Chapter 1

BOOK I

MATCHING'S EASY AT EASE

CHAPTER THE FIRST

MR. DIRECK VISITS MR. BRITLING

Section 1

It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck's first visit to England, and he was
at his acutest perception of differences. He found England in every way
gratifying and satisfactory, and more of a contrast with things American
than he had ever dared to hope.

He had promised himself this visit for many years, but being of a sunny
rather than energetic temperament--though he firmly believed himself
to be a reservoir of clear-sighted American energy--he had allowed all
sorts of things, and more particularly the uncertainties of Miss Mamie
Nelson, to keep him back. But now there were no more uncertainties about
Miss Mamie Nelson, and Mr. Direck had come over to England just to
convince himself and everybody else that there were other interests
in life for him than Mamie....

And also, he wanted to see the old country from which his maternal
grandmother had sprung. Wasn't there even now in his bedroom in New York
a water-colour of Market Saffron church, where the dear old lady had
been confirmed? And generally he wanted to see Europe. As an interesting
side show to the excursion he hoped, in his capacity of the rather
underworked and rather over-salaried secretary of the Massachusetts
Society for the Study of Contemporary Thought, to discuss certain
agreeable possibilities with Mr. Britling, who lived at Matching's Easy.

Mr. Direck was a type of man not uncommon in America. He was very much
after the fashion of that clean and pleasant-looking person one sees in
the advertisements in American magazines, that agreeable person who
smiles and says, "Good, it's the Fizgig Brand," or "Yes, it's a Wilkins,
and that's the Best," or "My shirt-front never rucks; it's a Chesson."
But now he was saying, still with the same firm smile, "Good. It's
English." He was pleased by every unlikeness to things American, by
every item he could hail as characteristic; in the train to London he
had laughed aloud with pleasure at the chequer-board of little fields
upon the hills of Cheshire, he had chuckled to find himself in a
compartment without a corridor; he had tipped the polite yet kindly
guard magnificently, after doubting for a moment whether he ought to tip
him at all, and he had gone about his hotel in London saying "Lordy!
Lordy! My _word!_" in a kind of ecstasy, verifying the delightful
absence of telephone, of steam-heat, of any dependent bathroom. At
breakfast the waiter (out of Dickens it seemed) had refused to know what
"cereals" were, and had given him his egg in a china egg-cup such as you
see in the pictures in _Punch_. The Thames, when he sallied out to see
it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had
ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked
accent and accosting some passer-by with the question, "Say! But is this
little wet ditch here the Historical River Thames?"

In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good and
careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in
controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in
dry "Americanisms" and poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people
asked him questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure," words he would no
more have used in America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he
had a sense of r�le. He wanted to be visibly and audibly America
eye-witnessing. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an
Englishman would expect him to be. At any rate, his clothes had been
made by a strongly American New York tailor, and upon the strength of
them a taxi-man had assumed politely but firmly that the shillings on
his taximeter were dollars, an incident that helped greatly to sustain
the effect of Mr. Direck, in Mr. Direck's mind, as something standing
out with an almost representative clearness against the English
scene.... So much so that the taxi-man got the dollars....

Because all the time he had been coming over he had dreaded that it
wasn't true, that England was a legend, that London would turn out to be
just another thundering great New York, and the English exactly like New
Englanders....

Section 2

And now here he was on the branch line of the little old Great Eastern
Railway, on his way to Matching's Easy in Essex, and he was suddenly in
the heart of Washington Irving's England.

Washington Irving's England! Indeed it was. He couldn't sit still and
just peep at it, he had to stand up in the little compartment and stick
his large, firm-featured, kindly countenance out of the window as if he
greeted it. The country under the June sunshine was neat and bright as
an old-world garden, with little fields of corn surrounded by dog-rose
hedges, and woods and small rushy pastures of an infinite tidiness. He
had seen a real deer park, it had rather tumbledown iron gates between
its shield-surmounted pillars, and in the distance, beyond all question,
was Bracebridge Hall nestling among great trees. He had seen thatched
and timbered cottages, and half-a-dozen inns with creaking signs. He had
seen a fat vicar driving himself along a grassy lane in a governess cart
drawn by a fat grey pony. It wasn't like any reality he had ever known.
It was like travelling in literature.

Mr. Britling's address was the Dower House, and it was, Mr. Britling's
note had explained, on the farther edge of the park at Claverings.
Claverings! The very name for some stately home of England....

And yet this was only forty-two miles from London. Surely it brought
things within the suburban range. If Matching's Easy were in America,
commuters would live there. But in supposing that, Mr. Direck displayed
his ignorance of a fact of the greatest importance to all who would
understand England. There is a gap in the suburbs of London. The suburbs
of London stretch west and south and even west by north, but to the
north-eastward there are no suburbs; instead there is Essex. Essex is
not a suburban county; it is a characteristic and individualised county
which wins the heart. Between dear Essex and the centre of things lie
two great barriers, the East End of London and Epping Forest. Before a
train could get to any villadom with a cargo of season-ticket holders it
would have to circle about this rescued woodland and travel for twenty
unprofitable miles, and so once you are away from the main Great Eastern
lines Essex still lives in the peace of the eighteenth century, and
London, the modern Babylon, is, like the stars, just a light in the
nocturnal sky. In Matching's Easy, as Mr. Britling presently explained
to Mr. Direck, there are half-a-dozen old people who have never set eyes
on London in their lives--and do not want to.

"Aye-ya!"

"Fussin' about thea."

"Mr. Robinson, 'e went to Lon', 'e did. That's 'ow 'e 'urt 'is fut."

Mr. Direck had learnt at the main-line junction that he had to tell the
guard to stop the train for Matching's Easy; it only stopped "by
request"; the thing was getting better and better; and when Mr. Direck
seized his grip and got out of the train there was just one little old
Essex station-master and porter and signalman and everything, holding a
red flag in his hand and talking to Mr. Britling about the cultivation
of the sweet peas which glorified the station. And there was the Mr.
Britling who was the only item of business and the greatest expectation
in Mr. Direck's European journey, and he was quite unlike the portraits
Mr. Direck had seen and quite unmistakably Mr. Britling all the same,
since there was nobody else upon the platform, and he was advancing with
a gesture of welcome.

