Chapter 4

MR. BRITLING IN SOLILOQUY

Section 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 and nervous activity--when the reckoning would be
presented and Mr. Britling would welter prostrate and groaning under a
stormy sky of unhappiness--active insatiable unhappiness--a beating with
rods.

The sorrows of the sanguine temperament are brief but furious; the world
knows little of them. The world has no need to reckon with them. They
cause no suicides and few crimes. They hurry past, smiting at their
victim as they go. None the less they are misery. Mr. Britling in these
moods did not perhaps experience the grey and hopeless desolations of
the melancholic nor the red damnation of the choleric, but he saw a
world that bristled with misfortune and error, with poisonous thorns and
traps and swampy places and incurable blunderings. An almost
insupportable remorse for being Mr. Britling would pursue
him--justifying itself upon a hundred counts....

And for being such a Britling!...

Why--he revived again that bitter question of a thousand and one unhappy
nights--why was he such a fool? Such a hasty fool? Why couldn't he look
before he leapt? Why did he take risks? Why was he always so ready to
act upon the supposition that all was bound to go well? (He might as
well have asked why he had quick brown eyes.)

Why, for instance, hadn't he adhered to the resolution of the early
morning? He had begun with an extremity of caution....

It was a characteristic of these moods of Mr. Britling that they
produced a physical restlessness. He kept on turning over and then
turning over again, and sitting up and lying back, like a martyr on a
gridiron....

This was just the latest instance of a life-long trouble. Will there
ever be a sort of man whose thoughts are quick and his acts slow? Then
indeed we shall have a formidable being. Mr. Britling's thoughts were
quick and sanguine and his actions even more eager than his thoughts.
Already while he was a young man Mr. Britling had found his acts elbow
their way through the hurry of his ideas and precipitate humiliations.
Long