Read Mr. Britling Sees It Through for Free Online Page A

one after-lunch cigar he allowed himself. At any rate, if he himself felt rather word-bound, the fountain was nimble and entertaining. He listened in a general sort of way to the talk, it was quite impossible to follow it thoughtfully throughout all its chinks and turnings, while his eyes wandered about the garden and went ever and again to the flitting tennisplayers beyond the green. It was all very gay and comfortable and complete; it was various and delightful without being in the least opulent; that was one of the little secrets America had to learn. It didn’t look as though it had been made or bought or cost anything, it looked as though it had happened rather luckily. …
    Mr. Britling’s talk became like a wide stream flowing through Mr. Direck’s mind, bearing along momentary impressions andobservations, drifting memories of all the crowded English sights and sounds of the last five days, filmy imaginations about ancestral names and pretty cousins, scraps of those prepared conversational openings on Mr. Britling’s standing in America, the explanation about the lecture club, the still incompletely forgotten purport of the Robinson anecdote. …
    â€œNobody planned the British estate system, nobody planned the British aristocratic system, nobody planned the confounded constitution, it came about, it was like layer after layer wrapping round an agate, but you see it came about so happily in a way, it so suited the climate and the temperament of our people and our island, it was on the whole so cosy, that our people settled down into it, you can’t help settling down into it, they had already settled down by the days of Queen Anne, and Heaven knows if we shall ever really get away again. We’re like that little shell the Lingula , that is found in the oldest rocks and lives today: it fitted its easy conditions, and it has never modified since. Why should it? It excretes all its disturbing forces. Our younger sons go away and found colonial empires. Our surplus cottage children emigrate to Australia and Canada or migrate into the towns. It doesn’t alter this . …”
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    Mr. Direck’s eye had come to rest upon the barn, and its expression changed slowly from lazy appreciation to a brightening intelligence. Suddenly he resolved to say something. He resolved to say it so firmly that he determined to say it even if Mr. Britling went on talking all the time.
    â€œI suppose, Mr. Britling,” he said, “this barn here dates from the days of Queen Anne.”
    â€œThe walls of the yard here are probably earlier: probably monastic. That grey patch in the corner, for example. The barn itself is Georgian.”
    â€œAnd here it is still. And this farmyard, here it is still.”
    Mr. Britling was for flying off again, but Mr. Direck would not listen; he held on like a man who keeps his grip on a lasso.
    â€œThere’s one thing I would like to remark about your barn, Mr. Britling, and I might, while I am at it, say the same thing about your farmyard.”
    Mr. Britling was held. “What’s that?” he asked.
    â€œWell,” said Mr. Direck, “the point that strikes me most about all this is that that barn isn’t a barn any longer, and that this farmyard isn’t a farmyard. There isn’t any wheat or chaff or anything of that sort in the barn, and there never will be again: there’s just a pianola and a dancing floor, and if a cow came into this farmyard everybody in the place would be shooing it out again. They’d regard it as a most unnatural object.”
    He had a pleasant sense of talking at last. He kept right on. He was moved to a sweeping generalisation.
    â€œYou were so good as to ask me, Mr. Britling, a little while ago, what my first impression of England was. Well, Mr. Britling, my first impression of England that seems to me to matter in the least is this: that it looks and feels more like the traditional Old