Mr. Britling Sees It Through (11 page)

“My word, I'm beginning to like it,” said Mr. Direck.

“You're going to play very well,” she said.

And such is the magic of a game that Mr. Direck was humbly proud and grateful for her praise, and trotted along by the side of this creature who had revealed herself so swift and resolute and decisive, full to overflowing of the mere pleasure of just trotting along by her side. And after tea, which was a large confused affair, enlivened by wonderful and entirely untruthful reminiscences of the afternoon by Mr. Raeburn, they played again, with fewer inefficients and greater skill and swiftness, and Mr. Direck did such quick and intelligent things that everybody declared that he was a hockey-player straight from heaven. The dusk, which at last made the position of the ball too speculative for play, came all too soon for him. He had played in six games, and he knew he would be as stiff as a Dutch doll in the morning. But he was very, very happy.

The rest of the Sunday evening was essentially a sequel to the hockey.

Mr. Direck changed again, and after using some embrocation, that Mrs. Britling recommended very strongly, came down in a black jacket and a cheerfully ample black tie. He had a sense of physical well-being such as he had not experienced since he came aboard the liner at New York. The curious thing was that it was not quite the same sense of physical well-being that one had in America. That is bright and clear and a little dry, this was—humid. His mind quivered contentedly, like sunset midges over a lake—it had no hard bright flashes—and his body wanted to sit about. His sense of intimacy with Cecily increased each time he looked at her. When she met his eyes she smiled. He'd caught her style now, he felt; he attempted no more compliments, and was frankly her pupil at hockey and Badminton. After supper Mr. Britling renewed his suggestion of an automobile excursion on the Monday.

“There's nothing to take you back to London,” said Mr. Britling, “and we could just hunt about the district with the little old car and see everything you want to see. …”

Mr. Direck did not hesitate three seconds. He thought of Gladys; he thought of Miss Cecily Corner.

“Well, indeed,” he said, “if it isn't burthening you, if I'm not being any sort of inconvenience here for another night, I'd be really very glad indeed of the opportunity of going around and seeing all these ancient places. …”

§ 6

The newspapers came next morning at nine, and were full of the Sarajevo Murders. Mr. Direck got
The Daily Chronicle
and found headlines quite animated for a British paper.

“Who's this Archduke,” he asked, “anyhow? And where is this Bosnia? I thought it was a part of Turkey.”

“It's in Austria,” said Teddy.

“It's in the middle ages,” said Mr. Britling. “What an odd, pertinacious business it seems to have been. First one bomb, then another; then finally the man with the pistol. While we were strolling about the rose-garden. It's like something out of ‘The Prisoner of Zenda.' ”

“Please,” said Herr Heinrich.

Mr. Britling assumed an attentive expression.

“Will not this generally affect European politics?”

“I don't know. Perhaps it will.”

“It says in the paper that Serbia has sent those bombs to Sarajevo.”

“It's like another world,” said Mr. Britling, over his paper. “Assassination as a political method. Can you imagine anything of the sort happening nowadays west of the Adriatic? Imagine some one assassinating the American Vice-President, and the bombs being at once ascribed to the arsenal at Toronto! … We take our politics more sadly in the West. … Won't you have another egg, Direck?”

“Please! Might this not lead to a war?”

“I don't think so. Austria may threaten Serbia, but she doesn't want to provoke a conflict with Russia. It would be going too near the powder-magazine. But it's all an extraordinary business.”

“But if she did?” Herr Heinrich persisted.

“She won't. … Some years ago I used to believe in the inevitable European war,” Mr. Britling explained to Mr. Direck, “but it's been threatened so long that at last I've lost all belief in it. The Powers wrangle and threaten. They're far too cautious
and civilised to let the guns go off. If there was going to be a war it would have happened two years ago when the Balkan League fell upon Turkey. Or when Bulgaria attacked Serbia. …”

Herr Heinrich reflected, and received these conclusions with an expression of respectful edification.

“I am naturally anxious,” he said, “because I am taking tickets for my holidays at an Esperanto Conference at Boulogne.”