"Did you ever see such peas, Mr. Dick?" said Mr. Britling by way of
introduction.

"My _word_," said Mr. Direck in a good old Farmer Hayseed kind of voice.

"Aye-ya!" said the station-master in singularly strident tones. "It be a
rare year for sweet peas," and then he slammed the door of the carriage
in a leisurely manner and did dismissive things with his flag, while the
two gentlemen took stock, as people say, of one another.

Section 3

Except in the doubtful instance of Miss Mamie Nelson, Mr. Direck's habit
was good fortune. Pleasant things came to him. Such was his position as
the salaried secretary of this society of thoughtful Massachusetts
business men to which allusion has been made. Its purpose was to bring
itself expeditiously into touch with the best thought of the age.

Too busily occupied with practical realities to follow the thought of
the age through all its divagations and into all its recesses, these
Massachusetts business men had had to consider methods of access more
quintessential and nuclear. And they had decided not to hunt out the
best thought in its merely germinating stages, but to wait until it had
emerged and flowered to some trustworthy recognition, and then, rather
than toil through recondite and possibly already reconsidered books and
writings generally, to offer an impressive fee to the emerged new
thinker, and to invite him to come to them and to lecture to them and to
have a conference with them, and to tell them simply, competently and
completely at first hand just all that he was about. To come, in fact,
and be himself--in a highly concentrated form. In this way a number of
interesting Europeans had been given very pleasant excursions to
America, and the society had been able to form very definite opinions
upon their teaching. And Mr. Britling was one of the representative
thinkers upon which this society had decided to inform itself. It was to
broach this invitation and to offer him the impressive honorarium by
which the society honoured not only its guests but itself, that Mr.
Direck had now come to Matching's Easy. He had already sent Mr. Britling
a letter of introduction, not indeed intimating his precise purpose, but
mentioning merely a desire to know him, and the letter had been so
happily phrased and its writer had left such a memory of pleasant
hospitality on Mr. Britling's mind during Mr. Britling's former visit to
New York, that it had immediately produced for Mr. Direck an invitation
not merely to come and see him but to come and stay over the week-end.

And here they were shaking hands.

Mr. Britling did not look at all as Mr. Direck had expected him to look.
He had expected an Englishman in a country costume of golfing tweeds,
like the Englishman in country costume one sees in American illustrated
stories. Drooping out of the country costume of golfing tweeds he had
expected to see the mildly unhappy face, pensive even to its drooping
moustache, with which Mr. Britling's publisher had for some faulty and
unfortunate reason familiarised the American public. Instead of this,
Mr. Britling was in a miscellaneous costume, and mildness was the last
quality one could attribute to him. His moustache, his hair, his
eyebrows bristled; his flaming freckled face seemed about to bristle
too. His little hazel eyes came out with a "ping" and looked at Mr.
Direck. Mr. Britling was one of a large but still remarkable class of
people who seem at the mere approach of photography to change their
hair, their clothes, their moral natures. No photographer had ever
caught a hint of his essential Britlingness and bristlingness. Only the
camera could ever induce Mr. Britling to brush his hair, and for the
camera alone did he reserve that expression of submissive martyrdom Mr.
Direck knew. And Mr. Direck was altogether unprepared for a certain
casualness of costume that sometimes overtook Mr. Britling. He was
wearing now a very old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of
knickerbockers, not tweed breeches but tweed knickerbockers of a
remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtuous socialistic
homespun tweeds that drag out into woolly knots and strings wherever
there is attrition. His stockings were worsted and wrinkled, and on his
feet were those extraordinary slippers of bright-coloured bast-like
interwoven material one buys in the north of France. These were purple
with a touch of green. He had, in fact, thought of the necessity of
meeting Mr. Direck at the station at the very last moment, and had come
away from his study in the clothes that had happened to him when he got
up. His face wore the amiable expression of a wire-haired terrier
disposed to be friendly, and it struck Mr. Direck that for a man of his
real intellectual distinction Mr. Britling was unusually short.

For there can be no denying that Mr. Britling was, in a sense,
distinguished. The hero and subject of this novel was at its very
beginning a distinguished man. He was in the _Who's Who_ of two
continents. In the last few years he had grown with some rapidity into a
writer recognised and welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the
American public, and even known to a select circle of British readers.
To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a
serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought and
national character and poets and painting. He had come through America
some years ago as one of those Kahn scholars, those promising writers
and intelligent men endowed by Auguste Kahn of Paris, who go about the
world nowadays in comfort and consideration as the travelling guests of
that original philanthropist--to acquire the international spirit.
Previously he had been a critic of art and literature and a writer of
thoughtful third leaders in the London _Times_. He had begun with a
Pembroke fellowship and a prize poem. He had returned from his world
tour to his reflective yet original corner of _The Times_ and to the
production of books about national relationships and social psychology,
that had brought him rapidly into prominence.

His was a naturally irritable mind, which gave him point and passion;
and moreover he had a certain obstinate originality and a generous
disposition. So that he was always lively, sometimes spacious, and never
vile. He loved to write and talk. He talked about everything, he had
ideas about everything; he could no more help having ideas about
everything than a dog can resist smelling at your heels. He sniffed at
the heels of reality. Lots of people found him interesting and
stimulating, a few found him seriously exasperating. He had ideas in the
utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political
institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and
China and aesthetics and America and the education of mankind in
general.... And all that sort of thing....

Mr. Direck had read a very great deal of all this expressed
opiniativeness of Mr. Britling: he found it entertaining and stimulating
stuff, and it was with genuine enthusiasm that he had come over to
encounter the man himself. On his way across the Atlantic and during
the intervening days, he had rehearsed this meeting in varying keys, but
always on the supposition that Mr. Britling was a large, quiet,
thoughtful sort of man, a man who would, as it were, sit in attentive
rows like a public meeting and listen. So Mr. Direck had prepared quite
a number of pleasant and attractive openings, and now he felt was the
moment for some one of these various simple, memorable utterances. But
in none of these forecasts had he reckoned with either the spontaneous
activities of Mr. Britling or with the station-master of Matching's
Easy. Oblivious of any conversational necessities between Mr. Direck and
Mr. Britling, this official now took charge of Mr. Direck's grip-sack,
and, falling into line with the two gentlemen as they walked towards the
exit gate, resumed what was evidently an interrupted discourse upon
sweet peas, originally addressed to Mr. Britling.

He was a small, elderly man with a determined-looking face and a sea
voice, and it was clear he overestimated the distance of his hearers.

"Mr. Darling what's head gardener up at Claverings, _'e_ can't get sweet
peas like that, try _'ow_ 'e will. Tried everything 'e 'as. Sand
ballast, 'e's tried. Seeds same as me. 'E came along 'ere only the other
day, 'e did, and 'e says to me, 'e says, 'darned 'f I can see why a
station-master should beat a professional gardener at 'is own game,' 'e
says, 'but you do. And in your orf time, too, so's to speak,' 'e says.
'I've tried sile,' 'e says--"

"Your first visit to England?" asked Mr. Britling of his guest.

"Absolutely," said Mr. Direck.

"I says to 'im, 'there's one thing you 'aven't tried,' I says," the
station-master continued, raising his voice by a Herculean feat still
higher.

"I've got a little car outside here," said Mr. Britling. "I'm a couple
of miles from the station."

"I says to 'im, I says, ''ave you tried the vibritation of the trains?'
I says. 'That's what you 'aven't tried, Mr. Darling. That's what you
_can't_ try,' I says. 'But you rest assured that that's the secret of my
sweet peas,' I says, 'nothing less and nothing more than the vibritation
of the trains.'"

Mr. Direck's mind was a little confused by the double nature of the
conversation and by the fact that Mr. Britling spoke of a car when
he meant an automobile. He handed his ticket mechanically to the
station-master, who continued to repeat and endorse his anecdote at the
top of his voice as Mr. Britling disposed himself and his guest in the
automobile.

"You know you 'aven't 'urt that mud-guard, sir, not the slightest bit
that matters," shouted the station-master. "I've been a looking at
it--er. It's my fence that's suffered most. And that's only strained
the post a lil' bit. Shall I put your bag in behind, sir?"

Mr. Direck assented, and then, after a momentary hesitation, rewarded
the station-master's services.

"Ready?" asked Mr. Britling.

"That's all right sir," the station-master reverberated.

With a rather wide curve Mr. Britling steered his way out of the station
into the highroad.

Section 4

And now it seemed was the time for Mr. Direck to make his meditated
speeches. But an unexpected complication was to defeat this intention.
Mr. Direck perceived almost at once that Mr. Britling was probably
driving an automobile for the first or second or at the extremest the
third time in his life.

The thing became evident when he struggled to get into the high gear--an
attempt that stopped the engine, and it was even more startlingly so
when Mr. Britling narrowly missed a collision with a baker's cart at a
corner. "I pressed the accelerator," he explained afterwards, "instead
of the brake. One does at first. I missed him by less than a foot."
The estimate was a generous one. And after that Mr. Direck became
too anxious not to distract his host's thoughts to persist with his
conversational openings. An attentive silence came upon both gentlemen
that was broken presently by a sudden outcry from Mr. Britling and a
great noise of tormented gears. "Damn!" cried Mr. Britling, and "How
the _devil_?"

Mr. Direck perceived that his host was trying to turn the car into a
very beautiful gateway, with gate-houses on either side. Then it was
manifest that Mr. Britling had abandoned this idea, and then they came
to a stop a dozen yards or so along the main road. "Missed it," said Mr.
Britling, and took his hands off the steering wheel and blew stormily,
and then whistled some bars of a fretful air, and became still.

"Do we go through these ancient gates?" asked Mr. Direck.

Mr. Britling looked over his right shoulder and considered problems of
curvature and distance. "I think," he said, "I will go round outside the
park. It will take us a little longer, but it will be simpler than
backing and manoeuvring here now.... These electric starters are
remarkably convenient things. Otherwise now I should have to get down
and wind up the engine."

After that came a corner, the rounding of which seemed to present few
difficulties until suddenly Mr. Britling cried out, "Eh! _eh_! EH! Oh,
_damn_!"

Then the two gentlemen were sitting side by side in a rather sloping car
that had ascended the bank and buried its nose in a hedge of dog-rose
and honeysuckle, from which two missel thrushes, a blackbird and a
number of sparrows had made a hurried escape....

Section 5

"Perhaps," said Mr. Britling without assurance, and after a little
peaceful pause, "I can reverse out of this."

He seemed to feel some explanation was due to Mr. Direck. "You see,
at first--it's perfectly simple--one steers _round_ a corner and then
one doesn't put the wheels straight again, and so one keeps on going
round--more than one meant to. It's the bicycle habit; the bicycle
rights itself. One expects a car to do the same thing. It was my fault.
The book explains all this question clearly, but just at the moment
I forgot."

He reflected and experimented in a way that made the engine scold
and fuss....

"You see, she won't budge for the reverse.... She's--embedded.... Do you
mind getting out and turning the wheel back? Then if I reverse, perhaps
we'll get a move on...."

Mr. Direck descended, and there were considerable efforts.

"If you'd just grip the spokes. Yes, so.... One, Two, Three!... No!
Well, let's just sit here until somebody comes along to help us. Oh!
Somebody will come all right. Won't you get up again?"

And after a reflective moment Mr. Direck resumed his seat beside
Mr. Britling....

Section 6

The two gentlemen smiled at each other to dispel any suspicion of
discontent.

"My driving leaves something to be desired," said Mr. Britling with
an air of frank impartiality. "But I have only just got this car for
myself--after some years of hired cars--the sort of lazy arrangement
where people supply car, driver, petrol, tyres, insurance and everything
at so much a month. It bored me abominably. I can't imagine now how
I stood it for so long. They sent me down a succession of compact,
scornful boys who used to go fast when I wanted to go slow, and slow
when I wanted to go fast, and who used to take every corner on the
wrong side at top speed, and charge dogs and hens for the sport of it,
and all sorts of things like that. They would not even let me choose my
roads. I should have got myself a car long ago, and driven it, if it
wasn't for that infernal business with a handle one had to do when the
engine stopped. But here, you see, is a reasonably cheap car with an
electric starter--American, I need scarcely say. And here I am--going
at my own pace."

Mr. Direck glanced for a moment at the pretty disorder of the hedge in
which they were embedded, and smiled and admitted that it was certainly
much more agreeable.

Before he had finished saying as much Mr. Britling was talking again.

He had a quick and rather jerky way of speaking; he seemed to fire out a
thought directly it came into his mind, and he seemed to have a loaded
magazine of thoughts in his head. He spoke almost exactly twice as fast
as Mr. Direck, clipping his words much more, using much compacter
sentences, and generally cutting his corners, and this put Mr. Direck
off his game.

That rapid attack while the transatlantic interlocutor is deploying is
indeed a not infrequent defect of conversations between Englishmen and
Americans. It is a source of many misunderstandings. The two conceptions
of conversation differ fundamentally. The English are much less disposed
to listen than the American; they have not quite the same sense of
conversational give and take, and at first they are apt to reduce their
visitors to the r�le of auditors wondering when their turn will begin.
Their turn never does begin. Mr. Direck sat deeply in his slanting seat
with a half face to his celebrated host and said "Yep" and "Sure" and
"That _is_ so," in the dry grave tones that he believed an Englishman
would naturally expect him to use, realising this only very gradually.

Mr. Britling, from his praise of the enterprise that had at last brought
a car he could drive within his reach, went on to that favourite topic
of all intelligent Englishmen, the adverse criticism of things British.
He pointed out that the central position of the brake and gear levers in
his automobile made it extremely easy for the American manufacturer to
turn it out either as a left-handed or a right-handed car, and so adapt
it either to the Continental or to the British rule of the road. No
English cars were so adaptable. We British suffered much from our
insular rule of the road, just as we suffered much from our insular
weights and measures. But we took a perverse pride in such
disadvantages. The irruption of American cars into England was a recent
phenomenon, it was another triumph for the tremendous organising ability
of the American mind. They were doing with the automobile what they had
done with clocks and watches and rifles, they had standardised and
machined wholesale, while the British were still making the things one
by one. It was an extraordinary thing that England, which was the
originator of the industrial system and the original developer of the
division of labour, should have so fallen away from systematic
manufacturing. He believed this was largely due to the influence of
Oxford and the Established Church....

At this point Mr. Direck was moved by an anecdote. "It will help to
illustrate what you are saying, Mr. Britling, about systematic
organisation if I tell you a little incident that happened to a friend
of mine in Toledo, where they are setting up a big plant with a view to
capturing the entire American and European market in the class of the
thousand-dollar car--"

"There's no end of such little incidents," said Mr. Britling, cutting in
without apparent effort. "You see, we get it on both sides. Our
manufacturer class was, of course, originally an insurgent class. It was
a class of distended craftsmen. It had the craftsman's natural
enterprise and natural radicalism. As soon as it prospered and sent its
boys to Oxford it was lost. Our manufacturing class was assimilated in
no time to the conservative classes, whose education has always had a
mandarin quality--very, very little of it, and very cold and choice. In
America you have so far had no real conservative class at all. Fortunate
continent! You cast out your Tories, and you were left with nothing but
Whigs and Radicals. But our peculiar bad luck has been to get a sort of
revolutionary who is a Tory mandarin too. Ruskin and Morris, for
example, were as reactionary and anti-scientific as the dukes and the
bishops. Machine haters. Science haters. Rule of Thumbites to the bone.
So are our current Socialists. They've filled this country with the idea
that the ideal automobile ought to be made entirely by the hand labour
of traditional craftsmen, quite individually, out of beaten copper,
wrought iron and seasoned oak. All this electric-starter business and
this electric lighting outfit I have here, is perfectly hateful to the
English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things,
we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated
electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through
wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and
fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper
British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you
get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional
electricity. Keep it in Leyden jars.... At Claverings here they still
refuse to have electric bells. There was a row when the Solomonsons, who
were tenants here for a time, tried to put them in...."

Mr. Direck had followed this cascade of remarks with a patient smile and
a slowly nodding head. "What you say," he said, "forms a very marked
contrast indeed with the sort of thing that goes on in America. This
friend of mine I was speaking of, the one who is connected with an
automobile factory in Toledo--"

"Of course," Mr. Britling burst out again, "even conservatism isn't an
ultimate thing. After all, we and your enterprising friend at Toledo,
are very much the same blood. The conservatism, I mean, isn't racial.
And our earlier energy shows it isn't in the air or in the soil. England
has become unenterprising and sluggish because England has been so
prosperous and comfortable...."

"Exactly," said Mr. Direck. "My friend of whom I was telling you, was a
man named Robinson, which indicates pretty clearly that he was of
genuine English stock, and, if I may say so, quite of your build and
complexion; racially, I should say, he was, well--very much what you
are...."

Section 7

This rally of Mr. Direck's mind was suddenly interrupted.

Mr. Britling stood up, and putting both hands to the sides of his mouth,
shouted "Yi-ah! Aye-ya! Thea!" at unseen hearers.

After shouting again, several times, it became manifest that he had
attracted the attention of two willing but deliberate labouring men.
They emerged slowly, first as attentive heads, from the landscape. With
their assistance the car was restored to the road again. Mr. Direck
assisted manfully, and noted the respect that was given to Mr. Britling
and the shillings that fell to the men, with an intelligent detachment.
They touched their hats, they called Mr. Britling "Sir." They examined
the car distantly but kindly. "Ain't 'urt 'e, not a bit 'e ain't, not
really," said one encouragingly. And indeed except for a slight
crumpling of the mud-guard and the detachment of the wire of one of the
headlights the automobile was uninjured. Mr. Britling resumed his seat;
Mr. Direck gravely and in silence got up beside him. They started with
the usual convulsion, as though something had pricked the vehicle
unexpectedly and shamefully behind. And from this point Mr. Britling,
driving with meticulous care, got home without further mishap, excepting
only that he scraped off some of the metal edge of his footboard
against the gate-post of his very agreeable garden.

