H G Wells Omnibus, page 238
Before this question could be dealt with at all adequately, the two small boys became active in the garden beating in everybody to “dress up” before supper. The secretary, Teddy, came in a fatherly way to look after Mr. Direck and see to his draperies.
§ 9
Mr. Direck gave his very best attention to this business of draping himself, for he had not the slightest intention of appearing ridiculous in the eyes of Miss Corner. Teddy came with an armful of stuff that he thought “might do.”
“What’ll I come as?” asked Mr. Direck.
“We don’t wear costumes,” said Teddy. “We just put on all the brightest things we fancy. If it’s any costume at all, its Futurist.”
“And surely why shouldn’t one?” asked Mr. Direck, greatly struck by this idea. “Why should we always be tied by the fashions and periods of the past?”
He rejected a rather Mephistopheles-like costume of crimson and a scheme for a brigand-like ensemble based upon what was evidently an old bolero of Mrs. Britling’s, and after some reflection he accepted some black silk tights. His legs were not legs to be ashamed of. Over this he tried various brilliant wrappings from the Dower House armoire, and chose at last, after some hesitation in the direction of a piece of gold and purple brocade, a big square of green silk curtain stuff adorned with golden pheasants and other large and dignified ornaments; this he wore toga fashion over his light silken undervest—Teddy had insisted on the abandonment of his shirt “if you want to dance at all”—and fastened with a large green glass-jewelled brooch. From this his head and neck projected, he felt, with a tolerable dignity. Teddy suggested a fillet of green ribbon, and this Mr. Direck tried, but after prolonged reflection before the glass rejected. He was still weighing the effect of this fillet upon the mind of Miss Corner when Teddy left him to make his own modest preparations. Teddy’s departure gave him a chance for profile studies by means of an arrangement of the long mirror and the table looking-glass that he had been too shy to attempt in the presence of the secretary. The general effect was quite satisfactory.
“Wa-a-a-l,” he said with a quiver of laughter, “now who’d have thought it?” and smiled a consciously American smile at himself before going down.
The company was assembling in the panelled hall, and made a brilliant show in the light of the acetylene candles against a dark background. Mr. Britling in a black velvet cloak and black silk tights was a deeper shade among shadows; the high lights were Miss Corner and her sister, in glittering garments of peacock green and silver that gave a snakelike quality to their lithe bodies. They were talking to the German tutor, who had become a sort of cotton Cossack, a spectacled Cossack in buff and bright green. Mrs. Britling was dignified and beautiful in a purple djibbêh, and her stepson had become a handsome still figure of black and crimson. Teddy had contrived something elaborate and effective in the Egyptian style, with a fish-basket and a cuirass of that thin matting one finds behind wash-stands; the small boys were brigands, with immensely baggy breeches and cummerbunds in which they had stuck a selection of paper-knives and toy pistols and similar weapons. Mr. Carmine and his young man had come provided with real Indian costumes; the feeling of the company was that Mr. Carmine was a mullah. The aunt-like lady with the noble nose stood out amidst these levities in a black silk costume with a gold chain. She refused, it seemed, to make herself absurd, though she encouraged the others to extravagance by nods and enigmatical smiles. Nevertheless she had put pink ribbons in her cap. A family of father, golden-haired mother, and two young daughters, sympathically attired, had just arrived, and were discarding their outer wrappings with the assistance of host and hostess.
It was all just exactly what Mr. Direck had never expected in England, and equally unexpected was the supper on a long candle-lit table without a cloth. No servants were present, but on a sideboard stood a cold salmon and cold joints and kalter aufschnitt and kartoffel salat, and a variety of other comestibles, and many bottles of beer and wine and whisky. One helped oneself and anybody else one could, and Mr. Direck did his best to be very attentive to Mrs. Britling and Miss Corner, and was greatly assisted by the latter.
