Mr. Britling Sees It Through (22 page)

“Even now,” he said, “the battleships may be fighting.”

He listened, but the sound was only the low intermittent drumming of his cylinders as he ran with his throttle nearly closed, down a stretch of gentle hill.

He felt that he must see the sea. He would follow the road beyond the Rodwell villages, and then turn up to the crest of Eastonbury Hill. And thither he went and saw in the gap of the low hills beyond a V-shaped level of moonlit water that glittered and yet lay still. He stopped his car by the roadside, and sat for a long time looking at this and musing. And once it seemed to him three little shapes like short black needles passed in line ahead across the molten silver.

But that may have been just the straining of the eyes. …

All sorts of talk had come to Mr. Britling's ears about the navies of England and France and Germany; there had been public disputes of experts, much whispering and discussion in private. We had the heavier vessels, the bigger guns, but it was not certain that we had the pre-eminence in science and invention. Were they relying as we were relying on Dreadnoughts, or had they their secrets and surprises for us? Tonight, perhaps, the great ships were steaming to conflict. …

Tonight all over the world ships must be in flight and ships pursuing; ten thousand towns must be ringing with the immediate excitement of war. …

Only a year ago Mr. Britling had been lunching on a battleship and looking over its intricate machinery. It had seemed to him then that there could be no better human stuff in the world that the quiet, sunburned, disciplined men and officers he had met. … And our little army, too, must be gathering tonight, the little army that had been chastened and reborn in South Africa, that he was convinced was individually more gallant and self-reliant and capable than any other army in the world. He would
have sneered or protested if he had heard another Englishman say that, but in his heart he held the dear belief. …

And what other aviators in the world could fly as the Frenchmen and Englishmen he had met once or twice at Eastchurch and Salisbury could fly? These are things of race and national quality. Let the German cling to his gas-bags. “We shall beat them in the air,” he whispered, “We shall beat them on the seas. Surely we shall beat them on the seas. If we have men enough and guns enough we shall beat them on land. … Yet——For years they have been preparing. …”

There was little room in the heart of Mr. Britling that night for any love but the love of England. He loved England now as a nation of men. There could be no easy victory. Good for us with our too easy natures that there could be no easy victory. But victory we must have now—or perish. …

He roused himself with a sigh, restarted his engine, and went on to find some turning-place. He still had a colourless impression that the journey's end was Pyecrafts.

“We must all do the thing we can,” he thought, and for a time the course of his automobile along a winding down-hill road held his attention so that he could not get beyond it. He turned about and ran up over the hill again and down long slopes inland, running very softly and smoothly with his lights devouring the road ahead and sweeping the banks and hedges beside him, and as he came down a little hill through a village he heard a confused clatter and jingle of traffic ahead, and saw the danger triangle that warns of crossroads. He slowed down and then pulled up, abruptly.

Riding across the gap between the cottages was a string of horsemen, and then a grey cart, and then a team drawing a heavy object—a gun, and then more horsemen, and then a
second gun. It was all a dim brown procession in the moonlight. A mounted officer came up beside him and looked at him and then went back to the crossroads, but as yet England was not troubling about spies. Four more guns passed, and then a string of carts and more mounted men, sitting stiffly. Nobody was singing or shouting; scarcely a word was audible, and through all the column there was an effect of quiet efficient haste. And so they passed, and rumbled and jingled and clattered out of the scene, leaving Mr. Britling in his car in the dreaming village. He restarted his engine once more, and went his way thoughtfully.

He went so thoughtfully that presently he missed the road to Pyecrafts—if ever he had been on the road to Pyecrafts at all—altogether. He found himself upon a highway running across a flattish plain, and presently discovered by the sight of the Great Bear, faint but traceable in the blue overhead, that he was going due north. Well, presently he would turn south and west; that in good time; now he wanted to feel; he wanted to think. How could he best help England in the vast struggle for which the empty silence and beauty of this night seemed to be waiting? But indeed he was not thinking at all, but feeling, feeling wonder, as he had never felt it since his youth had passed from him. This war might end nearly everything in the world as he had known the world; that idea struggled slowly through the moonlight into consciousness, and won its way to dominance in his mind.

The character of the road changed; the hedges fell away, and pine-trees and pine woods took the place of the black squat shapes of the hawthorn and oak and apple. The houses grew rarer and the world emptier and emptier, until he could have believed that he was the only man awake and out-of-doors in all the slumbering land. …

For a time a little thing caught hold of his dreaming mind. Continually as he ran on, black, silent birds rose startled out of the dust of the road before him, and fluttered noiselessly beyond his double wedge of light. What sort of bird could they be? Were they nightjars? Were they different kinds of birds snatching at the quiet of the night for a dustbath in the sand? This independent thread of inquiry ran through the texture of his mind and died away. …

And at one place there was a great bolting of rabbits across the road, almost under his wheels. …

The phrases he had used that afternoon at Claverings came back presently into his head. They were, he felt assured, the phrases that had to be said now. This war could be seen as the noblest of wars, as the crowning struggle of mankind against national dominance and national aggression; or else it was a mere struggle of nationalities and pure destruction and catastrophe. Its enormous significances, he felt, must not be lost in any petty bickering about the minor issues of the conflict. But were these enormous significances being stated clearly enough? Were they being understood by the mass of liberal and pacific thinkers? He drove more and more slowly as these questions crowded upon his attention until at last he came to a stop altogether. … “Certain things must be said clearly,” he whispered. “Certain things—The meaning of England. … The deep and long-unspoken desire for kindliness and fairness. … Now is the time for speaking. It must be put as straight now as her gun-fire, as honestly as the steering of her ships.”

Phrases and paragraphs began to shape themselves in his mind as he sat with one arm on his steering-wheel.

Suddenly he roused himself, turned over the map in the map-case beside him, and tried to find his position. …

So far as he could judge he had strayed right into Suffolk. …

About one o'clock in the morning he found himself in Newmarket. Newmarket too was a moonlit emptiness, but as he hesitated at the crossroads he became aware of a policeman standing quite stiff and still at the corner by the church.

“Matching's Easy?” he cried.

“That road, sir, until you come to Market Saffron, and then to the left. …”

Mr. Britling had a definite purpose now in his mind, and he drove faster, but still very carefully and surely. He was already within a mile or so of Market Saffron before he remembered that he had made a kind of appointment with himself at Pyecrafts. He stared at two conflicting purposes. He turned over certain possibilities.

At the Market Saffron crossroads he slowed down, and for a moment he hung undecided.

“Oliver,” he said, and as he spoke he threw over his steering-wheel towards the homeward way. … He finished his sentence when he had negotiated the corner safely. “Oliver must have her. …”

And then, perhaps fifty yards farther along and this time almost indignantly: “She ought to have married him long ago. …”

He put his automobile in the garage, and then went round under the black shadow of his cedars to the front door. He had no key, and for a long time he failed to rouse his wife by flinging pebbles and gravel at her half-open window. But at last he heard her stirring and called out to her.

He explained he had returned because he wanted to write. He wanted indeed to write quite urgently. He went straight up to his room, lit his reading-lamp, made himself some tea, and changed into his nocturnal suit.

Daylight found him still writing very earnestly at his pamphlet. The title he had chosen was: “And Now War Ends.”

§ 15

In this fashion it was that the great war began in Europe and came to one man in Matching's Easy, as it came to countless intelligent men in countless pleasant homes that had scarcely heeded its coming through all the years of its relentless preparation. The familiar scenery of life was drawn aside, and War stood unveiled. “I am the Fact,” said War, “and I stand astride the path of life. I am the threat of death and extinction that has always walked beside life, since life began. There can be nothing else and nothing more in human life until you have reckoned with me.”