His family welcomed his safe return, visitor and all, with undisguised
relief and admiration. A small boy appeared at the corner of the house,
and then disappeared hastily again. "Daddy's got back all right at
last," they heard him shouting to unseen hearers.

Section 8

Mr. Direck, though he was a little incommoded by the suppression of his
story about Robinson--for when he had begun a thing he liked to finish
it--found Mr. Britling's household at once thoroughly British, quite
un-American and a little difficult to follow. It had a quality that at
first he could not define at all. Compared with anything he had ever
seen in his life before it struck him as being--he found the word at
last--sketchy. For instance, he was introduced to nobody except his
hostess, and she was indicated to him by a mere wave of Mr. Britling's
hand. "That's Edith," he said, and returned at once to his car to put it
away. Mrs. Britling was a tall, freckled woman with pretty bright brown
hair and preoccupied brown eyes. She welcomed him with a handshake, and
then a wonderful English parlourmaid--she at least was according to
expectations--took his grip-sack and guided him to his room. "Lunch,
sir," she said, "is outside," and closed the door and left him to that
and a towel-covered can of hot water.

It was a square-looking old red-brick house he had come to, very
handsome in a simple Georgian fashion, with a broad lawn before it and
great blue cedar trees, and a drive that came frankly up to the front
door and then went off with Mr. Britling and the car round to unknown
regions at the back. The centre of the house was a big airy hall,
oak-panelled, warmed in winter only by one large fireplace and abounding
in doors which he knew opened into the square separate rooms that
England favours. Bookshelves and stuffed birds comforted the landing
outside his bedroom. He descended to find the hall occupied by a small
bright bristling boy in white flannel shirt and knickerbockers and bare
legs and feet. He stood before the vacant open fireplace in an attitude
that Mr. Direck knew instantly was also Mr. Britling's. "Lunch is in the
garden," the Britling scion proclaimed, "and I've got to fetch you. And,
I say! is it true? Are you American?"

"Why surely," said Mr. Direck.

"Well, I know some American," said the boy. "I learnt it."

"Tell me some," said Mr. Direck, smiling still more amiably.

"Oh! Well--God darn you! Ouch, Gee-whizz! Soak him, Maud! It's up to
you, Duke...."

"Now where did you learn all that?" asked Mr. Direck recovering.

"Out of the Sunday Supplement," said the youthful Britling.

"Why! Then you know all about Buster Brown," said Mr. Direck. "He's
Fine--eh?"

The Britling child hated Buster Brown. He regarded Buster Brown as a
totally unnecessary infant. He detested the way he wore his hair and the
peculiar cut of his knickerbockers and--him. He thought Buster Brown the
one drop of paraffin in the otherwise delicious feast of the Sunday
Supplement. But he was a diplomatic child.

"I think I like Happy Hooligan better," he said. "And dat ole Maud."

He reflected with joyful eyes, Buster clean forgotten. "Every week," he
said, "she kicks some one."

It came to Mr. Direck as a very pleasant discovery that a British infant
could find a common ground with the small people at home in these
characteristically American jests. He had never dreamt that the fine
wine of Maud and Buster could travel.

"Maud's a treat," said the youthful Britling, relapsing into his native
tongue.

Mr. Britling appeared coming to meet them. He was now in a grey flannel
suit--he must have jumped into it--and altogether very much tidier....

Section 9

The long narrow table under the big sycamores between the house and the
adapted barn that Mr. Direck learnt was used for "dancing and all that
sort of thing," was covered with a blue linen diaper cloth, and that too
surprised him. This was his first meal in a private household in
England, and for obscure reasons he had expected something very stiff
and formal with "spotless napery." He had also expected a very stiff and
capable service by implacable parlourmaids, and the whole thing indeed
highly genteel. But two cheerful women servants appeared from what was
presumably the kitchen direction, wheeling a curious wicker erection,
which his small guide informed him was called Aunt Clatter--manifestly
deservedly--and which bore on its shelves the substance of the meal. And
while the maids at this migratory sideboard carved and opened bottles
and so forth, the small boy and a slightly larger brother, assisted a
little by two young men of no very defined position and relationship,
served the company. Mrs. Britling sat at the head of the table, and
conversed with Mr. Direck by means of hostess questions and imperfectly
accepted answers while she kept a watchful eye on the proceedings.

The composition of the company was a matter for some perplexity to Mr.
Direck. Mr. and Mrs. Britling were at either end of the table, that was
plain enough. It was also fairly plain that the two barefooted boys were
little Britlings. But beyond this was a cloud of uncertainty. There was
a youth of perhaps seventeen, much darker than Britling but with nose
and freckles rather like his, who might be an early son or a stepson; he
was shock-headed and with that look about his arms and legs that
suggests overnight growth; and there was an unmistakable young German,
very pink, with close-cropped fair hair, glasses and a panama hat, who
was probably the tutor of the younger boys. (Mr. Direck also was wearing
his hat, his mind had been filled with an exaggerated idea of the
treacheries of the English climate before he left New York. Every one
else was hatless.) Finally, before one reached the limits of the
explicable there was a pleasant young man with a lot of dark hair and
very fine dark blue eyes, whom everybody called "Teddy." For him, Mr.
Direck hazarded "secretary."

