Mr. Britling Sees It Through

by Wells, H. G. ;

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

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

  § 4

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

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

  § 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  § 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  On the 21st of July Gladys came back repaired and looking none the worse for her misadventure. Next day he drove her very carefully over to Pyecrafts, hoping to drug his uneasiness with the pretence of a grand passion and the praises of “The Silent Places,” that beautiful work of art that was so free from any taint of application, and alas! he found Mrs. Harrowdean in an evil mood. He had been away from her for ten days—ten whole days. No doubt Edith had manoeuvred to keep him. She hadn’t! Hadn’t she? How was he, poor simple soul! to tell that she hadn’t? That was the prelude to a stormy afternoon.