scrap of pity left for the enemy. Not a scrap. Not a 
 trace of such feeling. They were tender about the 
 wounded in the early days — men tell me — and reverent 
 about the dead. It's all gone now. There have been 
 atrocities, gas, unforgetable things. Everything is harder. 
 Our people are inclined now to laugh at a man who gets 
 hit, and to be annoyed at a man with a troublesome wound. 
 The other day, they say, there was a big dead German out- 
 side the Essex trenches. He became a nuisance, and he 
 was dragged in and taken behind the line and buried. 
 After he was buried, a kindly soul was putting a board 
 over him with ' Somebody's Fritz ' on it, when a shell 
 burst close by. It blew the man with the board a dozen 
 yards and wounded him, and it restored Fritz to the open 
 air. He was lifted clean out. He flew head over heels 
 like a windmill. This was regarded as a tremendous joke 
 against the men who had been at the pains of burying 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 331 
 
 him. For a time nobody else would touch Fritz, who 
 was now some yards behind his original grave. Then as 
 he got worse and worse he was buried again by some de- 
 voted sanitarians, and this time the inscription was ' Some- 
 body's Fritz. B.I.P.' And as luck would have it, he was 
 spun up again. In pieces. The trench howled with 
 laughter and cries of ' Good old Fritz ! ' ' This isn't the 
 Resurrection, Fritz.' . . . 
 
 " Another thing that appeals to the sunny humour of 
 the trenches as a really delicious practical joke is the trick 
 of the fuses. We have two kinds of fuse, a slow-burning 
 fuse such as is used for hand-grenades and such-like things, 
 a sort of yard-a-minute fuse, and a rapid fuse that goes 
 a hundred yards a second — for firing mines and so on. 
 The latter is carefully distinguished from the former by 
 a conspicuous red thread. Also, as you know, it is the 
 habit of the enemy and ourselves when the trenches are 
 near enough, to enliven each other by the casting of homely 
 but effective hand-grenades made out of tins. When a 
 grenade drops in a British trench somebody seizes it in- 
 stantly and throws it back. To hoist the German with 
 his own petard is particularly sweet to the British mind. 
 When a grenade drops into a German trench everybody 
 runs. (At least that is what I am told happens by the 
 men from our trenches ; though possibly each side has its 
 exceptions.) If the bomb explodes, it explodes. If it 
 doesn't, Hans and Fritz presently come creeping back to 
 see what has happened. Sometimes the fuse hasn't caught 
 properly, it has been thrown by a nervous man; or it 
 hasn't burnt properly. Then Hans or Fritz puts in a 
 new fuse and sends it back with loving care. To hoist 
 the Briton with his own petard is particularly sweet to the 
 German mind. . . . But here it is that military genius 
 comes in. Some gifted spirit on our side procured (prob- 
 ably by larceny) a length of mine fuse, the rapid sort, and 
 spent a laborious day removing the red thread and mak- 
 ing it into the likeness of its slow brother. Then bits of 
 
332 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 it were attached to tin-bombs and shied — unlit of course 
 — into the German trenches. A long but happy pause 
 followed. I can see the chaps holding themselves in. 
 Hans and Eritz were understood to be creeping back, to 
 be examining the unlit fuse, to be applying a light there- 
 unto, in order to restore it to its maker after their cus- 
 tom. ... 
 
 " A loud bang in the German trenches ' indicated the 
 moment of lighting, and the exit of Hans and Fritz to 
 worlds less humorous. 
 
 " The genius in the British trenches went on with the 
 preparation of the next surprise bomb — against the ar- 
 rival of Kurt and Karl. . . . 
 
 "Hans, Fritz, Kurt, Karl, Michael and Wilhelm; it 
 went for quite a long time before they grew suspi- 
 cious. ... 
 
 " You once wrote that all fighting ought to be done 
 nowadays by metal soldiers. I perceive, my dear Daddy, 
 that all real fighting is. . . ." 
 
 § 11 
 
 Not all Hugh's letters were concerned with these grim 
 technicalities. It was not always that news and gossip 
 came along ; it was rare that a young man with a commis- 
 sion would condescend to talk shop to two young men 
 without one ; there were few newspapers and fewer maps, 
 and even in France and within sound of guns, Hugh could 
 presently find warfare almost as much a bore as it had 
 been at times in England. But his criticism of military 
 methods died away. " Things are done better out here," 
 he remarked, and "We're nearer reality here. I begin 
 to respect my Captain. Who is developing a sense of 
 locality. Happily for our prospects." And in another 
 place he speculated in an oddly characteristic manner 
 whether he was getting used to the army way, whether he 
 was beginning to see the sense of the army way, or whether 
 
IX THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 333 
 
 it really was that the army way braced up nearer and 
 nearer to efficiency as it got nearer to the enemy. " And 
 here one hasn't the haunting feeling that war is after all 
 an hallucination. It's already common sense and the busi- 
 ness of life. . . . 
 
 " In England I always had a sneaking idea that I had ' 
 ' dressed up ' in my uniform. . . . 
 
 " I never dreamt before I came here how much war 
 is a business of waiting about and going through duties 
 and exercises that were only too obviously a means of pre- 
 venting our discovering just how much waiting about we 
 were doing. I suppose there is no great harm in describ- 
 ing the place I am in here ; it's a kind of scenery that is 
 somehow all of a piece with the life we lead day by day. 
 It is a village that has been only partly smashed up; it 
 has never been fought through, indeed the Germans were 
 never within two miles of it, but it was shelled intermit- 
 tently for months before we made our advance. Almost 
 all the houses are still standing, but there is not a window 
 left with a square foot of glass in the place. One or two 
 houses have been burnt out, and one or two are just as 
 though they had been kicked to pieces by a lunatic giant. 
 We sleep in batches of four or five on the floors of the 
 rooms ; there are very few inhabitants about, but the vil- 
 lage inn still goes on. It has one poor weary billiard- 
 table, very small with very big balls, and the cues are 
 without tops ; it is The Amusement of the place. Ortheris 
 does miracles at it. When he leaves the army he says he's 
 
 going to be a marker, ' a b y marker.' The country 
 
 about us is flat — featureless — desolate, now I long 
 for 1 hills, even for Essex mud hills. Then the road runs 
 on towards the front, a brick road frightfully worn, lined 
 with poplars. Just at the end of the village mechanical 
 transport ends and there is a kind of depot from which 
 all the stuff goes up by mules or men or bicycles to the 
 trenches. It is the only movement in the place, and I have 
 spent hours watching men shift grub or ammunition or 
 
334 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 lending them a hand. All day one hears guns, a kind of 
 thud at the stomach, and now and then one sees an aero- 
 plane, very high and small. Just beyond this point there 
 is a group of poplars which have been punished by a Ger- 
 man shell. They are broken off and splintered in the most 
 astonishing way ; all split and ravelled out like the end of 
 a cane that has been broken and twisted to get the ends 
 apart. The choice of one's leisure is to watch the A.S.C. 
 or play football, twenty a side, or sit about indoors, or 
 stand in the doorway, or walk down to the Estaminet and 
 wait five or six deep for the billiard-table. Ultimately 
 one sits. And so you get these unconscionable letters." 
 
 " Unconscionable," said Mr. Britling. " Of course — 
 he will grow out of that sort of thing. 
 
 " And he'll write some day, sure enough. He'll write." 
 
 He went on reading the letter. 
 
 "We read, of course. But there never could be a 
 library here big enough to keep us going. We can do 
 with all sorts of books, but I don't think the ordinary sen- 
 sational novel is quite the catch it was for a lot of them 
 in peace time. Some break towards serious reading in 
 the oddest fashion. Old Park, for example, says he wants 
 books you can chew ; he is reading a cheap edition of ' The 
 Origin of Species.' He used to regard Florence Warden 
 and William le Queux as the supreme delights of print. 
 I wish you could send him Metchnikoff's ' Nature of Man ' 
 or Pearson's ' Ethics of Ereethought.' I feel I am build- 
 ing up his tender mind. Not for me though, Daddy. 
 Nothing of that sort for me. These things take people 
 differently. What I want here is literary opium. I want 
 something about fauns and nymphs in broad low glades. 
 I would like to read Spenser's ' Faerie Queen.' I don't 
 think I have read it, and yet I have a very distinct im- 
 pression of knights and dragons and sorcerers and wicked 
 magic ladies moving through a sort of Pre-Raphaelite 
 tapestry scenery — only with a light on them. I could 
 do with some Hewlett of the ' Forest Lovers ' kind. Or 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 335 
 
 with Joseph Conrad in his Kew Palm-house mood. And 
 there is a hook, I once looked into it at a man's room in 
 London; I don't know the title, hut it was by Eichard 
 Garnett, and it was all ahout gods who were in reduced 
 circumstances but amidst sunny picturesque scenery. 
 Scenery without steel or poles or wire. A thing after the 
 manner of Heine's e Florentine Nights.' Any hook ahout 
 Greek gods would he welcome, anything ahout temples of 
 ivory-coloured stone and purple seas, red caps, chests of 
 jewels, and lizards in the sun. I wish there was another 
 ' Thais.' The men here are getting a kind of newspaper 
 sheet of literature scraps called The Times Broadsheets. 
 Snippets, hut mostly from good stuff. They're small 
 enough to stir the appetite, hut not to satisfy it. Rather 
 an irritant — and one wants no irritant. ... I used to 
 imagine reading was meant to he a stimulant. Out here 
 it has to he an anodyne. . . . 
 
 " Have you heard of a hook called ' Tom Cringle's Log ' ? 
 
 " War is an exciting game — that I never wanted to 
 play. It excites once in a couple of months. And the 
 rest of it is dirt and muddle and boredom, and smashed 
 houses and spoilt roads and muddy scenery and boredom, 
 and the lumbering along of supplies and the lumbering 
 back of the wounded and weary — and boredom, and con- 
 tinual vague guessing of how it will end and boredom and 
 boredom and boredom, and thinking of the work you were 
 going to do and the travel you were going to have, and the 
 waste of life and the waste of days and boredom, and 
 splintered poplars and stink, everywhere stink and dirt 
 and boredom. . . . And all because these accursed Prus- 
 sians were too stupid to understand what a boredom they 
 were getting ready when they pranced and stuck their 
 chests out and earnt the praises of Mr. Thomas Carlyle. 
 . . . Gott strafe Deutschland. ... So send me some 
 books, books of dreams, books about China and the willow- 
 pattern plate and the golden age and fairyland. And 
 send them soon and address them very carefully. - . ." 
 
336 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 § 12 
 
 Teddy's misadventure happened while figs were still 
 ripening on Mr. Britling's big tree. It was Cissie 
 brought the news to Mr. Britling. She came up to the 
 Dower House with a white, scared face. 
 
 " I've come up for the letters," she said. " There's bad 
 news of Teddy, and Letty's- rather in a state." 
 
 " He's not ? " Mr. Britling left the word unsaid. 
 
 " He's wounded and missing," said Cissie. 
 
 " A prisoner ! " said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " And wounded. How, we don't know." 
 
 She added : " Letty has gone to telegraph." 
 
 " Telegraph to whom ? " 
 
 " To the War Office, to know what sort of wound he 
 has. They tell nothing. It's disgraceful." 
 
 " It doesn't say severely ? " 
 
 " It says just nothing. Wounded and missing ! 
 Surely they ought to give us particulars." 
 
 Mr. Britling thought. His first thought was that now 
 news might come at any time that Hugh was wounded and 
 missing. Then he set himself to persuade Cissie that the 
 absence of " seriously " meant that Teddy was only quite 
 bearably wounded, and that if he was also " missing " it 
 might be difficult for the War Office to ascertain at once 
 just exactly what she wanted to know. But Cissie said 
 merely that " Letty was in an awful state," and after Mr. 
 Britling had given her a few instruction's for his typing, 
 he went down to the cottage to repeat these mitigatory con- 
 siderations to Letty. He found her much whiter than her 
 sister, and in a state of cold indignation with the War 
 Office. It was clear she thought that organisation ought 
 to have taken better care of Teddy. She had a curious 
 effect of feeling that something was being kept back from 
 her. It was manifest too that she was disposed to regard 
 Mr. Britling as biassed in favour of the authorities. 
 
 "At any rate," she said, "they could have answered 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 337 
 
 my telegram promptly. I sent it at eight. Two hours of 
 scornful silence." 
 
 This fierce, strained, unjust Letty was a new aspect to 
 Mr. Britling. Her treatment of his proffered consolations 
 made him feel slightly henpecked. 
 
 " And just fancy ! " she said. " They have no means 
 of knowing if he has arrived safely on the German side. 
 How can they know he is a prisoner without knowing 
 that?" 
 
 " But the word is ' missing.' " 
 
 " That means a prisoner," said Letty uncivilly. . . . 
 
 § 13 
 
 Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House perplexed 
 and profoundly disturbed. He had a distressful sense 
 that things were far more serious with Teddy than he had 
 tried to persuade Letty they were ; that " wounded and 
 missing " meant indeed a man abandoned to very sinister 
 probabilities. He was distressed for Teddy, and still more 
 acutely distressed for Mrs. Teddy, whose every note and 
 gesture betrayed suppositions even more sinister than his 
 own. And that preposterous sense of liability, because he 
 had helped Teddy to get his commission, was more dis- 
 tressful than it had ever been. He was surprised that 
 Letty had not assailed him with railing accusations. 
 
 And this event had wiped off at one sweep all the pro- 
 tective scab of habituation that had gathered over the 
 wound of Hugh's departure. He was back face to face 
 with the one evil chance in five. . . . 
 
 In the hall there was lying a letter from Hugh that 
 had come by the second post. It was a relief even to see 
 it. . . . 
 
 Hugh had had his first spell in the trenches. 
 
 Before his departure he had promised his half brothers 
 a long and circumstantial account of what the trenches 
 were really like. Here he redeemed his promise. He had 
 
338 MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 evidently ■written with the idea that the letter would be 
 handed over to them. 
 
 " Tell the bruddykinses I'm glad they're going to Brins- 
 mead school. Later on, I suppose, they will go on to 
 Statesminster. I suppose that you don't care to send them 
 so far in these troubled times. . . . 
 
 " And now about those trenches — as I promised. The 
 great thing to grasp is that they are narrow. They are a 
 sort of negative wall. They are more like giant cracks 
 in the ground than anything else. . . . But perhaps I had 
 better begin by telling how we got there. We started 
 about one in the morning ladened up with everything you 
 can possibly imagine on a soldier, and in addition I had 
 a kettle — filled with water — most of the chaps had 
 bundles of firewood, and some had extra bread. We 
 marched out of our quarters along the road for a mile or 
 more, and then we took the fields, and presently came to 
 a crest and dropped into a sort of maze of zigzag trenches 
 going up to the front trench. These trenches, you know, 
 are much deeper than one's height; you don't see any- 
 thing. It's like walking along a mud-walled passage. 
 You just trudge along them in single file. Every now and 
 then some one stumbles into a soakaway for rainwater or 
 swears at a soft place, or somebody blunders into the man. 
 in front of him. This seems to go on for hours and hours. 
 It certainly went on for an hour; so I suppose we did 
 two or three miles of it. At one place we crossed a dip 
 in the ground and a ditch, and the trench was built up with 
 sandbags up to the ditch and there was a plank. Over- 
 head there were stars, and now and then a sort of blaze 
 thing they send up lit up the edges of the trench and 
 gave one a glimpse of a treetop or a factory roof far away. 
 Then for a time it was more difficult to go on because you 
 were blinded. Suddenly just when you were believing 
 that this sort of trudge was going on forever, we were in 
 the support trenches behind the firing line, and found the 
 men we were relieving ready to come back. 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 339 
 
 " And the firing line itself ? Just the same sort of ditch 
 with a parapet of sandhags, but with dug-outs, queer big 
 holes helped out with sleepers from a nearby railway 
 track, opening into it from behind. Dug-outs vary a good 
 deal. Many are rather like the cubby-house we made at 
 the end of the orchard last summer; only the walls are 
 thick enough to stand a high explosive shell. The best 
 dug-out in our company's bit of front was quite a dressy 
 affair with some woodwork and a door got from the ruins 
 of a house twenty or thirty yards behind us. It had a 
 stove in it too, and a chimbley, and pans to keep water 
 in. It was the best dug-out for miles. This house had a 
 well, and there was a special trench ran back to that, and 
 all day long there was a coming and going for water. 
 There had once been a pump over the well, but a shell had 
 smashed that. . . . 
 
 "And now you expect me to tell of Germans and the 
 fight and shelling and all sorts of things. I haven't seen 
 a live German; I haven't been within two hundred yards 
 of a shell burst, there has been no attack and I haven't 
 got the V.C. I have made myself muddy beyond describ- 
 ing; I've been working all the time, but I've not fired a 
 shot or fought a ha'porth. We were busy all the time — 
 just at work, repairing the parapet, which had to be done 
 gingerly because of snipers, bringing our food in from the 
 rear in big carriers, getting water, pushing our trench out 
 from an angle slantingways forward. Getting meals, 
 clearing up and so on takes a lot of time. We make tea 
 in big kettles in the big dug-out, which two whole com- 
 panies use for their cooking, and carry them with a pole 
 through the handles to our platoons. We wash up and 
 •wash and shave. Dinner preparation (and consumption) 
 takes two or three hours. Tea too uses up time. It's like 
 camping out and picnicking in the park. This first time 
 (and next too) we have been mixed with some Sussex men 
 who have been here longer and know the business. . . , 
 It works out that we do most of the fatigue. After- 
 
340 MR; BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 wards we shall go up aloue to a pitch of our own. . . . 
 
 " But all the time you want to know about the Ger- 
 mans. They are a quarter of a mile away at this part, 
 or nearly a quarter of a mile. When you snatch a peep 
 at them it is like a low parti-coloured stone wall — only 
 the stones are sandbags. The Germans have them black 
 and white, so that you cannot tell which are loopholes and 
 which are black bags. Our people haven't been so clever 
 — and the War Office love of uniformity has given us only 
 white bags. No doubt it looks neater. But it makes our 
 loopholes plain. For a time black sandbags were refused. 
 The Germans sniped at us, but not very much. Only one 
 of our lot was hit, by a chance shot that came through the 
 sandbag at the top of the parapet. He just had a cut in 
 the neck which didn't prevent his walking back. They 
 shelled the trenches half a mile to the left of us though, 
 and it looked pretty hot. The sandbags flew about. But 
 the men lie low, and it looks worse than it is. The weather 
 was fine and pleasant, as General French always says. 
 And after three days and nights of cramped existence 
 and petty chores, one in the foremost trench and two 
 a little way back, and then two days in support, we 
 cam* back — and here we are again waiting for our second 
 Go. 
 
 "The night time is perhaps a little more nervy than 
 the day. You get your head up and look about, and see 
 the flat dim country with its ruined houses and its lumps 
 of stuff that are dead bodies and its long vague lines of 
 sandbags, and the searchlights going like white windmill 
 arms and an occasional flare or star shell. And you have 
 a nasty feeling of people creeping and creeping ali night 
 between the trenches. . . . 
 
 " Some of us went out to strengthen a place in the 
 parapet that was only one sandbag thick, where a man had 
 been hit during the day. We made it four bags thick 
 right up to the top. All the while you were doing it, you 
 dreaded to find yourself in the white glare of a search- 
 
IN" THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 341 
 
 light, and you had a feeling that something would hit you 
 suddenly from behind. I had to make up my mind not 
 to look round, or I should have kept on looking round. . . . 
 Also our chaps kept shooting over us, within a foot of 
 one's head. Just to persuade the Germans that we were 
 not out of the trench. . . . 
 
 " Nothing happened to us. We got hack all right. 
 It was silly to have left that parapet only one bag 
 thick. There's the truth, and all of my first time in the 
 trenches. 
 
 " And the Germans ? 
 
 " I tell you there was no actual fighting at all. I never 
 saw the head of one. 
 
 " But now see what a good bruddykins I am. I have 
 seen a fight, a real exciting fight, and I have kept it to 
 the last to tell you about. ... It was a fight in the air. 
 And the British won. It began with a German machine 
 appearing, very minute and high, sailing towards our lines 
 a long way to the left. We could tell it was a German 
 because of the black cross; they decorate every aeroplane 
 with a black Iron Cross on its wings and tail; that our 
 officer could see with his glasses. (He let me look.) Sud- 
 denly whack, whack, whack, came a line of little puffs of 
 smoke behind it, and then one in front of it, which meant 
 that our anti-aircraft guns were having a go at it. Then, 
 as suddenly, Archibald stopped, and we could see the Brit- 
 ish machine buzzing across the path of the German. It 
 was just like two birds circling in the air. Or wasps. 
 They buzzed like wasps. There was a little crackling — 
 like brushing your hair in frosty weather. They were 
 shooting at each other. Then our lieutenant called out, 
 1 Hit, by Jove ! ' and handed the glasses to Park and in- 
 stantly wanted them back. He says he saw bits of the 
 machine flying off. 
 
 "When he said that you could fancy you saw it too, 
 up there in the blue. 
 
 " Anyhow the little machine cocked itself up on end. 
 
342 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 Bather slowly. . . • Then down it came like dropping a 
 knife. . . . 
 
 " It made you say ' Ooooo ! ' to see that dive. It came 
 down, seemed to get a little bit under control, and then 
 dive down again. You could hear the engine roar louder 
 and louder as it came down. I never saw anything fall 
 so fast. We saw it hit the ground among a lot of 
 smashed-up buildings on the crest behind us. It went 
 right over and flew to pieces, all to smithereens. . . . 
 
 " It hurt your nose to see it hit the ground. . . . 
 
 " Somehow — I was sort of overcome by the thought 
 of the men in that dive. I was trying to imagine how 
 they felt it. From the moment when they realised they 
 were going. 
 
 " What on earth must it have seemed like at last % 
 
 " They fell seven thousand feet, the men say ; some say 
 nine thousand feet. A mile and a half! 
 
 " But all the chaps were cheering. . . . And there was 
 our machine hanging in the sky. You wanted to reach up 
 and pat it on the back. It went up higher and away to- 
 wards the German lines, as though it was looking for an- 
 other German. It seemed to go now quite slowly. It was 
 an English machine, though for a time we weren't sure; 
 our machines are done in tri-colour just as though they 
 were French. But everybody says it was English. It 
 was one of our crack fighting machines, and from first to 
 last it has put down seven Germans. . . . And that's really 
 all the fighting there was. There has been fighting here ; 
 a month ago. There are perhaps a dozen dead Germans 
 lying out still in front of the lines. Little twisted figures, 
 like overthrown scarecrows, about a hundred yards away. 
 But that is all. 
 
 " No, the trenches have disappointed me. They are a 
 scene of tiresome domesticity. They aren't a patch on 
 our quarters in the rear. There isn't the traffic. I've not 
 found a single excuse for firing my rifle. I don't believe 
 I shall ever fire my rifle at an enemy — ever. . . . 
 
IN" THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 343 
 
 " YouVe seen Bendezvous' fresh promotion, I suppose ? 
 He's one of the men the young officers talk about. Every- 
 body believes in him. Do you remember how Manning 
 used to hide from him ? . . ." 
 
 § 14 
 
 Mr. Britling read this through, and then his thoughts 
 went back to Teddy's disappearance and then returned to 
 Hugh. The youngster was right in the front now, and 
 one had to steel oneself to the possibilities of the case. 
 Somehow Mr. Britling had not expected to find Hugh so 
 speedily in the firing line, though he would have been 
 puzzled to find a reason why this should not have hap- 
 pened. But he found he had to begin the lesson of stoic- 
 ism all over again. 
 
 He read the letter twice, and then he searched for some 
 indication of its date. He suspected that letters were 
 sometimes held back. . . . 
 
 Four days later this suspicion was confirmed by the 
 arrival of another letter from Hugh in which he told of 
 his second spell in the trenches. This time things had 
 been much more lively. They had been heavily shelled 
 and there had been a German attack. And this time he 
 was writing to his father, and wrote more freely. He had 
 scribbled in pencil. 
 
 " Things are much livelier here than they were. Our 
 guns are getting to work. They are firing in spells of an 
 hour or so, three or four times a day, and just when they 
 seem to be leaving off they begin again. The Germans 
 suddenly got the range of our trenches the day before yes- 
 terday, and begun to pound us with high explosive. . . . 
 Well, it's trying. You never seem quite to know when 
 the next bang is coming, and that keeps your nerves hung 
 up ; it seems to tighten your muscles and tire you. We've 
 done nothing but lie low all day, and I feel as weary as if 
 I had marched twenty miles. Then 'whop,' one's near 
 
344 MK. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 you, and there is a flash and everything flies. It's a mad 
 sort of smash-about. One came much too close to be pleas- 
 ant; as near as the old oil jars are from the barn court 
 door. It bowled me clean over and sent a lot of gravel 
 over me. When I got up there was twenty yards of trench 
 smashed into a mere hole, and men lying about, and some 
 of them groaning and one three-quarters buried. We had 
 to turn to and get them out as well as we could. . . . 
 
