Mr. Britling Sees It Through (34 page)

When he turned from the newspaper to his post, he would find the anonymous letter-writer had been busy. …

Perhaps Mr. Britling had remarked that Germans were after all human beings, or that if England had listened to Matthew Arnold in the eighties our officers by this time might have added efficiency to their courage and good temper. Perhaps he had himself put a touch of irritant acid
into his comment. Back flared the hate. “Who are
you
, sir? What are you, sir? What right have you, sir? What claim have
you
, sir?” …

§ 8

“Life had a wrangling birth. On the head of every one of us rests the ancestral curse of fifty million murders.”

So Mr. Britling's thoughts shaped themselves in words as he prowled one night in March, chill and melancholy, across a rushy meadow under an overcast sky. The death squeal of some little beast caught suddenly in a distant copse had set loose this train of thought. “Life struggling under a birth curse?” he thought. “How nearly I come back at times to the Christian theology! … And then, Redemption by the shedding of blood.”

“Life, like a rebellious child, struggling out of the control of the hate which made it what it is.”

But that was Mr. Britling's idea of Gnosticism, not of orthodox Christianity. He went off for a time into faded reminiscences of theological reading. What had been the Gnostic idea? That the God of the Old Testament was the Devil of the New? But that had been the idea of the Manichæans! …

Mr. Britling, between the black hedges, came back presently from his attempts to recall his youthful inquiries into man's ancient speculations, to the enduring riddles that have outlasted a thousand speculations. Has hate been necessary, and is it still necessary, and will it always be necessary? Is all life a war for ever? The rabbit is nimble, lives keenly, is prevented from degenerating into a diseased crawling eater of herbs by the incessant ferret. Without the ferret of war, what would life become? … War is murder truly, but is not Peace decay?

It was during these prowling nights in the first winter of the war that Mr. Britling planned a new writing that was to go whole abysses beneath the facile superficiality of “And Now War Ends.” It was to be called the “Anatomy of Hate.” It was to deal very faithfully with the function of hate as a corrective to inefficiency. So long as men were slack, men must be fierce. This conviction pressed upon him. …

In spite of his detestation of war, Mr. Britling found it impossible to maintain that any sort of peace state was better than a state of war. If wars produced destructions and cruelties, peace could produce indolence, perversity, greedy accumulation and selfish indulgences. War is discipline for evil, but peace may be relaxation from good. The poor man may be as wretched in peace-time as in war-time. The gathering forces of an evil peace, the malignity and waste of war, are but obverse and reverse of the medal of ill-adjusted human relationships. Was there no Greater Peace possible; not a mere recuperative pause in killing and destruction, but a phase of noble and creative living, a phase of building, of discovery, of beauty and research? He remembered, as one remembers the dead, dreams he had once dreamt of the great cities, the splendid freedoms, of a coming age, of marvellous enlargements of human faculty, of a coming science that would be light and of art that could be power. …

But would that former peace have ever risen to this? …

After all, had such visions ever been more than idle dreams? Had the war done more than unmask reality? …

He came to a gate and leaned over it.

The darkness drizzled about him; he turned up his collar and watched the dim shapes of trees and hedges gather out of the night to meet the dismal dawn. He was cold and hungry and weary.

He may have drowsed; at least he had a vision, very real and plain, a vision very different from any dream of Utopia.

It seemed to him that suddenly a mine burst under a great ship at sea, that men shouted and women sobbed and cowered, and flares played upon the rain-pitted black waves; and then the picture changed and showed a battle upon land, and searchlights were flickering through the rain and shells flashed luridly, and men darkly seen in silhouette against red flames ran with fixed bayonets and slipped and floundered over the mud, and at last, shouting thinly through the wind, leaped down into the enemy trenches. …

And then he was alone again staring over a wet black field towards a dim crest of shapeless trees.

§ 9

Abruptly and shockingly, this malignity of warfare, which had been so far only a festering cluster of reports and stories and rumours and suspicions, stretched out its arm into Essex and struck a barb of grotesque cruelty into the very heart of Mr. Britling. Late one afternoon came a telegram from Filmington-on-Sea, where Aunt Wilshire had been recovering her temper in a boarding-house after a round of visits in Yorkshire and the moorlands. And she had been “very seriously injured” by an overnight German air-raid. It was a raid that had not been even mentioned in the morning's papers. She had asked to see him.

