Mr. Britling Sees It Through (18 page)

“There's a feeling in the States,” he said, “that we've had rather a tendency to overdo work, and that there is scope for a leisure class to develop the refinement and the wider meanings of life.”

“But a leisure class doesn't mean a class that does nothing,” said Cecily. “It only means a class that isn't busy in business.”

“You're too hard on me,” said Mr. Direck with that quiet smile of his.

And then by way of putting her on the defensive he asked her what she thought a man in his position ought to do.

“
Something
,” she said, and in the expansion of this vague demand they touched on a number of things. She said that she was a Socialist, and there was still in Mr. Direck's composition a streak of the old-fashioned American prejudice against the word. He associated Socialists with Anarchists and deported aliens. It was manifest too that she was deeply read in the essays and dissertations of Mr. Britling. She thought everybody, man or woman, ought to be chiefly engaged in doing something definite for the world at large. (“There's my secretaryship of the Massachusetts Modern Thought Society, anyhow,” said Mr. Direck.) And she herself wanted to be doing something— it was just because she did not know what it was she ought to be doing that she was reading so extensively and voraciously. She wanted to lose herself in something. Deep in the being of Mr. Direck was the conviction that what she ought to be doing was making love in a rapturously egotistical manner, and enjoying every scrap of her own delightful self and her own delightful vitality—while she had it, but for the purposes of their conversation he did not care to put it any more definitely than to say that he thought we owed it to ourselves to develop our personalities. Upon which she joined issue with great vigour.

“That is just what Mr. Britling says about you in his American Impressions,' ” she said. “He says that America overdoes the development of personalities altogether, that, whatever else is wrong about America, is most clearly wrong. I read that this
morning, and directly I read it I thought, ‘Yes, that's exactly it! Mr. Direck is overdoing the development of personalities.' ”

“Me!”

“Yes. I like talking to you and I don't like talking to you. And I see now it is because you keep on talking of my Personality and your Personality. That makes me uncomfortable. It's like having some one following me about with a limelight. And in a sort of way I do like it. I like it and I'm flattered by it, and then I go off and dislike it, dislike the effect of it. I find myself trying to be what you have told me I am—sort of acting myself. I want to glance at looking-glasses to see if I am keeping it up. It's just exactly what Mr. Britling says in his book about American women. They act themselves, he says; they get a kind of story and explanation about themselves and they are always trying to make it perfectly plain and clear to every one. Well, when you do that you can't think nicely of other things.”

“We like a clear light on people,” said Mr. Direck.

“We don't. I suppose we're shadier,” said Cecily.

“You're certainly much more in half-tones,” said Mr. Direck. “And I confess it's the half-tones get hold of me. But still you haven't told me, Miss Cissie, what you think I ought to do with myself. Here I am, you see, very much at your disposal. What sort of business do you think it's my duty to go in for?”

“That's for some one with more experience than I have, to tell you. You should ask Mr. Britling.”

“I'd rather have it from you.”

“I don't even know for myself,” she said.

“So why shouldn't we start to find out together?” he asked.

It was her tantalising habit to ignore all such tentatives.

“One can't help the feeling that one is in the world for something more than oneself,” she said.

§ 8

Soon Mr. Direck could measure the time that was left to him at the Dower House no longer by days but by hours. His luggage was mostly packed, his tickets to Rotterdam, Cologne, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, were all in order. And things were still very indefinite between him and Cecily. But God has not made Americans cleanshaven and firm-featured for nothing, and he determined that matters must be brought to some sort of definition before he embarked upon travels that were rapidly losing their attractiveness in this concentration of his attention. …

A considerable nervousness betrayed itself in his voice and manner when at last he carried out his determination.

“There's just a lil' thing,” he said to her, taking advantage of a moment when they were together after lunch, “that I'd value now more than anything else in the world.”

She answered by a lifted eyebrow and a glance that had not so much inquiry in it as she intended.

“If we could just take a lil' walk together for a bit. Round by Claverings park and all that. See the deer again and the old trees. Sort of scenery I'd like to remember when I'm away from it.”

He was a little short of breath, and there was a quite disproportionate gravity about her moment for consideration.

“Yes,” she said with a cheerful acquiescence that came a couple of bars too late. “Let's. It will be jolly.”

“These fine English afternoons are wonderful afternoons,” he remarked after a moment or so of silence. “Not quite the splendid blaze we get in our summer, but—sort of glowing.”

“It's been very fine all the time you've been here,” she said. …

After which exchanges they went along the lane, into the road by the park fencing, and so to the little gate that lets one into the park, without another word.

The idea took hold of Mr. Direck's mind that until they got through the park gate it would be quite out of order to say anything. The lane and the road and the stile and the gate were all so much preliminary stuff to be got through before one could get to business. But after the little white gate the way was clear, the park opened out and one could get ahead without bothering about the steering. And Mr. Direck had, he felt, been diplomatically involved in lanes and byways long enough.

“Well,” he said as he rejoined her after very carefully closing the gate.

“What I really wanted was an opportunity of just mentioning something that happenes to be of interest to you—if it does happen to interest you. … I suppose I'd better put the thing as simply as possible. … Practically. … I'm just right over the head and all in love with you. … I thought I'd like to tell you. …”

Immense silences.

“Of course I won't pretend there haven't been others,” Mr. Direck suddenly resumed. “There have. One particularly. But I can assure you I've never felt the depth and height or anything like the sort of Quiet Clear Conviction… And now I'm just telling you these things, Miss Corner, I don't know whether it will interest you if I tell you that you're really and truly the very first love I ever had as well as my last. I've had sent over—I got it only yesterday—this lil' photograph of a miniature portrait of one of my ancestor's relations—a Corner just as you are. It's here. …”

He had considerable difficulties with his pockets and papers. Cecily, mute and flushed and inconvenienced by a
preposterous and unaccountable impulse to weep, took the picture he handed her.

“When I was a lil' fellow of fifteen,” said Mr. Direck in the tone of one producing a melancholy but conclusive piece of evidence, “I
worshipped
that miniature. It seemed to me—the loveliest person. … And—it's just you. …”

He too was preposterously moved.

It seemed a long time before Cecily had anything to say, and then what she had to say she said in a softened, indistinct voice. “You're very kind,” she said, and kept hold of the little photograph.

They had halted for the photograph. Now they walked on again.

“I thought I'd like to tell you,” said Mr. Direck and became tremendously silent.

Cecily found him incredibly difficult to answer. She tried to make herself light and offhand, and to be very frank with him.

“Of course,” she said, “I knew—I felt somehow—you meant to say something of this sort to me—when you asked me to come with you——”

“Well?” he said.

“And I've been trying to make my poor brain think of something to say to you.”

She paused and contemplated her difficulties. …

“Couldn't you perhaps say something of the same kind— such as I've been trying to say?” said Mr. Direck presently, with a note of earnest helpfulness. “I'd be very glad if you could.”

“Not exactly,” said Cecily, more careful than ever.

“Meaning?”

“I think you know that you are the best of friends. I think you are, oh—a Perfect Dear.”

“Well—that's all right—so far.”

“That
is
as far.”

“You don't know whether you love me? That's what you mean to say.”

“No. … I feel somehow it isn't that. … Yet. …”

“There's nobody else by any chance?”

“No.” Cecily weighed things. “You needn't trouble about that.”

“Only … only you don't know.”

Cecily made a movement of assent.

“It's no good pretending I haven't thought about you,” she said.

“Well, anyhow I've done my best to give you the idea,” said Mr. Direck. “I seem now to have been doing that pretty nearly all the time.”

“Only what should we do?”

Mr. Direck felt this question was singularly artless. “Why!— we'd marry,” he said. “And all that sort of thing.”

“Letty has married—and all that sort of thing,” said Cecily, fixing her eye on him very firmly because she was colouring brightly. “And it doesn't leave Letty very much—forrarder.”

“Well now, they have a good time, don't they? I'd have thought they have a lovely time!”