But in addition to these normal and understandable presences, there was
an entirely mysterious pretty young woman in blue linen who sat and
smiled next to Mr. Britling, and there was a rather kindred-looking girl
with darker hair on the right of Mr. Direck who impressed him at the
very outset as being still prettier, and--he didn't quite place her at
first--somehow familiar to him; there was a large irrelevant middle-aged
lady in black with a gold chain and a large nose, between Teddy and the
tutor; there was a tall middle-aged man with an intelligent face, who
might be a casual guest; there was an Indian young gentleman faultlessly
dressed up to his brown soft linen collar and cuffs, and thereafter an
uncontrolled outbreak of fine bronze modelling and abundant fuzzy hair;
and there was a very erect and attentive baby of a year or less, sitting
up in a perambulator and gesticulating cheerfully to everybody. This
baby it was that most troubled the orderly mind of Mr. Direck. The
research for its paternity made his conversation with Mrs. Britling
almost as disconnected and absent-minded as her conversation with him.
It almost certainly wasn't Mrs. Britling's. The girl next to him or the
girl next to Mr. Britling or the lady in black might any of them be
married, but if so where was the spouse? It seemed improbable that they
would wheel out a foundling to lunch....

Realising at last that the problem of relationship must be left to solve
itself if he did not want to dissipate and consume his mind entirely,
Mr. Direck turned to his hostess, who was enjoying a brief lull in her
administrative duties, and told her what a memorable thing the meeting
of Mr. Britling in his own home would be in his life, and how very
highly America was coming to esteem Mr. Britling and his essays. He
found that with a slight change of person, one of his premeditated
openings was entirely serviceable here. And he went on to observe that
it was novel and entertaining to find Mr. Britling driving his own
automobile and to note that it was an automobile of American
manufacture. In America they had standardised and systematised the
making of such things as automobiles to an extent that would, he
thought, be almost startling to Europeans. It was certainly startling to
the European manufacturers. In illustration of that he might tell a
little story of a friend of his called Robinson--a man who curiously
enough in general build and appearance was very reminiscent indeed of
Mr. Britling. He had been telling Mr. Britling as much on his way here
from the station. His friend was concerned with several others in one of
the biggest attacks that had ever been made upon what one might describe
in general terms as the thousand-dollar light automobile market. What
they said practically was this: This market is a jig-saw puzzle waiting
to be put together and made one. We are going to do it. But that was
easier to figure out than to do. At the very outset of this attack he
and his associates found themselves up against an unexpected and very
difficult proposition....

At first Mrs. Britling had listened to Mr. Direck with an almost
undivided attention, but as he had developed his opening the feast upon
the blue linen table had passed on to a fresh phase that demanded more
and more of her directive intelligence. The two little boys appeared
suddenly at her elbows. "Shall we take the plates and get the
strawberries, Mummy?" they asked simultaneously. Then one of the neat
maids in the background had to be called up and instructed in
undertones, and Mr. Direck saw that for the present Robinson's
illuminating experience was not for her ears. A little baffled, but
quite understanding how things were, he turned to his neighbour on his
left....

The girl really had an extraordinarily pretty smile, and there was
something in her soft bright brown eye--like the movement of some quick
little bird. And--she was like somebody he knew! Indeed she was. She was
quite ready to be spoken to.

"I was telling Mrs. Britling," said Mr. Direck, "what a very great
privilege I esteem it to meet Mr. Britling in this highly familiar way."

"You've not met him before?"

"I missed him by twenty-four hours when he came through Boston on the
last occasion. Just twenty-four hours. It was a matter of very great
regret to me."

"I wish I'd been paid to travel round the world."

"You must write things like Mr. Britling and then Mr. Kahn will send
you."

"Don't you think if I promised well?"

"You'd have to write some promissory notes, I think--just to convince
him it was all right."

The young lady reflected on Mr. Britling's good fortune.

"He saw India. He saw Japan. He had weeks in Egypt. And he went right
across America."

Mr. Direck had already begun on the liner to adapt himself to the
hopping inconsecutiveness of English conversation. He made now what he
felt was quite a good hop, and he dropped his voice to a confidential
undertone. (It was probably Adam in his first conversation with Eve, who
discovered the pleasantness of dropping into a confidential undertone
beside a pretty ear with a pretty wave of hair above it.)

"It was in India, I presume," murmured Mr. Direck, "that Mr. Britling
made the acquaintance of the coloured gentleman?"

"Coloured gentleman!" She gave a swift glance down the table as though
she expected to see something purple with yellow spots. "Oh, that is one
of Mr. Lawrence Carmine's young men!" she explained even more
confidentially and with an air of discussing the silver bowl of roses
before him. "He's a great authority on Indian literature, he belongs to
a society for making things pleasant for Indian students in London, and
he has them down."

"And Mr. Lawrence Carmine?" he pursued.

Even more intimately and confidentially she indicated Mr. Carmine, as it
seemed by a motion of her eyelash.

Mr. Direck prepared to be even more _sotto-voce_ and to plumb a much
profounder mystery. His eye rested on the perambulator; he leant a
little nearer to the ear.... But the strawberries interrupted him.

"Strawberries!" said the young lady, and directed his regard to his left
shoulder by a little movement of her head.

He found one of the boys with a high-piled plate ready to serve him.

And then Mrs. Britling resumed her conversation with him. She was so
ignorant, she said, of things American, that she did not even know if
they had strawberries there. At any rate, here they were at the crest of
the season, and in a very good year. And in the rose season too. It was
one of the dearest vanities of English people to think their apples and
their roses and their strawberries the best in the world.

"And their complexions," said Mr. Direck, over the pyramid of fruit,
quite manifestly intending a compliment. So that was all right.... But
the girl on the left of him was speaking across the table to the German
tutor, and did not hear what he had said. So that even if it wasn't
very neat it didn't matter....

Then he remembered that she was like that old daguerreotype of a cousin
of his grandmother's that he had fallen in love with when he was a boy.
It was her smile. Of course! Of course!... And he'd sort of adored that
portrait.... He felt a curious disposition to tell her as much....

