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 OF MATCHING'S EASY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MRS. TEDDY GOES FOR A WALK
Section 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 shattered 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 Russia, 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 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 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 became 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 almost 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 getting any address
and took her first parcel to the post office.
"Unless you know what prison he is at," said the postmistress.
"Pity!" said Letty. "I don't know that. Must it 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 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, are 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. Rooting 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. Flake 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. 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 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 remarked.... "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
Switzerland.... 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
staircase; 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."
"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."
Section 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? How far
would it carry her? Was 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
wisdom. 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 concentration 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 overlay 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
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 persuaded until her dream was ready. If this state of
suspense 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 existence 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 dependent on Mr. Britling, doing his work rather
badly, in a distraught unpunctual fashion.
She must be told, she must be convinced soon, or assuredly she would
become an eccentric, a strange character, a Matching's Easy Miss
Flite....
Section 3
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 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. Instead 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
exasperation his rightness 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 helpless 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 _perfect_ 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 back of a very nice
elephant that would wince to but not obey the goad....
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 about 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; but 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 devoted 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 about
America, and still take a line that would satisfy Cissie. He took it.
When he came down to Matching's Easy at her summons to bear his
convincing witness of Teddy's fate, he came in an unwonted costume. It
was a costume so wonderful in his imagination that it seemed to cry
aloud, to sound like a trumpet as he went through London to Liverpool
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 commonplace, 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 too,
resistant, incalculable, found no wonder in the wonderful suit.
He bore his testimony. It was the queer halting telling 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 taking 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 told me in a moment.
Just smile and say '_Indeed!_' ... Abandoned!--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 immediately 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 something that is mortally injured and still walks--into the
autumnal sunshine. She left the door wide open behind her.
Section 4
And Cissie, with eyes full of distress for her sister, had still to
grasp the fact that Direck was wearing a Canadian 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.
Section 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
convinced 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 nothing 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 was
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 compensation 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. Now, there was no more Teddy to
be deprived of....
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
expression 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 calling, 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.
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 hesitation. 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 between 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 staring.
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 streaming 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 relief....
Section 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 came dirting
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 abandonment, 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 approaches. 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 focussed down to the robin. She rolled over, sat up, and
imitated his friendly "cheep."
Section 7
Presently she became aware of footsteps rustling through the grass
towards her.
She looked over her shoulder and discovered Mr. Britling 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 himself. There was an interval of
silence.
"At first it hurts like the devil," he said at last, looking away at
Mertonsome spire and speaking as if he spoke 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 comforted 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
understood 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 mutilated or lying and screaming--or things like
that--they've gone. He's out of his spoilt body. He's my unbroken Teddy
again.... Out of sight somewhere.... Unbroken.... Sleeping."
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
instant...."
He considered. "Hugh, too, seems just round the corner 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...."
Section 8
"Somehow I can't talk about this to Edith. It is ridiculous, 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 before. But I haven't. I couldn't. No. Losing a lover,
that's a thing for oneself. I've been through that, you 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 particular 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 different thing. It's
less intimate, and more personally important."
"I have just thought, 'He's gone. He's gone.' Sometimes, 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.... You know, when he was only a few days
old, he would start suddenly at any strange sound. He was alive like an
Æolian 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. Before 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 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 profound 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 teaching
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 another. They had not been so comforted before since their losses
came upon them.
Section 9
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 importance 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. 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 millions. To end that folly is as much
our duty 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 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 beginning
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."
Section 10
Letty regarded him, frowning, and with her chin between 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 believe 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.
"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. You 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 struggle 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 innermost 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...."
"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. Britling. "It's all I can
think of now--this God, this God who struggles, who was in Hugh and
Teddy, clear 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."
Section 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 indefinable 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 completest confidence in the essential goodness of the
world 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 playmate, 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 occupation 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 bargains 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 behind 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 thousand old phrases she had
read and heard and given little heed to, that had lain like dry bones in
her memory, suddenly 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 companion.... 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 happiness. 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 back 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 kindnesses and tendernesses of God.... What right had she to a
white and bitter 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 egotism 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 rambler 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!
He came out of the frame of the porch towards the garden 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, and a beard....
He was entirely a stranger, a foreigner. Was she going 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 scaled 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 and 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 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, kissing her, weeping too,
weeping together with her. "Teddy my love!"
Section 12
Letty was in the cottage struggling to hear and understand 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
yourself? 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 Letty. 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--"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 standing
over him....
Then afterwards he had escaped. In quite a little time he had escaped.
He had been in a railway station somewhere 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 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 corrugated 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 aching 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 painful....
"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 looking
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 window-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...."
Section 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
only American who has gone Canadian--for the duration 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 understand 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
fighting for England, mind you. Don't you fancy that. I don't know I'm
so particularly in love with a lot of English 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 England. 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...."
Section 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. Britling 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 knickerbockered figure of Mr. Britling receding up the
hill, atlas and papers in his hands behind his back.
"I must go out to him," said Teddy, disengaging himself 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."