BOOK II

MATCHING'S EASY AT WAR

§ 1

On that eventful night of the first shots and the first deaths Mr. Britling did not sleep until daylight had come. He sat writing at this pamphlet of his, which was to hail the last explosion and the ending of war. For a couple of hours he wrote with energy, and then his energy flagged. There came intervals when he sat still and did not write. He yawned and yawned again and rubbed his eyes. The day had come and the birds were noisy when he undressed slowly, dropping his clothes anyhow upon the floor, and got into bed. …

He woke to find his morning tea beside him and the housemaid going out of the room. He knew that something stupendous had happened to the world, but for a few moments he could not remember what it was. Then he remembered that France was invaded by Germany and Germany by Russia, and that almost certainly England was going to war. It seemed a harsh and terrible fact in the morning light, a demand for stresses, a certainty of destruction; it appeared now robbed of all the dark and dignified beauty of the night. He remembered just the same feeling of unpleasant, anxious expectation as he now felt when the Boer War had begun fifteen years ago, before the first news came. The first news of the Boer War had been the wrecking of a British armoured train near Kimberley. What similar story might not the overdue paper presently tell?

Suppose, for instance, that some important division of our Fleet had been surprised and overwhelmed. …

Suppose the Germans were already crumpling up the French armies between Verdun and Belfort, very swiftly and dreadfully. …

Suppose after all that the Cabinet was hesitating, and that there would be no war for some weeks, but only a wrangle about Belgian neutrality. While the Germans smashed France. …

Or, on the other hand, there might be some amazing, prompt success on our part. Our army and navy people were narrow, but in their narrow way he believed they were extraordinarily good. …

What would the Irish do? …

His thoughts were no more than a thorny jungle of unaswerable questions through which he struggled in unprogressive circles.

He got out of bed and dressed in a slow, distraught manner. When he reached his braces he discontinued dressing for a time; he opened the atlas at Northern France, and stood musing over the Belgian border. Then he turned to Whitaker's Almanack to browse upon the statistics of the great European armies. He was roused from this by the breakfast-gong.

At breakfast there was no talk of anything but war. Hugh was as excited as a cat in thundery weather, and the small boys wanted information about flags. The Russian and the Serbian flag were in dispute, and the flag page of Webster's Dictionary had to be consulted. Newspapers and letters were both abnormally late, and Mr. Britling, tiring of supplying trivial information to his offspring, smoked cigarettes in the garden. He had an idea of intercepting the postman. His eyes and ears informed him of the approach of Mrs. Faber's automobile. It was an old, resolute-looking machine painted red, and driven by a trusted gardener; there was no mistaking it.

Mrs. Faber was in it, and she stopped it outside the gate and made signals. Mrs. Britling, attracted by the catastrophic sounds of Mrs. Faber's vehicle, came out by the front door, and she and her husband both converged upon the caller.

§ 2

“I won't come in,” cried Mrs. Faber, “but I thought I'd tell you. I've been getting food.”

“Food?”

“Provisions. There's going to be a run on provisions. Look at my flitch of bacon!”

“But——”

“Faber says we have to lay in what we can. This war—it's going to stop everything. We can't tell what will happen. I've got the children to consider, so here I am. I was at Hickson's before nine. …”

The little lady was very flushed and bright-eyed. Her fair hair was disordered, her hat a trifle askew. She had an air of enjoying unwonted excitements. “All the gold's being hoarded too,” she said, with a crow of delight in her voice. “Faber says that probably our cheques won't be worth
that
in a few days. He's rushed off to London to get gold at his clubs—while he can. I had to insist on Hickson taking a cheque. ‘Never,' I said, ‘will I deal with you again—never—unless you do. …' Even then he looked at me almost as if he thought he wouldn't.”

“It's Famine!” she said, turning to Mr. Britling. “I've laid hands on all I can. I've got the children to consider.”

“But why is it famine?” asked Mr. Britling.

“Oh! it
is
!” she said.

“But why?”