“They've had a lovely time. And Teddy is the dearest husband. And they have a sweet little house and a most amusing baby. And they play hockey every Sunday. And Teddy does his work. And every week is like every other week. It is just heavenly. Just always the same heavenly. Every Sunday there is a fresh week of heavenly beginning. And this, you see, isn't heaven; it is earth. And they don't know it, but they are getting bored. I have been watching them, and they are getting
dreadfully bored. It's heartbreaking to watch, because they are almost my dearest people. Teddy used to be making perpetual jokes about the house and the baby and his work and Letty, and now—he's made all the possible jokes. It's only now and then he gets a fresh one. It's like spring flowers and then—summer. And Letty sits about and doesn't sing. They want something new to happen. … And there's Mr. and Mrs. Britling. They love each other. Much more than Mrs. Britling dreams, or Mr. Britling for the matter of that. Once upon a time things were heavenly for them too, I suppose. Until suddenly it began to happen to them that nothing new ever happened. …”

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “people can travel.”

“But that isn't
real
happening,” said Cecily.

“It keeps one interested.”

“But real happening is doing something.”

“You come back to that,” said Mr. Direck. “I never met any one before who'd quite got that spirit as you have it. I wouldn't alter it. It's part of you. It's part of this place. It's what Mr. Britling always seems to be saying and never quite knowing he's said it. It's just as though all the things that are going on weren't the things that ought to be going on—but something else quite different. Somehow one falls into it. It's as if your daily life didn't matter, as if politics didn't matter, as if the King and the social round and business and all those things weren't anything really, and as though you felt there was something else—out of sight—round the corner—that you ought to be getting at. Well, I admit that's got hold of me too. And it's all mixed up with my idea of you. I don't see that there's really a contradiction in it at all. I'm in love with you, all my heart's in love with you, what's the good of being shy about it? I'd just die for your littlest wish right here now, it's just as though I'd got love in my veins instead of blood, but
that's not taking me away from that other thing. It's bringing me round to that other thing. I feel as if without you I wasn't up to anything at all, but
with
you——We'd not go settling down in a cottage or just touring about with a Baedeker Guide or anything of that kind. Not for long anyhow. We'd naturally settle down side by side and
do
. …”

“But what should we do?” asked Cecily.

There came a hiatus in their talk.

Mr. Direck took a deep breath.

“You see that old felled tree there. I was sitting on it the day before yesterday and thinking of you. Will you come there and sit with me on it? When you sit on it you get a view, oh! a perfectly lovely English view, just a bit of the house and those clumps of trees and the valley away there with the lily-pond. I'd love to have you in my memory of it. …”

They sat down, and Mr. Direck opened his case. He was shy and clumsy about opening it, because he had been thinking dreadfully hard about it, and he hated to seem heavy or profound or anything but artless and spontaneous to Cecily. And he felt even when he did open his case that the effect of it was platitudinous and disappointing. Yet when he had thought it out it had seemed very profound and altogether living.

“You see one doesn't want to use terms that have been used in a thousand different senses in any way that isn't a perfectly unambiguous sense, and at the same time one doesn't want to seem to be canting about things or pitching anything a note or two higher than it ought legitimately to go, but it seems to me that this sort of something that Mr. Britling is always asking for in his essays and writings and things, and what you are looking for just as much and which seems so important to you that even love itself is a secondary kind of thing until you can square the
two together, is nothing more or less than Religion—I don't mean this Religion, or that Religion but just Religion itself, a Big, Solemn, Comprehensive Idea that holds you and me and all the world together in one great, grand universal scheme. And though it isn't quite the sort of idea of loving-making that's been popular—well, in places like Carrierville—for some time, it's the right idea; it's got to be followed out if we don't want love-making to be a sort of idle, troublesome game of treats and flatteries that is sure as anything to lead right away to disappointments and foolishness and unfaithfulness, and—just Hell. What you are driving at, according to my interpretation, is that marriage has got to be a religious marriage or else you are splitting up life, that religion and love are most of life and all the power there is in it, and that they can't afford to be harnessed in two different directions. … I never had these ideas until I came here and met you, but they come up now in my mind as though they had always been there. … And that's why you don't want to marry in a hurry. And that's why I'm glad almost that you don't want to marry in a hurry.”