“Miss Corner’s sister?”
“Exactly. The village was a little startled. The cottager who had let rooms came to me privately. Teddy is rather touchy on the point of his personal independence, he considers any demand for explanations as an insult, and probably all he had said to the old lady was, ‘This is Letty—come to share my rooms.’ I put the matter to him very gently. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, rather in the manner of some one who has overlooked a trifle. ‘I got married to her in the Christmas holidays. May I bring her along to see Mrs. Britling?’ We induced him to go into a little cottage I rent. The wife was the daughter of a Colchester journalist and printer. I don’t know if you talked to her.”
“I’ve talked to the sister rather.”
“Well, they’re both idea’d. They’re highly educated in the sense that they do really think for themselves. Almost fiercely. So does Teddy. If he thinks he hasn’t thought anything he thinks for himself, he goes off and thinks it different. The sister is a teacher who wants to take the B.A. degree in London University. Meanwhile she pays the penalty of her sex.”
“Meaning——?” asked Mr. Direck startled.
“Oh! that she puts in a great deal too much of her time upon housework and minding her sister’s baby.”
“She’s a very interesting and charming young lady indeed,” said Mr. Direck. “With a sort of Western college freedom of mind—and something about her that isn’t American at all.”
Mr. Britling was following the train of his own thoughts.
“My household has some amusing contrasts,” he said. “I don’t know if you have talked to that German?
“He’s always asking questions. And you tell him any old thing and he goes and writes it down in his room upstairs, and afterwards asks you another like it in order to perplex himself by the variety of your answers. He regards the whole world with a methodical distrust. He wants to document it and pin it down. He suspects it only too justly of disorderly impulses, and a capacity for self-contradiction. He is the most extraordinary contrast to Teddy, whose confidence in the universe amounts almost to effrontery. Teddy carries our national laxness to a foolhardy extent. He is capable of leaving his watch in the middle of Claverings Park and expecting to find it a month later—being carefully taken care of by a squirrel, I suppose—when he happens to want it. He’s rather like a squirrel himself—without the habit of hoarding. He is incapable of asking a question about anything; he would be quite sure it was all right anyhow. He would feel that asking questions betrayed a want of confidence—was a sort of incivility. But my German, if you notice—his normal expression is one of grave solicitude. He is like a conscientious ticket-collector among his impressions. And did you notice how beautifully my pianola rolls are all numbered and catalogued? He did that. He set to work and did it as soon as he got here, just as a good cat when you bring it into a house sets to work and catches mice. Previously the pianola music was chaos. You took what God sent you.
“And he looks like a German,” said Mr. Britling.
“He certainly does that,” said Mr. Direck.
“He has the fair type of complexion, the rather full habit of body, the temperamental disposition, but in addition that close-cropped head—it is almost as if it were shaved—the plumpness, the glasses—those are things that are made. And the way he carries himself. And the way he thinks. His meticulousness. When he arrived he was delightful, he was wearing a student’s corps cap and a rucksack, he carried a violin; he seemed to have come out of a book. No one would ever dare to invent so German a German for a book. Now a young Frenchman or a young Italian or a young Russian coming here might look like a foreigner, but he wouldn’t have the distinctive national stamp a German has. He wouldn’t be plainly French or Italian or Russian. Other peoples are not made; they are neither made nor created but proceeding—out of a thousand indefinable causes. The Germans are a triumph of directive will. I had to remark the other day that when my boys talked German they shouted. ‘But when one talks German one must shout,’ said Herr Heinrich. ‘It is taught so in the schools.’ And it is. They teach them to shout and to throw out their chests. Just as they teach them to read notice-boards and not think about politics. Their very ribs are not their own. My Herr Heinrich is comparatively a liberal thinker. He asked me the other day, ‘But why should I give myself up to philology? But then,’ he considered, ‘it is what I have to do.’ ”
Mr. Britling seemed to have finished, and then just as Mr. Direck was planning a way of getting the talk back by way of Teddy to Miss Corner, he snuggled more deeply into his chair, reflected and broke out again.