Everybody seemed extremely gay and bright-eyed. Mr. Direck found something exhilarating and oddly exciting in all this unusual bright costume and in this easy mutual service; it made everybody seem franker and simpler. Even Mr. Britling had revealed a sturdy handsomeness that had not been apparent to Mr. Direck before, and young Britling left no doubts now about his good looks. Mr. Direck forgot his mission and his position and indeed things generally, in an irrational satisfaction that his golden pheasants harmonised with the glitter of the warm and smiling girl beside him. And he sat down beside her—“You sit anywhere,” said Mrs. Britling—with far less compunction than in his ordinary costume he would have felt for so direct a confession of preference. And there was something in her eyes, it was quite indefinable and yet very satisfying, that told him that now he had escaped from the stern square imperatives of his patriotic tailor in New York she had made a discovery of him.
Everybody chattered gaily, though Mr. Direck would have found it difficult to recall afterwards what it was they chattered about, except that somehow he acquired the valuable knowledge that Miss Corner was called Cecily and her sister Letty, and then—so far old Essex custom held—the masculine section was left for a few minutes for some imaginary drinking and a lighting of cigars and cigarettes, after which everybody went through interwoven moonlight and afterglow to the barn. Mr. Britling sat down to a pianola in the corner and began the familiar cadences of “Whistling Rufus.”
“You dance?” said Miss Cecily Corner.
“I’ve never been much of a dancing man,” said Mr. Direck. “What sort of dance is this?”
“Just anything. A two-step.”
Mr. Direck hesitated and regretted a well-spent youth, and then Hugh came prancing forward with outstretched hands and swept her away.
Just for an instant Mr. Direck felt that this young man was a trifle superflous. …
But it was very amusing dancing.
It wasn’t any sort of taught formal dancing. It was a spontaneous retort to the leaping American music that Mr. Britling footed out. You kept time, and for the rest you did as your nature prompted. If you had a partner you joined hands, you fluttered to and from one another, you paced down the long floor together, you involved yourselves in romantic pursuits and repulsions with other couples. There was no objection to your dancing alone. Teddy, for example, danced alone in order to develop certain Egyptian gestures that were germinating in his brain. There was no objection to your joining hands in a cheerful serpent. …
Mr. Direck’s gaze hung on to Cissie and her partner. They danced very well together; they seemed to like and understand each other. It was natural of course for two young people like that, thrown very much together, to develop an affection for one another. … Still, she was old by three or four years.
It seemed unreasonable that the boy anyhow shouldn’t be in love with her. …
It seemed unreasonable that any one shouldn’t be in love with her. …
Then Mr. Direck remarked that Cissie was watching Teddy’s manoeuvres over her partner’s shoulder. With real affection and admiration. …
But then most refreshingly she picked up Mr. Direck’s gaze and gave him the slightest of smiles. She hadn’t forgotten him.
The music stopped with an effect of shock, and all the bobbing, whirling figures became walking glories.
“Now that’s not difficult, is it?” said Miss Corner, glowing happily.
“Not when you do it,” said Mr. Direck.
“I can’t imagine an American not dancing a two-step. You must do the next with me. Listen! It’s ‘ ’Way Down Indiana’ … ah! I knew you could.”
Mr. Direck, too, understood now that he could, and they went off holding hands rather after the fashion of two skaters.
“My word!” said Mr. Direck. “To think I’d be dancing.”
But he said no more because he needed his breath.
He liked it, and he had another attempt with one of the visitor daughters, who danced rather more formally, and then Teddy took the pianola and Mr. Direck was astonished by the spectacle of an eminent British thinker in a whirl of black velvet and extremely active black legs engaged in a kind of Apache dance in pursuit of the visitor wife. In which Mr. Lawrence Carmine suddenly mingled.
“In Germany,” said Herr Heinrich, “we do not dance like this. It could not be considered seemly. But it is very pleasant.”
And then there was a waltz, and Herr Heinrich bowed to and took the visitor wife round three times, and returned her very punctually and exactly to the point whence he had taken her, and the Indian young gentleman (who must not be called “coloured”) waltzed very well with Cecily. Mr. Direck tried to take a tolerant European view of this brown and white combination. But he secured her as soon as possible from this Asiatic entanglement, and danced with her again, and then he danced with her again.
“Come and look at the moonlight,” cried Mrs. Britling.
And presently Mr. Direck found himself strolling through the rose-garden with Cecily. She had the sweetest moonlight face, her white shining robe made her altogether a thing of moonlight. If Mr. Direck had not been in love with her before he was now altogether in love. Mamie Nelson, whose freakish unkindness had been rankling like a poisoned thorn in his heart all the way from Massachusetts, suddenly became Ancient History.
A tremendous desire for eloquence arose in Mr. Direck’s soul, a desire so tremendous that no conceivable phrase he could imagine satisfied it. So he remained tongue-tied. And Cecily was tongue-tied, too. The scent of the roses just tinted the clear sweetness of the air they breathed.
Mr. Direck’s mood was an immense solemnity, like a dark ocean beneath the vast dome of the sky, and something quivered in every fibre of his being, like moonlit ripples on the sea. He felt at the same time a portentous stillness and an immense enterprise. …
Then suddenly the pianola, pounding a cake-walk, burst out into ribald invitation. …
“Come back to dance!” cried Cecily, like one from whom a spell has just been broken. And Mr. Direck, snatching at a vanishing scrap of everything he had not said, remarked, “I shall never forget this evening.”
She did not seem to hear that.
They danced together again. And then Mr. Direck danced with the visitor lady, whose name he had never heard. And then he danced with Mrs. Britling, and then he danced with Letty. And then it seemed time for him to look for Miss Cecily again.
And so the cheerful evening passed until they were within a quarter of an hour of Sunday morning. Mrs. Britling went to exert a restraining influence upon the pianola.
“Oh! one dance more!” cried Cissie Corner.
“Oh! one dance more!” cried Letty.
“One dance more,” Mr. Direck supported, and then things really had to end.
There was a rapid putting out of candles, and a stowing away of things by Teddy and the sons, two chauffeurs appeared from the region of the kitchen and brought Mr. Lawrence Carmine’s car and the visitor family’s car to the front door, and everybody drifted gaily through the moonlight and the big trees to the front of the house. And Mr. Direck saw the perambulator waiting—the mysterious perambulator—a little in the dark beyond the front door.
The visitor family and Mr. Carmine and his young Indian departed. “Come to hockey!” shouted Mr. Britling to each departing car-load, and Mr. Carmine receding answered: “I’ll bring three!”
Then Mr. Direck, in accordance with a habit that had been growing on him throughout the evening, looked round for Miss Cissie Corner and failed to find her. And then behold she was descending the staircase with the mysterious baby in her arms. She held up a warning finger, and then glanced at her sleeping burden. She looked like a silvery Madonna. And Mr. Direck remembered that he was still in doubt about that baby. …
Teddy, who was back in his flannels, seized upon the perambulator. There was much careful baby stowing on the part of Cecily; she displayed an infinitely maternal solicitude. Letty was away changing; she reappeared jauntily taking leave, disregarding the baby absolutely, and Teddy departed bigamously, wheeling the perambulator between the two sisters into the hazes of the moonlight. There was much crying of good nights. Mr. Direck’s curiosities narrowed down to a point of great intensity. …
Of course, Mr. Britling’s circle must be a very “Advanced” circle. …
§ 10
Mr. Direck found he had taken leave of the rest of the company, and drifted into a little parlour with Mr. Britling and certain glasses and siphons and a whisky decanter on a tray. …
“It is a very curious thing,” said Mr. Direck, “that in England I find myself more disposed to take stimulants and that I no longer have the need for iced water that one feels at home. I ascribe it to a greater humidity in the air. One is less dried and one is less braced. One is no longer pursued by a thirst, but one needs something to buck one up a little. Thank you. That is enough.”
Mr. Direck took his glass of whisky and soda from Mr. Britling’s hand.
Mr. Britling seated himself in an arm-chair by the fireplace and threw one leg carelessly over the arm. In his black velvet cloak and cap, and his black silk tights, he was very like a minor character, a court chamberlain, for example, in some cloak and rapier drama. “I find this weekend dancing and kicking about wonderfully wholesome,” he said. “That and our Sunday hockey. One starts the new week clear and bright about the mind. Friday is always my worst working day.”
Mr. Direck leaned against the table, wrapped in his golden pheasants, and appreciated the point.
“Your young people dance very cheerfully,” he said.
“We all dance very cheerfully,” said Mr. Britling.
“Then this Miss Corner,” said Mr. Direck, “she is the sister, I presume, is she? of that pleasant young lady who is married—she is married, isn’t she?—to the young man you call Teddy.”
“I should have explained these young people. They’re the sort of young people we are producing over here now in quite enormous quantity. They are the sort of equivalent of the Russian Intelligentsia, an irresponsible middle-class with ideas. Teddy, you know, is my secretary. He’s the son, I believe, of a Kilburn solicitor. He was recommended to me by Datcher of The Times. He came down here and lived in lodgings for a time. Then suddenly appeared the young lady.”
“Miss Corner’s sister?”
“Exactly. The village was a little startled. The cottager who had let rooms came to me privately. Teddy is rather touchy on the point of his personal independence, he considers any demand for explanations as an insult, and probably all he had said to the old lady was, ‘This is Letty—come to share my rooms.’ I put the matter to him very gently. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, rather in the manner of some one who has overlooked a trifle. ‘I got married to her in the Christmas holidays. May I bring her along to see Mrs. Britling?’ We induced him to go into a little cottage I rent. The wife was the daughter of a Colchester journalist and printer. I don’t know if you talked to her.”
“I’ve talked to the sister rather.”
“Well, they’re both idea’d. They’re highly educated in the sense that they do really think for themselves. Almost fiercely. So does Teddy. If he thinks he hasn’t thought anything he thinks for himself, he goes off and thinks it different. The sister is a teacher who wants to take the B.A. degree in London University. Meanwhile she pays the penalty of her sex.”
“Meaning——?” asked Mr. Direck startled.
“Oh! that she puts in a great deal too much of her time upon housework and minding her sister’s baby.”
“She’s a very interesting and charming young lady indeed,” said Mr. Direck. “With a sort of Western college freedom of mind—and something about her that isn’t American at all.”
Mr. Britling was following the train of his own thoughts.
“My household has some amusing contrasts,” he said. “I don’t know if you have talked to that German?
“He’s always asking questions. And you tell him any old thing and he goes and writes it down in his room upstairs, and afterwards asks you another like it in order to perplex himself by the variety of your answers. He regards the whole world with a methodical distrust. He wants to document it and pin it down. He suspects it only too justly of disorderly impulses, and a capacity for self-contradiction. He is the most extraordinary contrast to Teddy, whose confidence in the universe amounts almost to effrontery. Teddy carries our national laxness to a foolhardy extent. He is capable of leaving his watch in the middle of Claverings Park and expecting to find it a month later—being carefully taken care of by a squirrel, I suppose—when he happens to want it. He’s rather like a squirrel himself—without the habit of hoarding. He is incapable of asking a question about anything; he would be quite sure it was all right anyhow. He would feel that asking questions betrayed a want of confidence—was a sort of incivility. But my German, if you notice—his normal expression is one of grave solicitude. He is like a conscientious ticket-collector among his impressions. And did you notice how beautifully my pianola rolls are all numbered and catalogued? He did that. He set to work and did it as soon as he got here, just as a good cat when you bring it into a house sets to work and catches mice. Previously the pianola music was chaos. You took what God sent you.
“And he looks like a German,” said Mr. Britling.
“He certainly does that,” said Mr. Direck.
“He has the fair type of complexion, the rather full habit of body, the temperamental disposition, but in addition that close-cropped head—it is almost as if it were shaved—the plumpness, the glasses—those are things that are made. And the way he carries himself. And the way he thinks. His meticulousness. When he arrived he was delightful, he was wearing a student’s corps cap and a rucksack, he carried a violin; he seemed to have come out of a book. No one would ever dare to invent so German a German for a book. Now a young Frenchman or a young Italian or a young Russian coming here might look like a foreigner, but he wouldn’t have the distinctive national stamp a German has. He wouldn’t be plainly French or Italian or Russian. Other peoples are not made; they are neither made nor created but proceeding—out of a thousand indefinable causes. The Germans are a triumph of directive will. I had to remark the other day that when my boys talked German they shouted. ‘But when one talks German one must shout,’ said Herr Heinrich. ‘It is taught so in the schools.’ And it is. They teach them to shout and to throw out their chests. Just as they teach them to read notice-boards and not think about politics. Their very ribs are not their own. My Herr Heinrich is comparatively a liberal thinker. He asked me the other day, ‘But why should I give myself up to philology? But then,’ he considered, ‘it is what I have to do.’ ”
