Mr. Britling Sees It Through
- -
- 100%
- +
"Well, let it be Nix on the war! Don't come here and talk to me! You who were searching registers a year ago to find your Essex kin. Let it be Nix! Explanations! What do I want with explanations? And" – he mocked his guest's accent and his guest's mode of thought – "dif'cult prap'sitions."
He got up and stood irresolute. He knew he was being preposterously unfair to America, and outrageously uncivil to a trusting guest; he knew he had no business now to end the talk in this violent fashion. But it was an enormous relief. And to mend matters —No! He was glad he'd said these things…
He swung a shoulder to Mr. Direck, and walked out of the room…
Mr. Direck heard him cross the hall and slam the door of the little parlour…
Mr. Direck had been stirred deeply by the tragic indignation of this explosion, and the ring of torment in Mr. Britling's voice. He had stood up also, but he did not follow his host.
"It's his boy," said Mr. Direck at last, confidentially to the writing-desk. "How can one argue with him? It's just hell for him…"
§ 20
Mr. Direck took his leave of Mrs. Britling, and went very slowly towards the little cottage. But he did not go to the cottage. He felt he would only find another soul in torment there.
"What's the good of hanging round talking?" said Mr. Direck.
He stopped at the stile in the lane, and sat thinking deeply. "Only one thing will convince her," he said.
He held out his fingers. "First this," he whispered, "and then that. Yes."
He went on as far as the bend from which one sees the cottage, and stood for a little time regarding it.
He returned still more sorrowfully to the junction, and with every step he took it seemed to him that he would rather see Cecily angry and insulting than not see her at all.
At the post office he stopped and wrote a letter-card.
"Dear Cissie," he wrote. "I came down to-day to see you – and thought better of it. I'm going right off to find out about Teddy. Somehow I'll get that settled. I'll fly around and do that somehow if I have to go up to the German front to do it. And when I've got that settled I've got something else in my mind – well, it will wipe out all this little trouble that's got so big between us about neutrality. And I love you dearly, Cissie."
That was all the card would hold.
§ 21
And then as if it were something that every one in the Dower House had been waiting for, came the message that Hugh had been killed.
The telegram was brought up by a girl in a pinafore instead of the boy of the old dispensation, for boys now were doing the work of youths and youths the work of the men who had gone to the war.
Mr. Britling was standing at the front door; he had been surveying the late October foliage, touched by the warm light of the afternoon, when the messenger appeared. He opened the telegram, hoping as he had hoped when he opened any telegram since Hugh had gone to the front that it would not contain the exact words he read; that it would say wounded, that at the worst it would say "missing," that perhaps it might even tell of some pleasant surprise, a brief return to home such as the last letter had foreshadowed. He read the final, unqualified statement, the terse regrets. He stood quite still for a moment or so, staring at the words…
It was a mile and a quarter from the post office to the Dower House, and it was always his custom to give telegraph messengers who came to his house twopence, and he wanted very much to get rid of the telegraph girl, who stood expectantly before him holding her red bicycle. He felt now very sick and strained; he had a conviction that if he did not by an effort maintain his bearing cool and dry he would howl aloud. He felt in his pocket for money; there were some coppers and a shilling. He pulled it all out together and stared at it.
He had an absurd conviction that this ought to be a sixpenny telegram. The thing worried him. He wanted to give the brat sixpence, and he had only threepence and a shilling, and he didn't know what to do and his brain couldn't think. It would be a shocking thing to give her a shilling, and he couldn't somehow give just coppers for so important a thing as Hugh's death. Then all this problem vanished and he handed the child the shilling. She stared at him, inquiring, incredulous. "Is there a reply, Sir, please?"
"No," he said, "that's for you. All of it… This is a peculiar sort of telegram… It's news of importance…"
As he said this he met her eyes, and had a sudden persuasion that she knew exactly what it was the telegram had told him, and that she was shocked at this gala-like treatment of such terrible news. He hesitated, feeling that he had to say something else, that he was socially inadequate, and then he decided that at any cost he must get his face away from her staring eyes. She made no movement to turn away. She seemed to be taking him in, recording him, for repetition, greedily, with every fibre of her being.
He stepped past her into the garden, and instantly forgot about her existence…
§ 22
He had been thinking of this possibility for the last few weeks almost continuously, and yet now that it had come to him he felt that he had never thought about it before, that he must go off alone by himself to envisage this monstrous and terrible fact, without distraction or interruption.
He saw his wife coming down the alley between the roses.
He was wrenched by emotions as odd and unaccountable as the emotions of adolescence. He had exactly the same feeling now that he had had when in his boyhood some unpleasant admission had to be made to his parents. He felt he could not go through a scene with her yet, that he could not endure the task of telling her, of being observed. He turned abruptly to his left. He walked away as if he had not seen her, across his lawn towards the little summer-house upon a knoll that commanded the high road. She called to him, but he did not answer…
He would not look towards her, but for a time all his senses were alert to hear whether she followed him. Safe in the summer-house he could glance back.
It was all right. She was going into the house.
He drew the telegram from his pocket again furtively, almost guiltily, and re-read it. He turned it over and read it again…
Killed.
Then his own voice, hoarse and strange to his ears, spoke his thought.
"My God! how unutterably silly… Why did I let him go? Why did I let him go?"
§ 23
Mrs. Britling did not learn of the blow that had struck them until after dinner that night. She was so accustomed to ignore his incomprehensible moods that she did not perceive that there was anything tragic about him until they sat at table together. He seemed heavy and sulky and disposed to avoid her, but that sort of moodiness was nothing very strange to her. She knew that things that seemed to her utterly trivial, the reading of political speeches in The Times, little comments on life made in the most casual way, mere movements, could so avert him. She had cultivated a certain disregard of such fitful darknesses. But at the dinner-table she looked up, and was stabbed to the heart to see a haggard white face and eyes of deep despair regarding her ambiguously.
