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Updated: June 27, 2025
But all governments and rulers and ruling classes when you look at them closely are incredible.... "I don't believe the country is on the verge of civil war," said Mr. Britling. "Facts!" cried Lady Frensham, and seemed to wipe away delusions with a rapid gesture of her hands. "You're interested in Ireland, Mr. Dirks?" asked Lady Homartyn. "We see it first when we come over," said Mr.
He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversation when everything was thrown into commotion by the important arrival of Lady Frensham, and there was a general reshuffling of places. Lady Frensham had arrived from London by automobile; she appeared in veils and swathings and a tremendous dust cloak, with a sort of nephew in her train who had driven the car.
Britling. "Yes," said Lady Frensham. "Upon them and those who have flattered and misled them...." And so on.... It presently became necessary for Lady Homartyn to rescue Mr. Britling from the great lady's patriotic tramplings.
One writes "Germany." That is how one writes of nations, as though they had single brains and single purposes. But indeed while Mr. Britling lay awake and thought of his son and Lady Frensham and his smashed automobile and Mrs. Harrowdean's trick of abusive letter-writing and of God and evil and a thousand perplexities, a multitude of other brains must also have been busy, lying also in beds or sitting in studies or watching in guard-rooms or chatting belatedly in cafés or smoking-rooms or pacing the bridges of battleships or walking along in city or country, upon this huge possibility the crime of Sarajevo had just opened, and of the state of the world in relation to such possibilities. Few women, one guesses, heeded what was happening, and of the men, the men whose decision to launch that implacable threat turned the destinies of the world to war, there is no reason to believe that a single one of them had anything approaching the imaginative power needed to understand fully what it was they were doing. We have looked for an hour or so into the seething pot of Mr. Britling's brain and marked its multiple strands, its inconsistencies, its irrational transitions. It was but a specimen. Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal determination of the world's destinies, had its streak of personal motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections. One man decided to say this because if he said that he would contradict something he had said and printed four or five days ago; another took a certain line because so he saw his best opportunity of putting a rival into a perplexity. It would be strange if one could reach out now and recover the states of mind of two such beings as the German Kaiser and his eldest son as Europe stumbled towards her fate through the long days and warm, close nights of that July. Here was the occasion for which so much of their lives had been but the large pretentious preparation, coming right into their hands to use or forgo, here was the opportunity that would put them into the very forefront of history forever; this journalist emperor with the paralysed arm, this common-fibred, sly, lascivious son. It is impossible that they did not dream of glory over all the world, of triumphant processions, of a world-throne that would outshine Caesar's, of a godlike elevation, of acting Divus Caesar while yet alive. And being what they were they must have imagined spectators, and the young man, who was after all a young man of particularly poor quality, imagined no doubt certain women onlookers, certain humiliated and astonished friends, and thought of the clothes he would wear and the gestures he would make. The nickname his English cousins had given this heir to all the glories was the "White Rabbit." He was the backbone of the war party at court. And presently he stole bric-
He had a horrible vision of things disastrously muffled; of Lady Frensham and her Morning Post friends first garrulously and maliciously "patriotic," screaming her way with incalculable mischiefs through the storm, and finally discovering that the Germans were the real aristocrats and organising our national capitulation on that understanding.
"They'd get killed all the more if you had let us say Carson and Lloyd George and Northcliffe and Lady Frensham, with, I suppose, Austin Harrison and Horatio Bottomley thrown in as a Strong Silent Government.... I'd rather have Northcliffe as dictator than that.... We can't suddenly go back on the past and alter our type. We didn't listen to Matthew Arnold.
He had only to hold his tongue, to keep his monstrous, sans-culotte opinions to himself, at least, if he could not give them up; and she would have restored him his inheritance, would have dealt with him not only justly, but generously. He had chosen; he had deliberately chosen. Well, now then it was for her as she had said to old Lady Frensham it was for her to reply, but not in words only.
Certainly it was astonishing that she should be just as preoccupied with her schemes for the welfare of Constance as she had ever been preoccupied with schemes for the improvement of the Pension Frensham. She said to herself: "My life has been so queer and yet every part of it separately seemed ordinary enough how will it end?"
"The other day one of your 'loyalists, Andrews, was talking in the Morning Post of preferring conquest by Germany to Home Rule; Craig has been at the same game; Major Crawford, the man who ran the German Mausers last April, boasted that he would transfer his allegiance to the German Emperor rather than see Redmond in power." "Rhetoric!" said Lady Frensham. "Rhetoric!"
And one evening Jacqueline had come to see her, and had wept. Her exit from the Pension Frensham struck her now as poignantly pathetic, in its quickness and its absence of ceremonial. Ten steps, and her career was finished, closed. Astonishing with what liquid tenderness she turned and looked back on that hard, fighting, exhausting life in Paris!
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