Mr. Britling Sees It Through

by Wells, H. G. ;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “England?”

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

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

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

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

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

  § 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You can see he is ashamed.”

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

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

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

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

  “But it makes work for the servants.”

  “Do they complain?”

  “No.”

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

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

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

  “Perhaps if I call——”

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

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

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

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

  It was clear he feared the worst. …

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

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

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

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

  He discovered the missing Billy looking crumpled and annoyed.

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

  A startled white figure sat up in bed sharply.

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

  § 3

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

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

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

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