This has almost nothing to do directly with croquet, but it's clear (after reading it!) that the author's persona is not Wells, but someone who missed the experience of the First World War, was well-born and well-off, lived with an aunt (his parents having divorced), and does little of any consequence. I'm not sure Wells is very good at satire, or perhaps changes in 80 years have unfixed some assumptions. Croquet and archery and bridge are the hero's activities—if he can be called a hero.
My collection of Wells books I'd thought included this, and I remembered a brightly-coloured paperback design which I hadn't liked. But this was another short novel, Star-Begotten.
The setting, hardly recognised, is on the continent (Wells lived in France for years), but the hero's life has been stirred by meetings with two or three men, two of whom say that life is difficult and getting more and more dangerous and violent. They both feel that their countryside is being affected by strange changes and afflicted perhaps by emergent influences from the past—an archaeological relic of a huge skull and other bones as the visible sign, but a feeling of harmful and unpleasant 'stone age' influences has been growing. (I wondered if this was a dig, pun intended, against Hilaire Belloc, who believed in the 'fall of man' and the presumably concomitant belief in a good remote past.)
I looked online at Wells's Autobiography, so far as this is possible, checking the wording of a remark on Grant Allen, who made observations on the geography of farms and market towns and so on. [I noted in my notes on Wells's Autobiography that distributions of prominent families are less obvious!] I wanted to comment in effect that Kevin MacDonald hasn't even got so far as to discuss what proportion of Jews are needed to wreck a country. Grant Allen wrote a story for a London magazine in 1892, Pallinghurst Barrow on a tumulus, or perhaps earthworked hilltop, where another hero, under the influence of Cannabis indica, at the Autumn Equinox, has a near-death experience at the unreal hands of a group of long-dead savages. He returned safely to his modern hostess in the electrically-lighted nearby large house. ... This story seems to have underlain Wells's Croquet Player.
The third man in the story was a psychiatrist, or on fact psychotherapeutist. He was tall, hawklike, loud, full of gestures, and had received impressions from the two very worried men from the earlier arts of the book, a vicar and a medical doctor. Wells took vicars for granted; the oddity of the property-owning Church of England with its tenured positions, and the off-and-on symbiosis with Jews, never really presented itself to him—too huge to be visible. Though Wells saw Catholicism was different; he uses the word 'asperging' in this novel, for example. And Wells took the unprofessionalism of doctors for granted, though less so than clerics.
Guessing, Wells genuinely felt that the world in 1936 was menacing and unrestrained and dreadful. 'Breaking the frame of the Present'—Wells used notebooks and may have had his own compendium of wordings and phrases. And since he'd spent many years discussing what might be done, he must have been maddened by people explicitly intending to do nothing, as the world falls in ruins.
... Become "giant-minded"? What a phrase! Build up a new civilization of steel and power...? ... Me? ...
It is too much to expect of our sort of people.
I’m ready to fall in with anything that seems promising. I’m all for peace, order, social justice, service, and all that. But if I’m to think! If I’m to find out what to do with myself!
That’s too much.
The state of mind of the hero seems more or less identical to Wells himself in Mind at the End of its Tether, written about ten years later.
It's possible, now, to see what Wells had missed, the Jewish layer across the whole world, a sort of chemical fire-blanket obstructing communication between the parts of the whole. And the collaborators, typically Freemasons. At that time, leaders in the USA, UK, USSR, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China were all Jews. Wells displaced all this onto long-dead actors, who mostly would have understood nothing. The real actors were not yet dead.