"Hugh!" she said, and then with a chill intimation, "What is it?"
They looked at each other. His face softened and winced.
"My Hugh," he whispered, and neither spoke for some seconds.
"Killed," he said, and suddenly stood up whimpering, and fumbled with his pocket.
It seemed he would never find what he sought. It came at last, a crumpled telegram. He threw it down before her, and then thrust his chair back clumsily and went hastily out of the room. She heard him sob. She had not dared to look at his face again.
"Oh!" she cried, realising that an impossible task had been thrust upon her.
"But what can I say to him?" she said, with the telegram in her hand.
The parlourmaid came into the room.
"Clear the dinner away!" said Mrs. Britling, standing at her place. "Master Hugh is killed…" And then wailing: "Oh! what can I say? What can I say?"
§ 24
That night Mrs. Britling made the supreme effort of her life to burst the prison of self-consciousness and inhibition in which she was confined. Never before in all her life had she so desired to be spontaneous and unrestrained; never before had she so felt herself hampered by her timidity, her self-criticism, her deeply ingrained habit of never letting herself go. She was rent by reflected distress. It seemed to her that she would be ready to give her life and the whole world to be able to comfort her husband now. And she could conceive no gesture of comfort. She went out of the dining-room into the hall and listened. She went very softly upstairs until she came to the door of her husband's room. There she stood still. She could hear no sound from within. She put out her hand and turned the handle of the door a little way, and then she was startled by the loudness of the sound it made and at her own boldness. She withdrew her hand, and then with a gesture of despair, with a face of white agony, she flitted along the corridor to her own room.
Her mind was beaten to the ground by this catastrophe, of which to this moment she had never allowed herself to think. She had never allowed herself to think of it. The figure of her husband, like some pitiful beast, wounded and bleeding, filled her mind. She gave scarcely a thought to Hugh. "Oh, what can I do for him?" she asked herself, sitting down before her unlit bedroom fire… "What can I say or do?"
She brooded until she shivered, and then she lit her fire…
It was late that night and after an eternity of resolutions and doubts and indecisions that Mrs. Britling went to her husband. He was sitting close up to the fire with his chin upon his hands, waiting for her; he felt that she would come to him, and he was thinking meanwhile of Hugh with a slow unprogressive movement of the mind. He showed by a movement that he heard her enter the room, but he did not turn to look at her. He shrank a little from her approach.
She came and stood beside him. She ventured to touch him very softly, and to stroke his head. "My dear," she said. "My poor dear!
"It is so dreadful for you," she said, "it is so dreadful for you. I know how you loved him…"
He spread his hands over his face and became very still.
"My poor dear!" she said, still stroking his hair, "my poor dear!"
And then she went on saying "poor dear," saying it presently because there was nothing more had come into her mind. She desired supremely to be his comfort, and in a little while she was acting comfort so poorly that she perceived her own failure. And that increased her failure, and that increased her paralysing sense of failure…
And suddenly her stroking hand ceased. Suddenly the real woman cried out from her.
"I can't reach you!" she cried aloud. "I can't reach you. I would do anything… You! You with your heart half broken…"
She turned towards the door. She moved clumsily, she was blinded by her tears.
Mr. Britling uncovered his face. He stood up astonished, and then pity and pitiful understanding came storming across his grief. He made a step and took her in his arms. "My dear," he said, "don't go from me…"
She turned to him weeping, and put her arms about his neck, and he too was weeping.
"My poor wife!" he said, "my dear wife. If it were not for you – I think I could kill myself to-night. Don't cry, my dear. Don't, don't cry. You do not know how you comfort me. You do not know how you help me."
He drew her to him; he put her cheek against his own…
His heart was so sore and wounded that he could not endure that another human being should go wretched. He sat down in his chair and drew her upon his knees, and said everything he could think of to console her and reassure her and make her feel that she was of value to him. He spoke of every pleasant aspect of their lives, of every aspect, except that he never named that dear pale youth who waited now… He could wait a little longer…
At last she went from him.
"Good night," said Mr. Britling, and took her to the door. "It was very dear of you to come and comfort me," he said…
§ 25
He closed the door softly behind her.
The door had hardly shut upon her before he forgot her. Instantly he was alone again, utterly alone. He was alone in an empty world…
Loneliness struck him like a blow. He had dependents, he had cares. He had never a soul to whom he might weep…
For a time he stood beside his open window. He looked at the bed – but no sleep he knew would come that night – until the sleep of exhaustion came. He looked at the bureau at which he had so often written. But the writing there was a shrivelled thing…
This room was unendurable. He must go out. He turned to the window, and outside was a troublesome noise of night-jars and a distant roaring of stags, black trees, blacknesses, the sky clear and remote with a great company of stars… The stars seemed attentive. They stirred and yet were still. It was as if they were the eyes of watchers. He would go out to them…
Very softly he went towards the passage door, and still more softly felt his way across the landing and down the staircase. Once or twice he paused to listen.
He let himself out with elaborate precautions…
Across the dark he went, and suddenly his boy was all about him, playing, climbing the cedars, twisting miraculously about the lawn on a bicycle, discoursing gravely upon his future, lying on the grass, breathing very hard and drawing preposterous caricatures. Once again they walked side by side up and down – it was athwart this very spot – talking gravely but rather shyly…
And here they had stood a little awkwardly, before the boy went in to say good-bye to his stepmother and go off with his father to the station…
"I will work to-morrow again," whispered Mr. Britling, "but to-night – to-night… To-night is yours… Can you hear me, can you hear? Your father … who had counted on you…"
§ 26
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
§ 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…