“Faber understands,” she said. “Of course it's Famine. …

“And would you believe me,” she went on, going back to Mrs. Britling, “that man Hickson stood behind his counter— where I've dealt with him for
years
, and refused absolutely to let me have more than a dozen tins of sardines.
Refused
! Point-blank!

“I was there before nine, and even then Hickson's shop was crowded—
crowded
, my dear!”

“What have you got?” said Mr. Britling with an inquiring movement towards the automobile.

She had got quite a lot. She had two sides of bacon, a case of sugar, bags of rice, eggs, a lot of flour.

“What are all these little packets?” said Mr. Britling.

Mrs. Faber looked slightly abashed.

“Cerebos salt,” she said. “One gets carried away a little. I just got hold of it and carried it out to the car. I thought we might have to salt things later.”

“And the jars are pickles?” said Mr. Britling.

“Yes. But look at all my flour! That's what will go first. …”

The lady was a little flurried by Mr. Britling's too detailed examination of her haul. “What good is blacking?” he asked. She would not hear him. She felt he was trying to spoil her morning. She declared she must get on back to her home. “Don't say I didn't warn you,” she said. “I've got no end of things to do. There's peas! I want to show cook how to bottle our peas. For this year—it's lucky, we've got no end of peas. I came by here just for the sake of telling you.” And with that she presently departed—obviously ruffled by Mrs. Britling's lethargy and Mr. Britling's scepticism.

Mr. Britling watched her go off with a slowly rising indignation.

“And that,” he said “is how England is going to war! Scrambling for food—at the very beginning.”

“I suppose she is anxious for the children,” said Mrs. Britling.

“Blacking!”

“After all,” said Mrs. Britling, “if other people are doing that sort of thing——”

“That's the idea of all panics. We've got not to do it. … The country hasn't even declared war yet! Hallo, here we are! Better late than never.”

The head of the postman, bearing newspapers and letters, appeared gliding along the top of the hedge as he cycled down the road towards the Dower House corner.

§ 3

England was not yet at war, but all the stars were marching to that end. It was as if an event so vast must needs take its time to happen. No doubt was left upon Mr. Britling's mind, though a whole-page advertisement in
The Daily News
, in enormous type and of mysterious origin, implored Great Britain not to play into the hands of Russia, Russia the Terrible, that bugbear of the sentimental Radicals. The news was wide and sweeping, and rather inaccurate. The Germans were said to be in Belgium and Holland, and they had seized English ships in the Kiel Canal. A moratorium had been proclaimed, and the reports of a food panic showed Mrs. Faber to be merely one example of a large class of excitable people.

Mr. Britling found the food panic disconcerting. It did not harmonise with his leading
motif
of the free people of the world rising against the intolerable burthen of militarism. It spoiled his picture. …

Mrs. Britling shared the paper with Mr. Britling; they stood by the bed of begonias near the cedar-tree and read, and the air was full of the cheerful activities of the lawn-mower that was being drawn by a carefully booted horse across the hockey-field.

Presently Hugh came flitting out of the house to hear what had happened. “one can't work, somehow, with all these big things going on,” he apologised. He secured
The Daily News
while his father and mother read
The Times
. The voices of the younger boys came from the shade of the trees; they had brought all their toy soldiers out-of-doors, and were making entrenched camps in the garden.

“The financial situation is an extraordinary one,” said Mr. Britling, concentrating his attention. … “All sorts of staggering things may happen. In a social and economic system that has grown just anyhow. … Never been planned. … In a world full of Mrs. Fabers. …”

“Moratorium?” said Hugh over his
Daily News
. “In relation to debts and so on? Modern side you sent me to, Daddy. I live at hand to mouth in etymology. Morse and crematorium—do we burn our bills instead of paying them?”

“Moratorium,” reflected Mr. Britling; “moratorium. What nonsense you talk! It's something that delays, of course. Nothing to do with death. Just a temporary stoppage of payments. … Of course there's bound to be a tremendous change in values. …”

§ 4

“There's bound to be a tremendous change in values.”

