Mr. Britling Sees It ThroughWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Mr. Britling Sees It Through
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Their disposition towards under-feeding and a certain lack of fine
sentiment were the only flaws in the English scheme that Herr Heinrich
admitted. He certainly found the English unfeeling. His heart went even
less satisfied than his Magen. He was a being of expressive affections;
he wanted great friendships, mysterious relationships, love. He tried
very bravely to revere and to understand and be occultly understood by
Mr. Britling; he sought long walks and deep talks with Hugh and the
small boys; he tried to fill his heart with Cissie; he found at last
marvels of innocence and sweetness in the Hickson girl. She wore her
hair in a pigtail when first he met her, and it made her almost
Marguerite. This young man had cried aloud for love, warm and filling,
like the Mittagsessen that was implicit in their understanding. And all
these Essex people failed to satisfy him; they were silent, they were
subtle, they slipped through the fat yet eager fingers of his heart, so
that he fell back at last upon himself and his German correspondents and
the idealisation of Maud Hickson and the moral education of Billy.
Billy. Mr. Britling's memories came back at last to the figure of young
Heinrich with the squirrel on his shoulder, that had so often stood in
the way of the utter condemnation of Germany. That, seen closely, was
the stuff of one brutal Prussian. What quarrel had we with him?...
Other memories of Heinrich flitted across Mr. Britling's reverie.
Heinrich at hockey, running with extreme swiftness and little skill,
tricked and baffled by Letty, dodged by Hugh, going headlong forward and
headlong back, and then with a cry flinging himself flat on the ground
exhausted.... Or again Heinrich very grave and very pink, peering
through his glasses at his cards at Skat.... Or Heinrich in the boats
upon the great pond, or Heinrich swimming, or Heinrich hiding very, very
artfully from the boys about the garden on a theory of his own, or
Heinrich in strange postures, stalking the deer in Claverings Park. For
a time he had had a great ambition to creep quite close to a deer and
_touch_ it.... Or Heinrich indexing. He had a passion for listing and
indexing books, music, any loose classifiable thing. His favourite
amusement was devising schemes for the indentation of dictionary leaves,
so that one could turn instantly to the needed word. He had bought and
cut the edges of three dictionaries; each in succession improved upon
the other; he had had great hopes of patents and wealth arising
therefrom.... And his room had been a source of strange sounds; his
search for music upon the violin. He had hoped when he came to
Matching's Easy to join "some string quartette." But Matching's Easy
produced no string quartette. He had to fall back upon the pianola, and
try to play duets with that. Only the pianola did all the duet itself,
and in the hands of a small Britling was apt to betray a facetious
moodiness; sudden alternations between extreme haste and extreme
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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