CHAPTER THE SECOND
MR. BRITLING WRITES UNTIL SUNRISE
Section 1
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 swaggering gestures, with a smiling consciousness of
enhanced importance, with their scornful hatred of all measured and
temperate and kindly things turned now to scornful contempt. 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 distinct. They stepped on
him--heedlessly. They heeled the scattered stuff of his exquisite brain
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....
Section 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 believed 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 before 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 suffering, 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 Government of the World," and turn
to the brighter aspects, the funny and adventurous aspects of the war,
the Chestertonian jolliness, _Punch_ side of things? Think you because
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 Government of the World," with
little grinning gnomes' heads and waggish tails....
Section 3
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 CENSOR."
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 Russia
some months ago. He had been wounded and captured, after undergoing
great hardships, during the great Russian 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
sickened 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.
The substance of this letter invaded the orange circle of the lamp; it
would have to be answered, and the potentialities of the answer were
running through Mr. Britling's brain to the exclusion of any impersonal
composition. He thought of the old parents away there in Pomerania--he
believed but he was not quite sure, that Heinrich 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 gallant 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 imaginable issue. They had both
very much the same scientific 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 head surmounted 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 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 getting 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
creature. 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,
respectfully 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 relationships, 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 her, and it made her almost
Marguerite. This young man had cried aloud for love, warm and filling,
like the Mittagsessen 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 idealisation 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 condemnation 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. Britling'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. For
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 indentation 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. He had hoped when he came to
Matching's Easy to join "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
thoroughness. "Presently," he said, "I must study the machinery 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 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 discomfort; 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 shattered 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 witless 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 they knew no English some one would be
found to translate it to them. He would have to write very plainly.
Section 4
He pushed aside the manuscript of "The Better Government 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 intermediary.
_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 particular 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 something of your loss. I have got together for you a few
snapshots I chance to possess in which you will see him 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 was very dear to
me, and he too has been, killed 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 sunshine, 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 pictures 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 reminder 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
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 supposed 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. Perhaps 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 consolation; as if their loss was more pitiable than his own. He
doubted whether they had the consolation of his sanguine 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.... 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 necessary. Here am I bereaved and wretched--and I hope.
Never 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 incomplete 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 pathway."_
_"War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and
kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of
light, and now--I am not dreaming--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.
Section 5
Three hours later Mr. Britling was working by daylight, 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
Heinrich 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 bereaved....
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 universal as they were by the standard of
any previous experience, 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 against us. We knew enough
already to know what must be the reality of the German homes to which
those dead men would nevermore return....
If England had still the longer account to pay, the French 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 appeal;
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, bleeding, 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....
And to that he 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 Germany, 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 massacres 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 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 civilisation, 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 universal 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
together 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 Englishman to a German and with war
still being waged, there must be no mistake between us upon this
point. I 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 generously 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
inflicted 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 wearing 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 responsible for
that Germany as I am for--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.
_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 Germany 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 defensively
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
parallelisms. 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 traditional contempt for science. We have our Irelands
and Polands. Even our kings bear a curious likeness...._
At this point there was a break in the writing, and Mr. Britling made,
as it were, a fresh beginning.
_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 of
four democracies caught in the net of a vast yet casual imperialism;
the common man here is in a state of political 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 kindliness 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 practical 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 imperialism, 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 incompleteness 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...._
Section 6
From this point onward Mr. Britling's notes became more fragmentary.
They had a consecutiveness, but they were discontinuous. His thought had
leapt across gaps 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...."
Section 7
_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
leadership of the world tranquilly--no man disputing. Your science
was five years, your social and economic organisation 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 universal 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 accomplishment of Germany into the
fires of war...._
Section 8
_Your 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 perfection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some such
universal link. My youngster too was full of a 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.
Section 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 concern. 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 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 generalisations. Why, they would ask, should this
Englishman preach to them?
He sat back in his chair wearily, with his chin sunk upon his chest. For
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.
"No!" 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 thousands 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 Russians sat in the same stillness, facing
the same perplexities; there were Germans 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,
thinking 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 moment; he was still weak and weary, a discouraged
rhetorician, a good intention ill-equipped; but 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.
Britling'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 matter 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 explorations, 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. Britling, "and of what I
would do by myself. I have forgotten _that which was with me_...."
Section 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 ourselves with all
our minds and all our hearts to the perfecting and working out of
the methods of democracy and the ending for ever of the kings and
emperors and priestcrafts and the bands 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 silent 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
Republic amidst these ruins. Let it be our religion, our calling."
There he had stopped.
The last sheet of Mr. Britling's manuscript may be more conveniently
given in fac-simile than described.
[Handwritten:
Hugh
Hugh
My dear Hugh
Lawyers Princes
Dealers in Contention
_Honesty_
'Blood Blood ...
[Transcriber's Note: illegible] an End to them
]
Section 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. His thoughts wandered and spread and faded.
At length he 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 suddenly 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 Force 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...."
Section 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.
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's 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 END
End of Project Gutenberg's Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells