H G Wells Omnibus, page 272
She had left Mr. Britling to his atlas. He lay prone under the hedge with it spread before him. His occupation would have seemed to her only a little while ago the absurdest imaginable. He was drawing boundaries on his maps very carefully in red ink, with a fountain pen. But now she understood.
She knew that those red-ink lines of Mr. Britling’s might in the end prove wiser and stronger than the bargains of the diplomats. …
In the last hour he had come very near to her. She found herself full of an unwonted affection for him. She had never troubled her head about her relations with any one except Teddy before. Now suddenly she seemed to be opening out to all the world for kindness. This new idea of a friendly God, who had a struggle of his own, who could be thought of as kindred to Mr. Britling, as kindred to Teddy—had gripped her imagination. He was behind the autumnal sunshine; he was in the little bird that had seemed so confident and friendly. Whatever was kind, whatever was tender; there was God. And a thousand old phrases she had read and heard and given little heed to, that had lain like dry bones in her memory, suddenly were clothed in flesh and became alive. This God—if this was God—then indeed it was not nonsense to say that God was love, that he was a friend and companion. … With him it might be possible to face a world in which Teddy and she would never walk side by side again nor plan any more happiness for ever. After all she had been very happy; she had had wonderful happiness. She had had far more happiness, far more love, in her short year or so than most people had in their whole lives. And so in the reaction of her emotions, Letty who had gone out with her head full of murder and revenge, came back through the sunset thinking of pity, of the thousand kindnesses and tendernesses of Teddy that were after all, perhaps, only an intimation of the limitless kindnesses and tendernesses of God. … What right had she to a white and bitter grief, self-centred and vindictive, while old Britling could still plan an age of mercy in the earth and a red-gold sunlight that was warm as a smile from Teddy lay on all the world. …
She must go into the cottage and kiss Cissie, and put away that parcel out of sight until she could find some poor soldier to whom she could send it. She had been pitiless towards Cissie in her grief. She had, in the egotism of her sorrow, treated Cissie as she might have treated a chair or a table, with no thought that Cissie might be weary, might dream of happiness still to come. Cissie had still to play the lover, and her man was already in khaki. There would be no such year as Letty had had in the days before the war darkened the world. Before Cissie’s marrying the peace must come, and the peace was still far away. And Direck too would have to take his chances. …
Letty came through the little wood and over the stile that brought her into sight of the cottage. The windows of the cottage as she saw it under the bough of the big walnut-tree were afire from the sun. The crimson rambler over the porch that she and Teddy had planted was still bearing roses. The door was open and people were moving in the porch.
Some one was coming out of the cottage, a stranger, in an unfamiliar costume, and behind him was a man in khaki—but that was Mr. Direck! And behind him again was Cissie.
But the stranger!
He came out of the frame of the porch towards the gardengate. …
Who—who was this stranger?
It was a man in queer-looking foreign clothes, baggy trousers of some soft-looking blue stuff and a blouse, and he had a white-bandaged left arm. He had a hat stuck at the back of his head, and a beard. …
He was entirely a stranger, a foreigner. Was she going insane? Of course he was a stranger!
And then he moved a step, he made a queer sideways pace, a caper, on the path, and instantly he ceased to be strange and foreign. He became amazingly, incredibly, familiar by virtue of that step. …
No!
Her breath stopped. All Letty’s being seemed to stop. And this stranger who was also incredibly familiar, after he had stared at her motionless form for a moment, waved his hat with a gesture—a gesture that crowned and sealed the effect of familiarity. She gave no sign in reply.
No, that familiarity was just a mad freakishness in things.
This strange man came from Belgium perhaps, to tell something about Teddy. …
And then she surprised herself by making a groaning noise, an absurd silly noise, just like the noise when one imitated a cow to a child. She said “Mooo-oo.”
And she began to run forward, with legs that seemed misfits, waving her hands about, and as she ran she saw more and more certainly that this wounded man in strange clothing was Teddy. She ran faster and still faster, stumbling and nearly falling. If she did not get to him speedily the world would burst.
To hold him, to hold close to him! …
“Letty! Letty! Just one arm. …”
She was clinging to him and he was holding her. …
It was all right. She had always known it was all right. (Hold close to him.) Except just for a little while. But that had been foolishness. Hadn’t she always known he was alive? And here he was alive! (Hold close to him.) Only it was so good to be sure— after all her torment; to hold him, to hang about him, to feel the solid man, kissing her, weeping too, weeping together with her. “Teddy my love!”
§ 12
Letty was in the cottage struggling to hear and understand things too complicated for her emotion-crowded mind. There was something that Mr. Direck was trying to explain about a delayed telegram that had come soon after she had gone out. There was much indeed that Mr. Direck was trying to explain. What did any explanation really matter when you had Teddy, with nothing but a strange beard and a bandaged arm between him and yourself? She had an absurd persuasion at first that those two strangenesses would also presently be set aside, so that Teddy would become just exactly what Teddy had always been.
Teddy had been shot through the upper arm. …
“My hand has gone, dear little Letty. It’s my left hand, luckily. I shall have to wear a hook like some old pirate. …”
There was something about his being taken prisoner. “That other officer”—that was Mr. Direck’s officer—“had been lying there for days.” Teddy had been shot through the upper arm, and stunned by a falling beam. When he came to he was disarmed, with a German standing over him. …
Then afterwards he had escaped. In quite a little time he had escaped. He had been in a railway station somewhere in Belgium; locked in a waiting-room with three or four French prisoners, and the junction had been bombed by French and British aeroplanes. Their guard and two of the prisoners had been killed. In the confusion the others had got away into the town. There were trucks of hay on fire, and a store of petrol was in danger. “After that one was bound to escape. One would have been shot if one had been found wandering about.”
The bomb had driven some splinters of glass and corrugated iron into Teddy’s wrist; it seemed a small place at first; it didn’t trouble him for weeks. But then some dirt got into it.
In the narrow cobbled street beyond the station he had happened upon a woman who knew no English, but who took him to a priest, and the priest had hidden him.
Letty did not piece together the whole story at first. She did not want the story very much; she wanted to know about this hand and arm.
There would be queer things in the story when it came to be told. There was an old peasant who had made Teddy work in his fields in spite of his smashed and aching arm, and who had pointed to a passing German when Teddy demurred; there were the people called “they” who had at that time organised the escape of stragglers into Holland. There was the night watch, those long nights in succession before the dash for liberty. But Letty’s concern was all with the hand. Inside the sling there was something that hurt the imagination, something bandaged, a stump. She could not think of it. She could not get away from the thought of it.
“But why did you lose your hand?”
It was only a little place at first, and then it got painful. …
“But I didn’t go into a hospital, because I was afraid they would intern me, and so I wouldn’t be able to come home. And I was dying to come home. I was—homesick. No one was ever so homesick. I’ve thought of this place and the garden, and how one looked out of the window at the passers-by, a thousand times. I seemed always to be seeing them. Old Dimple with his benevolent smile, and Mrs. Wolker at the end cottage, and how she used to fetch her beer and wink when she caught us looking at her, and little Charlie Slobberface sniffing on his way to the pigs and all the rest of them. And you, Letty. Particularly you. And how we used to lean on the window-sill with our shoulders touching, and your cheek just in front of my eyes. … And nothing aching at all in one. …
“How I thought of that and longed for that! …
“And so, you see, I didn’t go to the hospital. I kept hoping to get to England first. And I left it too long. …”
“Life’s come back to me with you!” said Letty. “Until just today I’ve believed you’d come back. And today—I doubted. … I thought it was all over—all the real life, love, and the dear fun of things, and that there was nothing before me, nothing before me but just holding out—and keeping your memory. … Poor arm. Poor arm. And being kind to people. And pretending you were alive somewhere. … I’ll not care about the arm. In a little while. … I’m glad you’ve gone, but I’m gladder you’re back and can never go again. … And I will be your right hand, dear, and your left hand and all your hands. Both my hands for your dear lost left one. You shall have three hands instead of two. …”
§ 13
Letty stood by the window as close as she could to Teddy in a world that seemed wholly made up of unexpected things. She could not heed the others, it was only when Teddy spoke to the others, or when they spoke to Teddy, that they existed for her.
For instance, Teddy was presently talking to Mr. Direck.
They had spoken about the Canadians who had come up and relieved the Essex men after the fight in which Teddy had been captured. And then it was manifest that Mr. Direck was talking of his regiment. “I’m not the only American who has gone Canadian—for the duration of the war.”
He had got to his explanation at last.
“I’ve told a lie,” he said triumphantly. “I’ve shifted my birthplace six hundred miles.
“Mind you, I don’t admit a thing that Cissie has ever said about America—not one thing. You don’t understand the sort of proposition America is up against. America is the New World, where there are no races and nations any more; she is the Melting-Pot, from which we will cast the better state. I’ve believed that always—in spite of a thousand little things I believe it now. I go back on nothing. I’m not fighting as an American either. I’m fighting simply as myself. … I’m not going fighting for England, mind you. Don’t you fancy that. I don’t know I’m so particularly in love with a lot of English ways as to do that. I don’t see how any one can be very much in love with your Empire, with its dead-alive Court, its artful politicians, its lords and ladies and snobs, its way with the Irish and its way with India, and everybody shifting responsibility and telling lies about your common people. I’m not going fighting for England. I’m going fighting for Cissie—and justice and Belgium and all that—but more particularly for Cissie. And anyhow I can’t look Pa Britling in the face any more. … And I want to see those trenches—close. I reckon they’re a thing it will be interesting to talk about some day. … So I’m going,” said Mr. Direck. “But chiefly—it’s Cissie. See?”