On that text Mr. Britling's mind enlarged very rapidly. It produced a wonderful crop of possibilities before he got back to
his study. He sat down to his desk, but he did not immediately take up his work. He had discovered something so revolutionary in his personal affairs that even the war issue remained for a time in suspense.

Tucked away at the back of Mr. Britling's consciousness was something that had not always been there, something warm and comforting that made life and his general thoughts about life much easier and pleasanter than they would otherwise have been, the sense of a neatly arranged investment list, a shrewdly and geographically distributed system of holdings in national loans, municipal investments, railway debentures, that had amounted altogether to rather over five-and-twenty thousand pounds; his and Mrs. Britling's, a joint accumulation. It was, so to speak, his economic viscera. It sustained him, and kept him going and comfortable. When all was well he did not feel its existence; he had merely a pleasant sense of general well-being. Where here or there a security got a little disarranged he felt a vague discomfort. Now he became aware of grave disorders. It was as if he discovered he had been accidentally eating toadstools, and didn't quite know whether they weren't a highly poisonous sort. But an analogy may be carried too far. …

At any rate, when Mr. Britling got back to his writing-desk he was much too disturbed to resume “And Now War Ends.”

“There's bound to be a tremendous change in values!”

He had never felt quite so sure as most people about the stability of the modern financial system. He did not, he felt, understand the working of this moratorium, or the peculiar advantage of prolonging the bank holidays. It meant, he supposed, a stoppage of payment all round, and a cutting off of the supply of ready money. And Hickson the grocer, according to Mrs. Faber, was already looking askance at cheques.

Even if the bank did reopen, Mr. Britling was aware that his current balance was low; at the utmost it amounted to twenty or thirty pounds. He had been expecting cheques from his English and American publishers, and the usual
Times
cheque. Suppose these payments were intercepted!

All these people might, so far as he could understand, stop payment under this moratorium! That hadn't at first occurred to him. But, of course, quite probably they might refuse to pay his account when it fell due.

And suppose
The Times
felt his peculiar vein of thoughtfulness unnecessary in these stirring days!

And then if the bank really did lock up his deposit account, and his securities became unsaleable!

Mr. Britling felt like an oyster that is invited to leave its shell. …

He sat back from his desk contemplating these things. His imagination made a weak attempt to picture a world in which credit had vanished and money is of doubtful value. He supposed a large number of people would just go on buying and selling at or near the old prices by force of habit.

His mind and conscience made a valiant attempt to pick up “And Now War Ends” and go on with it, but before five minutes were out he was back at the thoughts of food panic and bankruptcy. …

§ 5

The conflict of interests at Mr. Britling's desk became unendurable. He felt he must settle the personal question first. He wandered out upon the lawn and smoked cigarettes.

His first conception of a great convergent movement of the nations to make a world peace and an end to militant Germany was being obscured by this second, entirely incompatible, vision of a world confused and disorganised. Mrs. Fabers in great multitudes hoarding provisions, riotous crowds attacking shops, moratorium, shut banks and waiting queues. Was it possible for the whole system to break down through a shock to its confidence? Without any sense of incongruity the dignified pacification of the planet had given place in his mind to these more intimate possibilities. He heard a rustle behind him, and turned to face his wife.

“Do you think,” she sasked, “that there is any chance of a shortage of food?”

“If all the Mrs. Fabers in the world run and grab——”

“Then every one must grab. I haven't much in the way of stores in the house.”

“H'm,” said Mr. Britling, and reflected. … “I don't think we must buy stores now.”

“But if we are short.”

“It's the chances of war,” said Mr. Britling.

He reflected. “Those who join a panic make a panic. After all, there is just as much food in the world as there was last month. And short of burning it the only way of getting rid of it is to eat it. And the harvests are good. Why begin a scramble at a groaning board?”