“This contrast between Heinrich’s carefulness and Teddy’s easygoingness, come to look at it, is I suppose one of the most fundamental in the world. It reaches to everything. It mixes up with education, statecraft, morals. Will you make or will you take? Those are the two extreme courses in all such things. I suppose the answer of wisdom to that is, like all wise answers, a compromise. I suppose one must accept and then make all one can of it. … Have you talked at all to my eldest son?”
“He’s a very interesting young man indeed,” said Mr. Direck. “I should venture to say there’s a very great deal in him. I was most impressed by the few words I had with him.”
“There, for example, is one of my perplexities,” said Mr. Britling.
Mr. Direck waited for some further light on this sudden transition.
“Ah! your troubles in life haven’t begun yet. Wait till you’re a father. That cuts to the bone. You have the most delicate thing in the world in hand, a young kindred mind. You feel responsible for it, you know you are responsible for it; and you lose touch with it. You can’t get at it. Nowadays we’ve lost the old tradition of fatherhood by divine right—and we haven’t got a new one. I’ve tried not to be a cramping ruler, a director, a domestic tyrant to that lad—and in effect it’s meant his going his own way. … I don’t dominate. I hoped to advise. But you see he loves my respect and good opinion. Too much. When things go well I know of them. When the world goes dark for him, then he keeps his trouble from Just when I would so eagerly go into it with him. … There’s something the matter now, something—it may be grave. I feel he wants to tell me. And there it is!—it seems I am the last person to whom he can humiliate himself by a confession of blundering, or weakness. … Something I should just laugh at and say, ‘That’s in the blood of all of us, dear Spit of myself. Let’s see what’s to be done.’ …”
He paused and then went on, finding in the unfamiliarity and transitoriness of his visitor a freedom he might have failed to find with a close friend.
“I am frightened at times at all I don’t know about in that boy’s mind. I know nothing of his religiosities. He’s my son and he must have religiosities. I know nothing of his ideas or of his knowledge about sex and all that side of life. I do not know of the things he finds beautiful. I can guess at times, that’s all; when he betrays himself. … You see, you don’t know really what love is until you have children. One doesn’t love women. Indeed you don’t! One gives and gets; it’s a trade. One may have tremendous excitements and expectations and overwhelming desires. That’s all very well in its way. But the love of children is an exquisite tenderness: it rends the heart. It’s a thing of God. And I lie awake at nights and stretch out my hands in the darkness to this lad—who will never know—until his sons come in their time. …”
He made one of his quick turns again.
“And that’s where our English way makes for distresses. Mr. Prussian respects and fears his father; respects authorities, attends, obeys and—his father has a hold upon him. But I said to myself at the outset, ‘No, whatever happens, I will not usurp the place of God. I will not be the Priest-Patriarch of my children. They shall grow and I will grow beside them, helping but not cramping or overshadowing.’ They grow more. But they blunder more. Life ceases to be a discipline and becomes an experiment. …”
“That’s very true,” said Mr. Direck, to whom it seem
ed the time was ripe to say something. “This is the problem of America perhaps even more than of England. Though I have not had the parental experience you have undergone. … I can see very clearly that a son is a very serious proposition.”