It was, ran the compressed telegraphic phrase, “advisable come at once.”

Mrs. Britling helped him pack a bag, and came with him to the station in order to drive the car back to the Dower House;
for the gardener's boy who had hitherto attended to these small duties had now gone off as an unskilled labourer to some munition works at Chelmsford. Mr. Britling sat in the slow train that carried him across country to the junction for Filmington, and failed altogether to realise what had happened to the old lady. He had an absurd feeling that it was characteristic of her to intervene in affairs in this manner. She had always been so tough and unbent an old lady that until he saw her he could not imagine her as being really seriously and pitifully hurt. …

But he found her in the hospital very much hurt indeed. She had been smashed in some complicated manner that left the upper part of her body intact, and lying slantingly upon pillows. Over the horror of bandaged broken limbs and tormented flesh below sheets and a counterpane were drawn. Morphia had been injected, he understood, to save her from pain, but presently it might be necessary for her to suffer. She lay up in her bed with an effect of being enthroned, very white and still, her strong profile with its big nose and her straggling hair and a certain dignity gave her the appearance of some very important, very old man, of an aged pope, for instance, rather than of an old woman. She had made no remark after they had set her and dressed her and put her to bed except “send for Hughie Britling, The Dower House, Matching's Easy. He is the best of the bunch.” She had repeated the address and this commendation firmly over and over again, in large print as it were, even after they had assured her that a telegram had been despatched.

In the night, they said, she had talked of him.

He was not sure at first that she knew of his presence.

“Here I am, Aunt Wilshire,” he said.

She gave no sign.

“Your nephew Hugh.”

“Mean and preposterous,” she said very distinctly.

But she was not thinking of Mr. Britling. She was talking of something else.

She was saying: “It should not have been known I was here. There are spies everywhere. Everywhere. There is a spy now— or a lump very like a spy. They pretend it is a hot-water bottle. Pretext. … Oh, yes! I admit—absurd. But I have been pursued by spies. Endless spies. Endless, endless spies. Their devices are almost incredible. … He has never forgiven me. …

“All this on account of a carpet. A palace carpet. Over which I had no control. I spoke my mind. He knew I knew of it. I never concealed it. So I was hunted. For years he had meditated revenge. Now he has it. But at what a cost! And they call him Emperor. Emperor!

“His arm is withered; his son—imbecile. He will die— without dignity. …”

Her voice weakened, but it was evident she wanted to say something more.

“I'm here,” said Mr. Britling. “Your nephew Hughie.”

She listened.

“Can you understand me?” he asked.

She became suddenly an earnest, tender human being. “My dear!” she said, and seemed to search for something in her mind and fail to find it.

“You have always understood me,” she said.

“You have always been a good boy to me, Hughie,” she said, rather vacantly, and added after some moments of still reflection, “au
fond
.”

After that she was silent for some minutes, and took no notice of his whispers.

Then she recollected what had been in her mind. She put out a hand that sought for Mr. Britling's sleeve.

“Hughie!”

“I'm here, Auntie,” said Mr. Britling. “I'm here.”

“Don't let him get at
your
Hughie. … Too good for it, dear. Oh! much—much too good. … People let these wars and excitements run away with them. … They put too much into them. … They aren't—they aren't worth it. Don't let him get at your Hughie.”

“No!”

“You understand me, Hughie?”

“Perfectly, Auntie.”

“Then don't forget it. Ever.”

She had said what she wanted to say. She had made her testament. She closed her eyes. He was amazed to find this grotesque old creature had suddenly become beautiful, in that silvery vein of beauty one sometimes finds in very old men. She was exalted as great artists will sometimes exalt the portraits of the aged. He was moved to kiss her forehead.

Then came a little tug at his sleeve.

“I think that is enough,” said the nurse, who had stood forgotten at his elbow.

“But I can come again?”

“Perhaps.”

She indicated departure by a movement of her hand.

§ 10

The next day Aunt Wilshire was unconscious of her visitor.

They had altered her position so that she lay now horizontally, staring inflexibly at the ceiling and muttering queer old disconnected things.

The Windsor Castle carpet story was still running through her mind, but mixed up with it now were scraps of the current newspaper controversies about the conduct of the war. And she was still thinking of the dynastic aspects of the war. And of spies. She had something upon her mind about the King's more German aunts.

“As a precaution,” she said, “as a precaution. Watch them all. … The Princess Christian. … Laying foundation-stones. … Cement. … Guns. Or else why should they always be laying foundation-stones? … Always. … Why? … Hushed up. …

“None of these things,” she said, “in the newspapers. They ought to be.”

And then after an interval, very distinctly, “The Duke of Wellington. My ancestor—in reality. … Publish and be damned.”

After that she lay still. …

The doctors and nurses could hold out only very faint hopes to Mr. Britling's enquiries; they said indeed it was astonishing that she was still alive.

And about seven o'clock that evening she died. …

§ 11

Mr. Britling, after he had looked at his dead cousin for the last time, wandered for an hour or so about the silent little watering-place before he returned to his hotel. There was no one to talk to and nothing else to do but to think of her death.

The night was cold and bleak, but full of stars. He had already mastered the local topography, and he knew now exactly where all the bombs that had been showered upon the place had fallen. Here was the corner of blackened walls and roasted beams where three wounded horses had been burned alive in a barn, here
the row of houses, some smashed, some almost intact, where a mutilated child had screamed for two hours before she could be rescued from the débris that had pinned her down, and taken to the hospital. Everywhere by the dim light of the shaded street-lamps he could see the black holes and gaps of broken windows; sometimes abundant, sometimes rare and exceptional, among otherwise uninjured dwellings. Many of the victims he had visited in the little cottage hospital where Aunt Wilshire had just died. She was the eleventh dead. Altogether fifty-seven people had been killed or injured in this brilliant German action. They were all civilians, and only twelve were men.

Two Zeppelins had come in from over the sea, and had been fired at by an anti-aircraft gun coming on an automobile from Ipswich. The first intimation the people of the town had had of the raid was the report of this gun. Many had run out to see what was happening. It was doubtful if any one had really seen the Zeppelins, though every one testified to the sound of their engines. Then suddenly the bombs had come streaming down. Only six had made hits upon houses or people; the rest had fallen ruinously and very close together on the local golflinks, and at least half had not exploded at all and did not seem to have been released to explode.

A third at least of the injured people had been in bed when destruction came upon them.

The story was like a page from some fantastic romance of Jules Verne's; the peace of the little old town, the people going to bed, the quiet streets, the quiet starry sky, and then for ten minutes an uproar of guns and shells, a clatter of breaking glass, and then a fire here, a fire there, a child's voice pitched high by pain and terror, scared people going to and fro with lanterns, and the sky empty again, the raiders gone. …

Five minutes before, Aunt Wilshire had been sitting in the boarding-house drawing-room playing a great stern “Patience,” the Emperor Patience (“Napoleon, my dear!—not that Potsdam creature”) that took hours to do. Five minutes later she was a thing of elemental terror and agony, bleeding wounds and shattered bones, plunging about in the darkness amidst a heap of wreckage. And already the German airmen were buzzing away to sea again, proud of themselves, pleased no doubt—like boys who have thrown a stone through a window, beating their way back to thanks and rewards, to iron crosses and the proud embraces of Fraus and Fräuleins. …

For the first time it seemed to Mr. Britling he really saw the immediate horror of war, the dense cruel stupidity of the business, plain and close. It was as if he had never perceived anything of the sort before, as if he had been dealing with stories, pictures, shows and representations that he knew to be shams. But that this dear, absurd old creature, this thing of home, this being of familiar humours and familiar irritations, should be torn to pieces, left in torment like a smashed mouse over which an automobile has passed, brought the whole business to a raw and quivering focus. Not a soul among all those who had been rent and torn and tortured in this agony of millions, but was to any one who understood and had been near to it, in some way lovable, in some way laughable, in some way worthy of respect and care. Poor Aunt Wilshire was but the sample thrust in his face of all this mangled multitude, whose green-white lips had sweated in anguish, whose broken bones had thrust raggedly through red, dripping flesh. … The detested features of the German Crown Prince jerked into the centre of Mr. Britling's picture. The young man stood in his dapper uniform and grinned under his long nose, carrying
himself jauntily, proud of his extreme importance to so many lives. …