Section 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 summer-house 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 summer-house 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....