We parted in London next day, I hardly know where. She seemed so part of my being, was for me so little more than an intellectual force, so little of a physical personality, that I cannot remember where my eyes lost sight of her.
I had desolately made the crossing from country to country, had convoyed my aunt to her big house in one of the gloomy squares in a certain district, and then we had parted. Even afterward it was as if she were still beside me, as if I had only to look round to find her eyes upon me. She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust out upon a mill-pond, moving more and more slowly. I had been for so long in the shadow of that great house, shut in among the gloom, that all this light, this blazing world—it was a June day in London—seemed impossible, and hateful. Over there, there had been nothing but very slow, fading minutes; now there was a past, a future. It was as if I stood between them in a cleft of unscalable rocks.
I went about mechanically, made arrangements for my housing, moved in and out of rooms in the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all the home I had, in a sort of stupor. Suddenly I remembered that I had been thinking of something; that she had been talking of Churchill. I had had a letter from him on the morning of the day before. When I read it, Churchill and his “Cromwell” had risen in my mind like preposterous phantoms; the one as unreal as the other—as alien. I seemed to have passed an infinity of ?ons beyond them. The one and the other belonged as absolutely to the past as a past year belongs. The thought of them did not bring with it the tremulously unpleasant sensations that, as a rule, come with the thoughts of a too recent temps jadis, but rather as a vein of rose across a gray evening. I had passed his letter over; had dropped it half-read among the litter of the others. Then there had seemed to be a haven into whose mouth I was drifting.
Now I should have to pick the letters up again, all of them; set to work desolately to pick up the threads of the past; and work it back into life as one does half-drowned things. I set about it listlessly. There remained of that time an errand for my aunt, an errand that would take me to Etchingham; something connected with her land steward. I think the old lady had ideas of inducting me into a position that it had grown tacitly acknowledged I was to fill. I was to go down there; to see about some alterations that were in progress; and to make arrangements for my aunt’s return. I was so tired, so dog tired, and the day still had so many weary hours to run, that I recognised instinctively that if I were to come through it sane I must tire myself more, must keep on going—until I sank. I drifted down to Etchingham that evening, I sent a messenger over to Churchill’s cottage, waited for an answer that told me that Churchill was there, and then slept, and slept.
I woke back in the world again, in a world that contained the land steward and the manor house. I had a sense of recovered power from the sight of them, of the sunlight on the stretches of turf, of the mellow, golden stonework of the long range of buildings, from the sound of a chime of bells that came wonderfully sweetly over the soft swelling of the close turf. The feeling came not from any sense of prospective ownership, but from the acute consciousness of what these things stood for. I did not recognise it then, but later I understood; for the present it was enough to have again the power to set my foot on the ground, heel first. In the streets of the little town there was a sensation of holiday, not pronounced enough to call for flags, but enough to convey the idea of waiting for an event.
The land steward, at the end of a tour amongst cottages, explained there was to be a celebration in the neighbourhood—a “cock-and-hen show with a political annex”; the latter under the auspices of Miss Churchill. Churchill himself was to speak; there was a possibility of a pronouncement. I found London reporters at my inn, men I half knew. They expressed mitigated delight at the view of me, and over a lunch-table let me know what “one said”—what one said of the outside of events I knew too well internally. They most of them had the air of my aunt’s solicitor when he had said, “Even I did not realise. . . . ” their positions saving them the necessity of concealing surprise. “One can’t know everything.” They fumbled amusingly about the causes, differed with one another, but were surprisingly unanimous as to effects, as to the panic and the call for purification. It was rather extraordinary, too, how large de Mersch loomed on the horizon over here. It was as if the whole world centred in him, as if he represented the modern spirit that must be purified away by burning before things could return to their normal state. I knew what he represented . . . but there it was.
It was part of my programme, the attendance at the poultry show; I was to go back to the cottage with Churchill, after he had made his speech. It was rather extraordinary, the sensations of that function. I went in rather late, with the reporter of the Hour, who was anxious to do me the favour of introducing me without payment—it was his way of making himself pleasant, and I had the reputation of knowing celebrities. It was rather extraordinary to be back again in the midst of this sort of thing, to be walking over a crowded, green paddock, hedged in with tall trees and dotted here and there with the gaily striped species of tent that is called marquee. And the type of face, and the style of the costume! They would have seemed impossible the day before yesterday.
There were all Miss Churchill’s gang of great dames, muslin, rustling, marriageable daughters, a continual twitter of voices, and a sprinkling of the peasantry, dun-coloured and struck speechless.
One of the great ladies surveyed me as I stood in the centre of an open space, surveyed me through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a long handle, and beckoned me to her side.
“You are unattached?” she asked. She had pretensions to voice the county, just as my aunt undoubtedly set the tone of its doings, decided who was visitable, and just as Miss Churchill gave the political tone. “You may wait upon me, then,” she said; “my daughter is with her young man. That is the correct phrase, is it not?”
She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot high, and whom one would have styled buxom, had one dared. “I have a grievance,” she went on; “I must talk to someone. Come this way. There!” She pointed with the handle of her glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. “You see! . . . Not even commended!—and I assure you the trouble I have taken over them, with the idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is incredible. They give a prize to one of our own tenants . . . which is as much as telling the man that he is an example to me. Then they wonder that the country is going to the dogs. I assure you that after breakfast I have had the scraps collected from the plates—that was the course recommended by the poultry manuals—and have taken them out with my own hands.”
The sort of thing passed for humour in the county, and, being delivered with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough.
“And that reminds me,” she went on, “—I mean the fact that the country is going to the dogs, as my husband [You haven’t seen him anywhere, have you? He is one of the judges, and I want to have a word with him about my Orpingtons] says every morning after he has looked at his paper—that . . . oh, that you have been in Paris, haven’t you? with your aunt. Then, of course, you have seen this famous Duc de Mersch?”
She looked at me humourously through her glasses. “I’m going to pump you, you know,” she said, “it is the duty that is expected of me. I have to talk for a countyful of women without a tongue in their heads. So tell me about him. Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this mischief? Is it through him that this man committed suicide? They say so. He was mixed up in that Royalist plot, wasn’t he?—and the people that have been failing all over the place are mixed up with him, aren’t they?”
“I . . . I really don’t know,” I said; “if you say so. . . . ”
“Oh, I assure you I’m sound enough,” she answered, “the Churchills—I know you’re a friend of his—haven’t a stauncher ally than I am, and I should only be too glad to be able to contradict. But it’s so difficult. I assure you I go out of my way; talk to the most outrageous people, deny the very possibility of Mr. Churchill’s being in any way implicated. One knows that it’s impossible, but what can one do? I have said again and again—to people like grocers’ wives; even to the grocers, for that matter—that Mr. Churchill is a statesman, and that if he insists that this odious man’s railway must go through, it is in the interests of the country that it should. I tell them. . . . ”
She paused for a minute to take breath and then went on: “I was speaking to a man of that class only this morning, rather an intelligent man and quite nice—I was saying, ‘Don’t you see, my dear Mr. Tull, that it is a question of international politics. If the grand duke does not get the money for his railway, the grand duke will be turned out of his—what is it—principality? And that would be most dangerous—in the present condition of affairs over there, and besides. . . . ’ The man listened very respectfully, but I could see that he was not convinced. I buckled to again. . . . ”
“‘And besides,’ I said, ‘there is the question of Greenland itself. We English must have Greenland . . . sooner or later. It touches you, even. You have a son who’s above—who doesn’t care for life in a country town, and you want to send him abroad—with a little capital. Well, Greenland is just the place for him.’ The man looked at me, and almost shook his head in my face.”
“‘If you’ll excuse me, my lady,’ he said, ‘it won’t do. Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings with him. But . . . well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you can’t touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people’ll think you’ve been defiled—those that don’t know you. The foreign nations are all very well, and the grand duchy—and the getting hold of Greenland, but what touches me is this—My neighbour Slingsby had a little money, and he gets a prospectus. It looked very well—very well—and he brings it in to me. I did not have anything to do with it, but Slingsby did. Well, now there’s Slingsby on the rates and his wife a lady born, almost. I might have been taken in the same way but for—for the grace of God, I’m minded to say. Well, Slingsby’s a good man, and used to be a hard-working man—all his life, and now it turns out that that prospectus came about by the man de Mersch’s manoeuvres—“wild-cat schemes,” they call them in the paper that I read. And there’s any number of them started by de Mersch or his agents. Just for what? That de Mersch may be the richest man in the world and a philanthropist. Well, then, where’s Slingsby, if that’s philanthropy? So Mr. Churchill comes along and says, in a manner of speaking, “That’s all very well, but this same Mr. Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other, and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with the powers.” Powers—what’s powers to me?—or Greenland? when there’s Slingsby, a man I’ve smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life, in the workhouse? And there’s hundreds of Slingsbys all over the country.’”
“The man was working himself—Slingsby was a good sort of man. It shocked even me. One knows what goes on in one’s own village, of course. And it’s only too true that there’s hundreds of Slingsbys—I’m not boring you, am I?”
I did not answer for a moment. “I—I had no idea,” I said; “I have been so long out of it and over there one did not realise the . . . the feeling.”
“You’ve been well out of it,” she answered; “one has had to suffer, I assure you.” I believed that she had had to suffer; it must have taken a good deal to make that lady complain. Her large, ruddy features followed the droop of her eyes down to the fringe of the parasol that she was touching the turf with. We were sitting on garden seats in the dappled shade of enormous elms.
There was in the air a touch of the sounds discoursed by a yeomanry band at the other end of the grounds. One could see the red of their uniforms through moving rifts in the crowd of white dresses.
“That wasn’t even the worst,” she said suddenly, lifting her eyes and looking away between the trunks of the trees. “The man has been reading the papers and he gave me the benefit of his reflections. ‘Someone’s got to be punished for this;’ he said, ‘we’ve got to show them that you can’t be hand-and-glove with that sort of blackguard, without paying for it. I don’t say, mind you, that Mr. Churchill is or ever has been. I know him, and I trust him. But there’s more tha............