Mr. Britling Sees It Through (6 page)

“Ah! that's a secret,” cried Lady Frensham. “Um,” said Mr. Britling.

“You see,” said Lady Frensham; “it
will
be civil war! And yet you writing people who have influence do nothing to prevent it!”

“What are we to do, Lady Frensham?”

“Tell people how serious it is.”

“You mean, tell the Irish Nationalists to lie down and be walked over. They won't be. …”

“We'll see about that,” cried Lady Frensham, “we'll see about that!”

She was a large and dignified person with a kind of figurehead nobility of carriage, but Mr. Direck was suddenly reminded of a girl cousin of his who had been expelled from college for some particularly elaborate and aimless rioting. …

“May I say something to you, Lady Frensham,” said Mr. Britling, “that you have just said to me? Do you realise
that this Carsonite campaign is dragging these islands within a measurable distance of civil war?”

“It's the fault of your Lloyd George and his government. It's the fault of your Socialists and sentimentalists. You've made the mischief and you have to deal with it.”

“Yes. But do you really figure to yourself what a civil war may mean for the empire? Surely there are other things in the world besides this quarrel between the ‘loyalists' of Ulster and the Liberal government; there are other interests in this big empire than party advantages? You think you are going to frighten this Home Rule government into some ridiculous sort of collapse that will bring in the Tories at the next election. Well, suppose you don't manage that. Suppose instead that you do really contrive to bring about a civil war. Very few people here or in Ireland want it—I was over there not a month ago—but when men have loaded guns in their hands they sometimes go off. And then people see red. Few people realise what an incurable sore opens when fighting begins. Suppose part of the army revolts and we get some extraordinary and demoralising fighting over there. India watches these things. Bengal may imitate Ireland. At that distance rebellion and treason are rebellion and treason whether they are coloured orange or green. And then suppose the Germans see fit to attack us!”

Lady Frensham had a woman's elusiveness. “Your Redmondites would welcome them with open arms.”

“It isn't the Redmondites who invite them now, any-how,” said Mr. Britling, springing his mine. “The other day one of your ‘loyalists,' Andrews, was talking in
The Morning Post
of preferring conquest by Germany to Home Rule; Craig has been at the same game; Major Crawford, the man who ran the German Mausers
last April, boasted that he would transfer his allegiance to the German Emperor rather than see Redmond in power.”

“Rhetoric!” said Lady Frensham. “Rhetoric!”

“But one of your Ulster papers has openly boasted that arrangements have been made for a ‘powerful Continental monarch' to help an Ulster rebellion.”

“Which paper?” snatched Lady Frensham.

Mr. Britling hesitated.

Mr. Philbert supplied the name. “I saw it. It was
The Irish Churchman
.”

“You two have got your case up very well,” said Lady Frensham. “I didn't know Mr. Britling was a party man.”

“The Nationalists have been circulating copies,” said Philbert. “Naturally.”

“They make it look worse than mere newspaper talk and speeches,” Mr. Britling pressed. “Carson, it seems, was lunching with the German Emperor last autumn. A fine fuss you'd make if Redmond did that. All this gun-running, too, is German gun-running.”

“What does it matter if it is?” said Lady Frensham, allowing a belligerent eye to rest for the first time on Philbert. “You drove us to it. One thing we are resolved upon at any cost. Johnny Redmond may rule England if he likes; he shan't rule Ireland. …”

Mr. Britling shrugged his shoulders, and his face betrayed despair.

“My one consolation,” he said, “in this storm is a talk I had last month with a young Irishwoman in Meath. She was a young person of twelve, and she took a fancy to me—I think because I went with her in an alleged dangerous canoe she was forbidden to navigate alone. All day the eternal Irish Question had banged over her observant head. When we were out on the water she
suddenly decided to set me right upon a disregarded essential. ‘You English,' she said, ‘are just a bit disposed to take all this trouble seriously. Don't you fret yourself about it … Half the time we're just laffing at you. You'd best leave us all alone. …' ”

And then he went off at a tangent from his own anecdote.

