Mr. Britling Sees It Through

the main current of his thinking; but all the same, just outside the circle of his attention a number of other things were dimly apprehended, bobbing up and down in the flood and ready at the slightest chance to swirl into the centre of his thoughts. There was, for instance, Captain Carmine in the moonlight lugging up a railway embankment something horrible, something loose and wet and warm that had very recently been a man. There was Teddy, serious and patriotic⁠—filling a futile penman with incredulous respect. There was the thin-faced man at the club, and a curious satisfaction he had betrayed in the public disarrangement. And there was Hugh. Particularly there was Hugh, silent but watchful. The boy never babbled. He had his mother’s gift of deep dark silences. Out of which she was wont to flash, a Black Princess waving a sword. He wandered for a little while among memories.⁠ ⁠… But Hugh didn’t come out like that, though it always seemed possible he might⁠—perhaps he didn’t come out because he was a son. Revelation to his father wasn’t his business.⁠ ⁠… What was he thinking of it all? What was he going to do? Mr. Britling was acutely anxious that his son should volunteer; he was almost certain that he would volunteer, but there was just a little shadow of doubt whether some extraordinary subtlety of mind mightn’t have carried the boy into a pacifist attitude. No! that was impossible. In the face of Belgium.⁠ ⁠… But as greatly⁠—and far more deeply in the warm flesh of his being⁠—did Mr. Britling desire that no harm, no evil should happen to Hugh.⁠ ⁠…

The door opened, and Hugh came in.⁠ ⁠…

Mr. Britling glanced over his shoulder with an affectation of indifference. “Hal-lo!” he said. “What do you want?”

Hugh walked awkwardly to the hearthrug.

“Oh!” he said in an offhand tone; “I suppose I’ve got to go soldiering for a bit. I just thought⁠—I’d rather like to go off with a man I know tomorrow.⁠ ⁠…”

Mr. Britling’s manner remained casual.

“It’s the only thing to do now, I’m afraid,” he said.

He turned in his chair and regarded his son. “What do you mean to do? O.T.C.?”

“I don’t think I should make much of an officer. I hate giving orders to other people. We thought we’d just go together into the Essex Regiment as privates.⁠ ⁠…”

There was a little pause. Both father and son had rehearsed this scene in their minds several times, and now they found that they had no use for a number of sentences that had been most effective in these rehearsals. Mr. Britling scratched his cheek with the end of his pen. “I’m glad you want to go, Hugh,” he said.

“I don’t want to go,” said Hugh with his hands deep in his pockets. “I want to go and work with Cardinal. But this job has to be done by everyone. Haven’t you been saying as much all day?⁠ ⁠… It’s like turning out to chase a burglar or suppress a mad dog. It’s like necessary sanitation.⁠ ⁠…”

“You aren’t attracted by soldiering?”

“Not a bit. I won’t pretend it, Daddy. I think the whole business is a bore. Germany seems to me now just like some heavy horrible dirty mass that has fallen across Belgium and France. We’ve got to shove the stuff back again. That’s all.⁠ ⁠…”

He volunteered some further remarks to his father’s silence.

“You know I can’t get up a bit of tootle about this business,” he said. “I think killing people or getting killed is a thoroughly nasty habit.⁠ ⁠… I expect my share will be just drilling and fatigue duties and route marches, and loafing here in England.⁠ ⁠…”

“You can’t possibly go out for two years,” said Mr. Britling, as if he regretted it.

A slight hesitation appeared in Hugh’s eyes. “I suppose not,” he said.

“Things ought to be over by then⁠—anyhow,” Mr. Britling added, betraying his real feelings.

“So it’s really just helping at the furthest end of the shove,” Hugh endorsed, but still with that touch of reservation in his manner.⁠ ⁠…

The pause had the effect of closing the theoretical side of the question. “Where do you propose to enlist?” said Mr. Britling, coming down to practical details.

§ 7

The battle of the Marne passed into the battle of the Aisne, and then the long lines of the struggle streamed northwestward until the British were back in Belgium failing to clutch Menin and then defending Ypres. The elation of September followed the bedazzlement and dismay of August into the chapter of forgotten moods; and Mr. Britling’s sense of the magnitude, the weight and duration of this war beyond all wars, increased steadily. The feel of it was less and less a feeling of crisis and more and more a feeling of new conditions. It wasn’t as it had seemed at first, the end of one human phase and the beginning of another; it was in itself a phase. It was a new way of living. And still he could find no real point of contact for himself with it all except the point of his pen. Only at his writing-desk, and more particularly at night, were the great presences of the conflict his. Yet he was always desiring some more personal and physical participation.

Hugh came along one day in October in an ill-fitting uniform, looking already coarser in fibre and with a nose scorched red by the autumnal sun. He said the life was rough, but it made him feel extraordinarily well; perhaps man was made to toil until he dropped asleep from exhaustion, to fast for ten or twelve hours and then eat like a wolf. He was acquiring a taste for Woodbine cigarettes, and a heady variety of mineral waters called Monsters. He feared promotion; he felt he could never take the high line with other human beings demanded of a corporal. He was still trying to read a little chemistry and crystallography, but it didn’t “go with the life.” In the scanty leisure of a recruit in training it was more agreeable to