Chapter 2

MR. BRITLING CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION

Section 1

Mr. Direck found little reason to revise his dictum in the subsequent
experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and the next day were
steadily consistent in confirming what a very good dictum it had been.
The scenery was the traditional scenery of England, and all the people
seemed quicker, more irresponsible, more chaotic, than any one could
have anticipated, and entirely inexplicable by any recognised code of
English relationships....

"You think that John Bull is dead and a strange generation is wearing
his clothes," said Mr. Britling. "I think you'll find very soon it's the
old John Bull. Perhaps not Mrs. Humphry Ward's John Bull, or Mrs. Henry
Wood's John Bull but true essentially to Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens,
Meredith...."

"I suppose," he added, "there are changes. There's a new generation
grown up...."

He looked at his barn and the swimming pool. "It's a good point of yours
about the barn," he said. "What you say reminds me of that very jolly
thing of Kipling's about the old mill-wheel that began by grinding corn
and ended by driving dynamos....

"Only I admit that barn doesn't exactly drive a dynamo....

"To be frank, it's just a pleasure barn....

"The country can afford it...."

Section 2

He left it at that for the time, but throughout the afternoon Mr. Direck
had the gratification of seeing his thought floating round and round in
the back-waters of Mr. Britling's mental current. If it didn't itself
get into the stream again its reflection at any rate appeared and
reappeared. He was taken about with great assiduity throughout the
afternoon, and he got no more than occasional glimpses of the rest of
the Dower House circle until six o'clock in the evening.

Meanwhile the fountains of Mr. Britling's active and encyclopædic mind
played steadily.

He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her incessantly. He
wanted to state England to Mr. Direck as the amiable summation of a
grotesque assembly of faults. That was the view into which the comforts
and prosperities of his middle age had brought him from a radicalism
that had in its earlier stages been angry and bitter. And for Mr.
Britling England was "here." Essex was the county he knew. He took Mr.
Direck out from his walled garden by a little door into a trim paddock
with two white goals. "We play hockey here on Sundays," he said in a way
that gave Mr. Direck no hint of the practically compulsory participation
of every visitor to Matching's Easy in this violent and dangerous
exercise, and thence they passed by a