“But look at this miserable spectacle!” he cried. “Here is a chance of getting something like a reconciliation of the old feud of English and Irish, and something like a settlement of these ancient distresses, and there seems no power, no conscience, no sanity in any of us, sufficient to save it from this cantankerous bitterness, this sheer wicked mischief of mutual exasperation. … Just when Ireland is getting a gleam of prosperity. … A murrain on both your parties!”

“I see, Mr. Britling, you'd hand us all over to Jim Larkin!”

“I'd hand you all over to Sir Horace Plunkett——”

“That doctrinaire dairyman!” cried Lady Frensham, with an air of quite conclusive repartee. “You're hopeless, Mr. Britling. You're hopeless.”

And Lady Homartyn, seeing that the phase of mere personal verdicts drew near, created a diversion by giving Lady Frensham a second cup of tea, and fluttering like a cooling fan about the heated brows of the disputants. She suggested tennis. …

§ 5

Mr. Britling was still flushed and ruffled as he and his guest returned towards the Dower House. He criticised England himself unmercifully, but he hated to think that in any respect she fell short of perfection; even her defects he liked to imagine were just a subtler kind of power and wisdom. And Lady Frensham had stuck her voice and her gestures through all these
amiable illusions. He was like a lover who calls his lady a foolish rogue, and is startled to find that facts and strangers do literally agree with him.

But it was so difficult to resolve Lady Frensham and the Irish squabble generally into anything better than idiotic mischief, that for a time he was unusually silent—wrestling with the problem, and Mr. Direck got the conversational initiative.

“To an American mind it's a little—startling,” said Mr. Direck, “to hear ladies expressing such vigorous political opinions.”

“I don't mind that,” said Mr. Britling. “Women over here go into politics and into public houses—I don't see why they shouldn't. If such things are good enough for men they are good enough for women; we haven't your sort of chivalry. But it's the peculiar malignant silliness of this sort of Toryism that's so discreditable. It's discreditable. There's no good in denying it. Those people you have heard and seen are a not unfair sample of our governing class—of a certain section of our governing class—as it is today. Not at all unfair. And you see how amazingly they haven't got hold of anything. There was a time when they could be politic. … Hidden away they have politic instincts even how. … But it makes me sick to think of this Irish business. Because, you know, it's true—we
are
drifting towards civil war there.”

“You are of that opinion?” said Mr. Direck.

“Well, isn't it so? Here's all this Ulster gun-running—you heard how she talked of it? Isn't it enough to drive the south into open revolt? …”

“Is there very much, do you think, in the suggestion that some of this Ulster trouble is a German intrigue? You and Mr. Philbert were saying things——”

“I don't know,” said Mr. Britling shortly.

“I don't know,” he repeated. “But it isn't because I don't think our Unionists and their opponents aren't foolish enough for anything of the sort. It's only because I don't believe that the Germans are so stupid as to do such things. … Why should they? …

“It makes me—expressionless with anger,” said Mr. Britling after a pause, reverting to his main annoyance. “They won't consider any compromise. It's sheer love of quarrelling. … Those people there think that nothing can possibly happen. They are like children in a nursery playing at rebellion. Unscathed and heedless. Until there is death at their feet they will never realise they are playing with loaded guns. …”

For a time he said no more; and listened perfunctorily while Mr. Direck tried to indicate the feeling in New England towards the Irish Question and the many difficult propositions an American politician has to face in that respect. And when Mr. Britling took up the thread of speech again it had little or no relation to Mr. Direck's observations.