“The old system of life was organisation. That is where Germany is still the most ancient of European states. It’s a reversion to a tribal cult. It’s atavistic. … To organise or discipline, or mould characters or press authority, is to assume that you have reached finality in your general philosophy. It implies an assured end. Heinrich has his assured end, his philological professorship or thereabouts as a part of the Germanic machine. And that too has its assured end in German national assertion. Here, we have none of those convictions. We know we haven’t finality, and so we are open and apologetic and receptive, rather than wilful. … You see all organisation, with its implication of finality, is death. We feel that. The Germans don’t. What you organise you kill. Organised morals or organised religion or organised thought are dead morals and dead religion and dead thought. Yet some organisation you must have. Organisation is like killing cattle. If you do not kill some the herd is just waste. But you mustn’t kill all or you kill the herd. The unkilled cattle are the herd, the continuation; the unorganised side of life is the real life. The reality of life is adventure, not performance. What isn’t adventure isn’t life. What can be ruled about can be machined. But priests and schoolmasters and bureaucrats get hold of life and try to make it all rules, all etiquette and regulation and correctitude. … And parents and the love of parents make for the same thing. It is all very well to experiment for oneself, but when one sees these dear things of one’s own, so young and inexperienced and so capable of every sort of gallant foolishness, walking along the narrow plank, going down into dark jungles, ah! then it makes one want to wrap them in laws and foresight and fence them about with ‘Verboten’ boards in all the conceivable aspects. …”
“In America of course we do set a certain store upon youthful self-reliance,” said Mr. Direck.
“As we do here. It’s in your blood and our blood. It’s the instinct of the English and the Irish anyhow to suspect government and take the risks of the chancy way. … And manifestly the Russians, if you read their novelists, have the same twist in them. … When we get this young Prussian here, he’s a marvel to us. He really believes in Law. He likes to obey. That seems a sort of joke to us. It’s curious how foreign these Germans are—to all the rest of the world. Because of their docility. Scratch the Russian and you get the Tartar. Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except the German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation—of something beyond organisation. …
“It’s one o’clock,” said Mr. Britling abruptly, perceiving a shade of fatigue upon the face of his hearer and realising that his thoughts had taken him too far, “and Sunday. Let’s go to bed.”
§ 11
For a time Mr. Direck could not sleep. His mind had been too excited by this incessant day with all its novelties and all its provocations to comparison. The whole complicated spectacle grouped itself, with a naturalness and a complete want of logic that all who have been young will understand, about Cecily Corner.
She had to be in the picture, and so she came in as though she were the central figure, as though she were the quintessential England. There she was, the type, the blood, the likeness, of no end of Massachusetts families, the very same stuff indeed, and yet she was different. …
For a time his thoughts hovered ineffectively about certain details of her ear and cheek, and one may doubt if his interest in these things was entirely international.
Then he found himself under way with an exposition of certain points to Mr. Britling. In the security of his bed he could imagine that he was talking very slowly and carefully while Mr. Britling listened; already he was more than halfway to dreamland or he could not have supposed anything so incredible.
“There’s a curious sort of difference,” he was saying. “It is difficult to define, but on the whole I might express it by saying that such a gathering as this if it was in America would be drawn with harder lines, would show its bones more and have everything more emphatic. And just to take one illustrative point: in America in such a gathering as this there would be bound to be several jokes going on as it were, running jokes and running criticisms, from day to day and from week to week. … There would be jokes about your writing and your influence and jokes about Miss Corner’s advanced reading. … You see, in America we pay much more attention to personal character. Here people, I notice, are not talked to about their personal characters at all, and many of them do not seem to be aware and do not seem to mind what personal characters they have. …
“And another thing I find noteworthy is the way in which what I might call mature people seem to go on having a good time instead of standing by and applauding the young people having a good time. … And the young people do not seem to have set out to have a good time at all. … Now in America, a charming girl like Miss Corner would be distinctly more aware of herself and her vitality than she is here, distinctly more. Her peculiarly charming side-long look, if I might make so free with her—would have been called attention to. It’s a perfectly beautiful look, the sort of look some great artist would have loved to make immortal. It’s a look I shall find it hard to forget. … But she doesn’t seem to be aware in the least of it. In America she would be aware of it. She would be distinctly aware of it. She would have been made aware of it. She would have been advised of it. It would be looked for and she would know it was looked for. She would give it as a singer gives her most popular song. Mamie Nelson, for example, used to give a peculiar little throw back of the chin and a laugh. … It was talked about. People came to see it. …
“Of course Mamie Nelson was a very brilliant girl indeed. I suppose in England you would say we spoiled her. I suppose we did spoil her. …”
It came into Mr. Direck’s head that for a whole day he had scarcely given a thought to Mamie Nelson. And now he was thinking of her—calmly. Why shouldn’t one think of Mamie Nelson calmly?