 " I felt stunned and insensitive ; it was well to have 
 something to do. . . . 
 
 " Our guns behind felt for the German guns. It was 
 the damnest racket. Like giant lunatics smashing about 
 amidst colossal pots and pans. They fired different sorts 
 of shells ; stink shells as well as Jack Johnsons, and though 
 we didn't get much of that at our corner there was a sting 
 of chlorine in the air all through the afternoon. Most of 
 the stink shells fell short. We hadn't masks, but we rigged 
 up a sort of protection with our handkerchiefs. And it 
 didn't amount to very much. It was rather like the chem- 
 istry room after Heinrich and the kids had been mixing 
 things. Most of the time I was busy helping with the 
 men who had got hurt. Suddenly there came a lull. 
 Then some one said the Germans were coming, and I had 
 a glimpse of them. 
 
 " You don't look at anything steadily while the guns are 
 going. When a big gun goes off or a shell bursts any- 
 where near you, you seem neither to see nor hear for a 
 moment. You keep on being intermittently stunned. 
 One sees in a kind of flicker in between the impacts. . . . 
 
 " Well, there they were. This time I saw them. They 
 were coming out and running a little way and dropping, 
 and our shell was bursting among them and behind them. 
 A lot of it was going too far. I watched what our men 
 were doing, and poured out a lot of cartridges ready to 
 my hand and began to blaze away. Half the German at- 
 tack never came out of their trench. If they really in- 
 tended business against us, which I doubt, they were half- 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 345 
 
 hearted in carrying it out. They didn't show for five 
 minutes, and they left two or three score men on the 
 ground. Whenever we saw a man wriggle we were told 
 to fire at him ; it might be an unwounded man trying to 
 crawl back. For a time our guns gave them beans. Then 
 it was practically over, but about sunset their guns got 
 back at us again, and the artillery fight went on until it 
 was moonlight. The chaps in our third company caught 
 it rather badly, and then our guns seemed to find some- 
 thing and get the upper hand. . . . 
 
 " In the night some of our men went out to repair the 
 wire entanglements, and one man crawled halfway to the 
 enemy trenches to listen. But I had done my bit for the 
 day, and I was supposed to sleep in the dug-out. I was 
 far too excited to sleep. All my nerves were jumping 
 about, and my mind was like a lot of flying fragments 
 flying about very fast. . . . 
 
 " They shelled us again next day and our tea dixy was 
 hit; so that we didn't get any tea. . . . 
 
 "■ I slept thirty hours after I got back here. And now 
 I am slowly digesting these experiences. Most of our 
 fellows are. My mind and nerves have been rather 
 bumped and bruised by the shelling, but not so much as 
 you might think. I feel as though I'd presently not think 
 very much of it. Some of our men have got the stun of 
 it a lot more than I have. It gets at the older men more. 
 Everybody says that. The men of over thirty-five don't 
 recover from a shelling for weeks. They go about — sort 
 of hesitatingly. . . . 
 
 " Life is very primitive here — which doesn't mean 
 that one is getting down to anything fundamental, but 
 only going back to something immediate and simple. It's 
 fetching and carrying and getting water and getting food 
 and going up to the firing line and coming back. One 
 goes on for weeks, and then one day one finds oneself 
 crying out, ' What is all this for ? When is it to end ? ' 
 I seemed to have something ahead of me before this war 
 
346 MK. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 began, education, science, work, discoveries; all sorts of 
 things ; but it is hard to feel that there is anything ahead 
 of us here. . . . 
 
 " Somehow the last spell in the fire trench has shaken 
 up my mind a lot. I was getting used to the war before, 
 but now I've got back to my original amazement at the 
 whole business. I find myself wondering what we are 
 really up to, why the war began, why we were caught 
 into this amazing routine. It looks, it feels orderly, me- 
 thodical, purposeful. Our officers give us orders and 
 get their orders, and the men back there get their or- 
 ders. Everybody is getting orders. Back, I suppose, to 
 Lord Kitchener. It goes on for weeks with the effect of 
 being quite sane and intended and the right thing, and 
 then, then suddenly it comes whacking into one's 
 head, 'But this — this is utterly mad!' This going 
 to and fro and to and fro and to and fro; this mo- 
 notony which breaks ever and again into violence — vio- 
 lence that never gets anywhere — is exactly the life that 
 a lunatic leads. Melancholia^ and mania. . . . It's just 
 a collective obsession — by war. The world is really 
 quite mad. I happen to be having just one gleam of 
 sanity, that won't last after I have finished this letter. 
 I suppose when an individual man goes mad and gets out 
 of the window because he imagines the door is magically 
 impossible, and dances about in the street without his 
 trousers jabbing at passers-by with a toasting-fork, he 
 has just the same sombre sense of unavoidable necessity 
 that we have, all of us, when we go off with our packs 
 into the trenches. . . . 
 
 " It's only by an effort that I can recall how life felt 
 in the spring of 1914. Do you remember Heinrich and 
 his attempt to make a table chart of the roses, so that we 
 could sit outside the barn and read the names of all the 
 roses in the barn court ? Like the mountain charts they 
 have on tables in Switzerland. What an inconceivable 
 thing that is now! For all I know I shot Heinrich the 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 347 
 
 other night. For all I know he is one of the lumps that 
 we counted after the attack went back. 
 
 " It's a queer thing, Daddy, but I have a sort of seditious 
 feeling in writing things like this. One gets to feel that 
 it is wrong to think. It's the effect of discipline. Of 
 being part of a machine. Still, I doubt if I ought to 
 think. If one really looks into things in this spirit, where 
 is it going to take us ? Ortheris — his real name by the 
 by is Arthur Jewell — hasn't any of these troubles. ' The 
 
 b y Germans butted into Belgium,' he says. ' We've 
 
 got to 'oof 'em out again. That's all abart it. Least- 
 ways it's all / know. ... I don't know nothing about 
 Serbia, I don't know nothing about anything, except that 
 the Germans got to stop this sort of gime for Everlasting, 
 Amen.' . . . 
 
 " Sometimes I think he's righter than I am. Some- 
 times I think he is only madder." 
 
 § 15 
 
 These letters weighed heavily upon Mr. Britling's mind. 
 He perceived that this precociously wise, subtle youngster 
 of his was now close up to the line of injury and death, 
 going to and fro from it, in a perpetual, fluctuating danger. 
 At any time now in the day or night the evil thing might 
 wing its way to him. If Mr. Britling could have prayed, 
 he would have prayed for Hugh. He began and never 
 finished some ineffectual prayers. 
 
 He tried to persuade himself of a Boman stoicism ; that 
 he would be sternly proud, sternly satisfied, if this last 
 sacrifice for his country was demanded from him. He 
 perceived he was merely humbugging himself. . . . 
 
 This war had no longer the simple greatness that would 
 make any such stern happiness possible. . . . 
 
 The disaster to Teddy and Mrs. Teddy hit him hard. 
 He winced at the thought of Mrs. Teddy's white face; 
 the unspoken accusation in her eyes. He felt he could 
 
348 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 never bring himself to say his one excuse to her : " I 
 did not keep Hugh back. If I had done that, then you 
 might have the right to blame." 
 
 If he had overcome every other difficulty in the way 
 to an heroic pose there was still Hugh's unconquerable 
 lucidity of outlook. War was a madness. . . . 
 
 But what else was to be done? What else could be 
 done ? We could not give in to Germany. If a lunatic 
 struggles, sane men must struggle too. . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling had ceased to write about the war at all. 
 All his later writings about it had been abandoned un- 
 finished. He could not imagine them counting, affecting 
 any one, producing any effect. Indeed he was writing 
 now very intermittently. His contributions to The Times 
 had fallen away. He was perpetually thinking now about 
 the war, about life and death, about the religious problems 
 that had seemed so remote in the days of the peace ; but 
 none of his thinking would become clear and definite 
 enough for writing. All the clear stars of his mind were 
 hidden by the stormy clouds of excitement that the daily 
 newspaper perpetually renewed and by the daily develop- 
 ments of life. And just as his professional income shrank 
 before his mental confusion and impotence, the private in- 
 come that came from his and his wife's investments be- 
 came uncertain. She had had two thousand pounds in the 
 Constantinople loan, seven hundred in debentures of the 
 Ottoman railway ; he had held similar sums in two Hun- 
 garian and one Bulgarian loan, in a linoleum factory at 
 Rouen and in a Swiss Hotel company. All these stopped 
 payments, and the dividends from their other investments 
 shrank. There seemed no limit set to the possibilities 
 of shrinkage of capital and income. Income tax had leapt 
 to colossal dimensions, the cost of most things had risen, 
 and the tangle of life was now increased by the need for 
 retrenchments and economies. He decided that Gladys, 
 the facetiously named automobile, was a luxury, and sold 
 her for a couple of hundred pounds. He lost his gar- 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 349 
 
 dener, who had gone to higher priced work with a miller, 
 and he had great trouble to replace him, so that the garden 
 became disagreeably unkempt and unsatisfactory. He 
 had to give up his frequent trips to London. He was 
 obliged to defer Statesminster for the boys. For a time 
 at any rate they must go as day boys to Brinsmead. At 
 avery point he met this uncongenial consideration of ways 
 and means. For years now he had gone easy, lived with 
 a certain self-indulgence. It was extraordinarily vexa- 
 tious to have one's greater troubles for one's country and 
 one's son and one's faith crossed and complicated by these 
 little troubles of the extra sixpence and the untimely bill. 
 
 What worried his mind perhaps more than anything 
 else was his gradual loss of touch with the essential issues 
 of the war. At first the militarism, the aggression of 
 Germany, had seemed so bad that he could not see the 
 action of Britain and her allies as anything but entirely 
 righteous. He had seen the war plainly and simply in 
 the phrase, " Now this militarism must end." He had 
 seen Germany as a system, as imperialism and junkerism, 
 as a callous materialist aggression, as the spirit that makes 
 war, and the Allies as the protest of humanity against all 
 these evil things. 
 
 Insensibly, in spite of himself, this first version of the 
 war was giving place to another. The tawdry, rhetorical 
 German Emperor, who had been the great antagonist at 
 the outset, the last upholder of Caesarism, God's anointed 
 with the withered arm and the mailed fist, had receded 
 from the foreground of the picture; that truer Germany 
 which is thought and system, which is the will to do things 
 thoroughly, the Germany of Ostwald and the once rejected 
 Hindenburg, was coming to the fore. It made no apology 
 for the errors and crimes that had been imposed upon it 
 by its Hohenzollern leadership, but it fought now to save 
 itself from the destruction and division that would be 
 its inevitable lot if it accepted defeat too easily; fought 
 to hold out, fought for a second chance, with discipline, 
 
350 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 with skill and patience, with a steadfast will. It fought 
 with science, it fought with economy, with machines and 
 thought against all too human antagonists. It necessitated 
 an implacable resistance, but also it commanded respect. 
 Against it fought three great peoples with as fine a will; 
 but they had neither the unity, the habitual discipline, 
 nor the science of Germany, and it was the latter defect 
 that became more and more the distressful matter of Mr. 
 Britling's thoughts. France after her initial experiences, 
 after her first reeling month, had risen from the very verge 
 of defeat to a steely splendour of resolution, but England 
 and Russia, those twin slack giants, still wasted force, 
 were careless, negligent, uncertain. Everywhere up and 
 down the scale, from the stupidity of the uniform sand- 
 bags and Hugh's young officer who would not use a map, 
 to the general conception and direction of the war, Mr. 
 Britling's inflamed and oversensitised intelligence per- 
 ceived the same bad qualities for which he had so often 
 railed upon his countrymen in the days of the peace, that 
 impatience, that indolence, that wastefulness and incon- 
 clusiveness, that failure to grip issues and do obviously 
 necessary things. The same lax qualities that had brought 
 England so close to the supreme imbecility of a civil war 
 in Ireland in July, 1914, were now muddling and pro- 
 longing the war, and postponing, it might be for ever, the 
 victory that had seemed so certain only a year ago. 
 The politician still intrigued, the ineffectives still directed. 
 Against brains used to the utmost their fight was a stupid 
 thrusting forth of men and men and yet more men, men 
 badly trained, under-equipped, stupidly led. A press 
 clamour for invention and scientific initiative was stifled 
 under a committee of elderly celebrities and eminent duf- 
 ferdom; from the outset, the Ministry of Munitions 
 seemed under the influence of the " business man." . . . 
 It is true that righteousness should triumph over the 
 tyrant and the robber, but have carelessness and incapacity 
 any right to triumph over capacity and foresight? Men 
 
IX THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 351 
 
 were coming now to dark questionings between this in- 
 tricate choice. And, indeed, was our cause all righteous- 
 ness? 
 
 There surely is the worst doubt of all for a man whose 
 son is facing death. 
 
 Were we indeed standing against tyranny for freedom ? 
 
 There came drifting to Mr. Britling's ears a confusion 
 of voices, voices that told of reaction, of the schemes of 
 employers to best the trade unions, of greedy shippers and 
 greedy house landlords reaping their harvest, of waste 
 and treason in the very households of the Ministry, of 
 religious cant and intolerance at large, of self-advertise- 
 ment written in letters of blood, of forestalling and job- 
 bery, of irrational and exasperating oppressions in India 
 and Egypt. ... It came with a shock to him, too, that 
 Hugh should see so little else than madness in the war, 
 and have so pitiless a realisation of its essential futility. 
 The boy forced his father to see — what indeed all along 
 he had been seeing more and more clearly. The war, even 
 by the standards of adventure and conquest, had long since 
 become a monstrous absurdity. Some way there must be 
 out of this bloody entanglement that was yielding victory 
 to neither side, that was yielding nothing but waste and 
 death beyond all precedent. The vast majority of people 
 everywhere must be desiring peace, willing to buy peace 
 at any reasonable price, and in all the world it seemed 
 there was insufficient capacity to end the daily butchery 
 and achieve the peace that was so universally desired, the 
 peace that would be anything better than a breathing 
 space for further warfare. . . . Every day came the 
 papers with the balanced story of battles, losses, destruc- 
 tions, ships sunk, towns smashed. And never a decision, 
 never a sign of decision. 
 
 One Saturday afternoon Mr. Britling found himself 
 with Mrs. Britling at Claverings. Lady Homartyn was 
 in mourning for her two nephews, the Glassington boys, 
 who had both been killed, one in Flanders, the other in 
 
352 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 Gallipoli. Raeburn was there too, despondent and tired- 
 looking. There were three young men in khaki, one with 
 the red of a staff, officer ; there were two or three women 
 whom Mr. Britling had not met before, and Miss Sharsper 
 the novelist, fresh from nursing experience among the con- 
 valescents in the south of Erance. But he was disgusted 
 to find that the gathering was dominated by his old an- 
 tagonist, Lady Erensham, unsubdued, unaltered, rampant 
 over them all, arrogant, impudent, insulting. She was in 
 mourning, she had the most splendid black furs Mr. Brit- 
 ling had ever seen ; her large triumphant profile came out 
 of them like the head of a vulture out of its ruff; her elder 
 brother was a wounded prisoner in Germany, her second 
 was dead ; it would seem that hers were the only sacrifices 
 the war had yet extorted from any one. She spoke as 
 though it gave her the sole right to criticise the war or 
 claim compensation for the war. 
 
 Her incurable propensity to split the country, to make 
 mischievous accusations against classes and districts and 
 public servants, was having full play. She did her best 
 to provoke Mr. Britling into a dispute, and throw some 
 sort of imputation upon his patriotism as distinguished 
 from her own noisy and intolerant conceptions of 
 " loyalty." 
 
 She tried him first with conscription. She threw out 
 insults at the shirkers and the " funk classes." All the 
 middle-class people clung on to their wretched little busi- 
 nesses, made any sort of excuse. . . . 
 
 Mr. Britling was stung to defend them. " A business," 
 he said acidly, " isn't like land, which waits and grows 
 rich for its owner. And these people can't leave ferrety 
 little agents behind them when they go off to serve. Tens 
 of thousands of middle-class men have ruined themselves 
 and flung away every prospect they had in the world to 
 go to this war." 
 
 " And scores of thousands haven't ! " said Lady Eren- 
 sham. " They are the men I'm thinking of." . . . 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 353 
 
 Mr. Britling ran through a little list of aristocratic 
 stay-at-homes that began with a duke. 
 
 " And not a soul speaks to them in consequence," she 
 said. 
 
 She shifted her attack to the Labour people. They 
 would rather see the country defeated than submit to a 
 little discipline. 
 
 " Because they have no faith in the house of lawyers 
 or the house of landlords," said Mr. Britling. " Who can 
 blame them ? " 
 
 She proceeded to tell everybody what she would do with 
 strikers. She would give them " short shrift." She 
 would give them a taste of the Prussian way — homoeo- 
 pathic treatment. " But of course old vote-catching 
 Asquith daren't — he daren't ! " Mr. Britling opened 
 his mouth and said nothing; he was silenced. The men 
 in khaki listened respectfully but ambiguously; one of 
 the younger ladies it seemed was entirely of Lady Fren- 
 sham's way of thinking, and anxious to show it. The 
 good lady having now got her hands upon the Cabinet 
 proceeded to deal faithfully with its two-and-twenty mem- 
 bers. Winston Churchill had overridden Lord Fisher 
 upon the question of Gallipoli, and incurred terrible re- 
 sponsibilities. Lord Haldane — she called him " Tubby 
 Haldane " — was a convicted traitor. " The man's a Ger- 
 man out and out. Oh ! what if he hasn't a drop of Ger- 
 man blood in his veins? He's a German by choice — 
 which is worse." 
 
 " I thought he had a certain capacity for organisation," 
 said Mr. Britling. 
 
 "We don't want his organisation, and we don't want 
 him," said Lady Frensham. 
 
 Mr. Britling pleaded for particulars of the late Lord 
 Chancellor's treasons. There were no particulars. It 
 was just an idea the good lady had got into her head, 
 that had got into a number of accessible heads. There 
 was only one strong man in all the country now, 
 
354 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 Lady Frensham insisted. That was Sir Edward Carson. 
 
 Mr. Britling jumped in his chair. 
 
 " But has he ever done anything ? " he cried, " except 
 embitter Ireland ? " 
 
 Lady Frensham did not hear that question. She pur- 
 sued her glorious theme. Lloyd George, who had once 
 been worthy only of the gallows, was now the sole minister 
 fit to put beside her hero. He had won her heart by his 
 condemnation of the working man. He was the one man 
 who was not afraid to speak out, to tell them they drank, 
 to tell them they shirked and loafed, to tell them plainly 
 that if defeat came to this country the blame would fall 
 upon them! 
 
 "No!" cried Mr. Britling. 
 
 " Yes," said Lady Frensham. " Upon them and those 
 who have flattered and misled them. . . ." 
 
 And so on. . . . 
 
 It presently became necessary for Lady Homartyn to 
 rescue Mr. Britling from the great lady's patriotic tramp- 
 lings. He found himself drifting into the autumnal gar- 
 den — the show of dahlias had never been so wonderful — 
 in the company of Raeburn and the staff officer and a small 
 woman who was presently discovered to be remarkably 
 well-informed. They were all despondent. " I think all 
 this promiscuous blaming of people is quite the worst — 
 and most ominous — thing about us just now," said Mr. 
 Britling after the restful pause that followed the departure 
 from the presence of Lady Frensham. 
 
 " It goes on everywhere," said the staff officer. 
 
 " Is it really — honest ? " said Mr. Britling. 
 
 Baeburn, after reflection, decided to answer. " As far 
 as it is stupid, yes. There's a lot of blame coming ; there's 
 bound to be a day of reckoning, and I suppose we've all 
 got an instinctive disposition to find a scapegoat for our 
 common sins. The Tory press is pretty rotten, and there's 
 a strong element of mere personal spite — in the 
 Churchill attacks for example. Personal jealousy prob- 
 
IN THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 355 
 
 ably. Our 'old families ' seem to have got vulgar- 
 spirited imperceptibly — in a generation or so. They 
 quarrel and shirk and lay blame exactly as bad servants 
 do — and things are still far too much in their hands. 
 Things are getting muffed, there can be no doubt about 
 that — not fatally, but still rather seriously. And the 
 government — it was human before the war, and we've 
 added no archangels. There's muddle. There's mutual 
 suspicion. You never know what newspaper office Lloyd 
 ■George won't be in touch with next. He's honest and 
 patriotic and energetic, but he's mortally afraid of old 
 women and class intrigues. He doesn't know where to 
 get his backing. He's got all a labour member's terror 
 of the dagger at his back. There's a lack of nerve, too, 
 in getting rid of prominent officers — who have friends." 
 
 The staff officer nodded. 
 
 " Northcliffe seems to me to have a case," said Mr. Brit- 
 ling. " Every one abuses him." 
 
 " I'd stop his Daily Mail," said Eaeburn. " I'd leave 
 The Times, but I'd stop the Daily Mail on the score of 
 its placards alone. It overdoes Northcliffe. It translates 
 him into the shrieks and yells of underlings. The plain 
 fact is that Northcliffe is scared out of his wits by Ger- 
 man efficiency — and in war time when a man is scared 
 out of his wits, whether he is honest or not, you put his 
 head in a bag or hold a pistol to it to calm him. . . . 
 What is the good of all this clamouring for a change of 
 government ? We haven't a change of government. It's 
 like telling a tramp to get a change of linen. Our men, 
 all our public men, are second-rate men, with the habits 
 of advocates. There is nothing masterful in their minds. 
 How can you expect the system to produce anything else ? 
 But they are doing as well as they can, and there is no 
 way of putting in any one else now, and there you are." 
 
 "Meanwhile," said Mr. Britling, "our boys — get 
 killed." 
 
 " They'd get killed all the more if you had — let us 
 
356 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 say — Carson and Lloyd George and Northcliffe and Lady 
 Frensham, with, I suppose, Austin Harrison and Horatio 
 Bottomley thrown in — as a Strong Silent Government. 
 . . . I'd rather have Northcliffe as dictator than that. 
 . . . We can't suddenly go back on the past and alter our 
 type. We didn't listen to Matthew Arnold. We've never 
 thoroughly turned out and cleaned up our higher schools. 
 We've resisted instruction. We've preferred to maintain 
 our national luxuries of a hench of bishops and party 
 politics. And compulsory Greek and the university sneer. 
 And Lady Erensham. And all that sort of thing. And 
 here we are! . . . Well, damn it, we're in for it now; 
 we've got to plough through with it — with what we have 
 — as what we are." 
 
 The young staff officer nodded. He thought that was 
 " about it." 
 
 " You've got no sons," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " I'm not even married," said Eaeburn, as though he 
 thanked God. 
 
 The little well-informed lady remarked abruptly that 
 she had two sons ; one was just home wounded from Suvla 
 Bay. What her son told her made her feel very grave. 
 She said that the public was still quite in the dark about 
 the battle of Anafarta. It had been a hideous muddle, 
 and we had been badly beaten. The staff work had been 
 awful. Nothing joined up, nothing was on the spot and 
 in time. The water supply, for example, had gone wrong ; 
 the men had been mad with thirst. One regiment which 
 she named had not been supported by another; when at 
 last the first came back the two battalions fought in the 
 trenches regardless of the enemy. There had been no 
 leading, no correlation, no plan. Some of the guns, she 
 declared, had been left behind in Egypt. Some of the 
 train was untraceable to this day. It was mislaid some- 
 where in the Levant. At the beginning Sir Ian Hamilton 
 had not even been present. He had failed to get there in 
 time. It had been the reckless throwing away of an army. 
 
IK THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE "357 
 
 And so hopeful an army! Her son declared it meant 
 the complete failure of the Dardanelles project. . . . 
 
 " And when one hears how near we came to victory ! " 
 she cried, and left it at that. 
 
 " Three times this year," said Baeburn, " we have 
 missed victories because of the badness of our staff work. 
 It's no good picking* out scapegoats. It's a question of 
 national habit. It's because the sort of man we turn out 
 from our public schools has never learnt how to catch 
 trains, get to an office on the minute, pack a knapsack 
 properly, or do anything smartly and quickly — anything 
 whatever that he can possibly get done for him. You 
 can't expect men who are habitually easy-going to keep 
 bucked up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of 
 time. All their training is against it. All their tradi- 
 tion. They hate being prigs. An Englishman will be 
 any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig. 
 That's why we've lost three good fights that we ought to 
 have won — and thousands and thousands of men — and 
 material and time, precious beyond reckoning. We've 
 lost a year. We've dashed the spirit of our people." 
 