§ 7

“There is only one way to master such a thing as driving an automobile,” said Mr. Britling outside his front door, as he took his place in the driver's seat, “and that is to resolve that from the first you will take no risks. Be slow if you like. Stop and think when you are in doubt. But do nothing rashly, permit no mistakes.”

It seemed to Mr. Direck as he took his seat beside his host that this was admirable doctrine.

They started out of the gates with an extreme deliberation. Indeed twice they stopped dead in the act of turning into the road, and the engine had to be restarted.

“You will laugh at me,” said Mr. Britling: “but I'm resolved to have no blunders this time.”

“I don't laugh at you. It's excellent,” said Mr. Direck.

“It's the right way,” said Mr. Britling. “Care—oh, damn! I've stopped the engine again. Ugh!—ah!—
so
!—Care, I was saying—and calm.”

“Don't think I want to hurry you,” said Mr. Direck. “I don't.”

They passed through the village at a slow, agreeable pace, tooting loudly at every corner, and whenever a pedestrian was
approached. Mr. Direck was reminded that he had still to broach the lecture project to Mr. Britling. So much had happened——

The car halted abruptly and the engine stopped.

“I thought that confounded hen was thinking of crossing the road,” said Mr. Britling. “Instead of which she's gone through the hedge. She certainly
looked
this way. … Perhaps I'm a little fussy this morning. … I'll warm up to the work presently.”

“I'm convinced you can't be too careful,” said Mr. Direck. “And this sort of thing enables one to see the country better. …”

Beyond the village Mr. Britling seemed to gather confidence. The pace quickened. But whenever other traffic or any indication of a side way appeared discretion returned. Mr. Britling stalked his sign-posts, crawling towards them on the belly of the lowest gear; he drove all the morning like a man who is flushing ambuscades. And yet accident overtook him. For God demands more from us that mere righteousness.

He cut through the hills to Market Saffron along a lane-road with which he was unfamiliar. It began to go up-hill. He explained to Mr. Direck how admirably his engine would climb hills on the top gear.

They took a curve and the hill grew steeper, and Mr. Direck opened the throttle.

They rounded another corner, and still more steeply the hill rose before them.

The engine began to make a chinking sound, and the car lost pace. And then Mr. Britling saw a pleading little white board with the inscription “Concealed Turning.” For the moment he thought a turning might be concealed anywhere. He threw out his clutch and clapped on his brake. Then he repented of what he had done. But the engine, after three Herculean throbs, ceased to work. Mr. Britling with a convulsive clutch at his steering-wheel
set the electric hooter snarling, while one foot released the clutch again and the other, on the accelerator, sought in vain for help. Mr. Direck felt they were going back, back, in spite of all this vocalisation. He clutched at the emergency brake. But he was too late to avoid misfortune. With a feeling like sitting gently in butter, the car sank down sideways and stopped with two wheels in the ditch.

Mr. Britling said they were in the ditch—said it with quite unnecessary violence. …

This time two cart-horses and a retinue of five men were necessary to restore Gladys to her self-respect. …

After that they drove on to Market Saffron, and got there in time for lunch, and after lunch Mr. Direck explored the church and the churchyard and the parish register. …

After lunch Mr. Britling became more cheerful about his driving. The road from Market Saffron to Blandish, whence one turns off to Matching's Easy, is the London and Norwich highroad; it is an old Roman Stane Street and very straightforward and honest in its stretches. You can see the crossroads half a mile away, and the low hedges give you no chance of a surprise. Everybody is cheered by such a road, and everybody drives more confidently and quickly, and Mr. Britling particularly was heartened by it and gradually let out Gladys from the almost excessive restriction that had hitherto marked the day. “On a road like this nothing can happen,” said Mr. Britling.

“Unless you broke an axle or burst a tire,” said Mr. Direck.

“My man at Matching's Easy is most careful in his inspection,” said Mr. Britling, putting the accelerator well down and watching the speed indicator creep from forty to forty-five. “He went over the car not a week ago. And it's not one month old—in use that is.”

Yet something did happen.

It was as they swept by the picturesque walls under the big old trees that encircle Brandismead Park. It was nothing but a slight miscalculation of distances. Ahead of them and well to the left rode a postman on a bicycle; towards them, with that curious effect of implacable fury peculiar to motor-cycles, came a motor-cyclist. First Mr. Britling thought that he would not pass between these two, then he decided that he would hurry up and do so, then he reverted to his former decision, and then it seemed to him that he was going so fast that he must inevitably run down the postman. His instinct not to do that pulled the car sharply across the path of the motor-cyclist. “Oh, my God!” cried Mr. Britling; “My God!” twisted his wheel over and distributed his feet among his levers dementedly.

He had an imperfectly formed idea of getting across right in front of the motor-cyclist, and then they were going down the brief grassy slope between the road and the wall, straight at the wall, and still at a good speed. The motor-cyclist smacked against something and vanished from the problem. The wall seemed to rush up at them and then—collapse. There was a tremendous concussion. Mr. Direck gripped at his friend the emergency brake, but had only time to touch it before his head hit against the frame of the glass wind-screen, and a curtain fell upon everything. …

He opened his eyes upon a broken wall, a crumpled motorcar, and an undamaged motor-cyclist in the aviator's cap and thin oilskin overalls dear to motor-cyclists. Mr. Direck stared and then, still stunned and puzzled, tried to raise himself. He became aware of acute pain.

“Don't move for a bit,” said the motor-cyclist. “Your arm and side are rather hurt, I think. …”

§ 8

In the course of the next twelve hours Mr. Direck was to make a discovery that was less common in the days before the war than it has been since. He discovered that even pain and injury may be vividly interesting and gratifying.

If any one had told him he was going to be stunned for five or six minutes, cut about the brow and face and have a bone in his wrist put out, and that as a consequence he would find himself pleased and exhilarated, he would have treated the prophecy with ridicule; but here he was lying stiffly on his back with his wrist bandaged to his side and smiling into the darkness even more brightly than he had smiled at the Essex landscape two days before. The fact is pain hurts or irritates, but in itself it does not make a healthily constituted man miserable. The expectation of pain, the certainty of injury may make one hopeless enough, the reality rouses our resistance. Nobody wants a broken bone or a delicate wrist, but very few people are very much depressed by getting one. People can be much more depressed by smoking a hundred cigarettes in three days or losing one per cent. of their capital.

And everybody had been most delightful to Mr. Direck.

He had had the monopoly of damage. Mr. Britling, holding on to the steering-wheel, had not even been thrown out. “Unless I'm internally injured,” he said, “I'm not hurt at all. My liver perhaps—bruised a little. …”

Gladys had been abandoned in the ditch, and they had been very kindly brought home by a passing automobile. Cecily had been at the Dower House at the moment of the rueful arrival. She had seen how an American can carry injuries.
She had made sympathy and helpfulness more delightful by expressed admiration.

“She's a natural born nurse,” said Mr. Direck, and then rather in the tone of one who addressed a public meeting: “But this sort of thing brings out all the good there is in a woman.”

He had been quite explicit to them and more particularly to her, when they told him he must stay at the Dower House until his arm was cured. He had looked the application straight into her pretty eyes.

“If I'm to stay right here just as a consequence of that little shake up, maybe for a couple of weeks, maybe three, and if you're coming to do a bit of a talk to me ever and again, then I tell you I don't call this a misfortune. It isn't a misfortune. It's right down sheer good luck. …”

And now he lay as straight as a mummy, with his soul filled with radiance of complete mental peace. After months of distress and confusion, he'd got straight again. He was in the middle of a real good story, bright and clean. He knew just exactly what he wanted.

“After all,” he said, “it's true. There's ideals.
She's
an ideal. Why, I loved her before ever I set eyes on Mamie. I loved her before I was put into pants. That old portrait, there it was pointing my destiny. … It's affinity. … It's natural selection. …

“Well, I don't know what she thinks of me yet, but I do know very well what she's
got
to think of me. She's got to think all the world of me—if I break every limb of my body making her do it.