"What makes this visit even more interesting if possible to me," he said
to Mrs. Britling, "than it would otherwise be, is that this Essex
country is the country in which my maternal grandmother was raised, and
also long way back my mother's father's people. My mother's father's
people were very early New England people indeed.... Well, no. If I said
_Mayflower_ it wouldn't be true. But it would approximate. They were
Essex Hinkinsons. That's what they were. I must be a good third of me at
least Essex. My grandmother was an Essex Corner, I must confess I've had
some thought--"

"Corner?" said the young lady at his elbow sharply.

"I was telling Mrs. Britling I had some thought--"

"But about those Essex relatives of yours?"

"Well, of finding if they were still about in these parts.... Say! I
haven't dropped a brick, have I?"

He looked from one face to another.

"_She's_ a Corner," said Mrs. Britling.

"Well," said Mr. Direck, and hesitated for a moment. It was so
delightful that one couldn't go on being just discreet. The atmosphere
was free and friendly. His intonation disarmed offence. And he gave the
young lady the full benefit of a quite expressive eye. "I'm very pleased
to meet you, Cousin Corner. How are the old folks at home?"

Section 10

The bright interest of this consulship helped Mr. Direck more than
anything to get the better of his Robinson-anecdote crave, and when
presently he found his dialogue with Mr. Britling resumed, he turned at
once to this remarkable discovery of his long lost and indeed hitherto
unsuspected relative. "It's an American sort of thing to do, I suppose,"
he said apologetically, "but I almost thought of going on, on Monday, to
Market Saffron, which was the locality of the Hinkinsons, and just
looking about at the tombstones in the churchyard for a day or so."

"Very probably," said Mr. Britling, "you'd find something about them in
the parish registers. Lots of our registers go back three hundred years
or more. I'll drive you over in my lil' old car."

"Oh! I wouldn't put you to that trouble," said Mr. Direck hastily.

"It's no trouble. I like the driving. What I have had of it. And while
we're at it, we'll come back by Harborough High Oak and look up the
Corner pedigree. They're all over that district still. And the road's
not really difficult; it's only a bit up and down and roundabout."

"I couldn't think, Mr. Britling, of putting you to that much trouble."

"It's no trouble. I want a day off, and I'm dying to take Gladys--"

"Gladys?" said Mr. Direck with sudden hope.

"That's my name for the lil' car. I'm dying to take her for something
like a decent run. I've only had her out four times altogether, and I've
not got her up yet to forty miles. Which I'm told she ought to do
easily. We'll consider that settled."

For the moment Mr. Direck couldn't think of any further excuse. But it
was very clear in his mind that something must happen; he wished he knew
of somebody who could send a recall telegram from London, to prevent him
committing himself to the casual destinies of Mr. Britling's car again.
And then another interest became uppermost in his mind.

"You'd hardly believe me," he said, "if I told you that that Miss Corner
of yours has a quite extraordinary resemblance to a miniature I've got
away there in America of a cousin of my maternal grandmother's. She
seems a very pleasant young lady."

But Mr. Britling supplied no further information about Miss Corner.

"It must be very interesting," he said, "to come over here and pick up
these American families of yours on the monuments and tombstones. You
know, of course, that district south of Evesham where every other church
monument bears the stars and stripes, the arms of departed Washingtons.
I doubt though if you'll still find the name about there. Nor will you
find many Hinkinsons in Market Saffron. But lots of this country here
has five or six hundred-year-old families still flourishing. That's why
Essex is so much more genuinely Old England than Surrey, say, or Kent.
Round here you'll find Corners and Fairlies, and then you get Capels,
and then away down towards Dunmow and Braintree Maynards and Byngs. And
there are oaks and hornbeams in the park about Claverings that have
echoed to the howling of wolves and the clank of men in armour. All the
old farms here are moated--because of the wolves. Claverings itself is
Tudor, and rather fine too. And the cottages still wear thatch...."

He reflected. "Now if you went south of London instead of northward it's
all different. You're in a different period, a different society. You're
in London suburbs right down to the sea. You'll find no genuine estates
left, not of our deep-rooted familiar sort. You'll find millionaires and
that sort of people, sitting in the old places. Surrey is full of rich
stockbrokers, company-promoters, bookies, judges, newspaper proprietors.
Sort of people who fence the paths across their parks. They do something
to the old places--I don't know what they do--but instantly the
countryside becomes a villadom. And little sub-estates and red-brick
villas and art cottages spring up. And a kind of new, hard neatness. And
pneumatic tyre and automobile spirit advertisements, great glaring
boards by the roadside. And all the poor people are inspected and rushed
about until they forget who their grandfathers were. They become villa
parasites and odd-job men, and grow basely rich and buy gramophones.
This Essex and yonder Surrey are as different as Russia and Germany. But
for one American who comes to look at Essex, twenty go to Godalming and
Guildford and Dorking and Lewes and Canterbury. Those Surrey people are
not properly English at all. They are strenuous. You have to get on or
get out. They drill their gardeners, lecture very fast on agricultural
efficiency, and have miniature rifle ranges in every village. It's a
county of new notice-boards and barbed-wire fences; there's always a
policeman round the corner. They dress for dinner. They dress for
everything. If a man gets up in the night to look for a burglar he puts
on the correct costume--or doesn't go. They've got a special scientific
system for urging on their tramps. And they lock up their churches on a
week-day. Half their soil is hard chalk or a rationalistic sand, only
suitable for bunkers and villa foundations. And they play golf in a
large, expensive, thorough way because it's the thing to do.... Now here
in Essex we're as lax as the eighteenth century. We hunt in any old
clothes. Our soil is a rich succulent clay; it becomes semi-fluid in
winter--when we go about in waders shooting duck. All our fingerposts
have been twisted round by facetious men years ago. And we pool our
breeds of hens and pigs. Our roses and oaks are wonderful; that alone
shows that this is the real England. If I wanted to play golf--which I
don't, being a decent Essex man--I should have to motor ten miles into
Hertfordshire. And for rheumatics and longevity Surrey can't touch us. I
want you to be clear on these points, because they really will affect
your impressions of this place.... This country is a part of the real
England--England outside London and outside manufactures. It's one with
Wessex and Mercia or old Yorkshire--or for the matter of that with Meath
or Lothian. And it's the essential England still...."