 " My boy in Flanders," said Mr. Britling, " says about 
 the same thing. He says our officers have never learnt 
 to count beyond ten, and that they are scared at the sight 
 of a map. . . ." 
 
 " And the war goes on," said the little woman. 
 
 " How long, oh Lord ! how long ? " cried Mr. Britling. 
 
 " I'd give them another year," said the staff officer. 
 " Just going as we are going. Then something must give 
 way. There will be no money anywhere. There'll be no 
 more men. ... I suppose they'll feel that shortage first 
 anyhow. Russia alone has over twenty millions." 
 
 " That's about the size of it," said Baeburn. . . . 
 
 " Do you think, sir, there'll be civil war ? " asked the 
 young staff officer abruptly after a pause. 
 
 There was a little interval before any one answered this 
 surprising question. 
 
358 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " After the peace, I mean," said the young officer. 
 
 " There'll be just the devil to pay," said Raeburn. 
 
 " One thing after another in the country is being pulled 
 up by its roots," reflected Mr. Britling. 
 
 " We've never produced a plan for the war, and it isn't 
 likely we shall have one for the peace," said Raeburn, and 
 added : " and Lady Frensham's little lot will be doing 
 their level best to sit on the safety-valve. . . . They'll 
 rake up Ireland and Ulster from the very start. But I 
 doubt if Ulster will save 'em." 
 
 " We shall squabble. What else do we ever do ? " 
 
 No one seemed able to see more than that. A silence 
 fell on the little party. 
 
 " Well, thank heaven for these dahlias," said Raeburn, 
 affecting the philosopher. 
 
 The young staff officer regarded the dahlias without en- 
 thusiasm. . . . 
 
 § 16 
 
 Mr. Britling sat one September afternoon with Captain 
 Lawrence Carmine in the sunshine of the barn court, and 
 smoked with him and sometimes talked and sometimes sat 
 still. 
 
 " When it began I did not believe that this war could 
 be like other wars," he said. " I did not dream it. I 
 thought that we had grown wiser at last. It seemed to 
 me like the dawn of a great clearing up. I thought the 
 common sense of mankind would break out like a flame, 
 an indignant flame, and consume all this obsolete foolery 
 of empires and banners and militarism directly it made 
 its attack upon human happiness. A score of things that 
 I see now were preposterous, I thought must happen — 
 naturally. I thought America would declare herself 
 against the Belgian outrage; that she would not tolerate 
 the smashing of the great sister republic — if only for the 
 memory of Lafayette. Well — I gather America is 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 359 
 
 chiefly concerned about our making cotton contraband. I 
 thought the Balkan States were capable of a reasonable 
 give and take; of a common care for their common free- 
 dom. I see now three German royalties trading in peas- 
 ants, and no men in their lands to gainsay them. I saw 
 this war, as so many Frenchmen have seen it, as some- 
 thing that might legitimately command a splendid en- 
 thusiasm of indignation. ... It was all a dream, the 
 dream of a prosperous comfortable man who had never 
 come to the cutting edge of life. Everywhere cunning, 
 everywhere small feuds and hatreds, distrusts, dishonest- 
 ies, timidities, feebleness of purpose, dwarfish imagina- 
 tions, swarm over the great and simple issues. ... It is 
 a war now like any other of the mobbing, many-aimed 
 cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the 
 world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost its 
 soul, it has become mere incoherent fighting and destruc- 
 tion, a demonstration in vast and tragic forms of the 
 stupidity and ineffectiveness of our species. . . ." 
 
 He stopped, and there was a little interval of silence. 
 
 Captain Carmine tossed the fag end of his cigar very 
 neatly into a tub of hydrangeas. " Three thousand years 
 ago in China," he said, " there were men as sad as we are, 
 for the same cause." 
 
 " Three thousand years ahead perhaps," said Mr. 
 Britling, " there will still be men with the same sadness. 
 . . . And yet -— and yet . . . No. Just now I have no 
 elasticity. It is not in my nature to despair, but things 
 are pressing me down. I don't recover as I used to re- 
 cover. I tell myself still that though the way is long 
 and hard the spirit of hope, the spirit of creation, the 
 generosities and gallantries in the heart of man, must end 
 in victory. But I say that over as one repeats a worn- 
 out prayer. The light is out of the sky for me. Some- 
 times I doubt if it will ever come back. Let younger men 
 take heart and go on with the world. If I could die for 
 
360 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 the right thing now — instead of just having to live on 
 in this world of ineffective struggle — I would be glad 
 to die now, Carmine. . . ." 
 
 § 17 
 
 In these days also Mr. Direck was very unhappy. 
 
 For Cissie, at any rate, had not lost touch with the 
 essential issues of the war. She was as clear as ever that 
 German militarism and the German attack on Belgium 
 and France was the primary subject of the war. And 
 she dismissed all secondary issues. She continued to de- 
 mand why America did not fight. " We fight for Bel- 
 gium. Won't you fight for the Dutch and Norwegian 
 ships ? Won't you even fight for your own ships that the 
 Germans are sinking ? " 
 
 Mr. Direck attempted explanations that were ill re- 
 ceived. 
 
 " You were ready enough to fight the Spaniards when 
 they blew up the Maine. But the Germans can sink the 
 Lusitania! That's — as you say — a different prop- 
 osition." 
 
 His mind was shot by an extraordinary suspicion that 
 she thought the Lusitania an American vessel. But Mr. 
 Direck was learning his Cissie, and he did not dare to 
 challenge her on this score. 
 
 " You haven't got hold of the American proposition," 
 he said. " We're thinking beyond wars." 
 
 " That's what we have been trying to do," said Cis- 
 sie. " Do you think we came into it for the fun of the 
 thing?" 
 
 " Haven't I shown in a hundred ways that I sym- 
 pathise ? " 
 
 "Oh — sympathy! . . ." 
 
 He fared little better at Mr. Britling's hands. Mr. 
 Britling talked darkly, but pointed all the time only too 
 plainly at America. " There's two sorts of liberalism," 
 
IN" THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 361 
 
 said Mr. Britling, "that pretend to be the same thing; 
 there's the liberalism of great aims and the liberalism of 
 defective moral energy. . . ." 
 
 § 18 
 
 It was not until Teddy had been missing for three weeks 
 that Hugh wrote about him. The two Essex battalions 
 on the Flanders front were apparently wide apart, and 
 it was only from home that Hugh learnt what had 
 happened. 
 
 " You can't imagine how things narrow down when one 
 is close up against them. One does not know what is 
 happening even within a few miles of us, until we get the 
 newspapers. Then, with a little reading between the lines 
 and some bold guessing, we fit our little bit of experience 
 with a general shape. Of course I've wondered at times 
 about Teddy. But oddly enough I've never thought of 
 him very much as being out here. It's queer, I know, 
 but I haven't. I can't imagine why. . . . 
 
 " I don't know about ' missing.' We've had nothing 
 going on here that has led to any missing. All our men 
 have been accounted for. But every few miles along the 
 front conditions alter. His lot may have been closer up to 
 the enemy, and there may have been a rush and a fight for 
 a bit of trench either way. In some parts the German 
 trenches are not thirty yards away, and there is mining, 
 bomb throwing, and perpetual creeping up and give and 
 take. Here we've been getting a bit forward. But I'll 
 tell you about that presently. And, anyhow, I don't un- 
 derstand about ' missing.' There's very few prisoners 
 taken now. But don't tell Letty that. I try to imagine 
 old Teddy in it. . . . 
 
 " Missing's a queer thing. It isn't tragic — or pitiful. 
 Or partly reassuring like ' prisoner.' It just sends one 
 speculating and speculating. I can't find any one who 
 knows where the 14th Essex are. Things move about 
 
362 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 here so mysteriously that for all I know we may find them 
 in the next trench next time we go up. But there is a 
 chance for Teddy. It's worth while Ducking Letty all 
 you can. And at the same time there's odds against him. 
 There plainly and unfeelingly is how things stand in my 
 mind. I think chiefly of Letty. I'm glad Cissie is with 
 her, and I'm glad she's got the boy. Keep her busy. 
 She was frightfully fond of him. I've seen all sorts of 
 things between them, and I know that. . . . I'll try and 
 write to her soon, and I'll find something hopeful to tell 
 her. 
 
 " Meanwhile I've got something to tell you. I've been 
 through a fight, a big fight, and I haven't got a scratch. 
 I've taken two prisoners with my lily hand. Men were 
 shot close to me. I didn't mind that a bit. It was as 
 exciting as one of those bitter fights we used to have round 
 the hockey goal. I didn't mind anything till afterwards. 
 Then when I was in the trench in the evening I trod on 
 something slippery — pah ! And after it was all over one 
 of my chums got it — sort of unfairly. And I keep on 
 thinking of those two things so much that all the early 
 part is just dreamlike. It's more like something I've read 
 in a book, or seen in the Illustrated London News than 
 actually been through. One had been thinking so often, 
 how will it feel ? how shall I behave ? that when it came 
 it had an effect of being flat and ordinary. 
 
 " They say we hadn't got enough guns in the spring 
 or enough ammunition. That's all right now — anyhow. 
 They started in plastering the Germans overnight, and 
 right on until it was just daylight. I never heard such 
 a row, and their trenches — we could stand up and look 
 at them without getting a single shot at us — were flying 
 about like the crater of a volcano. We were not in our 
 firing trench. We had gone back into some new trenches, 
 at the rear — I think to get out of the way of the counter 
 fire. But this morning they weren't doing very much. 
 For once our guns were on top. There was a feeling of 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 363 
 
 anticipation — very like waiting for an examination paper 
 to be given out; then we were at it. Getting out of a 
 trench to attack gives you an odd feeling of being just 
 hatched. Suddenly the world is big. I don't remember 
 our gun fire stopping. And then you rush. ' Come on r 
 Come on ! ' say the officers. Everybody gives a sort of 
 howl and rushes. When you see men dropping, you rush 
 the faster. The only thing that checks you at all is the 
 wire twisted about everywhere. You don't want to trip 
 over that. The frightening thing is the exposure. After 
 being in the trenches so long you feel naked. You run 
 like a scared child for the German trench ahead. I can't 
 understand the iron nerve of a man who can expose his 
 back by turning to run away. And there's a thirsty feel- 
 ing with one's bayonet. But they didn't wait. They 
 dropped rifles and ran. But we ran so fast after them 
 that we caught one or two in the second trench. I got 
 down into that, heard a voice behind me, and found my 
 two prisoners lying artful in a dug-out. They held up 
 their hands as I turned. If they hadn't I doubt if I 
 should have done anything to them. I didn't feel like 
 it. I felt friendly. 
 
 "Not all the Germans ran. Three or four stuck to 
 their machine-guns until they got bayoneted. Both the 
 trenches were frightfully smashed about, and in the first 
 one there were little knots and groups of dead. We got 
 to work at once shying the sandbags over from the old 
 front of the trench to the parados. Our guns had never 
 stopped all the time; they were now plastering the third 
 line trenches. And almost at once the German shells be- 
 gan dropping into us. Of course they had the range to 
 an inch. One didn't have any time to feel and think; 
 one just set oneself with all one's energy to turn the 
 trench over. . . . 
 
 "I don't remember that I helped or cared for a 
 wounded man all the time, or felt anything about the dead 
 except to step over them and not on them. I was just 
 
364 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 possessed by the idea that we had to get the trench into 
 a sheltering state before they tried to come back. And 
 then stick there. I just wanted to win, and there was 
 nothing else in my mind. . . . 
 
 " They did try to come back, but not very much. . . . 
 
 " Then when I began to feel sure of having got hold 
 of the trench for good, I began to realise just how tired 
 I was and how high the sun had got. I began to look 
 about me, and found most of the other men working just 
 as hard as I had been doing. ' We've done it ! ' I said, 
 and that was the first word I'd spoken since I told my two 
 Germans to come out of it, and stuck a man with a 
 wounded leg to watch them. ' It's a bit of All Eight,' 
 said Ortheris, knocking off also, and lighting a half-con- 
 sumed cigarette. He had been wearing it behind his ear, 
 I believe, ever since the charge. Against this occasion. 
 He'd kept close up to me all the time, I realised. And 
 then old Park turned up very cheerful with a weak bayonet 
 jab in his forearm that he wanted me to rebandage. It 
 was good to see him practically all right too. 
 
 " ' I took two prisoners,' I said, and everybody I spoke 
 to I told that. I was fearfully proud of it. 
 
 " I thought that if I could take two prisoners in my 
 first charge I was going to be some soldier. 
 
 " I had stood it all admirably. I didn't feel a bit 
 shaken. I was as tough as anything. I'd seen death and 
 killing, and it was all just hockey. 
 
 " And then that confounded Ortheris must needs go 
 and get killed. 
 
 " The shell knocked me over, and didn't hurt me a bit. 
 I was a little stunned, and some dirt was thrown over me, 
 and when I got up on my knees I saw Jewell lying about 
 six yards off — and his legs were all smashed about. 
 Ugh! Pulped! 
 
 "He looked amazed. 'Bloody,' he said, 'bloody.' 
 He fixed his eyes on me, and suddenly grinned. You 
 know we'd once had two fights about his saying ' bloody,' 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 365 
 
 I think I told you at the time, a fight and a return match, 
 he couldn't box for nuts, but he stood up like a Briton, and 
 it appealed now to his sense of humour that I should be 
 standing there too dazed to protest at the old offence. ' I 
 thought i/oMjwas done in,' he said. 'I'm in a mess — a 
 bloody mess, ain't I ? Like a stuck pig. Bloody — right 
 enough. Blpody ! I didn't know I 'ad it in me.' 
 
 " He looked at me and grinned with a sort of pale satis- 
 faction in keeping up to the last — dying good Ortheris 
 to the finish. I just stood up helpless in front of him, 
 still rather dazed. 
 
 " He said something about having a thundering thirst 
 on him. 
 
 " I really don't believe he felt any pain. He would 
 have done if he had lived. 
 
 " And then while I was fumbling with my water-bottle, 
 he collapsed. He forgot all about Ortheris. Suddenly 
 he said something that cut me all to ribbons. His face 
 puckered up just like the face of a fretful child which re- 
 fuses to go to bed. ' I didn't want to be aut of it,' he said 
 petulantly. ' And I'm done ! ' And then — then he just 
 looked discontented and miserable and died — right off. 
 Turned his head a little way over. As if he was impatient 
 at everything. Fainted — and fluttered out. 
 
 " For a time I kept trying to get him to drink. . . . 
 
 " I couldn't believe he was dead. . . . 
 
 "And suddenly it was all different. I began to cry. 
 Like a baby. I kept on with the water-bottle at his teeth 
 long after I was convinced he was dead. I didn't want 
 him to be aut of it ! God knows how I didn't. I wanted 
 my dear little Cockney cad back. Oh! most frightfully 
 I wanted him back. 
 
 " I shook him. I was like a scared child. I blubbered 
 and howled things. . . . It's all different since he 
 died. 
 
 " My dear, dear Father, I am grieving and grieving — 
 and it's altogether nonsense. And it's all mixed up in- 
 
366 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 my mind with the mess I trod on. And it gets worse and 
 worse. So that I don't seem to feel anything really, even 
 for Teddy. 
 
 " It's been just the last straw of all this hellish 
 foolery. . . . 
 
 " If ever there was a bigger lie, my dear Daddy, than 
 any other, it is that man is a reasonable creature. . . . 
 
 " War is just foolery — lunatic foolery — hell's 
 foolery. . . . 
 
 " But, anyhow, your son is sound and well — if sorrow- 
 ful and angry. We were relieved that night. And there 
 are rumours that very soon we are to have a holiday and 
 a, refit. We lost rather heavily. We have been praised. 
 But all along, Essex has done well. I can't reckon to 
 get back yet, but there are such things as leave for eight- 
 and-forty hours or so in England. . . . 
 
 " I shall be glad of that sort of turning round. • . . 
 
 " I'm tired. Oh ! I'm tired. . . . 
 
 " I wanted to write all about Jewell to his mother or 
 his sweetheart or some one; I wanted to wallow in his 
 praises, to say all the things I really find now that I 
 thought about him, but I haven't "even had that satisfac- 
 tion. He was a Poor Law child; he was raised in one 
 of those awful places between Sutton and Banstead in 
 Surrey. I've told you of all the sweethearting he had. 
 * Soldiers Three ' was his Bible ; he was always singing 
 ' Tipperary,' and he never got the tune right nor learnt 
 more than three lines of it. He laced all his talk with 
 
 ' b y ' ; it was his jewel, his ruby. But he had the 
 
 pluck of a robin or a squirrel; I never knew him scared 
 •or anything but cheerful. Misfortunes, humiliations, 
 only made him chatty. And he'd starve to have some- 
 thing to give away. 
 
 " Well, well, this is the way of war, Daddy. This is 
 -what war is. Damn the Kaiser! Damn all fools. . . . 
 •Give my love to the Mother and the bruddykins and every 
 one. . . ." 
 
IN THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 367 
 
 § 19 
 
 It was just a day or so over three weeks after this last 
 letter from Hugh that Mr. Direck reappeared at Match- 
 ing^ Easy. He had had a trip to Holland — a trip that 
 was as much a flight from Cissie's reproaches as a mission 
 of inquiry. He had intended to go on into Belgium, 
 where he had already been doing useful relief work under 
 Mr. Hoover, but the confusion of his own feelings had 
 checked him and brought him back. 
 
 Mr. Direck's mind was in a perplexity only too com- 
 mon during the stresses of that tragic year. He was 
 entangled in a paradox; like a large majority of Amer- 
 icans at that time his feelings were quite definitely pro- 
 Ally, and like so many in that majority he had a very 
 clear conviction that it would be wrong and impossible 
 for the United States to take part in the war. His sym- 
 pathies were intensely with the Dower House and its de- 
 pendent cottage; he would have wept with generous 
 emotion to see the Stars and Stripes interwoven with the 
 three other great banners of red, white and blue that led 
 the world against German imperialism and militarism, 
 but for all that his mind would not march to that tune. 
 Against all these impulses fought something very funda- 
 mental in Mr. Direck's composition, a preconception of 
 America that had grown almost insensibly in his mind, 
 the idea of America as a polity aloof from the Old World 
 system, as a fresh start for humanity, as something alto- 
 gether too fine and precious to be dragged into even the 
 noblest of European conflicts. America was to be the 
 beginning of the fusion of mankind, neither German nor 
 British nor French nor in any way national. She was to 
 be the great experiment in peace and reasonableness. She 
 had to hold civilisation and social order out of this fray, 
 to be a refuge for all those finer things that die under 
 stress and turmoil ; it was her task to maintain the stand- 
 ards of life and the claims of humanitarianism in the 
 
368 MB. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 conquered province and the prisoners' compound, she had 
 to be the healer and arbitrator, the remonstrance and not 
 the smiting hand. Surely there were enough smiting 
 hands. 
 
 But this idea of an America judicial, remonstrating, 
 and aloof, led him to a conclusion that scandalised him. 
 If America will not, and should not use force in the ends 
 of justice, he argued, then America has no right to make 
 and export munitions of war. She must not trade in 
 what she disavows. He had a quite exaggerated idea of 
 the amount of munitions that America was sending to the 
 Allies, he was inclined to believe that they were entirely 
 dependent upon their transatlantic supplies, and so he 
 found himself persuaded that the victory of the Allies 
 and the honour of America were incompatible things. 
 And — in spite of his ethical aloofness — he loved the 
 Allies. He wanted them to win, and he wanted America 
 to abandon a course that he believed was vitally necessary 
 to their victory. It was an intellectual dilemma. He 
 hid this self-contradiction from Matching's Easy with 
 much the same feelings that a curate might hide a poisoned 
 dagger at a tea-party. . . . 
 
 It was entirely against his habits of mind to hide any- 
 thing — more particularly an entanglement with a dif- 
 ficult proposition — but he perceived quite clearly that 
 neither Cecily nor Mr. Britling were really to be trusted 
 to listen calmly to what, under happier circumstances, 
 might be a profoundly interesting moral complication. 
 Yet it was not in his nature to conceal ; it was in his nature 
 to state. 
 
 And Cecily made things much more difficult. She was 
 pitiless with him. She kept him aloof. " How can I let 
 you make love to me," she said, " when our English men 
 are all going to the war, when Teddy is a prisoner and 
 Hugh is in the trenches. If I were a man ! " 
 
 She couldn't be induced to see any case for America. 
 England was fighting for freedom, and America ought 
 
IN THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 369 
 
 to be beside her. " All the world ought to unite against 
 this German wickedness," she said. 
 
 " I'm doing all I can to help in Belgium," he protested. 
 " Aren't I working ? We've fed four million people." 
 
 He had backbone, and he would not let her, he was 
 resolved, bully him into a falsehood about his country. 
 America was aloof. She was right to be aloof. ... At 
 the same time, Cecily's reproaches were unendurable. 
 And he could feel he was drifting apart from her. . . . 
 
 He couldn't make America go to war. 
 
 In the quiet of his London hotel he thought it all out. 
 He sat at a writing-table making notes of a perfectly lucid 
 statement of the reasonable, balanced liberal American 
 opinion. An instinct of caution determined him to test 
 it first on Mr. Britling. 
 
 But Mr. Britling realised his worst expectations. He 
 was beyond listening. 
 
 " I've not heard from my boy for more than three 
 weeks," said Mr. Britling in the place of any salutation. 
 " This morning makes three-and-twenty days without a 
 letter." 
 
 It seemed to Mr. Direck that Mr. Britling had sud- 
 denly grown ten years older. His face was more deeply 
 lined; the colour and texture of his complexion had gone 
 grey. He moved restlessly and badly; his nerves were 
 manifestly unstrung. 
 
 "It's intolerable that one should be subjected to this 
 gbastly suspense. The boy isn't three hundred miles 
 away." 
 
 Mr. Direck made obvious inquiries. 
 
 " Always before he's written — generally once a fort- 
 night." 
 
 They talked of Hugh for a time, but Mr. Britling was 
 fitful and irritable and quite prepared to hold Mr. Direck 
 accountable for the laxity of the War Office, the treachery 
 of Bulgaria, the ambiguity of Boumania or any other barb 
 that chanced to be sticking into his sensibilities. ' Tbey 
 
370 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 lunclfed precariously. Then they went into the study 
 to smoke. 
 
 There Mr. Direck was unfortunate enough to notice 
 a copy of that innocent American publication The New 
 Republic, lying close to two or three numbers of The 
 Fatherland, a pro-German periodical which at that time 
 inflicted itself upon English writers with the utmost de- 
 termination. Mr. Direck remarked that The New Re- 
 public was an interesting effort on the part of " la Jeunesse 
 Americaine." Mr. Britling regarded the interesting 
 effort with a jaded, unloving eye. 
 
 " You Americans," he said, " are the most extraordi- 
 nary people in the world." 
 
 " Our conditions are exceptional," said Mr. Direck. 
 
 " You think they are," said Mr. Britling, and paused, 
 and then began to deliver his soul about America in a 
 discourse of accumulating bitterness. At first he reasoned 
 and explained, but as he went on he lost self-control; he 
 became dogmatic, he became denunciatory, he became 
 abusive. He identified Mr. Direck more and more with 
 his subject ; he thrust the uncivil " You " more and more 
 directly at him. He let his cigar go out, and flung it 
 impatiently into the fire. As though America was re- 
 sponsible for its going out. . . . 
 
 Like many Britons Mr. Britling had that touch of 
 patriotic feeling towards America which takes the form 
 of impatient criticism. No one in Britain ever calls an 
 American a foreigner. To see faults in Germany or 
 Spain is to tap boundless fountains of charity; but the 
 faults of America rankle in an English mind almost as 
 much as the faults of England. Mr. Britling could ex- 
 plain away the faults of England readily enough; our 
 Hanoverian monarchy, our Established Church and its 
 deadening effect on education, our imperial obligations 
 and the strain they made upon our supplies of admin- 
 istrative talent were all very serviceable for that purpose. 
 But there in America was the old race, without Crown 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 371 
 
 or Church or international embarrassment, and it was 
 still falling short of splendid. His speech to Mr. Direck 
 had the rancour of a family quarrel. Let me only give 
 a few sentences that were to stick in Mr. Direck's mem- 
 ory. 
 
 " You think you are out of it for good and all. So 
 did we think. We were as smug as you are when France 
 went down in '71. . . . Yours is only one further degree 
 of insularity. You think this vacuous aloofness of yours 
 is some sort of moral superiority. So did we, so did 
 we. . . . 
 
 " It won't last you ten years if we go down. . . . 
 
 " Do you think that our disaster will leave the Atlantic 
 for you ? Do you fancy there is any Freedom of the Seas 
 possible beyond such freedom as we maintain, except the 
 freedom to attack you ? For forty years the British fleet 
 has guarded all America from European attack. Your 
 Monroe doctrine skulks behind it now. . . . 
 
 " I'm sick of this high thin talk of yours about the war. 
 . . . You are a nation of ungenerous onlookers — watch- 
 ing us throttle or be throttled. You gamble on our win- 
 ning. And we shall win; we shall win. And you will 
 profit. And when we have won a victory only one shade 
 less terrible than defeat, then you think you will come in 
 and tinker with our peace. Bleed us a little more to 
 please your hyphenated patriots. . . ." 
 
 He came to his last shaft. " You talk of your New 
 Ideals of Peace. You say that you are too proud to fight. 
 But your business men in New York give the show away. 
 There's a little printed card now in half the offices in New 
 York that tells of the real pacificism of America. They're 
 busy, you know. Trade's real good. And so as not to 
 interrupt it they stick up this card : ' Nix on the war ! ' 
 Think of it ! — ' Nix on the war ! ' Here is the whole fate 
 of mankind at stake, and America's contribution is a little 
 grumbling when the Germans sank the Lusitania, and no 
 end of grumbling when we hold up a ship or two and some 
 
372 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 fool of a harbour-master makes an overcharge. Otherwise 
 — ' Nix on the war ! ' . . . 
 
 " Well, let it be Nix on the war ! Don't come here and 
 talk to me ! You who were searching registers a year ago 
 to find your Essex kin. Let it be Nix ! Explanations ! 
 What do I want with explanations ? And " — he mocked 
 his guest's accent and his guest's mode of thought — 
 " dif'cult prap'sitions." 
 
 He got up and stood irresolute. He knew he was being 
 preposterously unfair to America, and outrageously un- 
 civil to a trusting guest; he knew he had no business now 
 to end the talk in this violent fashion. But it was an 
 enormous relief. And to mend matters — No ! He was 
 glad he'd said these things. . . . 
 
 He swung a shoulder to Mr. Direck, and walked out 
 of the room. . . . 
 
 Mr. Direck heard him cross the hall and slam the door 
 of the little parlour. . . . 
 
 Mr. Direck had been stirred deeply by the tragic indig- 
 nation of this explosion, and the ring of torment in Mr. 
 Britling's voice. He had stood up also, but he did not 
 follow his host. 
 
 " It's his boy," said Mr. Direck at last, confidentially 
 to the writing-desk. " How can one argue with liim ? 
 It's just hell for him. . . ." 
 
 § 20 
 
 Mr. Direck took his leave of Mrs. Britling, and went 
 very slowly towards the little cottage. But he did not 
 go to the cottage. He felt he would only find another 
 soul in torment there. 
 
 " What's the good of hanging round talking ? " said Mr. 
 Direck. 
 
 He stopped at the stile in the lane, and sat thinking 
 deeply. " Only one thing will convince her," he said. 
 
 He held out his fingers. "First this," he whispered, 
 " and then that. Yes." 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 373 
 
 He went on as far as the bend from which one sees the 
 cottage, and stood for a little time regarding it. 
 
 He returned still more sorrowfully to the junction, and 
 with every step he took it seemed to him that he would 
 rather see Cecily angry and insulting than not see her 
 at all. 
 
 At the post office he stopped and wrote a letter-card. 
 
 " Dear Cissie," he wrote. " I came down to-day to 
 see you — and thought better of it. I'm going right off 
 to find out about Teddy. Somehow I'll get that settled. 
 I'll fly around and do that somehow if I have to go up 
 to the German front to do it. And when I've got that 
 settled I've got something else in my mind — well, it will 
 wipe out all this little trouble that's got so big between 
 us about neutrality. And I love you dearly, Cissie." 
 
 That was all the card would hold. 
 
 § 21 
 
 And then as if it were something that every one in the 
 Dower House had been waiting for, came the message that 
 Hugh had been killed. 
 
 The telegram was brought up by a girl in a pinafore 
 instead of the boy of the old dispensation, for boys now 
 were doing the work of youths and youths the work of 
 the men who had gone to the war. 
 
 Mr. Britling was standing at the front door; he had 
 been surveying the late October foliage, touched by the 
 warm light of the afternoon, when the messenger appeared. 
 He opened the telegram, hoping as he had hoped when 
 he opened any telegram since Hugh had gone to the front 
 that it would not contain the exact words he read ; that it 
 would say wounded, that at the worst it would say " miss- 
 ing," that perhaps it might even tell of some pleasant 
 surprise, a brief return to home such as the last letter 
 had foreshadowed. ■ He read the final, unqualified state- 
 ment, the terse regrets. He stood quite still for a mo- 
 ment or so, staring at the words. . . . 
 
374 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 It was a mile and a quarter from the post office to the 
 Dower House, and it was always his custom to give tele- 
 graph messengers who came to his house twopence, and 
 he wanted very much to get rid of the telegraph girl, who 
 stood expectantly before him holding her red bicycle. He 
 felt now very sick and strained; he had a conviction that 
 if he did not by an effort maintain his bearing cool and 
 dry he would howl aloud. He felt in his pocket for 
 money; there were some coppers^ and a shilling. He 
 pulled it all out together and stared at it. 
 
 He had an absurd conviction that this ought to be a 
 sixpenny telegram. The thing worried him. He wanted 
 to give the brat sixpence, and he had only threepence and 
 a shilling, and he didn't know what to do and his brain 
 couldn't think. It would be a shocking thing to give her 
 a shilling, and he couldn't somehow give just coppers for 
 so important a thing as Hugh's death. Then all this prob- 
 lem vanished and he handed the child the shilling. She 
 stared at him, inquiring, incredulous. " Is there a reply, 
 Sir, please ? " 
 
 " No," he said, " that's for you. All of it. . . . This 
 is a peculiar sort of telegram. . . . It's news of im- 
 portance. . . ." 
 
 As he said this he met her eyes, and had a sudden per- 
 suasion that she knew exactly what it was the telegram 
 had told him, and that she was shocked at this gala-like 
 treatment of such terrible news. He hesitated, feeling 
 that he had to say something else, that he was socially 
 inadequate, and then he decided that at any cost he must 
 get his face away from her staring eyes. She made no 
 movement to turn away. She seemed to be taking him 
 in, recording him, for repetition, greedily, with every fibre 
 of her being. 
 
 He stepped past her into the garden, and instantly 
 forgot about her existence. . . . 
 
IN THE WEB OE THE INEFFECTIVE 375 
 
 § 22 
 
 He had been thinking of this possibility for the last 
 few weeks almost continuously, and yet now that it had 
 come to him he felt that he had never thought about it 
 before, that he must go off alone by himself to envisage 
 this monstrous and terrible fact, without distraction or 
 interruption. 
 
 He saw his wife coming down the alley between the 
 roses. 
 
 He was wrenched by emotions as odd and unaccount- 
 able as the emotions of adolescence. He had exactly the 
 same feeling now that he had had when in his boyhood 
 some unpleasant admission had to be made to his parents. 
 He felt he could not go through a scene with her yet, that 
 he could not endure the task of telling her, of being ob- 
 «6v*c*. He turned abruptly to his left. He walked 
 away as if he had not seen her, across his lawn towards 
 the little summer-house upon a knoll that commanded the 
 high road. She called to him, but he did not answer. . , . 
 
 He would not look towards her, but for a time all bis 
 senses were alert to hear whether she followed him. Safe 
 in the summer-house he could glance back. 
 
 It was all right. She was going into the house. 
 
 He drew the telegram from his pocket again furtively, 
 almost guiltily, and re-read it. He turned it over and 
 read it again. . . . 
 
 Killed. 
 
 Then his own voice, hoarse and strange to his ears, 
 spoke his thought. 
 
 " My God ! how unutterably silly. . . . Why did I let 
 him go ? Why did I let him go ? " 
 
 § 23 
 
 Mrs. Britling did not learn of the blow that had struck 
 them until after dinner that night. She was so accus- 
 tomed to ignore his incomprehensible moods that she did 
 
3Y6 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 not perceive that there was anything tragic ahout him 
 until they sat at table together. He seemed heavy and 
 sulky and disposed to avoid her, but that sort of moodi- 
 ness was nothing very strange to her. She knew that 
 things that seemed to her utterly trivial, the reading of 
 political speeches in The Times, little comments on life 
 made in the most casual way, mere movements, could so 
 avert him. She had cultivated a certain disregard of 
 such fitful darknesses. But at the dinner-table she looked 
 up, and was stabbed to the heart to see a haggard white 
 face and eyes of deep despair regarding her ambiguously. 
 
 " Hugh ! " she said, and then with a chill intimation, 
 "What is it?" 
 
 They looked at each other. His face softened and 
 winced. 
 
 <l My Hugh," he whispered, and neither spoke for some 
 seconds. 
 
 " Killed" he said, and suddenly stood up whimpering, 
 and fumbled with his pocket. 
 
 It seemed he would never find what he sought. It 
 came at last, a crumpled telegram. He threw it down 
 before her, and then thrust his chair back clumsily and 
 went hastily out of the room. She heard him sob. She 
 had not dared to look at his face again. 
 
 " Oh! " she cried, realising that an impossible task had 
 been thrust upon her. 
 
 " But what can I say to him ? " she said, with the tele- 
 gram in her hand. 
 
 The parlourmaid came into the room. 
 
 " Clear the dinner away ! " said Mrs. Britling, stand- 
 ing at her place. " Master Hugh is killed. . . ." And 
 then wailing : " Oh ! what can I say ? What can I 
 
 § 24 
 
 That night Mrs. Britling made the supreme effort of 
 her life to burst the prison of self-consciousness and in- 
 hibition in which she was confined. Never before in all 
 
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 377 
 
 her life had she so desired to be spontaneous and unre- 
 strained; never before had she so felt herself hampered 
 by her timidity, her self-criticism, her deeply ingrained 
 habit of never letting herself go. She was rent by re- 
 flected distress. It seemed to her that she would be ready 
 to give her life and the whole world to be able to comfort 
 her husband now. And she could conceive no gesture of 
 comfort. She went out of the dining-room into the hall 
 and listened. She went very softly upstairs until she 
 came to the door of her husband's room. There she stood 
 still. She could hear no sound from within. She put 
 out her hand and turned the handle of the door a little 
 way, and then she was startled by the loudness of the 
 sound it made and at her own boldness. She withdrew 
 her hand, and then with a gesture of despair, with a face 
 of white agony, she flitted along the corridor to her own 
 room. 
 
 Her mind was beaten to the ground by this catastrophe, 
 of which to this moment she had never allowed herself to 
 think. She had never allowed herself to think of it. 
 The figure of her husband, like some pitiful beast, 
 wounded and bleeding, filled her mind. She gave 
 scarcely a thought to Hugh. " Oh, what can I do for 
 him?" she asked herself, sitting down before her unlit 
 bedroom fire. ..." What can I say or do ? " 
 
 She brooded until she shivered, and then she lit her 
 fire. . . . 
 
 It was late that night and after an eternity of resolu- 
 tions and doubts and indecisions that Mrs. Britling went 
 to her husband. He was sitting close up to the fire with 
 his chin upon his hands, waiting for her ; he felt that she 
 would come to him, and he was thinking meanwhile of 
 Hugh with a slow unprogressive movement of the mind. 
 He showed by a movement that he heard her enter the 
 room, but he did not turn to look at herl He shrank a 
 little from her approach. 
 
 She came and stood beside him. She ventured to touch 
 
378 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 him very softly,, and to stroke his head. " My dear," she 
 said. " My poor dear ! 
 
 " It is so dreadful for you," she said, " it is so dreadful 
 for you. I know how you loved him. . . ." 
 
 He spread his hands over his face and hecame very still. 
 
 " My poor dear ! " she said, still stroking his hair, " my 
 poor dear ! " 
 
 And then she went on saying " poor dear," saying it 
 presently because there was nothing more had come into 
 her mind. She desired supremely to be his comfort, and 
 in a little while she was acting comfort so poorly that she 
 perceived her own failure. And that increased her 
 failure, and that increased her paralysing sense of 
 failure. . . . 
 
 And suddenly her stroking hand ceased. Suddenly the 
 real woman cried out from her. 
 
 " I can't reach you ! " she cried aloud. " I can't reach 
 you. I would do anything. . . . You! You with your 
 heart half broken. . . ." 
 
 She turned towards the door. She moved clumsily, she 
 was blinded by her tears. 
 
 Mr. Britling uncovered his face. He stood up aston- 
 ished, and then pity and pitiful understanding came 
 storming across- his grief. He made a step and took her 
 in his arms. " My dear," he said, " don't go from 
 me. . . ." 
 
 She turned to him weeping, and put her arms about 
 his neck, and he too was weeping. 
 
 " My poor wife ! " he said, " my dear wife. If it were 
 not for you — I think I could kill myself to-night. Don't 
 cry, my dear. Don't, don't cry. You do not know how 
 you comfort me. You do not know how you help me." 
 
 He drew her to him; he put her cheek against his 
 •own. . . . 
 
 His heart was so sore and wounded that he could not 
 endure that another human being should go wretched. 
 He sat down in his chair and drew her upon his knees, 
 
IX THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE 370 
 
 and said everything he could think of to console her and 
 reassure her and make her feel that she was of value to 
 him. He spoke of every pleasant aspect of their lives, 
 of every aspect, except that he never named that dear pale 
 youth who waited now. . . . He could wait a little 
 longer. . . . 
 
 At last she went from him. 
 
 " Good night," said Mr. Britling, and took her to the 
 door. " It was very dear of you to come and comfort 
 me," he said. . . . 
 
 § 25 
 
 He closed the door softly hehind her. 
 
 The door had hardly shut upon her hefore he forgot 
 her. Instantly he was alone again, utterly alone. He 
 was alone in an empty world. . . . 
 
 Loneliness struck him like a hlow. He had dependents, 
 he had cares. He had never a soul to whom he might 
 weep. . . . 
 
 For a time he stood beside his open window. He 
 looked at the bed — but no sleep he knew would come that 
 night — until the sleep of exhaustion came. He looked 
 at the bureau at which he had so often written. But the 
 writing there was a shrivelled thing. . . . 
 
 This room was unendurable. He must go out. He 
 turned to the window, and outside was a troublesome 
 noise of night-jars and a distant roaring of stags, black 
 trees, blacknesses, the sky clear and remote with a great 
 company of stars. . . . The stars seemed attentive. 
 They stirred and yet were still. It was as if they were 
 the eyes of watchers. He would go out to them. . . . 
 
 Very softly he went towards the passage door, and still 
 more softly felt his way across the landing and down the 
 staircase. Once or twice he paused to listen. 
 
 He let himself out with elaborate precautions. . . . 
 
 Across the dark he went, and suddenly his boy was all 
 about him, playing, climbing the cedars, twisting mirac- 
 
380 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 ulously about the lawn on a bicycle, discoursing gravely 
 upon his future, lying on the grass, breathing very hard 
 and drawing preposterous caricatures. Onoe again they 
 walked side by side up and down — it was athwart this 
 very spot — talking gravely but rather shyly. . . . 
 
 And here they had stood a little awkwardly, before the 
 boy went in to say good-bye to his stepmother and go off 
 with his father to the station. . . . 
 
 " I will work to-morrow again," whispered Mr. Brit- 
 ling, " but to-night — to-night. . . . To-night is yours. 
 . . . Can you hear me, can you hear i Your father . . . 
 who had counted on you. . . ." 
 
 § 26 
 
 He went into the far corner of the hockey paddock, 
 and there he moved about for a while and then stood for 
 a long time holding the fence with both hands and staring 
 blankly into the darkness. At last he turned away, and 
 went stumbling and blundering towards the rose garden. 
 A spray of creeper tore his face and distressed him. He 
 thrust it aside fretfully, and it scratched his hand. He 
 made his way to the seat in the arbour, and sat down and 
 whispered a little to himself, and then became very still 
 with his arm upon the back of the seat and his head upon 
 his arm. 
 
BOOK III 
 THE TESTAMENT OE MATCHING'S EASY 
 
CHAPTEE THE FIRST 
 
 MES. TEDDT GOES FOE A WALK 
 § 1 
 
 All over England now, where the livery of mourning 
 had been a rare thing to see, women and children went 
 about in the October sunshine in new black clothes. 
 Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, mothers who had 
 lost their sons, women who had lost their men, lives shat- 
 tered and hopes destroyed. The dyers had a great time 
 turning coloured garments to black. And there was also 
 a growing multitude of crippled and disabled men. It 
 was so in England, much more was it so in France and 
 Eussia, in all the countries of the Allies, and in Germany 
 and Austria; away into Asia Minor and Egypt, in India 
 and Japan and Italy there was mourning, the world was 
 filled with loss and mourning and impoverishment and 
 distress. 
 
 And still the mysterious powers that required these 
 
 things of mankind were unappeased, and each day added 
 
 v its quota of heart-stabbing messages and called for new 
 
 mourning, and sent home fresh consignments of broken 
 
 and tormented men. 
 
 Some clung to hopes that became at last almost more 
 terrible than black certainties. . . . 
 
 Mrs. Teddy went about the village in a coloured dress 
 bearing herself confidently. Teddy had been listed now 
 as " missing, since reported killed," and she had had two 
 letters from his comrades. They said Teddy had been 
 left behind in the ruins of a farm with one or two other 
 wounded, and that when the Canadians retook the place 
 these wounded had all been found butchered. None had 
 
 383 
 
384 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 been found alive. Afterwards the Canadians had' had 
 to fall back. Mr. Direck had been at great pains to hunt 
 up wounded men from Teddy's company, and also any 
 likely Canadians both at the base hospital in France and 
 in London, and to get what he could from them. He had 
 made it a service to Cissie. Only one of his witnesses was 
 quite clear about Teddy, but he, alas ! was dreadfully clear. 
 There had been only one lieutenant among the men left 
 behind, he said, and obviously that must have been Teddy. 
 " He had been prodded in half-a-dozen places. His head 
 was nearly severed from his body." 
 
 Direck came down and told the story to Cissie. " Shall 
 I tell it to her « " he asked. 
 
 Cissie thought. " Not yet," she said. . . . 
 
 Letty's face changed in those pitiful weeks when she 
 was denying death. She lost her pretty colour, she be- 
 came white ; her mouth grew hard and her eyes had a hard 
 brightness. She never wept, she never gave a sign of 
 sorrow, and she insisted upon talking about Teddy, in a 
 dry offhand voice. Constantly she referred to his final 
 return. " Teddy," she said, " will be surprised at this," 
 or " Teddy will feel sold when he sees how I have altered 
 that." 
 
 " Presently we shall see his name in a list of prisoners," 
 she said. " He is a wounded prisoner in Germany." 
 
 She adopted that story. She had no justification for 
 it, but she would hear no doubts upon it. She presently 
 began to prepare parcels to send him. " They want al- 
 most everything," she told people. " They are treated 
 abominably. He has not been able to write to me yet, 
 but I do not think I ought to wait until he asks me." 
 
 Cissie was afraid to interfere with this. 
 
 After a time Letty grew impatient at the delay in get- 
 ting any address and took her first parcel to the post office. 
 
 " Unless you know what prison he is at," said the post- 
 mistress. 
 
 " Pity ! " said Letty. " I don't know that. Must it 
 
MES. TEDDY GOES FOE A WALK 385 
 
 wait for that ? I thought the Germans were so systematic 
 that it didn't matter." 
 
 The postmistress made tedious explanations that Letty 
 did not seem to hear. She stared straight in front of her 
 at nothing. Then in a pause in the conversation she 
 picked up her parcel. 
 
 " It's tiresome for him to have to wait," she said. 
 " But it can't be long before I know." 
 
 She took the parcel back to the cottage. 
 
 " After all," she said, " it gives us time to get the better 
 sort of throat lozenges for him — the sort the syndicate 
 shop doesn't keep." 
 
 She put the parcel conspicuously upon the dresser in 
 the kitchen where it was most in the way, and set herself 
 to make a jersey for Teddy against the coming of the cold 
 weather. 
 
 But one night the white mask fell for a moment from 
 her face. 
 
 Cissie and she had been sitting in silence before the 
 fire. She had been knitting — she knitted very badly — 
 and Cissie had been pretending to read, and had been 
 watching her furtively. Cissie eyed the slow, toilsome 
 growth of the slack woolwork for a time, and the touch 
 of angry effort in every stroke of the knitting needles. 
 Then she was stirred to remonstrance. 
 
 " Poor Letty ! " she said very softly. " Suppose after 
 all, he is dead?" 
 
 Letty met her with a pitiless stare. 
 
 " He is a prisoner," she said. " Isn't that enough ? 
 Why do you jab at me by saying that? A wounded 
 prisoner. Isn't that enough despicable trickery for God 
 even to play on Teddy — our Teddy ? To the very last 
 moment he shall not be dead. Until the war is over. 
 Until six months after the war. . . . 
 
 " I will tell you why, Cissie. . . ." 
 
 She leant across the table and pointed her remarks 
 with her knitting needles, speaking in a tone of reasonable 
 
386 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 remonstrance. " You see," she said, " if people like 
 Teddy are to be killed, then all our ideas that life is 
 meant for, honesty and sweetness and happiness, a^e 
 wrong, and this world is just a place of devils ; just a dirty 
 cruel hell. Getting born would be getting damned. 
 And so one must not give way to that idea, however much 
 it may seem likely that he is dead. ... 
 
 " You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and 
 some one must pay me for his death. . . . Some one must 
 pay me. ... I shall wait for six months after the war, 
 dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn my 
 way about there. And I will murder some German. Not 
 just a common German, but a German who belongs to the 
 guilty kind. A sacrifice. It ought, for instance, to be 
 comparatively easy to kill some of the children of the 
 Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian princes. I shall 
 prefer German children. I shall sacrifice them to Teddy. 
 It ought not to be difficult to find people who can be made 
 directly responsible, the people who invented the poison 
 gas, for instance, and kill them, or to kill people who 
 are dear to them. Or necessary to them. . . . Women 
 can do that so much more easily than men. . . . 
 
 " That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this 
 kind will ever be brought to an end. By women insisting 
 on killing the kind of people who make them. Booting 
 them out. By a campaign of pursuit and assassination 
 that will go on for years and years 'after the war itself is 
 over. . . . Murder is such a little gentle punishment for 
 the crime of war. ... It would be hardly more than a 
 reproach for what has happened. Falling like snow. 
 Death after death. Elake by flake. This prince. That 
 statesman. The count who writes so fiercely for war. 
 . . . That is what I am going to do. If Teddy is really 
 dead. . . . We women were ready enough a year or so 
 ago to starve and die for the Vote, and that was quite a 
 little thing in comparison with this business. . . . Don't 
 you see what I mean ? It's so plain and sensible, Cissie. 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK 387 
 
 Whenever a man sits and thinks whether he will make a 
 war or not, then he will think too of women, women with 
 daggers, bombs; of a vengeance that will never tire nor 
 rest ; of consecrated patient women ready to start out upon 
 a pilgrimage that will only end with his death. ... I 
 wouldn't hurt these war makers. No. In spite of the 
 poison gas. In spite of trench feet and the men who 
 have been made blind and the wounded who have lain 
 for days, dying slowly in the wet. Women ought not to 
 hurt. But I would kill. Like killing dangerous vermin. 
 It would go on year by year. Balkan kings, German 
 princes, chancellors, they would have schemed for so much 
 — and come to just a rattle in the throat. . . . And if 
 presently other kings and emperors began to prance about 
 and review armies, they too would go. . . . 
 
 " Until all the world understood that women would not 
 stand war any more forever. . . . 
 
 " Of course I shall do something of the sort. What 
 else is there to do now for me % " 
 
 Letty's eyes were bright and intense, but her voice was 
 soft and subdued. She went on after a pause in the same 
 casual voice. " You see now, Cissie, why I cling to the 
 idea that Teddy is alive. If Teddy is alive, then even 
 if he is wounded, he will get some happiness out of it — 
 and all this won't be — just rot. If he is dead then 
 everything is so desperately silly and cruel from top to 
 bottom " 
 
 She smiled wanly to finish her sentence. 
 
 "But, Letty ! " said Cissie, " there is the boy! " 
 
 " I shall leave the boy to you. Compared with Teddy 
 I don't care that for the boy. I never did. What is the 
 good of pretending? Some women are made like that." 
 
 She surveyed her knitting. "Poor stitches," she 
 said. . . . 
 
 " I'm hard stuff, Cissie. I take after mother more 
 than father. Teddy is my darling. All the tenderness 
 of my life is Teddy. If it goes, it goes. ... I won't 
 
388 ME. BEETLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 crawl about the world like all these other snivelling 
 widows. If they've killed my man I shall kill. Blood 
 for blood and loss for loss. I shall get just as close to the 
 particular Germans who made this war as I can, and I 
 shall kill them and theirs. . . . 
 
 " The Women's Association for the Extirpation of the 
 whole breed of War Lords," she threw out. " If I do 
 happen to hurt — does it matter ? " 
 
 She looked at her sister's shocked face and smiled 
 again. 
 
 " You think I go about staring at nothing," she re- 
 marked. ..." Not a bit of it ! I have been planning 
 all sorts of things. ... I have been thinking how I could 
 get to Germany. ... Or one might catch them in Swit- 
 zerland. . . . I've had all sorts of plans. They can't go 
 guarded for ever. ... 
 
 " Oh, it makes me despise humanity to see how many 
 soldiers and how few assassins there are in the world. 
 . . . After the things we have seen. If people did their 
 duty by the dagger there wouldn't be such a thing as a 
 War Lord in the world. Not one. . . . The Kaiser and 
 his sons and his sons' sons would know nothing but fear 
 now for all their lives. Fear would only cease to pursue 
 as the coffin went down into the grave. Fear by sea, fear 
 by land, for the vessel he sailed in, the train he travelled 
 in, fear when he slept for the death in his dreams, fear 
 when he waked for the death in every shadow; fear in 
 every crowd, fear whenever he was alone. Fear would 
 stalk him through the trees, hide in the corner of the stair- 
 case ; make all his food taste perplexingly, so that he would 
 want to spit it out. . . ." 
 
 She sat very still brooding on that idea for a time, and 
 then stood up. 
 
 " What nonsense one talks ! " she cried, and yawned. 
 " I wonder why poor Teddy doesn't send me a post card 
 or something to tell me his address. I tell you what I 
 am afraid of sometimes about him, Cissie." 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK 389 
 
 " Yes ? " said Cissie. 
 
 " Loss of memory. Suppose a beastly lump of shell 
 or something whacked him on the head. ... I had a 
 dream of him looking strange about the eyes and not 
 knowing me. That, you know, really may have happened. 
 ... It would be beastly, of course. . . ." 
 
 Cissie's eyes were critical, but she had nothing ready 
 to say. 
 
 There were some moments of silence. 
 
 "Oh! bed," said Letty. "Though I shall just lie 
 scheming." 
 
 § 2 
 
 Cissie lay awake that night thinking about her sister 
 as if she had never thought about her before. 
 
 She began to weigh the concentrated impressions of a 
 thousand memories. She and her sister were near in age ; 
 they knew each other with an extreme intimacy, and yet it 
 seemed to Cissie that night as though she did not know 
 Letty at all. A year ago she would have been certain she 
 knew everything about her. But the old familiar Letty, 
 with the bright complexion and the wicked eye, with her 
 rebellious schoolgirl insistence upon the beautifulness of 
 " Boof'l young men," and her frank and glowing passion 
 for Teddy, with her delight in humorous mystifications and 
 open-air exercise and all the sunshine and laughter of life, 
 this sister Letty, who had been so satisfactory and complete 
 and final, had been thrust aside like a mask. Cissie no 
 longer knew her sister's eyes. Letty's hand had become 
 thin and unfamiliar and a little wrinkled ; she was sharp- 
 featured and thin-lipped; her acts, which had once been 
 predictable, were incomprehensible, and Cissie was thrown 
 back upon speculations. In their schooldays Letty had had 
 a streak of intense sensibility ; she had been easily moved 
 to tears. But never once had she wept or given any sign of 
 weeping since Teddy's name had appeared in the casualty 
 list. . . . What was the strength of this tragic tension? 
 
390 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 How far would it carry her ? Waa Letty really capable of 
 becoming a Charlotte Corday ? Of carrying out a scheme 
 of far-seeing vengeance, of making her way through long 
 months and years nearer and nearer to revenge? 
 
 Were such revenges possible? 
 
 Would people presently begin to murder the makers 
 of the Great War ? What a strange thing it would be in 
 history if so there came a punishment and end to the folly 
 of kings ! 
 
 Only a little while ago Cissie's imagination might have 
 been captured by so romantic a dream. She was still 
 but a year or so out of the stage of melodrama. But she 
 was out of it. She was growing up now to a subtler wis- 
 dom. People, she was beginning to realise, do not do 
 these simple things. They make vows of devotion and 
 they are not real vows of devotion ; they love — quite 
 honestly — and qualify. There are no great revenges but 
 only little mean ones ; no life-long vindications except the 
 unrelenting vengeance of the law. There is no real con- 
 centration of people's lives anywhere such as romance 
 demands. There is change, there is forgetfulness. 
 Everywhere there is dispersal. Even to the tragic story 
 of Teddy would come the modifications of time. Even to 
 the wickedness of the German princes would presently be 
 added some conflicting aspects. Could Letty keep things 
 for years in her mind, hard and terrible, as they were 
 now ? Surely they would soften ; other things would over- 
 lay them. . . . 
 
 There came a rush of memories of Letty in a dozen 
 schoolgirl adventures, times when she had ventured, and 
 times when she had failed ; Letty frightened, Letty vexed, 
 Letty launching out to great enterprises, going high and 
 hard and well for a time, and then failing. She had seen 
 Letty snivelling and dirty ; Letty shamed and humiliated. 
 She knew her Letty to the soul. Poor Letty ! Poor dear 
 Letty ! With a sudden clearness of vision Cissie realised 
 what was happening in her sister's mind. All this tense 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK 391 
 
 scheming of revenges was the imaginative play with 
 which Letty warded off the black alternative to her hope ; 
 it was not strength, it was weakness. It was a form of 
 giving way. She could not face starkly the simple fact 
 of Teddy's death. That was too much for her. So she 
 was building up this dream of a mission of judgment 
 against the day when she could resist the facts no longer. 
 She was already persuaded, only she would not be per- 
 suaded until her dream was ready. If this state of sus- 
 pense went on she might establish her dream so firmly 
 that it would at last take complete possession of her mind. 
 And by that time also she would have squared her exist- 
 ence at Matching's Easy with the elaboration of her 
 reverie. 
 
 She would go about the place then, fancying herself 
 preparing for this tremendous task she would never really 
 do; she would study German maps; she would read the 
 papers about German statesmen and rulers; perhaps she 
 would even make weak attempts to obtain a situation in 
 Switzerland or in Germany. Perhaps she would buy a 
 knife or a revolver. Perhaps presently she would begin to 
 hover about Windsor or Sandringham when peace was 
 made, and the German cousins came visiting again. . . . 
 
 Into Cissie's mind came the image of the thing that 
 might be; Letty, shabby, draggled, with her sharp bright 
 prettiness become haggard, an assassin dreamer, still de- 
 pendent on Mr. Britling, doing his work rather badly, in 
 a distraught unpunctual fashion. 
 
 She must be told, she must be convinced soon, or as- 
 suredly she would become an eccentric, a strange char- 
 acter, a Matching's Easy Miss Elite. . . . 
 
 Cissie could think more clearly of Letty's mind than 
 of her own. 
 
 She herself was in a tangle. She had grown to be very 
 
392 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 fond of Mr. Direck, and to have a profound trust and 
 confidence in him, and her fondness seemed able to find 
 no expression at all except a constant girding at his and 
 America's avoidance of war. She had fallen in love with 
 him when he was wearing fancy dress; she was a young 
 woman with a stronger taste for body and colour than 
 she supposed; what indeed she resented about him, 
 though she did not know it, was that he seemed never 
 disposed to carry the spirit of fancy dress into everyday 
 life. To begin with he had touched both her imagination 
 and senses, and she wanted him to go, on doing that. In- 
 stead of which he seemed lapsing more and more into 
 reiterated assurances of devotion and the flat competent 
 discharge of humanitarian duties. Always nowadays he 
 was trying to persuade her that what he was doing was 
 the right and honourable thing for him to do ; what he did 
 not realise, what indeed she did not realise, was the ex- 1 
 asperation his Tightness and reasonableness produced in 
 her. When he saw he exasperated her he sought -very 
 earnestly to- be righter and reasonabler and more plainly 
 and demonstrably right and reasonable than ever., 
 
 Withal, as she felt and perceived, he was such a good 
 thing, such a very good thing; so kind, so trustworthy, 
 with a sort of slow strength, with a careful honesty, a big 
 good childishness, a passion for fairness. And so help- 
 less in her hands. She could lash him and distress him. 
 Yet she could not shake his slowly formed convictions. 
 
 When Cissie had dreamt of the lover that fate had in 
 store for her in her old romantic days, he was to be per- 
 fect always, he and she were always to be absolutely in 
 the right (and, if the story needed it, the world in the 
 wrong). She had never expected to find herself tied by 
 her affections to a man with whom she disagreed, and who 
 went contrary to her standards, very much as if she was 
 lashed on the ba.ck of a very nice elephant that would 
 wince to but not obey the goad. . . . 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOE A WALK 393 
 
 So she nagged him and taunted him, and would hear 
 no word of his case. And he wanted dreadfully to discuss 
 his case. He felt that the point of conscience ahout the 
 munitions was particularly fine and difficult. He wished 
 she would listen and enter into it more. But she thought 
 with that more rapid English flash which is not so much 
 thinking as feeling. He loved that flash in her in spite 
 of his persuasion of its injustice. 
 
 Her thought that he ought to go to the war made him feel 
 like a renegade; hut her claim that he. was somehow still 
 English held him in spite of his reason. In the midst of 
 such perplexities he was glad to find one neutral task 
 wherein he could find himself whole-heartedly with and 
 for Cissie. 
 
 He hunted up the evidence of Teddy's fate with a de- 
 voted pertinacity. 
 
 And in the meanwhile the other riddle resolved itself. 
 He had had a certain idea in his mind for some time. 
 He discovered one day that it was an inspiration. He 
 could keep his conscientious objection ahout America, and 
 still take a line that would satisfy Cissie. He took it. 
 
 When he came down to Matching's Easy at her sum- 
 mons to hear his convincing witness of Teddy's fate, he 
 came in an unwonted costume. It was a costume so won- 
 derful in his imagination that it seemed to cry aloud, to 
 sound like a trumpet as he went through London to Liver- 
 pool Street station ; it was a costume like an international 
 event; it was a costume that he felt would blare right 
 away to Berlin. And yet it was a costume so common- 
 place, so much the usual wear now, that Cissie, meeting 
 him at the station and full of the thought of Letty's trouble, 
 did not remark it, felt indeed rather than observed that 
 he was looking more strong and handsome than he had 
 ever done since he struck upon her imagination in the 
 fantastic wrap that Teddy had found for him in the merry 
 days when there was no death in the world. And Letty 
 
394 MK. BEITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 too, resistant, incalculable, found no wonder in the won- 
 derful suit. 
 
 He bore his testimony. It was the queer halting tell- 
 ing of a patched-together tale. • . . 
 
 " I suppose," said Letty, " if I tell you now that I don't 
 believe that that officer was Teddy you will think I am 
 cracked. . . . But I don't." 
 
 She sat staring straight before her for a time after 
 saying this. Then suddenly she got up and began tak- 
 ing down her hat and coat from the peg behind the kitchen 
 door. The hanging strap of the coat was twisted and she 
 struggled with it petulantly until she tore it. 
 
 " Where are you going ? " cried Cissie. 
 
 Letty's voice over her shoulder was the harsh voice of 
 a scolding woman. 
 
 " I'm going out — anywhere." She turned, coat in 
 hand. " Can't I go out if I like? " she asked. " It's a 
 beautiful day. . . . Mustn't I go out? ... I suppose 
 you think I ought to take in what you have tola me 
 in a moment. Just smile and say 'Indeed! . . . Aban- 
 doned ! — while his men retreated ! How jolly ! And 
 then not think of it any more. .' . . Besides, I must go 
 out. You two want to be left together. You want to 
 canoodle. Do it while you can ! " 
 
 Then she put on coat and hat, jamming her hat down on 
 her head, and said something that Cissie did not imme- 
 diately understand. 
 
 " He'll have his turn in the trenches soon enough. Now 
 that he's made up his mind. . . . He might have done it 
 sooner. . . ." 
 
 She turned her back as though she had forgotten them. 
 She stood for a moment as though her feet were wooden, 
 not putting her feet as she usually put her feet. She 
 took slow, wide, unsure steps. She went out — like some- 
 thing that is mortally injured and still walks — into the 
 autumnal sunshine. She left the door wide open behind 
 her. 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK 395 
 
 § 4 
 
 And Cissie, with eyes full of distress for her sister, 
 had still to grasp the fact that Direck was wearing a Cana- 
 dian uniform. . . . 
 
 He stood behind her, ashamed that in such a moment 
 this fact and its neglect by every one could be so vivid in 
 his mind. 
 
 § 5 
 
 Cissie's estimate of her sister's psychology had been 
 just. The reverie of revenge had not yet taken a grip 
 upon Letty's mind sufficiently strong to meet the challenge 
 of this conclusive evidence of Teddy's death. She walked 
 out into a world of sunshine now almost completely con- 
 vinced that Teddy was dead, and she knew quite well that 
 her dream of some dramatic and terrible vindication had 
 gone from her. She knew that in truth she could do noth- 
 ing of that sort. . . . 
 
 She walked out with a set face and eyes that seemed 
 unseeing, and yet it was as if some heavy weight had 
 been lifted from her shoulders. It wap over; there was 
 no more to hope for and there was nothing more to fear. 
 She would have been shocked to realise that her mind was 
 relieved. 
 
 She wanted to be alone. She wanted to be away from 
 every eye. She was like some creature that after a long 
 nightmare incubation is at last born into a clear, bleak 
 day. She had to feel herself ; she had to stretch her mind 
 in this cheerless sunshine, this new world, where there 
 was to be no more Teddy and no real revenge nor com- 
 pensation for Teddy. Teddy was past. . . . 
 
 Hitherto she had had an angry sense of being deprived 
 of Teddy — almost as though he were keeping away from 
 her. Wow, there was no more Teddy to be deprived 
 of. . . . 
 
396 MR. BRITMSTG SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 She went through the straggling village, and across the 
 fields to the hillside that looks away towards Mertonsome 
 and its steeple. And where the hill begins to fall away 
 she threw herself down under the hedge by the path, near 
 by the stile into the lane, and lay still. She did not so 
 much think as remain blank, waiting for the beginning 
 of impressions. . . . 
 
 It was as it were a blank stare at the world. . . . 
 
 She did not know if it was five minutes or half an hour 
 later that she became aware that some one was looking 
 at her. She turned with a start, and discovered the 
 Reverend Dimple with one foot on the stile, and an ex- 
 pression of perplexity and consternation upon his chubby 
 visage. 
 
 Instantly she understood. Already on four different 
 occasions since Teddy's disappearance she had seen the 
 good man coming towards her, always with a manifest 
 decision, always with the same faltering doubt as now. 
 Often in their happy days had she and Teddy discussed 
 him and derided him and rejoiced over him. They had 
 agreed he was as good as Jane Austen's Mr. Collins. He 
 really was very like Mr. Collins, except that he was 
 plumper. And now, it was as if he was transparent to her 
 hard defensive scrutiny. She knew he was impelled by his 
 tradition, by his sense of fitness, by his respect for his call- 
 ing, to offer her his ministrations and consolations, to say 
 his large flat amiabilities over her and pat her kindly with 
 his hands. And she knew too that he dreaded her. She 
 knew that the dear old humbug knew at the bottom of his 
 heart quite certainly that he was a poor old humbug, and 
 that she was in his secret. And at the bottom of his heart 
 he found himself too honest to force his poor platitudes 
 upon any who would not be glad of them. If she could 
 have been glad of them he would have had no compunction. 
 He was a man divided against himself; failing to carry 
 through his rich pretences, dismayed. 
 
MKS. TEDDY GOES FOE A WALK 397 
 
 He had been taking his afternoon "constitutional." 
 He had discovered her beyond the stile just in time to 
 pull up. Then had come a fatal, a preposterous hesita- 
 tion. She stared at him now, with hard, expressionless 
 eyes. 
 
 He stared back at her, until his plump pink face was 
 all consternation. He was extraordinarily distressed. It 
 was as if a thousand unspoken things had been said be- 
 tween them. 
 
 " No wish," he said, " intrude." 
 
 If he had had the certain balm, how gladly would he 
 have given it ! 
 
 He broke the spell by stepping back into the lane. He 
 made a gesture with his hands, as if he would have wrung 
 them. And then he had fled down the lane — almost at 
 a run. 
 
 " Po' girl," he shouted. " Po' girl," and left her star- 
 ing. 
 
 Staring — and then she laughed. 
 
 This was good. This was the sort of thing one could 
 tell Teddy, when at last he came back and she could tell 
 him anything. And then she realised again; there was 
 no more Teddy, there would be no telling. And suddenly 
 she fell weeping. 
 
 " Oh, Teddy, Teddy," she cried through her stream- 
 ing tears. " How could you leave me ? How can I bear 
 it?" 
 
 Never a tear had she shed since the news first came, 
 and now she could weep, she could weep her grief out. 
 She abandoned herself unreservedly to this blessed re- 
 lief. . . . 
 
 § 6 
 There comes an end to weeping at last, and Letty lay 
 still, in the red light of the sinking sun. 
 
 She lay so still that presently a little foraging robin 
 
398 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 came flirting down to the grass not ten yards away and 
 stopped and looked at her. And then it came a hop or so 
 nearer. 
 
 She had been lying in a state of passive abandon- 
 ment, her swollen wet eyes open, regardless of everything. 
 But those quick movements caught her back to attention. 
 She began to watch the robin, and to note how it glanced 
 sidelong at her and appeared to meditate further ap- 
 proaches. She made an almost imperceptible movement, 
 and straightway the little creature was in a projecting 
 spray of berried hawthorn overhead. 
 
 Her tear-washed mind became vaguely friendly. With 
 an unconscious comfort it f ocussed down to the robin. She 
 rolled over, sat up, and imitated his friendly "cheep." 
 
 § 7 
 
 Presently she became aware of footsteps rustling through 
 the grass towards her. 
 
 She looked over her shoulder and discovered Mr. Brit- 
 ling approaching by the field path. He looked white and 
 tired and listless, even his bristling hair and moustache 
 conveyed his depression; he was dressed in an old tweed 
 knickerbocker suit and carrying a big atlas and some 
 papers. He had an effect of hesitation in his approach. 
 It was as if he wanted to talk to her and doubted her 
 reception for him. 
 
 He spoke without any preface. " Direck has told 
 you ? " he said, standing over her. 
 
 She answered with a sob. 
 
 " I was afraid it was so, and yet I did not believe it," 
 said Mr. Britling. " Until now." 
 
 He hesitated as if he would go on, and then he knelt 
 down on the grass a little way from her and seated him- 
 self. There was an interval of silence. 
 
 " At first it hurts like the devil," he said at last, look- 
 ing away at Mertonsome spire and speaking as if he spoke 
 
MBS. TEDDY GOES EOE A WALK 399 
 
 to no one in particular. " And then it hurts. It goes on 
 hurting. . . . And one can't say much to any one. . . ." 
 
 He said no more for a time. But the two of them com- 
 forted one another, and knew that they comforted each 
 other. They had a common feeling of fellowship and ease. 
 They had been stricken by the same thing; they under- 
 stood how it was with each other. It was not like the 
 attempted comfort they got from those who had not loved 
 and dreaded. . . . 
 
 She took up a little broken twig and dug small holes 
 in the ground with it. 
 
 " It's strange," she said, " but I'm glad I know for 
 sure." 
 
 " I can understand that," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " It stops the nightmares. ... It isn't hopes I've had 
 so much as fears. ... I wouldn't admit he was dead or 
 
 hurt. Because I couldn't think it without thinking 
 
 it — horrible. Now " 
 
 " It's final," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " It's definite," she said after a pause. " It's like 
 thinking he's asleep — for good." 
 
 But that did not satisfy her. There was more than 
 this in her mind. " It does away with the half and half," 
 she said. " He's dead or he is alive. . . ." 
 
 She looked up at Mr. Britling as if she measured his 
 understanding. 
 
 " You don't still doubt ? " he said. 
 
 " I'm content now in my mind — in a way. He wasn't 
 anyhow there — unless he was dead. But if I saw Teddy 
 
 coming over the hedge there to me It would be just 
 
 natural. . . . No, don't stare at me. I know really he 
 is dead. And it is a comfort. It is peace. . . . All the 
 thoughts of him being crushed dreadfully or being muti- 
 lated or lying and screaming — or things like that — 
 they've gone. He's out of his spoilt body. He's my un- 
 broken Teddy again. . . . Out of sight somewhere. . . . 
 Unbroken. . . . Sleeping." 
 
400 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 She resumed her excavation with the little stick, with 
 the tears running down her face. 
 
 Mr. Britling presently went on with the talk. " For 
 me it came all at once, without a doubt or a hope. I 
 hoped until the last that nothing would touch Hugh. And 
 then it was like a black shutter falling — in an in- 
 stant. . . ." 
 
 He considered. " Hugh, too, seems just round the cor- 
 ner at times. But at times, it's a blank place. . . . 
 
 "At times," said Mr. Britling, "I feel nothing but 
 astonishment. The whole thing becomes incredible. Just 
 as for weeks after the war began I couldn't believe that 
 a big modern nation could really go to war — seriously 
 — with its whole heart. . . . And they have killed Teddy 
 and Hugh. . . . 
 
 " They have killed millions. Millions — who had 
 fathers and mothers and wives and sweethearts. . . ." 
 
 § 8 
 
 " Somehow I can't talk about this to Edith. It is ri- 
 diculous, I know. But in some way I can't. ... It isn't 
 fair to her. If I could, I would. . . . Quite soon after 
 we were married I ceased to talk to her. I mean talking 
 really and simply — as I do to you. And it's never come 
 back. I don't know why. . . . And particularly I can't 
 talk to her of Hugh. . . . Little things, little shadows of 
 criticism, but enough to make it impossible. . . . And I 
 go about thinking about Hugh, and what has happened to 
 him sometimes ... as though I was stifling." 
 
 Letty compared her case. 
 
 " I don't want to talk about Teddy — not a word." 
 
 " That's queer. . . . But perhaps — a son is different. 
 Now I come to think of it — I've never talked of Mary. 
 . . . Not to any one ever. I've never thought of that be- 
 fore. But I haven't. I couldn't. No. Losing a lover, 
 that's a thing for oneself. I've been through that, you 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK 401 
 
 see. But a son's more outside you. Altogether. And 
 more your own making. It's not losing a thing in you; 
 it's losing a hope and a pride. . . . Once when I was a 
 little boy I did a drawing very carefully. It took me a 
 long time. . . . And a big boy tore it up. For no par- 
 ticular reason. Just out of cruelty. . . . That — that 
 was exactly like losing Hugh. . . ." 
 
 Letty reflected. 
 
 " No," she confessed, " I'm more selfish than that." 
 
 " It isn't selfish," said Mr. Britling. " But it's a dif- 
 ferent thing. It's less intimate, and more personally im- 
 portant." 
 
 " I have just thought, ' He's gone. He's gone.' Some- 
 times, do you know, I have felt quite angry with him. 
 Why need he have gone — so soon ? " 
 
 Mr. Britling nodded understandingly. 
 
 " I'm not angry. I'm not depressed. I'm just bitterly 
 hurt by the ending of something I had hoped to watch — 
 always — all my life," he said. " I don't know how it 
 is between most fathers and sons, but I admired Hugh. 
 I found exquisite things in him. I doubt if other people 
 saw them. He was quiet. He seemed clumsy. But he 
 had an extraordinary fineness. He was a creature of the 
 most delicate and rapid responses. . . . These aren't my 
 fond delusions. It was so. . . . Tou know, when he was 
 only a few days old, he would start suddenly at any strange 
 sound. He was alive like an iEolian harp from the very 
 beginning. . . . And his hair when he was born — he had 
 a lot of hair — was like the down on the breast of a bird. 
 I remember that now very vividly — and how I used to 
 like to pass my hand over it. It was silk, spun silk. Be- 
 fore he was two he could talk — whole sentences. He 
 had the subtlest ear. He loved long words. . . . And 
 then," he said with tears in his voice, " all this beautiful 
 fine structure, this brain, this fresh life as nimble as 
 water — as elastic as a steel spring, it is destroyed. . . . 
 
 " I don't make out he wasn't human. Often and often 
 
402 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 I have been angry with him, and disappointed in him. 
 There were all sorts of weaknesses in him. We all knew 
 them. And we didn't mind them. We loved him the 
 better. And his odd queer cleverness ! . . . And his pro- 
 found wisdom. And then all this beautiful and delicate 
 fabric, all those clear memories in his dear brain, all his 
 whims, his sudden inventions. . . . 
 
 " You know, I have had a letter from his chum Park. 
 He was shot through a loophole. The bullet went through 
 his eye and brow. . . . Think of it ! 
 
 " An amazement ... a blow ... a splattering of 
 blood. Rags of tormented skin and brain stuff. ... In 
 a moment. What had taken eighteen years — love and 
 care. . . ." 
 
 He sat thinking for an interval, and then went on, 
 " The reading and writing alone ! I taught him to read 
 myself — because his first governess, you see, wasn't very 
 clever. She was a very good methodical sort, but she had 
 no inspiration. So I got up all sorts of methods for teach- 
 ing him to read. But it wasn't necessary. He seemed 
 to leap all sorts of difficulties. He leapt to what one was 
 trying to teach him. It was as quick as the movement of 
 some wild animal. . . . 
 
 " He came into life as bright and quick as this robin 
 looking for food. . . . 
 
 " And he's broken up and thrown away. . . . Like a 
 cartridge case by the side of a covert. . . ." 
 
 He choked and stopped speaking. His elbows were on 
 his knees, and he put his face between his hands and 
 shuddered and became still. His hair was troubled. The 
 end of his stumpy moustache and a little roll of flesh stood 
 out at the side of his hand, and made him somehow twice as 
 pitiful. His big atlas, from which papers projected, 
 seemed forgotten by his side. So he sat for a long time, 
 and neither he nor Letty moved or spoke. But they were 
 in the same shadow. They found great comfort in one 
 
MBS. TEDDY GOES FOE A WALK 403 
 
 another. They had not been so comforted before since 
 their losses came upon them. 
 
 § » 
 
 It was Mr. Britling who broke silence. And when he 
 drew- his hands down from his face and spoke, he said 
 one of the most amazing and unexpected things she had 
 ever heard in her life. 
 
 " The only possible government in Albania," he said, 
 looking steadfastly before him down the hill-side, "is a 
 group of republican cantons after the Swiss pattern. I 
 can see no other solution that is not offensive to God. It 
 does not matter in the least what we owe to Serbia or 
 what we owe to Italy. We have got to set this world on 
 a different footing. We have got to set up the world at 
 last — on justice and reason." 
 
 Then, after a pause, " The Treaty of Bucharest was an 
 evil treaty. It must be undone. Whatever this German 
 King of Bulgaria does, that treaty must be undone and the 
 Bulgarians united again into one people. They must have 
 themselves, whatever punishment they deserve, they must 
 have nothing more, whatever reward they win." 
 
 She could not believe her ears. 
 
 " After this precious blood, after this precious blood, 
 if we leave one plot of wickedness or cruelty in the 
 world " 
 
 And therewith he began to lecture Letty on the im- 
 portance of international politics — to every one. How 
 he and she and every one must understand, however hard 
 it was to understand. 
 
 " No life is safe, no happiness is safe, there is no chance 
 of bettering life until we have made an end to all that 
 causes war. . . . 
 
 "We have to put an end to the folly and vanity of 
 kings, and to any people ruling any people but themselves. 
 
404 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 There is no convenience, there is no justice in any people 
 ruling any people but themselves; the ruling of men by 
 others, who have not their creeds and their languages and 
 their ignorances and prejudices, that is the fundamental 
 folly that has killed Teddy and Hugh — and these mil- 
 lions. To end that folly is as much our duly and business 
 as telling the truth or earning a living. . . ." 
 
 " But how can you alter it ? " 
 
 He held out a finger at her. " Men may alter anything 
 if they have motive enough and faith enough." 
 
 He indicated the atlas beside him. 
 
 " Here I am planning the real map of the world," he 
 said. " Every sort of district that has a character of its 
 own must have its own rule ; and the great republic of the 
 united states of the world must keep the federal peace 
 between them all. That's the plain sense of life; the 
 federal world-republic. Why do we bother ourselves with 
 loyalties to any other government but that ? It needs only 
 that sufficient men should say it, and that republic would 
 be here now. Why have we loitered so long — until these 
 tragic punishments come? We have to map the world 
 out into its states, and plan its government and the way of 
 its tolerations." 
 
 " And you think it will come ? " 
 
 " It will come." 
 
 "And you believe that men will listen to such 
 schemes ? " said Letty. 
 
 Mr. Britling, with his eyes far away over the hills, 
 seemed to think. " Yes," he said. " Not perhaps to-day 
 — not steadily. But kings and empires die ; great ideas, 
 once they are born, can never die again. In the end this 
 world-republic, this sane government of the world, is as 
 certain as the sunset. Only. . . ." 
 
 He sighed, and turned over a page of his atlas blindly. 
 
 " Only we want it soon. The world is weary of this 
 bloodshed, weary of all this weeping, of this wasting of 
 substance and this killing of sons and lovers. We want 
 
MES. TEDDY GOES EOE A WALK 405 
 
 it soon, and to have it soon we must work to bring it about. 
 We must give our lives. What is left of our lives. . . . 
 " That is what you and I must do, Letty. What else 
 is there left for us to do ? . . . I will write of nothing else, 
 I will think of nothing else now but of safety and order. 
 So that all these dear dead — not one of them but will 
 have brought the great days of peace and man's real be- 
 ginning nearer, and these cruel things that make men 
 whimper like children, that break down bright lives into 
 despair and kill youth at the very moment when it puts 
 out its clean hands to take hold of life — these cruelties, 
 these abominations of confusion, shall cease from the earth 
 forever." 
 
 § 10 
 
 Letty regarded him, frowning, and with her chin be- 
 tween her fists. . . . 
 
 " But do you really believe," said Letty, " that things 
 can be better than they are ? " 
 
 " But — Yes! " said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " I don't," said Letty. " The world is cruel. It is 
 just cruel. So it will always be." 
 
 " It need not be cruel," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " It is just a place of cruel things. It is all set with 
 knives. It is full of diseases and accidents. As for God 
 — either there is no God or he is an idiot. He is a 
 slobbering idiot. He is like some idiot who pulls off the 
 wings of flies." 
 
 " 'No," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 " There is no progress. Nothing gets better. How can 
 you believe in God after Hugh ? Do you believe in God ? " 
 
 " Yes," said Mr. Britling after a long pause ; " I do be- 
 lieve in God." 
 
 " Who lets these things happen ! " She raised herself 
 on her arm and thrust her argument at him with her hand. 
 " Who kills my Teddy and your Hugh — and millions." 
 
 " No," said Mr. Britling. 
 
406 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 " But he must let these things happen. Or why do they 
 happen ? " 
 
 " No," said Mr. Britling. " It is the theologians who 
 must answer that. They have been extravagant about 
 God. They have had silly absolute ideas — that He is all 
 powerful. That He's omni-everything. But the common 
 sense of men knows better. Every real religious thought 
 denies it. After all, the real God of the Christians is 
 Christ, not God Almighty; a poor mocked and wounded 
 God nailed on a cross of matter. . . . Some day He will 
 triumph. . . . But it is not fair to say that He causes all 
 things now. It is not fair to make out a case against him. 
 Tou have been misled. It is a theologian's folly. God 
 is not absolute; God is finite. ... A finite God who 
 struggles in his great and comprehensive way as we strug- 
 gle in our weak and silly way — who is with us — that is 
 the essence of all real religion. ... I agree with you 
 
 so Why ! if I thought there was an omnipotent God 
 
 who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste 
 and horror of this war — able to prevent these things — 
 doing them to amuse Himself — I would spit in his empty 
 face. . . ." 
 
 " Any one would. . . ." 
 
 " But it's your teachers and catechisms have set you 
 against God. . . . They want to make out He owns all 
 Nature. And all sorts of silly claims. Like the heralds 
 in the Middle Ages who insisted that Christ was certainly 
 a great gentleman entitled to bear arms. But God is 
 within Nature and necessity. Necessity is a thing beyond 
 God — beyond good and ill, beyond space and time, a 
 mystery everlastingly impenetrable. God is nearer than 
 that. Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the in- 
 nermost thing. Closer He is than breathing and nearer 
 than hands and feet. He is the Other Thing than this 
 world. Greater than Nature or Necessity, for he is a 
 spirit and they are blind, but not controlling them. . . . 
 Not yet. ..." 
 
MKS. TEDDY GOES FOE A WALK 407 
 
 " They always told me He was the maker of Heaven 
 and Earth." 
 
 " That's the Jew God the Christians took over. It's 
 a Quack God, a Panacea. It's not my God." 
 
 Letty considered these strange ideas. 
 
 " I never thought of Him like that," she said at last. 
 " It makes it all seem different." 
 
 " Nor did I. But I do now. ... I have suddenly 
 found it and seen it plain. I see it so plain that I am 
 amazed that I have not always seen it. . . . It is, you 
 see, so easy to understand that there is a God, and how 
 complex and wonderful and brotherly He is, when one 
 thinks of those dear boys who by the thousand, by the 
 hundred thousand, have laid down their lives. . . . Ay, 
 and there were German boys too who did the same. . . . 
 The cruelties, the injustice, the brute aggression — they 
 saw it differently. They laid down their lives — they 
 laid down their lives. - . . Those dear lives, those lives 
 of hope and sunshine. . . . 
 
 " Don't you see that it must be like that, Letty ? Don't 
 you see that it must be like that ? " 
 
 " No," she said, " I've seen things differently from 
 that." 
 
 " But it's so plain to me," said Mr. Britling. " If 
 there was nothing else in all the world but our kindness 
 for each other, or the love that made you weep in this kind 
 October sunshine, or the love I bear Hugh — if there was 
 nothing else at all — if everything else was cruelty and 
 mockery and filthiness and bitterness, it would still be 
 certain that there was a God of love and righteousness. 
 If there were no signs of God in all the world but the 
 godliness we have seen in those two boys of ours; if 
 we had no other light but the love we have between 
 us. . . . 
 
 " You don't mind if I talk like this « " said Mr. Brit- 
 ling. " It's all I can think of now — this God, this God 
 who struggles, who was in Hugh and Teddy, clear 
 
408 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 and plain, and how He must become the ruler of the 
 world. . . ." 
 
 " This God who struggles," she repeated. " I have 
 never thought of Him like that." 
 
 " Of course He must be like that," said Mr. Britling. 
 " How can God be a Person ; how can He be anything that 
 matters to man, unless He is limited and defined and — 
 human like ourselves. . . . With things outside Him and 
 beyond Him." 
 
 § 11 
 
 Letty walked back slowly through the fields of stubble 
 to her cottage. 
 
 She had been talking to Mr. Britling for an hour, and 
 her mind was full of the thought of this changed and 
 simplified man, who talked of God as he might have done 
 of a bird he had seen or of a tree he had sheltered under. 
 And all mixed up with this thought of Mr. Britling was 
 this strange idea of God who was also a limited person, 
 who could come as close as Teddy, whispering love in the 
 darkness. She had a ridiculous feeling that God really 
 struggled like Mr. Britling, and that with only some in- 
 definable inferiority of outlook Mr. Britling loved like 
 God. She loved him for his maps and his dreams and 
 the bareness of his talk to her. It was strange how the 
 straining thought of the dead Teddy had passed now out 
 of her mind. She was possessed by a sense of ending and 
 beginning, as though a page had turned over in her life 
 and everything was new. She had never given religion 
 any thought but contemptuous thought for some years, 
 since indeed her growing intelligence had dismissed it as 
 a scheme of inexcusable restraints and empty pretences, 
 a thing of discords where there were no discords except 
 of its making. She had been a happy Atheist. She had 
 played in the sunshine, a natural creature with the com- 
 pletest confidence in the essential goodness of the world 
 
MBS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK 409 
 
 in which she found herself. She had refused all thought 
 of painful and disagreeable things. Until the bloody paw 
 of war had wiped out all her assurance. Teddy, the play- 
 mate, was over, the love game was ended for ever; the 
 fresh happy acceptance of life as life ; and in the place of 
 Teddy was the sorrow of life, the pity of life^ and this 
 coming of God out of utter remoteness into a conceivable 
 relation to her own existence. 
 
 She had left Mr. Britling to his atlas. He lay prone 
 under the hedge with it spread before him. His occupa- 
 tion would have seemed to her only a little while ago the 
 absurdest imaginable. He was drawing boundaries on his 
 maps very carefully in red ink, with a fountain pen. But 
 now she understood. 
 
 She knew that those red ink lines of Mr. Britling's 
 might in the end prove wiser and stronger than the bar- 
 gains of the diplomats. . . . 
 
 In the last hour he had come very near to her. She 
 found herself full of an unwonted affection for him. She 
 had never troubled her head about her relations with any 
 one except Teddy before. Now suddenly she seemed to 
 be opening out to all the world for kindness. This new 
 idea of a friendly God, who had a struggle of his own, who 
 could be thought of as kindred to Mr. Britling, as kindred 
 to Teddy — had gripped her imagination. He was be- 
 hind the autumnal sunshine ; he was in the little bird that 
 had seemed so confident and friendly. Whatever was 
 kind, whatever was tender; there was God. And a thou- 
 sand old phrases she had read and heard and given little 
 heed eo, that had lain like dry bones in her memory, sud- 
 denly were clothed in flesh and became alive. This God 
 — if this was God — then indeed it was not nonsense to 
 say that God was love, that he was a friend and com- 
 panion. . . . With him it might be possible to face a 
 world in which Teddy and she would never walk side by 
 side again nor plan any more happiness for ever. After 
 all she had been very happy ; she had had wonderful hap- 
 
410 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 piness. She had had far more happiness, far more love, 
 in her short years or so than most people had in their whole 
 lives. And so in the reaction of her emotions, Letty, who 
 had gone out with her head full of murder and revenge, 
 came hack through the sunset thinking of pity, of the 
 thousand kindnesses and tendernesses of Teddy that were, 
 after all, perhaps only an intimation of the limitless kind- 
 nesses and tendernesses of God. . . . What right had she 
 to a white and hitter grief, self-centred and vindictive, 
 while old Britling could still plan an age of mercy in the 
 earth and a red-gold sunlight that was warm as a smile 
 from Teddy lay on all the world. . . . 
 
 She must go into the cottage and kiss Cissie, and put 
 away that parcel out of sight until she could find some 
 poor soldier to whom she could send it. She had been 
 pitiless towards Cissie in her grief. She had, in the ego- 
 tism of her sorrow, treated Cissie as she might have treated 
 a chair or a table, with no thought that Cissie might be 
 weary, might dream of happiness still to come. Cissie 
 had still to play the lover, and her man was already in 
 khaki. There would be no such year as Letty had had in 
 the days before the war darkened the world. Before 
 Cissie's marrying the peace must come, and the peace was 
 still far away. And Direck too would have to take his 
 chances. . . . 
 
 Letty came through the little wood and over the stile 
 that brought her into sight of the cottage. The windows 
 of the cottage as she saw it under the bough of the big 
 walnut tree, were afire from the sun. The crimson ram- 
 bler over the porch that she and Teddy had planted was 
 still bearing roses. The door was open and people were 
 moving in the porch. 
 
 Some one was coming out of the cottage, a stranger, 
 in an unfamiliar costume, and behind him was a man in 
 khaki — but that was Mr. Direck ! And behind him again 
 was Cissie. 
 
 But the stranger! 
 
MRS. TEDDY GOES EOR A WALK 411 
 
 He came out of the frame- of the porch towards the gar- 
 den gate. . . . 
 
 Who — who was this stranger ? 
 
 It was a man in queer-looking foreign clothes, baggy 
 trousers of some soft-looking blue stuff and a blouse, and 
 he had a white-bandaged left arm. He had a hat stuck 
 at the back of his head, ajl ^- a beard. . . . 
 
 He was entirely a stranger, a foreigner. Was she go- 
 ing insane? Of course he was a stranger! 
 
 And then he moved a step, he made a queer sideways 
 pace, a caper, on the path, and instantly he ceased to be 
 strange and foreign. He became amazingly, incredibly, 
 familiar by virtue of that step. . . . 
 
 No! 
 
 Her breath stopped. All Letty's being seemed to stop. 
 And this stranger who was also incredibly familiar, after 
 he had stared at her motionless form for a moment, waved 
 his hat with a gesture — a gesture that crowned and sealed 
 the effect of familiarity. She gave no sign in reply. 
 
 No, that familiarity was just a mad freakishness in 
 things. ' 
 
 This strange man came from Belgium perhaps, to tell 
 something about Teddy. . . . 
 
 And then she surprised herself by making a groaning 
 noise, an absurd silly noise, just like the noise when one 
 imitates a cow to a child. She said " Mooo-oo." 
 
 And she began to run forward, with legs that seemed 
 misfits, waving her hands about, and as she ran she saw 
 more and more certainly that this wounded man in strange 
 clothing was Teddy. She ran faster and still faster, 
 stumbling arid nearly falling. If she did not get to him 
 speedily the world would burst. 
 
 To hold him, to hold close to him ! . . . 
 
 " Letty ! Letty ! Just one arm. . . ." 
 
 She was clinging to him and he was holding her. . . . 
 
 It was all right. She had always known it was all right. 
 (Hold close to him.) Except just for a little while. But 
 
412 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 that had been foolishness. Hadn't she always known he 
 was alive ? And here he was alive ! (Hold close to him.) 
 Only it was so good to be sure — after all her torment ; 
 to hold him, to hang about him, to feel the solid man, kiss- 
 ing her, weeping too, weeping together with her. " Teddy 
 my love ! " 
 
 § 12 
 
 Letty was in the cottage struggling to hear and under- 
 stand things too complicated for her emotion-crowded 
 mind. There was something that Mr. Direck was trying 
 to explain about a delayed telegram that had come soon 
 after she had gone out. There was much indeed that Mr. 
 Direck was trying to explain. What did any explanation 
 really matter when you had Teddy, with nothing but a 
 strange beard and a bandaged arm between him and your- 
 self ? She had an absurd persuasion at first that those 
 two strangenesses would also presently be set aside, so 
 that Teddy would become just exactly what Teddy had 
 always been. 
 
 Teddy had been shot through the upper arm. . . . 
 
 " My hand has gone, dear little LeJ;ty. It's my left 
 hand, luckily. I shall have to wear a hook like some old 
 pirate. ..." 
 
 There was something about his being taken prisoner. 
 *' That other officer " — that was Mr. Direck's officer — 
 u had been lying there for days." Teddy had been shot 
 through the upper arm, and stunned by a falling beam. 
 When he came to he was disarmed, with a German stand- 
 ing over him. ... 
 
 ' Then afterwards he had escaped. In quite a little time 
 he had escaped. He had been in a railway station some- 
 where in Belgium ; locked in a waiting-room with three or 
 four French prisoners, and the junction had been bombed 
 by French and British aeroplanes. Their guard and two 
 of the prisoners had been killed. In the confusion the 
 others had got away into the town. There were trucks 
 
MES. TEDDY GOES FOE A WALK 413 
 
 of hay on fire, and a store of petrol was in danger. " After 
 that one was bound to escape. One would have been shot 
 if one had been found wandering about." 
 
 The bomb had driven some splinters of glass and cor- 
 rugated iron into Teddy's wrist; it seemed a small place 
 at first; it didn't trouble him for weeks. But then some 
 dirt got into it. 
 
 In the narrow cobbled street beyond the station he had 
 happened upon a woman who knew no English, but who 
 took him to a priest, and the priest had hidden him. 
 
 Letty did not piece together the whole story at first. 
 She did not want the story very much ; she wanted to know 
 about this hand and arm. 
 
 There would be queer things in the story when it came 
 to be told. There was an old peasant who had made 
 Teddy work in his fields in spite of his smashed and ach- 
 ing arm, and who had pointed to a passing German when 
 Teddy demurred; there were the people called "they" 
 who had at that time organised the escape of stragglers 
 into Holland. There was the night watch, those long 
 nights in succession before the dash for liberty- But 
 Letty's concern was all with the hand. Inside the sling 
 there was something that hurt the imagination, something 
 bandaged, a stump. She could not think of it. She could 
 not get away from the thought of it. 
 
 " But why did you lose your hand ? " 
 
 It was only a little place at first, and then it got pain- 
 ful. . . . 
 
 " But I didn't go into a hospital because I was afraid 
 they would intern me, and so I wouldn't be able to 
 come home. And I was dying to come home. I was — 
 homesick. No one was ever so homesick. I've thought 
 of this place and the garden, and how one looked out of 
 the window at the passers-by, a thousand times. I seemed 
 always to be seeing them. Old Dimple with his benevolent 
 smile, and Mrs. Wolker at the end cottage, and how she 
 used to fetch her beer and wink when she caught us look- 
 
414 MK. BRITLLKTG SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 ing at her, and little Charlie Slobberface sniffing on his 
 way to the pigs and all the rest of them. And you, Letty. 
 Particularly you. And how we used to lean on the win- 
 dow-sill with our shoulders touching, and your cheek just 
 in front of my eyes. . . . And nothing aching at all in 
 one. . . . 
 
 " How I thought of that and longed for that ! . . . 
 
 " And so, you see, I didn't go to the hospital. I kept 
 hoping to get to England first. And I left it too 
 long. . . ." 
 
 " Life's come back to me with you ! " said Letty. 
 " Until just to-day I've believed you'd come back. And 
 to-day — I doubted. ... I thought it was all over — all 
 the real life, love and the dear fun of things, and that 
 there was nothing before me, nothing before me but just 
 holding out — and keeping your memory. . . . Poor arm. 
 Poor arm. And being kind to people. And pretending 
 you were alive somewhere. . . . I'll not care about the 
 arm. In a little while. . . . I'm glad you've gone, but 
 I'm gladder you're back and can never go again. . . . 
 And I will be your right hand, dear, and your left hand 
 and all your hands. Both my hands for your dear lost 
 left one. You shall have three hands instead of 
 two. . . ." 
 
 § 13 
 
 Letty stood by the window as close as she could to Teddy 
 in a world that seemed wholly made up of unexpected 
 things. She could not heed the others, it was only when 
 Teddy spoke to the others, or when they spoke to Teddy, 
 that they existed for her. 
 
 For instance, Teddy was presently talking to Mr. 
 Direck. 
 
 They had spoken about the Canadians who had come 
 up and relieved the Essex men after the fight in which 
 Teddy had been captured. And then it was manifest that 
 Mr. Direck was talking of his regiment. " I'm not the 
 
MES. TEDDY GOES EOR A WALK 415 
 
 only American -who has gone Canadian — for the dura- 
 tion of the war." 
 
 He had got to his explanation at last. 
 
 " I've told a lie," he said triumphantly. " I've shifted 
 my birthplace six hundred miles. 
 
 " Mind you, I don't admit a thing that Cissie has ever 
 said about America — not one thing. You don't under- 
 stand the sort of proposition America is up against. 
 America is the New World, where there are no races and 
 nations any more ; she is the Melting Pot, from which we 
 will cast the better state. I've believed that always — 
 in spite of a thousand little things I believe it now. I go 
 back on nothing. I'm not fighting as an American either. 
 I'm fighting simply as myself. . . . I'm not going fight- 
 ing for England, mind you. Don't you fancy that. I 
 don't know I'm so particularly in love with a lot of Eng- 
 lish ways as to do that. I don't see how any one can be 
 very much in love with your Empire, with its dead-alive 
 Court, its artful politicians, its lords and ladies and 
 snobs, its way with the Irish and its way with India, 
 and everybody shifting responsibility and telling lies about 
 your common people. I'm not going fighting for Eng- 
 land. I'm going fighting for Cissie — and justice and 
 Belgium and all that — but more particularly for Cissie. 
 And anyhow I can't look Pa Britling in the face any 
 more. . . . And I want to see those trenches — close. I 
 reckon they're a thing it will be interesting to talk about 
 some day. ... So I'm going," said Mr. Direck. " But 
 chiefly — it's Cissie. See?" 
 
 Cissie had come and stood by the side of him. 
 
 She looked from poor broken Teddy to him and back 
 again. 
 
 " Up to now," she said, " I've wanted you to go. . . ." 
 
 Tears came into her eyes. 
 
 " I suppose I must let you go," she said. " Oh ! I'd 
 hate you not to go. . . ." 
 
4:16 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 14 
 
 " Good God ! how old the Master looks ! " cried Teddy 
 suddenly. 
 
 He was standing at the window, and as Mr. Direck came 
 forward inquiringly he pointed to the figure of Mr. Brit- 
 ling passing along the road towards the Dower House. 
 
 " He does look old. I hadn't noticed," said Mr. Direck. 
 
 " Why, he's gone grey ! " cried Teddy, peering. " He 
 wasn't grey when I left." 
 