“The psychology of all this recent insubordination and violence is—curious. Exasperating too. … I don't quite grasp it. … It's the same thing whether you look at the suffrage business or the labour people or at this Irish muddle. People may be too safe. You see we live at the end of a series of secure generations in which none of the great things of life have changed materially. We've grown up with no sense of danger—that is to say, with no sense of responsibility. None of us, none of us—for though I talk my actions belie me—really believe that life can change very fundamentally any more for ever. All this”—Mr. Britling waved his arm comprehensively—“looks as though it was bound to go on steadily for ever. It seems incredible that the system could be smashed. It seems
incredible that anything we can do will ever smash the system. Lady Homartyn, for example, is incapable of believing that she won't always be able to have weekend parties at Claverings, and that the letters and the tea won't come to her bedside in the morning. Or if her imagination goes to the point of supposing that some day
she
won't be there to receive the tea, it means merely that she supposes somebody else will be. Her pleasant butler may fear to lose his ‘situation,' but nothing on earth could make him imagine a time when there will not be a ‘situation' for him to lose. Old Asquith thinks that we always have got along, and that we always shall get along by being quietly artful and saying, ‘Wait and see.' And it's just because we are all convinced that we are so safe against a general breakdown that we are able to be so recklessly violent in our special cases. Why shouldn't women have the vote? they argue. What does it matter? And bang goes a bomb in Westminister Abbey. Why shouldn't Ulster create an impossible position? And off trots some demented Carsonite to Germany to play at treason on some half word of the German Emperor's and buy half a million rifles. …

“Exactly like children being very, very naughty. …

“And,” said Mr. Britling with a gesture to round off his discourse, “we do go on. We shall go on—until there is a spark right into the magazine. We have lost any belief we ever had that fundamental things happen. We English are everlasting children in an everlasting nursery. …”

And immediately he broke out again.

“The truth of the matter is that hardly any one has ever yet mastered the fact that the world is round. The world is round—like an orange. The thing is told us—like any old scandal—at school. For all practical purposes we forget it.—Practically we
all live in a world as flat as a pancake. Where time never ends and nothing changes. Who really believes in any world outside the circle of the horizon? Here we are and visibly nothing is changing. And so we go on to—nothing will ever change. It just goes on—in space, in time. If we could realise that round world beyond, then indeed we should go circumspectly. … If the world were like a whispering gallery, what whispers might we not hear now—from India, from Africa, from Germany, warnings from the past, intimations of the future. …

“We shouldn't heed them. …”

§ 6

And indeed at the very moment when Mr. Britling was saying these words, in Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the hour was somewhat later, men whispered together, and one held nervously to a black parcel that had been given him and nodded as they repeated his instructions, a black parcel with certain unstable chemicals and a curious arrangement of detonators therein, a black parcel destined ultimately to shatter nearly every landmark of Mr. Britling's and Lady Frensham's cosmogony. …

§ 7

When Mr. Direck and Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House the guest was handed over to Mrs. Britling and Mr. Britling vanished, to reappear at supper-time, for the Britlings had a supper in the evening instead of dinner. When Mr. Britling did reappear every trace of his vexation with the levities of British politics and the British ruling class had vanished altogether, and
he was no longer thinking of all that might be happening in Germany or India. …

While he was out of the way Mr. Direck extended his acquaintance with the Britling household. He was taken round the garden and shown the roses by Mrs. Britling, and beyond the rose-garden in a little arbour they came upon Miss Corner reading a book. She looked very grave and pretty reading a book. Mr. Direck came to a pause in front of her, and Mrs. Britling stopped beside him. The young lady looked up and smiled.

“The last new novel?” asked Mr. Direck pleasantly.

“Campanella's ‘City of the Sun.' ”

“My word! but isn't that stiff reading?”

“You haven't read it,” said Miss Corner.

“It's a dry old book anyhow.”

“It's no good pretending you have,” she said, and there Mr. Direck felt the conversation had to end.

“That's a very pleasant young lady to have around,” he said to Mrs. Britling as they went on towards the barn court.

“She's all at loose ends,” said Mrs. Britling. “And she reads like a——Whatever does read? One drinks like a fish. One eats like a wolf.”

They found the German tutor in a little court playing Badminton with the two younger boys. He was a plump young man with glasses and compact gestures; the game progressed chiefly by misses and the score was counted in German. He won thoughtfully and chiefly through the ardour of the younger brother, whose enthusiastic returns invariably went out. Instantly the boys attacked Mrs. Britling with a concerted enthusiasm. “Mummy! Is it to be dressing-up supper?”