She was a proud imperious thing. There was something Southern in her. Very dark blue eyes she had, much darker than Miss Corner’s. …
But how tortuous she had been behind that outward pride of hers! For four years she had let him think he was the only man who really mattered in the world, and all the time quite clearly and definitely she had deceived him. She had made a fool of him and she had made a fool of the others perhaps—just to have her retinue and play the queen in her world. And at last humiliation, bitter humiliation, and Mamie with her chin in the air and her bright triumphant smile looking down on him.
Hadn’t he, she asked, had the privilege of loving her?
She took herself at the value they had set upon her.
Well—somehow—that wasn’t right. …
All the way across the Atlantic Mr. Direck had been trying to forget her downward glance with the chin up, during that last encounter—and other aspects of the same humiliation. The years he had spent upon her! The time! Always relying upon her assurance of a special preference for him. He tried to think he was suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, and to conceal from himself just how bitterly his pride and vanity had been rent by her ultimate rejection. There had been a time when she had given him reason to laugh in his sleeve at Booth Wilmington.
Perhaps Booth Wilmington had also had reason for laughing in his sleeve. …
Had she even loved Booth Wilmington? Or had she just snatched at him? …
Wasn’t he, Direck, as good a man as Booth Wilmington anyhow? …
For some moments the old sting of jealousy rankled again. He recalled the flaring rivalry that had ended in his defeat, the competition of gifts and treats. … A thing so open that all Carrierville knew of it, discussed it, took sides. … And over it all Mamie with her flashing smile h
ad sailed like a processional goddess. …
Why, they had made jokes about him in the newspapers!
One couldn’t imagine such a contest in Matching’s Easy. Yet surely even in Matching’s Easy there are lovers.
Is it something in the air, something in the climate that makes things harder and clearer in America? …
Cissie—why shouldn’t one call her Cissie in one’s private thoughts anyhow?—would never be as hard and clear as Mamie. She had English eyes—merciful eyes. …
That was the word—merciful!
The English light, the English air, are merciful. …
Merciful. …
They tolerate old things and slow things and imperfect apprehensions. They aren’t always getting at you. …
They don’t laugh at you. … At least—they laugh differently. …
Was England the tolerant country? With its kind eyes and its wary sidelong look. Toleration. In which everything mellowed and nothing was destroyed. A soft country. A country with a passion for imperfection. A padded country. …
England—all stuffed with soft feathers … under one’s ear. A pillow—with soft, kind Corners. … Beautiful rounded Corners. … Dear, dear Corners. Cissie Corners. Corners. Could there be a better family?
H. G. WELLS Massachusetts—but in heaven. …
Harps playing two-steps, and kind angels wrapped in moonlight.
Very softly I and you,
One tum, two tum, three tum, too.
Off—we—go! …
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENTERTAINMENT OF MR. DIRECK REACHES A CLIMAX
§ 1
Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easy-going feast. Then the small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the pond and the boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, talking rather intently. And when Mr. Direck returned from the boats in a state of greatly enhanced popularity he found Mr. Britling conversing over his garden railings with what was altogether a new type of Britisher in Mr. Direck’s experience. It was a tall, lean sun-bitten youngish man of forty perhaps, in brown tweeds, looking more like the Englishman of the American illustrations than anything Mr. Direck had met hitherto. Indeed he came very near to a complete realisation of that ideal except that there was a sort of intensity about him, and that his clipped moustache had the restrained stiffness of a wiry-haired terrier. This gentleman Mr. Direck learned was Colonel Rendezvous. He spoke in clear short sentences, they had an effect of being punched out, and he was refusing to come into the garden and talk.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through Page 7