 They watched the knickerhockered figure of Mr. Brit- 
 ling receding up the hill, atlas and papers in his hands 
 behind his back. 
 
 " I must go out to him," said Teddy, disengaging him- 
 self from Letty. 
 
 " No," she said, arresting him with her hand. 
 
 " But he will be glad " 
 
 She stood in her husband's way. She had a vision of 
 Mr. Britling suddenly called out of his dreams of God 
 ruling the united states of the world, to rejoice at Teddy's 
 restoration. . . . 
 
 " No," she said ; " it will only make him think again 
 of Hugh — and how he died. Don't go out, Teddy. Not 
 now. What does he care for you? . . . Let him rest 
 from such things. . . . Leave him to dream over his atlas. 
 . . . He isn't so desolate — if you knew. ... I will tell 
 you, Teddy — when I can. . . . 
 
 " But just now No, he will think of Hugh again. 
 
 . . . Let him go. . . . He has God and his atlas there. 
 . . . They're more than you think." 
 
OHAPTEE THE SECOND 
 
 ME. BBITLING WRITES UNTIL SOTTEISE 
 
 It was some weeks later. It was now the middle of 
 November, and Mr. Britling, very warmly wrapped in his 
 thick dressing-gown and his thick llama wool pyjamas, 
 was sitting at his night desk, and working ever and again 
 at an essay, an essay of preposterous ambitions, for the 
 title of it was " The Better Government of the World." 
 
 Latterly he had had much sleepless misery. In the day 
 life was tolerable, but in the night — unless he defended 
 himself by working, the losses and cruelties of the war 
 came and grimaced at him, insufferably. Now he would 
 be haunted by long processions of refugees, now he would 
 think of the dead lying stiff and twisted in a thousand 
 dreadful attitudes. Then again he would be overwhelmed 
 with anticipations of the frightful economic and social 
 dissolution that might lie ahead. ... At other times he 
 thought of wounds and the deformities of body and spirit 
 produced by injuries. And sometimes he would think of 
 the triumph of evil. Stupid and triumphant persons went 
 about a world that stupidity had desolated, with swagger- 
 ing gestures, with a smiling consciousness of enhanced im- 
 portance, with their scornful hatred of all measured and 
 temperate and kindly things turned now to scornful con- 
 tempt. And mingling with the soil they walked on lay 
 the dead body of Hugh, face downward. At the back of 
 the boy's head, rimmed by blood-stiffened hair — the hair 
 that had once been " as soft as the down of a bird " — 
 was a big red hole. That hole was always pitilessly dis- 
 
 417 
 
418 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 tinct. They stepped on him — heedlessly. They heeled 
 the scattered stuff of his exquisite hrain into the clay. . . . 
 From all such moods of horror Mr. Britling's circle of 
 lamplight was his sole refuge. His work could conjure 
 up visions, like opium visions, of a world of order and 
 justice. Amidst the gloom of world bankruptcy he stuck 
 to the prospectus of a braver enterprise — reckless of his 
 chances of subscribers. . . . 
 
 § 2 
 
 But this night even this circle of lamplight would not 
 "hold his mind. Doubt had crept into this last fastness. 
 He pulled the papers towards him, and turned over the 
 portion he had planned. 
 
 His purpose in the book he was beginning to write was 
 to reason out the possible methods of government that 
 would give a stabler, saner control to the world. He be- 
 lieved still in democracy, but he was realising more and 
 more that democracy had yet to discover its method. It 
 had to take hold of the consciences of men, it had to equip 
 itself with still unformed organisations. Endless years of 
 patient thinking, of experimenting, of discussion lay be- 
 fore mankind ere this great idea could become reality, and 
 right, the proven right thing, could rule the earth. 
 
 Meanwhile the world must still remain a scene of blood- 
 stained melodrama, of deafening noise, contagious follies, 
 vast irrational destructions. One fine life after another 
 went down from study and university and laboratory to 
 be slain and silenced. . . . 
 
 Was it conceivable that this mad monster of mankind 
 would ever be caught and held in the thin-spun webs of 
 thought? 
 
 Was it, after all, anything but pretension and folly for 
 a man to work out plans for the better government of the 
 world? — was it any better than the ambitious scheming 
 of some fly upon the wheel of the romantic gods ? 
 
 Man has come, floundering and wounding and suffer- 
 
ME. BEITLING WEITES UNTIL SUNRISE 419 
 
 ing, out of the breeding darknesses of Time, that will 
 presently crush and consume him again. "Why not 
 flounder with the rest, why not eat, drink, fight, scream, 
 weep and pray, forget Hugh, stop brooding upon Hugh, 
 banish all these priggish dreams of " The Better Govern- 
 ment of the World," and turn to the brighter aspects, the 
 funny and adventurous aspects of the war, the Chester- 
 tonian jolliness, Punch side of things? Think you be- 
 cause your sons are dead that there will be no more cakes 
 and ale % Let mankind blunder out of the mud and blood 
 as mankind has blundered in. . . . 
 
 Let us at any rate keep our precious Sense of 
 Humour. ... 
 
 He pulled his manuscript towards him. For a time he 
 sat decorating the lettering of his title, " The Better Gov- 
 ernment of the World," with little grinning gnomes' heads 
 and waggish tails. . . . 
 
 On the top of Mr. Britling's desk, beside the clock, lay 
 a letter, written in clumsy English and with its envelope 
 resealed by a label which testified that it had been 
 " OPENED BY CENSOE." 
 
 The friendly go-between in Norway had written to tell 
 Mr. Britling that Herr Heinrich also was dead; he had 
 died a wounded prisoner in Eussia some months ago. He 
 had been wounded and captured, after undergoing great 
 hardships, during the great Eussian attack upon the passes 
 of the Carpathians in the early spring, and his wound had 
 mortified. He had recovered partially for a time, and 
 then he had been beaten and injured again in some struggle 
 between German and Croatian prisoners, and he had sick- 
 ened and died. Before he died he had written to his 
 parents, and once again he had asked that the fiddle he had 
 left in Mr. Britling's care should if possible be returned 
 to them. It was manifest that both for him and them now 
 it had become a symbol with many associations. 
 
420 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 The substance of this letter invaded the orange circle 
 of the lamp ; it would have to be answered, and the poten- 
 tialities of the answer were running through Mr. Brit- 
 ling's brain to the exclusion of any impersonal composi- 
 tion. He thought of the old parents away there in Pom- 
 erania — he believed but he was not quite sure, that Hein- 
 rich had been an only son — and of the pleasant spectacled 
 figure that had now become a broken and decaying thing 
 in a prisoner's shallow grave. . . . 
 
 Another son had gone — all the world was losing its 
 sons. . . . 
 
 He found himself thinking of young Heinrich in the 
 very manner, if with a lesser intensity, in which he thought 
 about his own son, as of hopes senselessly destroyed. His 
 mind took no note of the fact that Heinrich was an enemy, 
 that by the reckoning of a " war of attrition " his death 
 was balance and compensation for the death of Hugh. 
 He went straight to the root fact that they had been gal- 
 lant and kindly beings, and that the same thing had killed 
 them both. . . . 
 
 By no conceivable mental gymnastics could he think of 
 the two as antagonists. Between them there was no im- 
 aginable issue. They had both very much the same scien- 
 tific disposition; with perhaps more dash and inspiration 
 in the quality of Hugh; more docility and method in the 
 case of Karl. Until war had smashed them one against 
 the other. ... 
 
 He recalled his first sight of Heinrich at the junction, 
 and how he had laughed at the sight of his excessive 
 Teutonism. The close-cropped shining fair bead sur- 
 mounted by a yellowish-white corps cap had appeared 
 dodging about among the people upon the platform, and 
 manifestly asking questions. The face had been very pink 
 with the effort of an unaccustomed tongue. The young 
 man had been clad in a suit of white flannel refined by a 
 purple line ; his boots were of that greenish yellow leather 
 that only a German student could esteem " chic " ; his 
 
ME. BRITLING WRITES UNTIL SUNRISE 421 
 
 rucksack was upon his back, and the precious fiddle in its 
 case was carried very carefully in one hand; this same 
 dead fiddle. The other hand held a stick with a carved 
 knob and a pointed end. He had been too German for 
 belief. " Herr Heinrich ! " Mr. Britling had said, and 
 straightway the heels had clashed together for a bow, a 
 bow from the waist, a bow that a heedless old lady much 
 burthened with garden produce had greatly disarranged 
 From first to last amidst our off-hand English ways Herr 
 Heinrich had kept his bow — and always it had been get- 
 ting disarranged. 
 
 That had been his constant effect; a little stiff, 
 a little absurd, and always clean and pink and methodical. 
 The boys had liked him without reserve, Mrs. Britling 
 had liked him; everybody had found him a likeable crea- 
 ture. He never complained of anything except picnics. 
 But he did object to picnics; to the sudden departure of 
 the family to wild surroundings for the consumption of 
 cold, knifeless and forkless meals in the serious middle 
 hours of the day. He protested to Mr. Britling, respect- 
 fully but very firmly. It was, he held, implicit in their 
 understanding that he should have a cooked meal in the 
 middle of the day. Otherwise his Magen was perplexed 
 and disordered. In the evening he could not eat with any 
 gravity or profit. . . . 
 
 Their disposition towards under-feeding and a certain 
 lack of fine sentiment were the only flaws in the English 
 scheme that Herr Heinrich admitted. He certainly 
 found the English unfeeling. His heart went even less 
 satisfied than his Magen. He was a being of expressive 
 affections; he wanted great friendships, mysterious re- 
 lationships, love. He tried very bravely to revere and to 
 understand and be occultly understood by Mr. Britling; 
 he sought long walks and deep talks with Hugh and the 
 small boys ; he tried to fill his heart with Cissie ; he found 
 at last marvels of innocence and sweetness in the Hickson 
 girL She wore her hair in a pigtail when first he met 
 
422 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 her, and it made her almost Marguerite. This young man 
 had cried aloud for love, warm and filling, like the Mit- 
 tagsessen that was implicit in their understanding. And 
 all these Essex people failed to satisfy him; they were 
 silent, they were subtle, they slipped through the fat yet 
 eager fingers of his heart, so that he fell back at last upon 
 himself and his German correspondents and the idealisa- 
 tion of Maud Hickson and the moral education of Billy. 
 Billy. Mr. Britling's memories came back at last to the 
 figure of young Heinrich with the squirrel on his shoulder, 
 that had so often stood in the way of the utter condem- 
 nation of Germany. That, seen closely, was the stuff 
 of one brutal Prussian. What quarrel had we with 
 him? . . . 
 
 Other memories of Heinrich flitted across Mr. Brit- 
 ling's reverie. Heinrich at hockey, running with extreme 
 swiftness and little skill, tricked and baffled by Letty, 
 dodged by Hugh, going headlong forward and headlong 
 back, and then with a cry flinging himself flat on the 
 ground exhausted. ... Or again Heinrich very grave 
 and very pink, peering through his glasses at his cards 
 at Skat. ... Or Heinrich in the boats upon the great 
 pond, or Heinrich swimming, or Heinrich hiding very, 
 very artfully from the boys about the garden on a theory 
 of his own, or Heinrich in strange postures, stalking the 
 deer in Claverings Park. Eor a time he had had a great 
 ambition to creep quite close to a deer and touch it. . . . 
 Or Heinrich indexing. He had a passion for listing and 
 indexing books, music, any loose classifiable thing. His 
 favourite amusement was devising schemes for the inden- 
 tation of dictionary leaves, so that one could turn instantly 
 to the needed word. He had bought and cut the edges 
 of three dictionaries; each in succession improved upon 
 the other; he had had great hopes of patents and wealth 
 arising therefrom. . . . And his room had been a source 
 of strange sounds; his search for music upon the violin. 
 Hs had h^ped when he came to Matching's Easy to join 
 
ME. BRITLING WEITES UNTIL SUNRISE 423 
 
 " some string quartette." But Matching's Easy produced 
 no string quartette. He had to fall back upon the pianola, 
 and try to play duets with that. Only the pianola did all 
 the duet itself, and in the hands of a small Britling was 
 apt to betray a facetious moodiness; sudden alternations 
 between extreme haste and extreme lassitude. . . . 
 
 Then there came a memory of Heinrich talking very 
 seriously; his glasses magnifying his round blue eyes, 
 talking of his ideas about life, of his beliefs and disbeliefs, 
 of his ambitions and prospects in life. 
 
 He confessed two principal ambitions. They varied 
 perhaps in their absolute dimensions, but they were of 
 equal importance in his mind. The first of these was, 
 so soon as he had taken his doctorate in philology, to give 
 himself to the perfecting of an International Language; 
 it was to combine all the virtues of Esperanto and Ido. 
 " And then," said Herr Heinrich, " I do not think there 
 will be any more wars — ever." The second ambition, 
 which was important first because Herr Heinrich found 
 much delight in working at it, and secondly because he 
 thought it would give him great wealth and opportunity 
 for propagating the perfect speech, was the elaboration of 
 his system of marginal indentations for dictionaries and 
 alphabetical books of reference of all sorts. It was to be 
 so complete that one would just stand over the book to 
 be consulted, run hand and eye over its edges and open 
 the book — " at the very exact spot." He proposed to 
 follow this business up with a quite Germanic thorough- 
 ness. " Presently," he said, " I must study the machin- 
 ery by which the edges of books are cut. It is possible I 
 may have to invent these also." This was the double- 
 barrelled scheme of Herr Heinrich's career. And along 
 it he was to go, and incidentally develop his large vague 
 heart that was at present so manifestly unsatisfied. . . . 
 
 Such was the brief story of Herr Heinrich. 
 
 That story was over — just as Hugh's story was over. 
 That first volume would never now have a second and 
 
424 ME. BRITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 a third. It ended in some hasty grave in Russia. The 
 great scheme for marginal indices would never be patented, 
 the duets with the pianola would never be played again. 
 
 Imagination glimpsed a little figure toiling manfully 
 through the slush and snow of the Carpathians; saw it 
 staggering under its first experience of shell fire; set it 
 amidst attacks and flights and fatigue and hunger and a 
 rush perhaps in the darkness; guessed at the wounding 
 blow. Then came the pitiful pilgrimage of the prisoners 
 into captivity, captivity in a land desolated, impoverished 
 and embittered. Came wounds wrapped in filthy rags, 
 pain and want of occupation, and a poor little bent and 
 broken Heinrich sitting aloof in a crowded compound 
 nursing a mortifying wound. . . . 
 
 He used always to sit in a peculiar attitude with his 
 arms crossed on his crossed legs, looking slantingly 
 through his glasses. . . . 
 
 So he must have sat, and presently he lay on some 
 rough bedding and suffered, untended, in infinite discom- 
 fort; lay motionless and thought at times, it may be, of 
 Matching's Easy and wondered what Hugh and Teddy 
 were doing. Then he became fevered, and the world 
 grew bright-coloured and fantastic and ugly for him. 
 Until one day an infinite weakness laid hold of him, and 
 his pain grew faint and all his thoughts and memories 
 grew faint — and still fainter. . . . 
 
 The violin had been brought into Mr. Britling's study 
 that afternoon, and lay upon the further window-seat. 
 Poor little broken sherd, poor little fragment of a shat- 
 tered life ! It looked in its case like a baby in a coffin. 
 
 " I must write a letter to the old father and mother," 
 Mr. Britling thought. " I can't just send the poor little 
 fiddle — without a word. In all this pitiful storm of wit- 
 less hate — surely there may be one greeting — not 
 hateful. 
 
 " From my blackness to yours," said Mr. Britling aloud. 
 
 He would have to write it in English. But even if 
 
ME. BRITLING WRITES UNTIL SUNRISE 425 
 
 they knew no English some one would be found to trans- 
 late it to them. He wotdd have to write very plainly. 
 
 § 4 
 
 He pushed aside the manuscript of " The Better Gov- 
 ernment of the World," and began to write rather slowly, 
 shaping his letters roundly and distinctly: 
 
 Dear Sir, 
 
 I am writing this letter to you to tell you I am sending 
 back the few little things I had kept for your son at his 
 request when the war broke out. I am sending them 
 
 Mr. Britling left that blank for the time until he could 
 arrange the method of sending to the Norwegian inter- 
 mediary. 
 
 Especially I am sending his violin, which he had asked 
 me thrice to convey to you. Either it is a gift from you 
 or it symbolised many things for him that he connected 
 with home and you. I will have it packed with par- 
 ticular care, and I will do all in my power to ensure its 
 safe arrival. 
 
 I want to tell you that all the stress and passion of this 
 war has not made us here in Matching 's Easy forget our 
 friend your son. He was one of us, he had our affection, 
 he had friends here who are still his friends. We found 
 him honourable and companionable, and we share some- 
 thing of your loss. I have got together for you a few 
 snapshots I chance to possess in which you will see Mm 
 in the sunshine, and which will enable you perhaps to 
 picture a little more definitely than you would otherwise 
 do the life he led here. There is one particularly that I 
 have marked. Our family is lunching out-of-doors, and 
 you will see that next to your son is a youngster, a year 
 or so his junior, who is touching glasses with him. I 
 have put a cross over his head. He is my eldest son, he 
 
426 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 ivas very dear to me, and he too has been hilled in this 
 war. They are, you see, smiling very pleasantly at each 
 other. 
 
 While writing this Mr. Britling had been struck by 
 the thought of the photographs, and he had taken them 
 out of the little drawer into which he was accustomed to 
 thrust them. He picked out the ones that showed the 
 young German, but there were others, bright with sun- 
 shine, that were now charged with acquired significances ; 
 there were two showing the children and Teddy and Hugh 
 and Cissie and Letty doing the goose step, and there was 
 one of Mr. Van der Pant, smiling at the front door, in 
 Heinrich's abandoned slippers. There were endless pic- 
 tures of Teddy also. It is the happy instinct of the 
 Kodak to refuse those days that are overcast, and the 
 photographic record of a life is a chain of all its kindlier 
 aspects. In the drawer above these snapshots there were 
 Hugh's letters and a miscellany of trivial documents 
 touching on his life. 
 
 Mr. Britling discontinued writing and turned these 
 papers over and mused. Heinrich's letters and postcards 
 had got in among them, and so had a letter of 
 Teddy's. . . . 
 
 The letters reinforced the photographs in their re- 
 minder how kind and pleasant a race mankind can be. 
 Until the wild asses of nationalism came kicking and 
 slaying amidst them, until suspicion and jostling greed 
 and malignity poison their minds, until the fools with the 
 high explosives blow that elemental goodness into shrieks 
 of hate and splashes of blood. How kindly men are — 
 up to the very instant of their cruelties! His mind 
 teemed suddenly with little anecdotes and histories of the 
 goodwill of men breaking through the ill-will of war, of 
 the mutual help of sorely wounded Germans and English 
 lying together in the mud and darkness between the 
 trenches, of the fellowship of captors and prisoners, of 
 
ME. BEITLING WEITES UNTIL SUKRISE 427 
 
 the Saxons at Christmas fraternising with the English. 
 . . . Of that he had seen photographs in one of the daily 
 papers. . . . 
 
 His mind came back presently from these wanderings 
 to the task before him. 
 
 He tried to picture these Heinrich parents. He sup- 
 posed they were kindly, civilised people. It was manifest 
 the youngster had come to him from a well-ordered and 
 gentle-spirited home. But he imagined them — he could 
 not tell why — as people much older than himself. Per- 
 haps young Heinrich had on some occasion said they were 
 old people — he could not remember. And he had a 
 curious impulse too to write to them in phrases of con- 
 solation; as if their loss was more pitiable than his own. 
 He doubted whether they had the consolation of his san- 
 guine temperament, whether they could resort as readily 
 as he could to his faith, whether in Pomerania there was 
 the same consoling possibility of an essay on the Better 
 Government of the World. He did not think this very 
 clearly, but that was what was at the back of his mind. 
 He went on writing. 
 
 If you think that these two boys have both perished, 
 not in some noble common cause but one against the other 
 in a struggle of dynasties and boundaries and trade routes 
 and tyrannous ascendancies, then it seems to me that you 
 must feel as I feel that this war is the most tragic and 
 dreadful thing that has ever happened to mankind. 
 
 He sat thinking for some minutes after he had written 
 that, and when presently he resumed his writing, a fresh 
 strain of thought was traceable even in his opening 
 sentence. 
 
 If you count dead and wounds this is the most dreadful 
 war in history; for you as for me, it has been almost the 
 extremity of personal tragedy. . . . Black sorrow. . . . 
 
428 MR BKITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 But is it the most dreadful war? 
 
 I do not think it is. I can write to you and tell you 
 that I do indeed believe that our two sons have died not 
 altogether in vain. Our pain and anguish may not be 
 wasted — may be necessary. Indeed they may be neces- 
 sary. Here am I bereaved and wretched — and I hope. 
 Nerer was the fabric of war so black: that I admit. But 
 never was the black fabric of war so threadbare. At a 
 thousand points the light is shining through. 
 
 Mr. Britling's pen stopped. 
 
 There was perfect stillness in the study bedroom. 
 
 " The tinpot style," said Mr. Britling at last in a voice 
 of extreme bitterness. 
 
 He fell into an extraordinary quarrel with his style. 
 He forgot about those Pomeranian parents altogether in 
 his exasperation at his own inexpressiveness, at his incom- 
 plete control of these rebel words and phrases that came 
 trailing each its own associations and suggestions to 
 hamper his purpose with it. He read over the offending 
 sentence. 
 
 " The point is that it is true," he whispered. " It is 
 exactly what I want to say." . . . 
 
 Exactly? . . . 
 
 His mind stuck on 'that " exactly." . . . When one has 
 much to say style is troublesome. It is as if one fussed 
 with one's uniform before a battle. . . . But that is just 
 what one ought to do before a battle. . . . One ought to 
 have everything in order. . . . 
 
 He took a fresh sheet and made three trial beginnings. 
 
 " War is like a black fabric." . . . 
 
 " War is a curtain of black fabric across the paihwe/y." 
 
 " War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the 
 hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let 
 
MR BKITLING WHITES UNTIL SUNKISE 429 
 
 through some gleams of light, and now — I am not dream- 
 ing — it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a 
 thousand points the light is breaking through. ~We owe 
 it to all these dear youths — " 
 
 His pen stopped again. 
 
 " I must work on a rough draft," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 § 5 
 
 Three hours later Mr. Britling was working by day- 
 light, though his study lamp was still burning, and his 
 letter to old Heinrich was still no better than a collection 
 of material for a letter. But the material was falling 
 roughly into shape, and Mr. Britling's intentions were 
 finding themselves. It was clear to him now that he was 
 no longer writing as his limited personal self to those two 
 personal selves grieving, in the old, large, high-walled, 
 steep-roofed household amidst pine woods, of which Hein- 
 rich had once shown him a picture. He knew them too 
 little for any such personal address. He was writing, he 
 perceived, not as Mr. Britling but as an Englishman — 
 that was all he could be to them — and he was writing to 
 them as Germans; he could apprehend them as nothing 
 more. He was just England bereaved to Germany be- 
 reaved. . . . 
 
 He was no longer writing to the particular parents of 
 one particular boy, but to all that mass of suffering, regret, 
 bitterness and fatigue that lay behind the veil of the 
 " front." Slowly, steadily, the manhood of Germany was 
 being wiped out. As he sat there in the stillness he could 
 think that at least two million men of the Central Powers 
 were dead, and an equal number maimed and disabled. 
 Compared with that our British losses, immense and uni- 
 versal as they were by the standard of any previous ex- 
 perience, were still slight; our larger armies had still to 
 suffer, and we had lost irrevocably not very much more 
 than a quarter of a million.' But the tragedy gathered 
 
430 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 against us. We knew enough already to know what must 
 he the reality of the German homes to which those dead 
 men would nevermore return. . . . 
 
 If England had still the longer account to pay, the 
 Erench had paid already nearly to the limits of endurance. 
 They must have lost well over a million of their mankind, 
 and still they bled and bled. Russia too in the East had 
 paid far more than man for man in this vast swapping off 
 of lives. In a little while no Censorship would hold the 
 voice of the peoples. There would be no more talk of 
 honour and annexations, hegemonies and trade routes, but 
 only Europe lamenting for her dead. . . . 
 
