He had an imperfectly formed idea of getting across right in front of the motorcyclist, and then they were going down the brief grassy slope between the road and the wall, straight at the wall, and still at a good speed. The motorcyclist smacked against something and vanished from the problem. The wall seemed to rush up at them and then—collapse. There was a tremendous concussion. Mr. Direck gripped at his friend the emergency brake, but had only time to touch it before his head hit against the frame of the glass windscreen, and a curtain fell upon everything. …
He opened his eyes upon a broken wall, a crumpled motor car, and an undamaged motorcyclist in the aviator’s cap and thin oilskin overalls dear to motorcyclists. Mr. Direck stared and then, still stunned and puzzled, tried to raise himself. He became aware of acute pain.
“Don’t move for a bit,” said the motorcyclist. “Your arm and side are rather hurt, I think. …”
§ 8
In the course of the next twelve hours Mr. Direck was to make a discovery that was less common in the days before the war than it has been since. He discovered that even pain and injury may be vividly interesting and gratifying.
If anyone had told him he was going to be stunned for five or six minutes, cut about the brow and face and have a bone in his wrist put out, and that as a consequence he would find himself pleased and exhilarated, he would have treated the prophecy with ridicule; but here he was lying stiffly on his back with his wrist bandaged to his side and smiling into the darkness even more brightly than he had smiled at the Essex landscape two days before. The fact is pain hurts or irritates, but in itself it does not make a healthily constituted man miserable. The expectation of pain, the certainty of injury may make one hopeless enough, the reality rouses our resistance. Nobody wants a broken bone or a delicate wrist, but very few people are very much depressed by getting one. People can be much more depressed by smoking a hundred cigarettes in three days or losing one percent of their capital.
And everybody had been most delightful to Mr. Direck.
He had had the monopoly of damage. Mr. Britling, holding on to the steering wheel, had not even been thrown out. “Unless I’m internally injured,” he said, “I’m not hurt at all. My liver perhaps—bruised a little. …”
Gladys had been abandoned in the ditch, and they had been very kindly brought home by a passing automobile. Cecily had been at the Dower House at the moment of the rueful arrival. She had seen how an American can carry injuries. She had made sympathy and helpfulness more delightful by expressed admiration.
“She’s a natural born nurse,” said Mr. Direck, and then rather in the tone of one who addressed a public meeting: “But this sort of thing brings out all the good there is in a woman.”
He had been quite explicit to them and more particularly to her, when they told him he must stay at the Dower House until his arm was cured. He had looked the application straight into her pretty eyes.
“If I’m to stay right here just as a consequence of that little shake up, maybe for a couple of weeks, maybe three, and if you’re coming to do a bit of a talk to me ever and again, then I tell you I don’t call this a misfortune. It isn’t a misfortune. It’s right down sheer good luck. …”
And now he lay as straight as a mummy, with his soul filled with radiance of complete mental peace. After months of distress and confusion, he’d got straight again. He was in the middle of a real good story, bright and clean. He knew just exactly what he wanted.
“After all,” he said, “it’s true. There’s ideals. She’s an ideal. Why, I loved her before ever I set eyes on Mamie. I loved her before I was put into pants. That old portrait, there it was pointing my destiny. … It’s affinity. … It’s natural selection. …
“Well, I don’t know what she thinks of me yet, but I do know very well what she’s got to think of me. She’s got to think all the world of me—if I break every limb of my body making her do it.
“I’d a sort of feeling it was right to go in that old automobile.
“Say what you like, there’s a Guidance. …”
He smiled confidentially at the darkness as if they shared a secret.
IV
Mr. Britling in Soliloquy
§ 1
Very different from the painful contentment of the bruised and broken Mr. Direck was the state of mind of his unwounded host. He too was sleepless, but sleepless without exaltation. The day had been too much for him altogether; his head, to borrow an admirable American expression, was “busy.”
How busy it was, a whole chapter will be needed to describe. …
The impression Mr. Britling had made upon Mr. Direck was one of indefatigable happiness. But there were times when Mr. Britling was called upon to pay for his general cheerful activity in lump sums of bitter sorrow. There were nights—and especially after seasons of exceptional excitement
