He gave up science for art after grave consultation with his father, and the real trouble that had been fretting him, it seemed, was that now he repented and wanted to follow Cardinal to Cambridge, and—a year lost—go on with science again. He felt it was a discreditable fluctuation; he knew it would be a considerable expense; and so he took two weeks before he could screw himself up to broaching the matter.
“So that is all,” said Mr. Britling, immensely relieved.
“My dear Parent, you didn’t think I had backed a bill or forged a cheque?”
“I thought you might have married a chorus girl or something of that sort,” said Mr. Britling.
“Or bought a large cream-coloured motorcar for her on the instalment system, which she’d smashed up. No, that sort of thing comes later. … I’ll just put myself down on the waiting list of one of those bits of delight in the Cambridge tobacco shops—and go on with my studies for a year or two. …”
§ 6
Though Mr. Britling’s anxiety about his son was dispelled, his mind remained curiously apprehensive throughout July. He had a feeling that things were not going well with the world, a feeling he tried in vain to dispel by various distractions. Perhaps some subtler subconscious analysis of the situation was working out probabilities that his conscious self would not face. And when presently he bicycled off to Mrs. Harrowdean for flattery, amusement, and comfort generally, he found her by no means the exalting confirmation of everything he wished to believe about himself and the universe, that had been her delightful role in the early stages of their romantic friendship. She maintained her hostility to Edith; she seemed bent on making things impossible. And yet there were one or two phases of the old sustaining intimacies.
They walked across her absurd little park to the summerhouse with the view on the afternoon of his arrival, and they discussed the Irish pamphlet which was now nearly finished.
“Of course,” she said, “it will be a wonderful pamphlet.”
There was a reservation in her voice that made him wait.
“But I suppose all sorts of people could write an Irish pamphlet. Nobody but you could write ‘The Silent Places.’ Oh, why don’t you finish that great beautiful thing, and leave all this world of reality and newspapers, all these Crude, Vulgar, Quarrelsome, Jarring things to other people? You have the magic gift, you might be a poet, you can take us out of all these horrid things that are, away to Beautyland, and you are just content to be a critic and a disputer. It’s your surroundings. It’s your sordid realities. It’s that Practicality at your elbow. You ought never to see a newspaper. You ought never to have an American come within ten miles of you. You ought to live on bowls of milk drunk in valleys of asphodel.”
Mr. Britling, who liked this sort of thing in a way, and yet at the same time felt ridiculously distended and altogether preposterous while it was going on, answered feebly and self-consciously.
“There was your letter in the Nation the other day,” she said. “Why do you get drawn into arguments? I wanted to rush into the Nation and pick you up and wipe the anger off you, and carry you out of it all—into some quiet beautiful place.”
“But one has to answer these people,” said Mr. Britling, rolling along by the side of her like a full moon beside Venus, and quite artlessly falling in with the tone of her.
She repeated lines from “The Silent Places” from memory. She threw quite wonderful emotion into her voice. She made the words glow. And he had only shown her the thing once. …
Was he indeed burying a marvellous gift under the dust of current affairs? When at last in the warm evening light they strolled back from the summerhouse to dinner he had definitely promised her that he would take up and finish “The Silent Places.” … And think over the Irish pamphlet again before he published it. …
Pyecrafts was like a crystal casket of finer soil withdrawn from the tarred highways of the earth. …
And yet the very next day this angel enemy of controversies broke out in the most abominable way about Edith, and he had to tell her more plainly than he had done hitherto, that he could not tolerate that sort of thing. He wouldn’t have Edith guyed. He wouldn’t have Edith made to seem base. And at that there was much trouble between them, and tears and talk of Oliver. …
Mr. Britling found himself unable to get on either with “The Silent Places” or the pamphlet, and he was very unhappy. …
Afterwards she repented very touchingly, and said that if only he would love her she would swallow a thousand Ediths. He waived a certain disrespect in the idea of her swallowing Edith, and they had a beautiful reconciliation and talked of exalted things, and in the evening he worked quite well upon “The Silent Places” and thought of half-a-dozen quite wonderful lines, and in the course of the next day he returned to Dower House and Mr. Direck and considerable piles of correspondence and the completion of the Irish pamphlet.
But he was restless. He was more restless in his house than he had ever been. He could not understand it. Everything about him was just as it had always been, and yet it was unsatisfactory, and it seemed more unstable than anything had ever seemed before. He was bored