 The Germany to which he wrote would be a nation 
 of widows and children, rather pinched boys and girls, 
 crippled men, old men, deprived men, men who had lost 
 brothers and cousins and friends and ambitions. No 
 triumph now on land or sea could save Germany from 
 becoming that. France too would be that, Russia, and 
 lastly Britain, each in their degree. Before the war there 
 had been no Germany to which an Englishman could ap- 
 peal; Germany had been a threat, a menace, a terrible 
 trampling of armed men. It was as little possible then 
 to think of talking to Germany as it would have been to 
 have stopped the Kaiser in mid career in his hooting car 
 down the Unter den Linden and demand a quiet talk 
 with him. But the Germany that had watched those 
 rushes with a slightly doubting pride had her eyes now 
 full of tears and blood. She had believed, she had obeyed, 
 and no real victory had come. Still she fought on, bleed- 
 ing, agonising, wasting her substance and the substance 
 of the whole world, to no conceivable end but exhaustion, so 
 capable she was, so devoted, so proud and utterly foolish. 
 And the mind of Germany, whatever it was before the 
 war, would now be something residual, something left over 
 and sitting beside a reading-lamp as he was sitting beside 
 a reading-lamp, thinking, sorrowing, counting the cost, 
 looking into the dark future. . . . 
 
ME. BRITLING WRITES UNTIL SUNRISE 431 
 
 And to that lie wrote, to that dimly apprehended figure 
 outside a circle of the light like his own circle of light — 
 , which was the father of Heinrich, which was great Ger- 
 many, Germany which lived before and which will yet 
 outlive the flapping of the eagles. . . . 
 
 Our boys, he wrote, have died, fighting one against the 
 other. They have been fighting upon an issue so obscure 
 that your German press is still busy discussing what it 
 was. For us it was that Belgium was invaded and France 
 in danger of destruction. Nothing else could have 
 brought the English into the field against you. But why 
 you invaded Belgium and France and whether that might 
 have been averted we do not know to this day. And still 
 this war goes on and still more boys die, and these men 
 who do not fight, these men in the newspaper offices and 
 in the ministries plan campaigns and strokes and counter- 
 strokes that belong to no conceivable plan at all. Except 
 that now for them there is something more terrible than 
 war. And that is the day of reckoning with their own 
 people. 
 
 What have we been fighting for? What are we fighting 
 for? Do you know? Does any one know? Why am I 
 spending what is left of my substance and you what is 
 left of yours to keep on this war against each other? 
 What have we to gain from hurting one another still 
 further? Why should we be puppets any longer in the 
 hands of crowned fools and witless diplomatists? Even 
 if we were dumb and acquiescent before, does not the 
 blood of our sons now cry out to us that this foolery 
 should cease? We have let these people send our sons 
 to death. 
 
 It is you and I who must stop these wars, these mas- 
 sacres of boys. 
 
 Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of 
 modern war. The killing off of the young. It is the 
 destruction of the human inheritance, it is the spending 
 
432 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 of all the life and material of the future upon present-day 
 hate and greed. Fools and knaves, politicians, tricksters, 
 and those who trade on the suspicions and thoughtless, 
 generous angers of men, make wars; the indolence and 
 modesty of the mass of men permit them. Are you and 
 I to suffer such things until the whole fabric of our civilisa- 
 tion, that has been so slowly and so laboriously built up, 
 is altogether destroyed? 
 
 When I sat down to write to you I had meant only to 
 write to you of your son and mine. But I feel that what 
 can be said in particular of our loss, need not be said; it 
 can be understood without saying. What needs to be said 
 and written about is this, that war must be put an end 
 to and that nobody else but you and me and all of us can 
 do it. We have to do that for the love of our sons and 
 our race and all that is human. War is no longer human; 
 the chemist and the metallurgist have changed all that. 
 My boy was shot through the eye; his brain was blown to 
 pieces by some man who never knew what he had done. 
 Think what that means! . . . It is plain to me, surely 
 it is plain to you and all the world, that war is now a mere 
 putting of the torch to explosives that flare out to univer- 
 sal ruin. There is nothing for one sane man to write to 
 another about in these days but the salvation of mankind 
 from war. 
 
 Now I want you to be patient with me and hear me out. 
 There was a time in the earlier part of this war when it 
 was hard to be patient because there hung over us the 
 dread of losses and disaster. Now we need dread no 
 longer. The dreaded thing has happened. Sitting to- 
 gether as we do in spirit beside the mangled bodies of our 
 dead, surely we can be as patient as the hills. 
 
 I want to tell you quite plainly and simply that I think 
 that Germany which is chief and central in this war is 
 most to blame for this war. Writing to you as an Eng- 
 lishman to a German and with war still being waged, 
 there must be no mistake between us upon this point. I 
 
MR BEITLING WEITES UNTIL STJNKISE 433 
 
 am persuaded that in the decade that ended with your 
 overthrow of France in 1871, Germany turned her face 
 towards evil, and that her refusal to treat France gen- 
 erously and to make friends with any other great power 
 in the world, is the essential cause of this war. Germany 
 triumphed — and she trampled on the loser. She in- 
 flicted intolerable indignities. She set herself to prepare 
 for further aggressions; long before this killing began she 
 was making war upon land and sea, launching warships, 
 building strategic railways, setting up a vast establishment 
 of war material, threatening, straining all the world to 
 keep pace with her threats. . . . At last there was no 
 choice before any European nation but submission to the 
 German will, or war. And it was no will to which 
 righteous men could possibly submit. It came as an 
 illiberal and ungracious will. It was the will of Zabern. 
 It is not as if you had set yourselves to be an imperial 
 people and embrace and unify the world. You did not 
 want to unify the world. You wanted to set the foot of 
 an intensely national Germany, a sentimental and illiberal 
 Germany, a Germany that treasured the portraits of your 
 ridiculous Kaiser and his litter of sons, a Germany wear- 
 ing uniform, reading black letter, and despising every 
 kultur but her own, upon the neck of a divided and 
 humiliated mankind. It was an intolerable prospect. I 
 had rather the whole world died. 
 
 Forgive me for writing "you." You are as little re- 
 sponsible for that Germany as I am foi Sir Edward 
 
 Grey. But this happened over you; you did not do your 
 utmost to prevent it — even as England has happened, 
 and I have let it happen over me. . .. . 
 
 " It is so dry ; so general," whispered Mr. Britling. 
 " And yet — it is this that has killed our sons." 
 
 He sat still for a time, and then went on reading a fresh 
 sheet of his manuscript. 
 
434 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 When I bring these charges against Germany I have 
 little disposition to claim any righteousness for Britain. 
 There has been small splendour in this war for either Ger- 
 many or Britain or Russia; we three have chanced to be 
 the biggest of the combatants, but the glory lies with 
 invincible France. It is France and Belgium and Serbia 
 who shine as the heroic lands. They have fought de- 
 fensively and beyond all expectation, for dear land and 
 freedom. This war for them has been a war of simple, 
 definite issues, to which they have risen with an entire 
 nobility. Englishman and German alike may well envy 
 them that simplicity. I look to you, as an honest man 
 schooled by the fierce lessons of this war, to meet me in 
 my passionate desire to see France, Belgium and Serbia 
 emerge restored from all this blood and struggle, enlarged 
 to the limits of their nationality, vindicated and secure. 
 Russia I will not write about here; let me go on at once 
 to tell you about my own country; remarking only that 
 between England and Russia there are endless parallel- 
 isms. We have similar complexities, kindred difficulties. 
 We have for instance an imported dynasty, we have a soul- 
 destroying State Church which cramps and poisons the 
 education of our ruling class, we have a people out of 
 touch with a secretive government, and the same tradi- 
 tional contempt for science. We have our Irelands and 
 Polands. Even our kings bear a curious likeness. . . . 
 
 At this point there was a hreak in the writing, and 
 Mr. Britling made, as it were, a fresh heginning. 
 
 Politically the British Empire is a clumsy collection 
 of strange accidents. It is a thing as little to be proud 
 of as the outline of a flint or the shape of a potato. For 
 the mass of English people India and Egypt and all that 
 side of our system mean less than nothing; our trade is 
 something they do not understand, our imperial wealth 
 something they do not share. Britain has been a group 
 
MR BRITLING WHITES UNTIL SUNRISE 435 
 
 of four democracies caught in the net of a vast yet casual 
 imperialism; the common man here is in a state of ■po- 
 litical perplexity from the cradle to the grave. None the 
 less there is a great people here even as there is a great 
 people in Russia, a people with a soul and character of 
 its own, a people of unconquerable leindliness and with 
 a peculiar genius, which still struggle towards will and 
 expression. We have been beginning that same great 
 experiment that France and America- and Switzerland 
 and China are making, the experiment of democracy. It 
 is the newest form of human association, and we are still 
 but half awake to its needs and necessary conditions. For 
 it is idle to pretend that the little city democracies of 
 ancient times were comparable to the great essays in prac- 
 tical republicanism that mankind is making to-day. 
 This age of the democratic republics that dawn is a new 
 age. It has not yet lasted for a century, not for a paltry 
 hundred years. . . . All new things are weak things; a 
 rat can kill a man-child with ease; the greater the 
 destiny, the weaker the immediate self-protection may be. 
 And to me it seems that your complete and perfect im- 
 perialism, ruled by Germans for Germans, is in its scope 
 and outlook a more antiquated and smaller and less noble 
 thing than these sprawling emergent giant democracies of 
 the West that struggle so confusedly against it. . . . 
 
 But that we do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders 
 and infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our 
 indisciplines and to the dishonesties and tricks our incom- 
 pleteness provokes, that the prolongation of this war is 
 to be ascribed, I readily admit. At the outbreak of this 
 war I had hoped to see militarism felled within a 
 year. . . . 
 
 From this point onward Mr. Britling's notes became 
 more fragmentary. They had a consecutiveness, hut they 
 were discontinuous. His thought had leapt across gaps 
 
436 MK. BKITLING SEES IT THKOUGH 
 
 that his pen had had no time to fill. And he had begun 
 to realise that his letter to the old people in Pomerania 
 was becoming impossible. It had broken away into 
 dissertation. 
 
 " Yet there must be dissertations," he said. " Unless 
 such men as we are take these things in hand, always we 
 shall be misgoverned, always the sons will die. . . ." 
 
 I do not think you Germans realise how steadily you 
 were conquering the world before this war began. Had 
 you given half the energy and intelligence you have spent 
 upon this war to the peaceful conquest of men's minds 
 and spirits, I believe that you would have taken the leader- 
 ship of the world tranquilly — no man disputing. Your 
 science was five years, your social and economic organisa- 
 tion was a quarter of a century in front of ours. . . . 
 Never has it so lain in the power of a great people to lead 
 and direct mankind towards the world republic and uni- 
 versal peace. It needed but a certain generosity of the. 
 imagination. . . . 
 
 But your Junkers, your Imperial court, your foolish 
 vicious Princes; what were such dreams to them? . . . 
 With an envious satisfaction they hurled all the accom- 
 plishment of Germany into the fires of war. . . . 
 
 § 8 
 
 Tour boy, as no doubt you know, dreamt constantly 
 of such a world peace as this that I foreshadow; he was 
 more generous than his country. He could envisage war 
 and hostility only as misunderstanding. He thought that 
 a world that could explain itself clearly would surely be 
 at peace. He was scheming always therefore for the per- 
 fection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some 
 such universal link. My youngster too was full of a 
 
ME. BEITLING WHITES UNTIL SUNEISE 437 
 
 kindred and yet larger dream, the dream of human science, 
 which knows neither king nor country nor race. . . . 
 These boys, these hopes, this war has killed. . . . 
 
 That fragment ended so. Mr. Britling ceased to 
 read for a time. "But has it killed them?" he 
 whispered. . . . 
 
 " If you had lived, my dear, you and your England 
 would have talked with a younger Germany — better than 
 I can ever do. . . ." 
 
 He turned the pages back, and read here and there 
 with an accumulating discontent. 
 
 § 9 
 
 " Dissertations," said Mr. Britling. 
 
 Never had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was 
 a weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer, and 
 never had he felt so invincible a conviction that the Spirit 
 of God was in him, and that it fell to him to take some 
 • part in the establishment of a new order of living upon 
 the earth; it might be the most trivial part by the scale 
 of the task, but for him it was to be now his supreme con- 
 cern. And it was an almost intolerable grief to him that 
 his services should be, for all his desire, so poor in quality, 
 so weak in conception. Always he seemed to be on the 
 verge of some illuminating and beautiful statement of 
 his cause ; always he was finding his writing inadequate, 
 a thin treachery to the impulse of his heart, always he was 
 finding his effort weak and ineffective. In this instance, 
 at the outset he seemed to see with a golden clearness the 
 message of brotherhood, or forgiveness, of a common call. 
 To whom, could such a message be better addressed than 
 to those sorrowing parents ; from whom could it come with 
 a better effect than from himself ? And now he read what 
 he had made of this message. It seemed to his jaded 
 mind a pitifully jaded effort. It had no light, it had no 
 
438 ME. BEITLING SEES IT THEOUGH 
 
 depth. It was like the disquisition of a debating society. 
 
 He was distressed by a fancy of an old German couple, 
 spectacled and peering, puzzled by his letter. Perhaps 
 they would be obscurely hurt by his perplexing generalisa- 
 tions. Why, they would ask, should this Englishman 
 preach to them? 
 
 He sat back in his chair wearily, with his chin sunk 
 upon his chest. Eor a time he did not think, and then, 
 he read again the sentence in front of his eyes. 
 
 " These boys, these hopes, this war has killed." 
 
 The words hung for a time in his mind. 
 " Kb ! " said Mr. Britling stoutly. " They live ! " 
 And suddenly it was borne in upon his mind that he 
 was not alone. There were thousands and tens of thou- 
 sands of men and women like himself, desiring with all 
 their hearts to say, as he desired to say, the reconciling 
 word. It was not only his hand that thrust against the 
 obstacles. . . . Frenchmen and Eussians sat in the same 
 stillness, facing the same perplexities; there were Ger- 
 mans seeking a way through to him. Even as he sat and 
 wrote. And for the first time clearly he felt a Presence 
 of which he had thought very many times in the last few 
 weeks, a Presence so close to him that it was behind his 
 eyes and in his brain and hands. It was no trick of his 
 vision ; it was a feeling of immediate reality. And it was 
 , Hugh, Hugh that he had thought was dead, it was young 
 Heinrich living also, it was himself, it was those others 
 that sought, it was all these and it was more, it was the 
 Master, the Captain of Mankind, it was God, there present 
 with him, and he knew that it was God. It was as if 
 he had been groping all this time in the darkness, think- 
 ing himself alone amidst rocks and pitfalls and pitiless 
 things, and suddenly a hand, a firm strong hand, had 
 touched his own. And a voice within him bade him be 
 of good courage. There was no magic trickery in that 
 
ME. BEETLING WRITES UNTIL SUNRISE 439 
 
 moment; he was still weak and weary, a discouraged 
 rhetorician, a good intention ill-equipped; hut he was no 
 longer lonely and wretched, no longer in the same world 
 with despair. God was beside him and within him and 
 about him. ... It was the crucial moment of Mr. Brit- 
 ling's life. It was a thing as light as the passing of a 
 cloud on an April morning ; it was a thing as great as the 
 first day of creation. For some moments he still sat back 
 with his chin upon his chest and his hands dropping from 
 the arms of his chair. Then he sat up and drew a deep 
 breath. . . . 
 
 This had come almost as a mattter of course. 
 
 For weeks his mind had been playing about this idea. 
 He had talked to Letty of this Finite God, who is the king 
 of man's adventure in space and time. But hitherto God 
 had been for him a thing of the intelligence, a theory, a 
 report, something told about but not realised. . . . Mr. 
 Britling's thinking about God hitherto had been like some 
 one who has found an empty house, very beautiful and 
 pleasant, full of the promise of a fine personality. And 
 then as the discoverer makes his lonely, curious explora- 
 tions, he hears downstairs, dear and friendly, the voice 
 of the Master coming in. . . . 
 
 There was no need to despair because he himself was 
 one of the feeble folk. God was with him indeed, and 
 he was with God. The King was coming to his own. 
 Amidst the darknesses and confusions, the nightmare 
 cruelties and the hideous stupidities of the great war, God, 
 the Captain of the World Republic, fought his way to 
 empire. So long as one did one's best and utmost in a 
 cause so mighty, did it matter though the thing one did 
 was little and poor ? 
 
 " I have thought too much of myself," said Mr. Brit- 
 ling, " and of what I would do by myself. I have for- 
 gotten that which was with me. . . ." 
 
440 ME. BKITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 § 10 
 
 He turned over the rest of the night's writing presently, 
 and read it now as though it was the work of another man. 
 
 These later notes were fragmentary, and written in a 
 sprawling hand. 
 
 " Let us make ourselves watchers and guardians of the 
 order of the world. . . . 
 
 " If only for love of our dead. . . . 
 
 "Let us pledge ourselves to service. Let us set our- 
 selves with all our minds and all our hearts to the perfect- 
 ing and working out of the methods of democracy and the 
 ending for ever of the kings and emperors and priestcrafts 
 and the hands of adventurers, the traders and owners and 
 forestallers who have betrayed mankind into this morass 
 of hate and blood — in which our sons are lost — in which 
 we flounder still. . . ." 
 
 How feeble was this squeak of exhortation! It broke 
 into a scolding note. 
 
 " Who have betrayed," read Mr. Britling, and judged 
 the phrase. 
 
 " Who have fallen with us," he amended. . . . 
 
 " One gets so angry and bitter — because one feels 
 alone, I suppose. Because one feels that for them one's 
 reason is no reason. One is enraged by the sense of their 
 ailent and regardless contradiction, and one forgets the 
 Power of which one is a part. . . ." 
 
 The sheet that bore the sentence he criticised was 
 otherwise blank except that written across it obliquely in 
 a very careful hand were the words " Hugh," and " Hugh 
 Philip Britling." ... 
 
 On the next sheet he had written : " Let us set up the 
 peace of the World Eepublic amidst these ruins. Let it 
 be our religion, our calling." 
 
 There he had stopped. 
 
ME. BEITLING WHITES UNTIL SUNElSE 441 
 
 The last sheet of Mr. Britling's manuscript may be 
 more conveniently given in f ac-simile than described. 
 
 & J 
 
 
 
 > 
 
 *MoodL iye«odL 
 
 § 11 
 
 He sighed. 
 
 He looked at the scattered papers, and thought of the 
 letter they were to have made. 
 
 His fatigue spoke first. 
 
 " Perhaps after all I'd better just send the fiddle. . . ." 
 
 He rested his cheeks between his hands, and remained 
 so for a long time. His eyes stared unseeingly. Hia 
 thoughts wandered and spread and faded. At length he 
 
442 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 
 
 recalled his mind to that last idea. " Just send the fiddle 
 — without a word." > 
 
 " No. I must write to them plainly. 
 
 " About God as I have found Him. 
 
 " As He has found me. . . ." 
 
 He forgot the Pomeranians for a time. He murmured 
 to himself. He turned over the conviction that had sud- 
 denly become clear and absolute in his mind. 
 
 " Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and 
 until a man has found God and been found by God, 
 he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. He may 
 have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of 
 honour. But all these things fall into place and life falls 
 into place only with God. Only with God. God, who 
 fights through men against Blind Eorce and Night and 
 Non-Existence ; who is the end, who is the meaning. He 
 is the only King. ... Of course I must write about Him. 
 I must tell all my world of Him. And before the coming 
 of the true King, the inevitable King, the King who is 
 present whenever just men foregather, this blood-stained 
 rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings and tawdry 
 emperors, these wily politicians and artful lawyers, these 
 men who claim and grab and trick and compel, these war 
 makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and pass — 
 like paper thrust into a flame. . . ." 
 
 Then after a time he said : 
 
 " Our sons who have shown us God. . . ." 
 
 § 12 
 
 He rubbed his open hands over his eyes and forehead. 
 
 The night of effort had tired his brain, and he was no 
 longer thinking actively. He had a little interval of 
 blankness, sitting at his desk with his hands pressed over 
 his eyes. . . . 
 
 He got up presently, and stood quite motionless at the 
 window, looking out. 
 
ME. BRITLING WEITES UNTIL SUNRISE 443 
 
 His lamp was still burning, but for some time he had 
 not been writing by the light of his lamp. Insensibly 
 the day had come and abolished his need for that 
 individual circle of yellow light. Colour had returned 
 to the world, clean pearly colour, clear and definite like 
 the glance of a child or the voice of a girl, and a golden 
 wisp of cloud hung in the sky over the tower of the church. 
 There was a mist upon the pond, a soft grey mist not a 
 yard high. A covey of partridges ran and halted and ran 
 again in the dewy grass outside his garden railings. The 
 partridges were very numerous this year because there 
 had been so little shooting. Beyond in the meadow a 
 hare sat up as still as a stone. A horse neighed. . . . 
 Wave after wave of warmth and light came sweeping 
 before the sunrise across the world of Matching'? Easy. 
 It was as if there was nothing but morning and sunrise 
 in the world. 
 
 From away towards the church came the sound of some 
 early worker whetting a scythe. 
 
 THE ENB 
 
 PBINTHD IN THE UNITED STATES OT AMEBIOA" 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 What is Coming ? 
 
 By H. G. WELLS 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 
 
 This book is a forecast of the consequences of the war. The 
 profound psychological changes, the industrial and diplomatic 
 developments, the reorganizations in society which are sure to fol- 
 low so great an upheaval of the established institutions, are sub- 
 jects to which Mr. Wells devotes his deep insight into men's minds 
 as Well as his prophetic ability. Out of the materials of the past 
 and the history-making present, he constructs a brilliant and 
 persuasive picture of the future, as sure of touch as his daring, 
 imaginative essays, as full of interest as his novels. 
 
 Of special interest are his chapters on the United States, which 
 set forth the belief that here in the New World there is being 
 moulded a larger understanding of the kinship of nations; an 
 awakening from the great mistake that ideals are geographically 
 determined ; that in America there is the foundation of a capacity 
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 handling and directing of international affairs. Out of the chaos 
 will come a dominant peace alliance, in which the United States 
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 and movements toward friendship out of which will have to grow, 
 whose probable growth, indeed, he forecasts, some sort of leaguing 
 together of the nations looking toward a greater measure of peace 
 than the world has heretofore enjoyed."— New York Times. 
 
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 author whose popularity in America is no less than in his native 
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 read it to be the best work that Mr. Wells has done, realizing 
 fully the promises of greatness which not a few have found in its 
 immediate predecessors. The author's theme — the research mag- 
 nificent — is the story of one man's search for the kingly life. 
 A subject such as this is one peculiarly suited to Mr. Wells's 
 literary genius, and he has handled it with the skill, the feeling, the 
 vision, which it requires. 
 
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 intellect."— New York Herald. 
 
 "Challenges discussion at a hundred points. It abounds in 
 stimulating ideas." — New York Times. 
 
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 most be called an epitome of human existence." — Chicago Herald. 
 
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THE following pages contain advertisements of 
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 a work of art. In a literary sense, Mr. Wells has never done ' 
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 interest those who are not of that faith, and correct those who 
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 and the result is a splendid picture of the Holy Land in the days 
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 By EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 Here Mr. Phillpotts adds another brilliant story to his series of 
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 Green Alleys is a tale of the Kentish hop fields. Against this 
 background there is told a dramatic and interesting story, one 
 which is a worthy addition to his long line of successful and per- 
 manently valuable books. There are those among the Phillpotts 
 admirers who maintain, and with good reason, that in these later 
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 contributes to the important business enterprises of the day, Mr. 
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 fresh demonstration of the ever-increasing skill of one who stands 
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
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 By H. G. WELLS 
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 This is the story of the revolt of a little boy who does not 
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 but whose heart is set on accomplishing "something big." It 
 is told with a delightful sense of the whimsical. The situa- 
 tions abound in humor — that peculiarly fascinating humor for 
 which Mr. Wells is so famous. Bealby, alias Dick Maltravers, 
 who runs away from his troubles only to encounter fresh ones, 
 is as wholly charming a character as Mr. Wells has ever cre- 
 ated and one whose ever changing fortunes the reader follows 
 with unbroken interest 
 
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 A deliriously amusing comedy of action swift, violent, and 
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'BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
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 of merit. It is a guarantee that on the pages which follow 
 will be found an absorbing story told with master skill. In the 
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 He is writing of modern society life, particularly of one very 
 charming young woman, Lady Harman, who finds herself so 
 bound in by conventions, so hampered by restrictions, largely 
 those of a well intentioned but short sighted husband, that she 
 is ultimately moved to revolt. The real meaning of this revolt, 
 its effect upon her life and those of her associates axe narrated 
 by one who goes beneath the surface in his analysis of human 
 motives. In the group of characters, writers, suffragists, labor 
 organizers, social workers and society lights surrounding Lady 
 Harman, and in the dramatic incidents which compose the years 
 of her existence which are described by Mr. Wells, there is a 
 novel which is significant in its interpretation of the trend of 
 affairs today, and fascinatingly interesting as fiction. It is 
 Mr. Wells at his best. 
 
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