Mr. Britling Sees It Through | Page 3

with his flag, while the
two gentlemen took stock, as people say, of one another.
Section 3
Except in the doubtful instance of Miss Mamie Nelson, Mr. Direck's
habit was good fortune. Pleasant things came to him. Such was his

position as the salaried secretary of this society of thoughtful
Massachusetts business men to which allusion has been made. Its
purpose was to bring itself expeditiously into touch with the best
thought of the age.
Too busily occupied with practical realities to follow the thought of the
age through all its divagations and into all its recesses, these
Massachusetts business men had had to consider methods of access
more quintessential and nuclear. And they had decided not to hunt out
the best thought in its merely germinating stages, but to wait until it had
emerged and flowered to some trustworthy recognition, and then, rather
than toil through recondite and possibly already reconsidered books
and writings generally, to offer an impressive fee to the emerged new
thinker, and to invite him to come to them and to lecture to them and to
have a conference with them, and to tell them simply, competently and
completely at first hand just all that he was about. To come, in fact, and
be himself--in a highly concentrated form. In this way a number of
interesting Europeans had been given very pleasant excursions to
America, and the society had been able to form very definite opinions
upon their teaching. And Mr. Britling was one of the representative
thinkers upon which this society had decided to inform itself. It was to
broach this invitation and to offer him the impressive honorarium by
which the society honoured not only its guests but itself, that Mr.
Direck had now come to Matching's Easy. He had already sent Mr.
Britling a letter of introduction, not indeed intimating his precise
purpose, but mentioning merely a desire to know him, and the letter
had been so happily phrased and its writer had left such a memory of
pleasant hospitality on Mr. Britling's mind during Mr. Britling's former
visit to New York, that it had immediately produced for Mr. Direck an
invitation not merely to come and see him but to come and stay over
the week-end.
And here they were shaking hands.
Mr. Britling did not look at all as Mr. Direck had expected him to look.
He had expected an Englishman in a country costume of golfing tweeds,
like the Englishman in country costume one sees in American

illustrated stories. Drooping out of the country costume of golfing
tweeds he had expected to see the mildly unhappy face, pensive even to
its drooping moustache, with which Mr. Britling's publisher had for
some faulty and unfortunate reason familiarised the American public.
Instead of this, Mr. Britling was in a miscellaneous costume, and
mildness was the last quality one could attribute to him. His moustache,
his hair, his eyebrows bristled; his flaming freckled face seemed about
to bristle too. His little hazel eyes came out with a "ping" and looked at
Mr. Direck. Mr. Britling was one of a large but still remarkable class of
people who seem at the mere approach of photography to change their
hair, their clothes, their moral natures. No photographer had ever
caught a hint of his essential Britlingness and bristlingness. Only the
camera could ever induce Mr. Britling to brush his hair, and for the
camera alone did he reserve that expression of submissive martyrdom
Mr. Direck knew. And Mr. Direck was altogether unprepared for a
certain casualness of costume that sometimes overtook Mr. Britling. He
was wearing now a very old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of
knickerbockers, not tweed breeches but tweed knickerbockers of a
remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtuous socialistic
homespun tweeds that drag out into woolly knots and strings wherever
there is attrition. His stockings were worsted and wrinkled, and on his
feet were those extraordinary slippers of bright-coloured bast-like
interwoven material one buys in the north of France. These were purple
with a touch of green. He had, in fact, thought of the necessity of
meeting Mr. Direck at the station at the very last moment, and had
come away from his study in the clothes that had happened to him
when he got up. His face wore the amiable expression of a wire-haired
terrier disposed to be friendly, and it struck Mr. Direck that for a man
of his real intellectual distinction Mr. Britling was unusually short.
For there can be no denying that Mr. Britling was, in a sense,
distinguished. The hero and subject of this novel was at its very
beginning a distinguished man. He was in the Who's Who of two
continents. In the last few years he had grown with some