Mr. Britling Sees It Through (5 page)

He was carried on even further. He made a tremendous literary epigram. “I thought,” he said, “when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.”

§ 1

Mr. Direck found little reason to revise his dictum in the subsequent experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and the next day were steadily consistent in confirming what a very good dictum it had been. The scenery was the traditional scenery of England, and all the people seemed quicker, more irresponsible, more chaotic, than any one could have anticipated, and entirely inexplicable by any recognised code of English relationships. …

“You think that John Bull is dead and a strange generation is wearing his clothes,” said Mr. Britling. “I think you'll find very soon it's the old John Bull. Perhaps not Mrs. Humphry Ward's John Bull, or Mrs. Henry Wood's John Bull, but true essentially to Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Meredith. …

“I suppose,” he added, “there are changes. There's a new generation grown up. …”

He looked at his barn and the swimming-pool. “It's a good point of yours about the barn,” he said. “What you say reminds me of that very jolly thing of Kipling's about the old mill-wheel that began by grinding corn and ended by driving dynamos. …

“Only I admit that barn doesn't exactly drive a dynamo. …

“To be frank, it's just a pleasure barn. …

“The country can afford it. …”

§ 2

He left it at that for the time, but throughout the afternoon Mr. Direck had the gratification of seeing his thought floating round and round in the back-waters of Mr. Britling's mental current. If it didn't itself get into the stream again its reflection at any rate appeared and reappeared. He was taken about with great assiduity throughout the afternoon, and he got no more than occasional glimpses of the rest of the Dower House circle until six o'clock in the evening.

Meanwhile the fountains of Mr. Britling's active and encyclopædic mind played steadily.

He was inordinately proud of England, and had abused her incessantly. He wanted to state England to Mr. Direck as the amiable summation of a grotesque assembly of faults. That was the view into which the comforts and prosperities of his middle age had brought him from a radicalism that had in its earlier stages been angry and bitter. And for Mr. Britling England was “here.” Essex was the county he knew. He took Mr. Direck out from his walled garden by a little door into a trim paddock with two white goals. “We play hockey here on Sundays,” he said, in a way that gave Mr. Direck no hint of the practically compulsory participation of every visitor to Matching's Easy in this violent and dangerous exercise, and thence they passed by a rich deep lane into a highroad that ran along the edge of the deer park of Claverings. “We will call in on Claverings later,” said Mr. Britling. “Lady Homartyn has some people there for the weekend, and you ought to see the sort of thing it is and the sort of people they are. She wanted us to lunch there tomorrow, but I didn't accept that because of our afternoon hockey.”

Mr. Direck received this reason uncritically.

The village reminded him of Abbey's pictures. There was an inn with a sign standing out in the road, a painted sign of the Clavering Arms; it had a water-trough (such as Mr. Weller senior ducked the dissenter in) and a green painted table outside its inviting door. There were also a general shop and a number of very pleasant cottages, each marked with the Mainstay crest. All this was grouped about a green with real geese drilling thereon. Mr. Britling conducted his visitor (through a lych-gate) into the churchyard, and there they found mossy, tumble-down tombstones, one with a skull and cross-bones upon it, that went back to the later seventeenth century. In the aisle of the church were three huge hatchments, and there was a side chapel devoted to the Mainstay family and the Barons Homartyn, with a series of monuments that began with painted Tudor effigies and came down to a vast stained-glass window of the vilest commercial Victorian. There were also mediæval brasses of parish priests, and a marble crusader and his lady of some extinguished family which had ruled Matching's Easy before the Mainstays came. And as the two gentlemen emerged from the church they ran against the perfect vicar, Mr. Dimple, ample and genial, with an embracing laugh and an enveloping voice. “Come to see the old country,” he said to Mr. Direck. “So Good of you Americans to do that! So Good of you. …”

There was some amiable sparring between the worthy man and Mr. Britling about bringing Mr. Direck to church on Sunday morning. “He's terribly Lax,” said Mr. Dimple to Mr. Direck, smiling radiantly. “Terribly Lax. But then nowadays Everybody
is
so Lax. And he's very Good to my Coal Club; I don't know what we should do without him. So I just admonish him. And if he doesn't go to church, well, anyhow he doesn't go anywhere
else. He may be a poor churchman, but anyhow he's not a dissenter. …”

“In England, you see,” Mr. Britling remarked, after they had parted from the reverend gentleman, “we have domesticated everything. We have even domesticated God.”

For a while Mr. Britling showed Mr. Direck English lanes and then came back along narrow white paths across small fields of rising wheat, to the village and a little gate that led into the park.

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “what you say about domestication does seem to me to be very true indeed. Why! even those clouds up there look as though they had a shepherd and were grazing.”

“Ready for shearing almost,” said Mr. Britling.

“Indeed,” said Mr. Direck, raising his voice a little. “I've seen scarcely anything in England that wasn't domesticated, unless it was some of your back streets in London.”

Mr. Britling seemed to reflect for a moment. “They're an excrescence,” he said. …

§ 3

The park had a trim wildness like nature in an old Italian picture; dappled fallow deer grouped close at hand and looked at the two men fearlessly; the path dropped through oak-trees and some stunted bracken to a little loitering stream, that paused ever and again to play at ponds and waterfalls and bear a fleet of water-lily leaves, and then their way curved round in an indolent sweep towards the cedars and shrubberies of the great house. The house looked low and extensive to an American eye, and its red-brick chimneys rose like infantry in open order along its extended line. There was a glimpse of flower-bright garden and
terraces to the right as they came round the corner to the front of the house through a path cut in the laurel bushes.

Mr. Britling had a moment of exposition as they approached the entrance.

“I expect we shall find Philbert from the Home Office—or is it the Local Government Board?—and Sir Thomas Loot, the Treasury man. There may be some other people of that sort, the people we call the Governing Class. Wives also. And I rather fancy the Countess of Frensham is coming, she's strong on the Irish question, and Lady Venetia Trumpington, who they say is a beauty—I've never seen her. It's Lady Homartyn's way to expect me to come in—not that I'm an important item at these weekend social feasts—but she likes to see me on the table—to be nibbled at if any one wants to do so—like the olives and the salted almonds. And she always asks me to lunch on Sunday and I always refuse—because of the hockey. So you see I put in an appearance on the Saturday afternoon. …”

They had reached the big doorway.

It opened into a large cool hall adorned with the heads of hippopotami and rhinoceroses and a stuffed lion, and furnished chiefly with a vast table on which hats and sticks and newspapers were littered. A man servant with a subdued, semiconfidential manner conveyed to Mr. Brtiling that her ladyship was on the terrace, and took the hats and sticks that were handed to him and led the way through the house. They emerged upon a broad terrace looking out under great cedar trees upon flower-beds and stone urns and tennis lawns and yew hedges that dipped to give a view of distant hills. On the terrace were grouped perhaps a dozen people for the most part holding teacups, they sat in deck chairs and folding seats about a little table that bore the tea-things. Lady Homartyn came forward to welcome the newcomers.

Mr. Direck was introduced as a travelling American gratified to see a typical English country house, and Lady Homartyn in an habituated way ran over the points of her Tudor specimen. Mr. Direck was not accustomed to titled people, and was suddenly in doubt whether you called a baroness “My Lady” or “Your Ladyship,” so he wisely avoided any form of address until he had a lead from Mr. Britling. Mr. Britling presently called her “Lady Homartyn.” She took Mr. Direck and sat him down beside a lady whose name he didn't catch, but who had had a lot to do with the British Embassy at Washington, and then she handed Mr. Britling over to the Right Honourable George Philbert, who was anxious to discuss certain points in the latest book of essays. The conversation of the lady from Washington was intelligent but not exacting, and Mr. Direck was able to give some of his attention to the general effect of the scene.

He was a little disappointed to find that the servants didn't wear livery. In American magazine pictures and in American cinematograph films of English stories and in the houses of very rich Americans living in England, they do so. And the Mansion House is misleading; he had met a compatriot who had recently dined at the Mansion House, and who had described “flunkies” in hair-powder and cloth of gold—like Thackeray's Jeames Yellowplush. But here the only servants were two slim, discreet and attentive young gentlemen in black coats and with a gentle piety of manner instead of pride. And he was a little disappointed too by a notable lack of splendour in the company. The ladies affected him as being ill-dressed; there was none of the hard snap, the “
There
! and what do you say to it?” about them of the well-dressed American woman, and the men too were not so much tailored as unobtrusively and yet grammatically clothed.

§ 4

He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversation when everything was thrown into commotion by the important arrival of Lady Frensham, and there was a general reshuffling of places. Lady Frensham had arrived from London by automobile; she appeared in veils and swathings and a tremendous dust-cloak, with a sort of nephew in her train who had driven the car. She was manifestly a constitutionally triumphant woman. A certain afternoon lassitude vanished in the swirl of her arrival. Mr. Philbert removed wrappings and handed them to the man servant.

“I lunched with Sir Edward Carson today, my dear,” she told Lady Homartyn, and rolled a belligerent eye at Philbert.

“And is he as obdurate as ever?” asked Sir Thomas.

“Obdurate! It's Redmond who's obdurate,” cried Lady Frensham. “What do you say, Mr. Britling?”

“A plague on both your parties,” said Mr. Britling.

“You can't keep out of things like that,” said Lady Frensham with the utmost gusto, “when the country's on the very verge of civil war. … You people who try to pretend there isn't a grave crisis when there is one, will be more accountable than any one—when the civil war does come. It won't spare you. Mark my words!”

The party became a circle.

Mr. Direck found himself the interested auditor of a real English country-house weekend political conversation. This at any rate was like the England of which Mrs. Humphry Ward's novels had informed him, but yet not exactly like it. Perhaps that was due to the fact that for the most part these novels dealt with the England of the nineties, and things had lost a little in dignity
since those days. But at any rate here were political figures and titled people, and they were talking about the “country.” …

Was it possible that people of this sort did “run” the country, after all? … When he had read Mrs. Humphry Ward in America he had always accepted this theory of the story quite easily, but now that he saw and heard them——!

But all governments and rulers and ruling classes when you look at them closely are incredible. …

“I don't believe the country is on the verge of civil war,” cried Mr. Britling.

“Facts!” cried Lady Frensham, and seemed to wipe away delusions with a rapid gesture of her hands.

“You're interested in Ireland, Mr. Dirks?” asked Lady Homartyn.

“We see it first when we come over,” said Mr. Direck rather neatly, and after that he was free to attend to the general discussion.

Lady Frensham, it was manifest, was one of that energetic body of aristocratic ladies who were at that time taking up an irreconcilable attitude against Home Rule “in any shape or form.” They were rapidly turning British politics into a system of bitter personal feuds in which all sense of imperial welfare was lost. A wild ambition to emulate the extremest suffragettes seemed to have seized upon them. They insulted, they denounced, they refused every invitation lest they should meet that “traitor” the Prime Minister, they imitated the party hatreds of a fiercer age, and even now the moderate and politic Philbert found himself treated as an invisible object. They were supported by the extremer section of the Tory press, and the most extraordinary writers were set up to froth like lunatics against the government as “traitors,” as men who “insulted the King”;
The Morning Post
and the lighter-witted side of the Unionist press generally poured out a torrent of partisan nonsense it is now almost incredible to recall. Lady Frensham, bridling over Lady Homartyn's party, and for a time leaving Mr. Britling, hurried on to tell of the newest developments of the great feud. She had a wonderful description of Lady Londonderry sitting opposite “that old rascal,” the Prime Minister, at a performance of Mozart's “Zauberflöte.”

“If looks could kill!” cried Lady Frensham with tremendous gusto.

“Sir Edward is quite firm that Ulster means to fight. They have machine-guns—ammunition. And I am sure the army is with us. …”

“Where did they get those machine-guns and ammunition?” asked Mr. Britling suddenly.