Cissie had come and stood by the side of him.
She looked from poor broken Teddy to him and back again.
“Up to now,” she said, “I’ve wanted you to go. …”
Tears came into her eyes.
“I suppose I must let you go,” she said. “Oh! I’d hate you not to go. …”
§ 14
“Good God! how old the Master looks!” cried Teddy suddenly.
He was standing at the window, and as Mr. Direck came forward inquiringly he pointed to the figure of Mr. Britling passing along the road towards the Dower House.
“He does look old. I hadn’t noticed,” said Mr. Direck.
“Why, he’s gone grey!” cried Teddy, peering. “He wasn’t grey when I left.”
They watched the knickerbockered figure of Mr. Britling receding up the hill, atlas and papers in his hands behind his back.
“I must go out to him,” said Teddy, disengaging himself from Letty.
“No,” she said, arresting him with her hand.
“But he will be glad——”
She stood in her husband’s way. She had a vision of Mr. Britling suddenly called out of his dreams of God ruling the United States of the World, to rejoice at Teddy’s restoration. …
“No,” she said; “it will only make him think again of Hugh— and how he died. Don’t go out, Teddy. Not now. What does he care for you? … Let him rest from such things. … Leave him to dream over his atlas. … He isn’t so desolate—if you knew. … I will tell you, Teddy—when I can. …
“But just now——No, he will think of Hugh again. … Let him go. … He has God and his atlas there. … They’re more than you think.”
CHAPTER THE SECOND
MR. BRITLING WRITES UNTIL SUNRISE
§ 1
It was some weeks later. It was now the middle of November, and Mr. Britling, very warmly wrapped in his thick dressinggown and his thick llama-wool pyjamas, was sitting at his night desk, and working ever and again at an essay, an essay of preposterous ambitions, for the title of it was “The Better Government of the World.”
Latterly he had had much sleepless misery. In the day life was tolerable, but in the night—unless he defended himself by working, the losses and cruelties of the war came and grimaced at him, insufferably. Now he would be haunted by long processions of refugees, now he would think of the dead lying stiff and twisted in a thousand dreadful attitudes. Then again he would be overwhelmed with anticipations of the frightful economic and social dissolution that might lie ahead. … At other times he thought of wounds and the deformities of body and spirit produced by injuries. And sometimes he would think of the triumph of evil. Stupid and triumphant persons went about a world that stupidity had desolated, with swaggering gestures, with a smiling consciousness of enhanced importance, with their scornful hatred of all measured and temperate and kindly things turned now to scornful contempt. And mingling with the soil they walked on lay the dead body of Hugh, face downward. At the back of the boy’s head, rimmed by blood-stiffened hair—the hair that had once been “as soft as the down of a bird”—was a big red hole. That hole was always pitilessly distinct. They stepped on him—heedlessly. They heeled the scattered stuff of his exquisite brain into the clay. …
From all such moods of horror Mr. Britling’s circle of lamplight was his sole refuge. His work could conjure up visions, like opium visions, of a world of order and justice. Amidst the gloom of world bankruptcy he stuck to the prospectus of a braver enterprise—reckless of his chances of subscribers. …
§ 2
But this night even this circle of lamplight would not hold his mind. Doubt had crept into this last fastness. He pulled the papers towards him, and turned over the portion he had planned.
His purpose in the book he was beginning to write was to reason out the possible methods of government that would give a stabler, saner control to the world. He believed still in democracy, but he was realising more and more that democracy had yet to discover its method. It had to take hold of the consciences of men, it had to equip itself with still unformed organisations. Endless years of patient thinking, of experimenting, of discussion lay before mankind ere this great idea could become reality, and right, the proven right thing, could rule the earth.
Meanwhile the world must still remain a scene of bloodstained melodrama, of deafening noise, contagious follies, vast irrational destructions. One fine life after another went down from study and university and laboratory to be slain and silenced. …
Was it conceivable that this mad monster of mankind would ever be caught and held in the thin-spun webs of thought?
Was it, after all, anything but pretension and folly for a man to work out plans for the better government of the world?—was it any better than the ambitious scheming of some fly upon the wheel of the romantic gods?
Man has come, floundering and wounding and suffering, out of the breeding darknesses of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again. Why not flounder with the rest, why not eat, drink, fight, scream, weep and pray, forget Hugh, stop brooding upon Hugh, banish all these priggish dreams of “The Better Government of the World,” and turn to the brighter aspects, the funny and adventurous aspects of the war, the Chestertonian jolliness, the Punch side of things. Think you because your sons are dead that there will be no more cakes and ale? Let mankind blunder out of the mud and blood as mankind has blundered in. …