Section 11

It detracted a little from Mr. Direck's appreciation of this flow of
information that it was taking them away from the rest of the company.
He wanted to see more of his new-found cousin, and what the baby and the
Bengali gentleman--whom manifestly one mustn't call "coloured"--and the
large-nosed lady and all the other inexplicables would get up to.
Instead of which Mr. Britling was leading him off alone with an air of
showing him round the premises, and talking too rapidly and variously
for a question to be got in edgeways, much less any broaching of the
matter that Mr. Direck had come over to settle.

There was quite a lot of rose garden, it made the air delicious, and it
was full of great tumbling bushes of roses and of neglected standards,
and it had a long pergola of creepers and trailers and a great arbour,
and underneath over the beds everywhere, contrary to all the rules, the
blossom of a multitude of pansies and stock and little trailing plants
swarmed and crowded and scrimmaged and drilled and fought great massed
attacks. And then Mr. Britling talked their way round a red-walled
vegetable garden with an abundance of fruit trees, and through a door
into a terraced square that had once been a farmyard, outside the
converted barn. The barn doors had been replaced by a door-pierced
window of glass, and in the middle of the square space a deep tank had
been made, full of rainwater, in which Mr. Britling remarked casually
that "everybody" bathed when the weather was hot. Thyme and rosemary and
suchlike sweet-scented things grew on the terrace about the tank, and
ten trimmed little trees of _Arbor vitae_ stood sentinel. Mr. Direck was
tantalisingly aware that beyond some lilac bushes were his new-found
cousin and the kindred young woman in blue playing tennis with the
Indian and another young man, while whenever it was necessary the
large-nosed lady crossed the stage and brooded soothingly over the
perambulator. And Mr. Britling, choosing a seat from which Mr. Direck
just couldn't look comfortably through the green branches at the flying
glimpses of pink and blue and white and brown, continued to talk about
England and America in relation to each other and everything else under
the sun.

Presently through a distant gate the two small boys were momentarily
visible wheeling small but serviceable bicycles, followed after a little
interval by the German tutor. Then an enormous grey cat came slowly
across the garden court, and sat down to listen respectfully to Mr.
Britling. The afternoon sky was an intense blue, with little puff-balls
of cloud lined out across it.

Occasionally, from chance remarks of Mr. Britling's, Mr. Direck was led
to infer that his first impressions as an American visitor were being
related to his host, but as a matter of fact he was permitted to relate
nothing; Mr. Britling did all the talking. He sat beside his guest and
spirted and played ideas and reflections like a happy fountain in the
sunshine.

Mr. Direck sat comfortably, and smoked with quiet appreciation the one
after-lunch cigar he allowed himself. At any rate, if he himself felt
rather word-bound, the fountain was nimble and entertaining. He listened
in a general sort of way to the talk, it was quite impossible to follow
it thoughtfully throughout all its chinks and turnings, while his eyes
wandered about the garden and went ever and again to the flitting
tennis-players beyond the green. It was all very gay and comfortable and
complete; it was various and delightful without being in the least
_opulent_; that was one of the little secrets America had to learn. It
didn't look as though it had been made or bought or cost anything, it
looked as though it had happened rather luckily....

Mr. Britling's talk became like a wide stream flowing through Mr.
Direck's mind, bearing along momentary impressions and observations,
drifting memories of all the crowded English sights and sounds of the
last five days, filmy imaginations about ancestral names and pretty
cousins, scraps of those prepared conversational openings on Mr.
Britling's standing in America, the explanation about the lecture club,
the still incompletely forgotten purport of the Robinson anecdote....

"Nobody planned the British estate system, nobody planned the British
aristocratic system, nobody planned the confounded constitution, it came
about, it was like layer after layer wrapping round an agate, but you
see it came about so happily in a way, it so suited the climate and the
temperament of our people and our island, it was on the whole so cosy,
that our people settled down into it, you can't help settling down into
it, they had already settled down by the days of Queen Anne, and Heaven
knows if we shall ever really get away again. We're like that little
shell the _Lingula_, that is found in the oldest rocks and lives to-day:
it fitted its easy conditions, and it has never modified since. Why
should it? It excretes all its disturbing forces. Our younger sons go
away and found colonial empires. Our surplus cottage children emigrate
to Australia and Canada or migrate into the towns. It doesn't alter
_this_...."

Section 12

Mr. Direck's eye had come to rest upon the barn, and its expression
changed slowly from lazy appreciation to a brightening intelligence.
Suddenly he resolved to say something. He resolved to say it so firmly
that he determined to say it even if Mr. Britling went on talking all
the time.

"I suppose, Mr. Britling," he said, "this barn here dates from the days
of Queen Anne."

"The walls of the yard here are probably earlier: probably monastic.
That grey patch in the corner, for example. The barn itself is
Georgian."

"And here it is still. And this farmyard, here it is still."

Mr. Britling was for flying off again, but Mr. Direck would not listen;
he held on like a man who keeps his grip on a lasso.

"There's one thing I would like to remark about your barn, Mr. Britling,
and I might, while I am at it, say the same thing about your farmyard."

Mr. Britling was held. "What's that?" he asked.

"Well," said Mr. Direck, "the point that strikes me most about all this
is that that barn isn't a barn any longer, and that this farmyard isn't
a farmyard. There isn't any wheat or chaff or anything of that sort in
the barn, and there never will be again: there's just a pianola and a
dancing floor, and if a cow came into this farmyard everybody in the
place would be shooing it out again. They'd regard it as a most
unnatural object."

He had a pleasant sense of talking at last. He kept right on. He was
moved to a sweeping generalisation.

"You were so good as to ask me, Mr. Britling, a little while ago, what
my first impression of England was. Well, Mr. Britling, my first
impression of England that seems to me to matter in the least is this:
that it looks and feels more like the traditional Old England than any
one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like
the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have
imagined."

He was carried on even further. He made a tremendous literary epigram.
"I thought," he said, "when I looked out of the train this morning that
I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find it is not even
the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward."