CHAPTER SIX
It was Saturday and, as was his custom during the session, the Foreign Secretary had gone for privacy and rest till Monday to a small country house he had within easy reach of town. I went down with a letter from Fox in my pocket, and early in the afternoon found myself talking without any kind of inward disturbance to the Minister’s aunt, a lean, elderly lady, with a keen eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of European politics. She had a rather abrupt manner and a business-like, brown scheme of coloration. She looked people very straight in the face, bringing to bear all the penetration which, as rumour said, enabled her to take a hidden, but very real part in the shaping of our foreign policy. She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf, before I had given my first answer to her first question.
“You ought to know this part of the country well,” she said. I think she was considering me as a possible canvasser—an infinitesimal thing, but of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the next General Election.
“No,” I said, “I’ve never been here before.”
“Etchingham is only three miles away.”
It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who had taken to literature.
“I met your aunt yesterday,” Miss Churchill continued. She had met everybody yesterday.
“Yes,” I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner, nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged—but I knew that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging on my shortcomings.
“Has she found a companion to suit her yet?” I said, absent-mindedly. I was thinking of an old legend of my mother’s. Miss Churchill looked me in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform malice.
“Why, yes,” she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, “she has adopted a niece.”
The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. “Who starved her governess?” it had inquired.
My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the Hour—but an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was “one of us,” who had temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of great author’s bottle-holder.
A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It seemed to say: “Why any noisy vigour?” It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew real to me—more real than the face of one’s nearest friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before—as if I had begun to realise that the world had moved on.
He said, languidly—almost protestingly, “What am I to do about the Duc de Mersch?”
Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance—a start that meant, “Why wasn’t I warned before?” This irritated me; I knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His attitudes were rather grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence. He stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of looking down from an immense height—of needing a telescope.
“Oh, ah ... Mrs. Granger’s son, I presume.... I wasn’t aware....” The hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get anywhere—not for years and years.
“No,” I said, rather brusquely, “I’m only from the Hour.”
He thought me one of Fox’s messengers then, said that Fox might have written: “Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or....”
He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me by proving that he was aware of my identity.
“Oh,” I said, a little loftily, “I haven’t any message, I’ve only come to interview you.” An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his face.
“To....” he began, “but I’ve never allowed—” He recovered himself sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had found the right track. “Oh, I remember now,” he said, “I hadn’t looked at it in that way.”
The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way, furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was clean-handed in the matter; I hadn’t any axe to grind.
“Ah, yes,” he said, hastily, “you are to draw my portrait—as Fox put it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it—it struck a very nice note. And so—.” He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find the process a bore.
“Not more for me than for you,” he answered, seriously—“one has to do these things.”
“Why, yes,” I echoed, “one has to do these things.” It struck me that he regretted it—regretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter meaning to the words.
“And ... what is the procedure?” he asked, after a pause. “I am new to the sort of thing.” He had the air, I thought, of talking to some respectable tradesman that one calls in only when one is in extremis—to a distinguished pawnbroker, a man quite at the top of a tree of inferior timber.
“Oh, for the matter of that, so am I,” I answered. “I’m supposed to get your atmosphere, as Callan put it.”
“Indeed,” he answered, absently, and then, after a pause, “You know Callan?” I was afraid I should fall in his estimation.
“One has to do these things,” I said; “I’ve just been getting his atmosphere.”
He looked again at the letter in his hand, smoothed his necktie and was silent. I realised that I was in the way, but I was still so disturbed that I forgot how to phrase an excuse for a momentary absence.
“Perhaps, ...” I began.
He looked at me attentively.
“I mean, I think I’m in the way,” I blurted out.
“Well,” he answered, “it’s quite a small matter. But, if you are to get my atmosphere, we may as well begin out of doors.” He hesitated, pleased with his witticism; “Unless you’re tired,” he added.
“I will go and get ready,” I said, as if I were a lady with bonnet-strings to tie. I was conducted to my room, where I kicked my heels for a decent interval. When I descended, Mr. Churchill was lounging about the room with his hands in his trouser-pockets and his head hanging limply over his chest. He said, “Ah!” on seeing me, as if he had forgotten my existence. He paused for a long moment, looked meditatively at himself in the glass over the fireplace, and then grew brisk. “Come along,” he said.
We took a longish walk through a lush home-country meadow land. We talked about a number of things, he opening the ball with that infernal Jenkins sketch. I was in the stage at which one is sick of the thing, tired of the bare idea of it—and Mr. Churchill’s laboriously kind phrases made the matter no better.
“You know who Jenkins stands for?” I asked. I wanted to get away on the side issues.
“Oh, I guessed it was——” he answered. They said that Mr. Churchill was an enthusiast for the school of painting of which Jenkins was the last exponent. He began to ask questions about him. Did he still paint? Was he even alive?
“I once saw several of his pictures,” he reflected. “His work certainly appealed to me ... yes, it appealed to me. I meant at the time ... but one forgets; there are so many things.” It seemed to me that the man wished by these detached sentences to convey that he had the weight of a kingdom—of several kingdoms—on his mind; that he could spare no more than a fragment of his thoughts for everyday use.
“You must take me to see him,” he said, suddenly. “I ought to have something.” I thought of poor white-haired Jenkins, and of his long struggle with adversity. It seemed a little cruel that Churchill should talk in that way without meaning a word of it—as if the words were a polite formality.
“Nothing would delight me more,” I answered, and added, “nothing in the world.”
He asked me if I had seen such and such a picture, talked of artists, and praised this and that man very fittingly, but with a certain timidity—a timidity that lured me back to my normally overbearing frame of mind. In such matters I was used to hearing my own voice. I could talk a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness of things, I talked Churchill down. The position, even then, struck me as gently humorous. It was as if some infinitely small animal were bullying some colossus among the beasts. I was of no account in the world, he had his say among the Olympians. And I talked recklessly, like any little school-master, and he swallowed it.
We reached the broad market-place of a little, red and grey, home county town; a place of but one street dominated by a great inn-signboard a-top of an enormous white post. The effigy of So-and-So of gracious memory swung lazily, creaking, overhead.
“This is Etchingham,” Churchill said.
It was a pleasant commentary on the course of time, this entry into the home of my ancestors. I had been without the pale for so long, that I had never seen the haunt of ancient peace. They had done very little, the Grangers of Etchingham—never anything but live at Etchingham and quarrel at Etchingham and die at Etchingham and be the monstrous important Grangers of Etchingham. My father had had the undesirable touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian. The Grangers of Etchingham had cut him adrift and he had swum to sink in other seas. Now I was the last of the Grangers and, as things went, was quite the best known of all of them. They had grown poor in their generation; they bade fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise, and I had come back to the old places on the arm of one of the great ones of the earth. I wondered what the portentous old woman who ruled alone in Etchingham thought of these times—the portentous old woman who ruled, so they said, the place with a rod of iron; who made herself unbearable to her companions and had to fall back upon an unfortunate niece. I wondered idly who the niece could be; certainly not a Granger of Etchingham, for I was the only one of the breed. One of her own nieces, most probably. Churchill had gone into the post-office, leaving me standing at the foot of the sign-post. It was a pleasant summer day, the air very clear, the place very slumbrous. I looked up the street at a pair of great stone gate-posts, august, in their way, standing distinctly aloof from the common houses, a little weather-stained, staidly lichened. At the top of each column sat a sculptured wolf—as far as I knew, my own crest. It struck me pleasantly that this must be the entrance of the Manor house.
The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw a girl on a bicycle curve out, at the top of the sunny street. She glided, very clear, small, and defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant for the turn, and came shining down toward me. My heart leapt; she brought the whole thing into composition—the whole of that slumbrous, sunny street. The bright sky fell back into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the red and blue of the sign-board, the blue of the pigeons walking round my feet, the bright red of a postman’s cart. She was gliding toward me, growing and growing into the central figure. She descended and stood close to me.
“You?” I said. “What blessed chance brought you here?”
“Oh, I am your aunt’s companion,” she answered, “her niece, you know.”
“Then you must be a cousin,” I said.
“No; sister,” she corrected, “I assure you it’s sister. Ask anyone—ask your aunt.” I was braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.
“But really, you know,” I said. She was smiling, standing up squarely to me, leaning a little back, swaying her machine with the motion of her body.
“It’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said.
“Very,” I answered, “but even at that, I don’t see—. And I’m not phenomenally dense.”
“Not phenomenally,” she answered.
“Considering that I’m not a—not a Dimensionist,” I bantered. “But you have really palmed yourself off on my aunt?”
“Really,” she answered, “she doesn’t know any better. She believes in me immensely. I am such a real Granger, there never was a more typical one. And we shake our heads together over you.” My bewilderment was infinite, but it stopped short of being unpleasant.
“Might I call on my aunt?” I asked. “It wouldn’t interfere—”
“Oh, it wouldn’t interfere,” she said, “but we leave for Paris to-morrow. We are very busy. We—that is, my aunt; I am too young and too, too discreet—have a little salon where we hatch plots against half the régimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are.”
“I don’t understand in the least,” I said; “not in the least.”
“Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand,” she answered, “and you won’t do that. I tell you plainly that I find my account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them. Everywhere. You will see.”
She spoke with her monstrous dispassionateness, and I felt a shiver pass down my spine, very distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if ever she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way—as her husband, for example.
“I wish you would talk sense—for one blessed minute,” I said; “I want to get things a little settled in my mind.”
“Oh, I’ll talk sense,” she said, “by the hour, but you won’t listen. Take your friend, Churchill, now. He’s the man that we’re going to bring down. I mentioned it to you, and so....”
“But this is sheer madness,” I answered.
“Oh, no, it’s a bald statement of fact,” she went on.
“I don’t see how,” I said, involuntarily.
“Your article in the Hour will help. Every trifle will help,” she said. “Things that you understand and others that you cannot.... He is identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it’s fatal. There will be friendships ... and desertions.”
“Ah!” I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom everybody—perhaps from fear—pretended to trust. She looked at me and smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow. “Do you know I don’t like to hear that?” I began.
“Oh, there’s irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing,” she said, with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. “He goes into it clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it’s his last chance. It’s not that he’s worn out—but he feels that his time has come—unless he does something. And so he’s going to do something. You understand?”
“Not in the least,” I said, light-heartedly.
“Oh, it’s the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions—the Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a grand coup with that—to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of course, it would add immensely to your national prestige. And he only half sees what de Mersch is or isn’t.”
“This is all Greek to me,” I muttered rebelliously.
“Oh, I know, I know,” she said. “But one has to do these things, and I want you to understand. So Churchill doesn’t like the whole business. But he’s under the shadow. He’s been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over—I’ll prove it to you in a minute—and so—oh, he’s going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand. So he lets you get his atmosphere. That’s all.”
“Oh, that’s all,” I said, ironically.
“Of course he’d have liked to go on playing the stand-off to chaps like you and me,” she mimicked the tone and words of Fox himself.
“This is witchcraft,” I said. “How in the world do you know what Fox said to me?”
“Oh, I know,” she said. It seemed to me that she was playing me with all this nonsense—as if she must have known that I had a tenderness for her and were fooling me to the top of her bent. I tried to get my hook in.
“Now look here,” I said, “we must get things settled. You ...”
She carried the speech off from under my nose.
“Oh, you won’t denounce me,” she said, “not any more than you did before; there are so many reasons. There would be a scene, and you’re afraid of scenes—and our aunt would back me up. She’d have to. My money has been reviving the glories of the Grangers. You can see, they’ve been regilding the gate.”
I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron gates through which she had passed into my view. It was true enough—some of the scroll work was radiant with new gold.
“Well,” I said, “I will give you credit for not wishing to—to prey upon my aunt. But still ...” I was trying to make the thing out. It struck me that she was an American of the kind that subsidizes households like that of Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word ... “You are no sister of mine!” I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.
Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.
“Did you hear him?” she said. “Did you hear him, Mr. Churchill. He casts off—he disowns me. Isn’t he a stern brother? And the quarrel is about nothing.” The impudence—or the presence of mind of it—overwhelmed me.
Churchill smiled pleasantly.
“Oh—one always quarrels about nothing,” Churchill answered. He spoke a few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran—that sort of thing. He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child, impertinent with licence and welcome enough. He himself looked rather like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at the unicorn across a plum-cake.
“So you are going back to Paris,” he said. “Miss Churchill will be sorry. And you are going to continue to—to break up the universe?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered, “we are going on with that, my aunt would never give it up. She couldn’t, you know.”
“You’ll get into trouble,” Churchill said, as if he were talking to a child intent on stealing apples. “And when is our turn coming? You’re going to restore the Stuarts, aren’t you?” It was his idea of badinage, amiable without consequence.
“Oh, not quite that,” she answered, “not quite that.” It was curious to watch her talking to another man—to a man, not a bagman like Callan. She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what Churchill took her for—a spoiled child. At times she suggested a certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition. One half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.
“Oh, you know,” she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, “we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like—” Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big “C H U.” She had erased it with the point of her foot—“like that,” she concluded.
He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.
“Dear me,” he said, “I had no idea that I was so much in the way of—of yourself and Mrs. Granger.”
“Oh, it’s not only that,” she said, with a little smile and a cast of the eye to me. “But you’ve got to make way for the future.”
Churchill’s face changed suddenly. He looked rather old, and grey, and wintry, even a little frail. I understood what she was proving to me, and I rather disliked her for it. It seemed wantonly cruel to remind a man of what he was trying to forget.
“Ah, yes,” he said, with the gentle sadness of quite an old man, “I dare say there is more in that than you think. Even you will have to learn.”
“But not for a long time,” she interrupted audaciously.
“I hope not,” he answered, “I hope not.” She nodded and glided away.
We resumed the road in silence. Mr. Churchill smiled at his own thoughts once or twice.
“A most amusing ...” he said at last. “She does me a great deal of good, a great deal.”
I think he meant that she distracted his thoughts.
“Does she always talk like that?” I asked. He had hardly spoken to me, and I felt as if I were interrupting a reverie—but I wanted to know.
“I should say she did,” he answered; “I should say so. But Miss Churchill says that she has a real genius for organization. She used to see a good deal of them, before they went to Paris, you know.”
“What are they doing there?” It was as if I were extracting secrets from a sleep-walker.
“Oh, they have a kind of a meeting place, for all kinds of Legitimist pretenders—French and Spanish, and that sort of thing. I believe Mrs. Granger takes it very seriously.” He looked at me suddenly. “But you ought to know more about it than I do,” he said.
“Oh, we see very little of each other,” I answered, “you could hardly call us brother and sister.”
“Oh, I see,” he answered. I don’t know what he saw. For myself, I saw nothing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I succeeded in giving Fox what his journal wanted; I got the atmosphere of Churchill and his house, in a way that satisfied the people for whom it was meant. His house was a pleasant enough place, of the sort where they do you well, but not nauseously well. It stood in a tranquil countryside, and stood there modestly. Architecturally speaking, it was gently commonplace; one got used to it and liked it. And Churchill himself, when one had become accustomed to his manner, one liked very well—very well indeed. He had a dainty, dilettante mind, delicately balanced, with strong limitations, a fantastic temperament for a person in his walk of life—but sane, mind you, persistent. After a time, I amused myself with a theory that his heart was not in his work, that circumstance had driven him into the career of politics and ironical fate set him at its head. For myself, I had an intense contempt for the political mind, and it struck me that he had some of the same feeling. He had little personal quaintnesses, too, a deference, a modesty, an open-mindedness.
I was with him for the greater part of his weekend holiday; hung, perforce, about him whenever he had any leisure. I suppose he found me tiresome—but one has to do these things. He talked, and I talked; heavens, how we talked! He was almost always deferential, I almost always dogmatic; perhaps because the conversation kept on my own ground. Politics we never touched. I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I should be checked—politely, but very definitely. Perhaps he actually contrived to convey as much to me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I were to say:
“What do you think about the ‘Greenland System’”—he would answer:
“I try not to think about it,” or whatever gently closuring phrase his mind conceived. But I never did so; there were so many other topics.
He was then writing his Life of Cromwell and his mind was very full of his subject. Once he opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for signs of boredom. It happened, by the merest chance—one of those blind chances that inevitably lead in the future—that I, too, was obsessed at that moment by the Lord Oliver. A great many years before, when I was a yearling of tremendous plans, I had set about one of those glorious novels that one plans—a splendid thing with Old Noll as the hero or the heavy father. I had haunted the bookstalls in search of local colour and had wonderfully well invested my half-crowns. Thus a company of seventeenth century tracts, dog-eared, coverless, but very glorious under their dust, accompany me through life. One parts last with those relics of a golden age, and during my late convalescence I had reread many of them, the arbitrary half-remembered phrases suggesting all sorts of scenes—lamplight in squalid streets, trays full of weather-beaten books. So, even then, my mind was full of Mercurius Rusticus. Mr. Churchill on Cromwell amused me immensely and even excited me. It was life, this attending at a self-revelation of an impossible temperament. It did me good, as he had said of my pseudo-sister. It was fantastic—as fantastic as herself—and it came out more in his conversation than in the book itself. I had something to do with that, of course. But imagine the treatment accorded to Cromwell by this delicate, negative, obstinately judicial personality. It was the sort of thing one wants to get into a novel. It was a lesson to me—in temperament, in point of view; I went with his mood, tried even to outdo him, in the hope of spurring him to outdo himself. I only mention it because I did it so well that it led to extraordinary consequences.
We were walking up and down his lawn, in the twilight, after his Sunday supper. The pale light shone along the gleaming laurels and dwelt upon the soft clouds of orchard blossoms that shimmered above them. It dwelt, too, upon the silver streaks in his dark hair and made his face seem more pallid, and more old. It affected me like some intense piece of irony. It was like hearing a dying man talk of the year after next. I had the sense of the unreality of things strong upon me. Why should nightingale upon nightingale pour out volley upon volley of song for the delight of a politician whose heart was not in his task of keeping back the waters of the deluge, but who grew animated at the idea of damning one of the titans who had let loose the deluge?
About a week after—or it may have been a fortnight—Churchill wrote to me and asked me to take him to see the Jenkins of my Jenkins story. It was one of those ordeals that one goes through when one has tried to advance one’s friends. Jenkins took the matter amiss, thought it was a display of insulting patronage on the part of officialism. He was reluctant to show his best work, the forgotten masterpieces, the things that had never sold, that hung about on the faded walls and rotted in cellars. He would not be his genial self; he would not talk. Churchill behaved very well—I think he understood.
Jenkins thawed before his gentle appreciations. I could see the change operating within him. He began to realise that this incredible visit from a man who ought to be hand and glove with Academicians was something other than a spy’s encroachment. He was old, you must remember, and entirely unsuccessful. He had fought a hard fight and had been worsted. He took his revenge in these suspicions.
We younger men adored him. He had the ruddy face and the archaic silver hair of the King of Hearts; and a wonderful elaborate politeness that he had inherited from his youth—from the days of Brummell. And, whilst all his belongings were rotting into dust, he retained an extraordinarily youthful and ingenuous habit of mind. It was that, or a little of it, that gave the charm to my Jenkins story.
It was a disagreeable experience. I wished so much that the perennial hopefulness of the man should at last escape deferring and I was afraid that Churchill would chill before Jenkins had time to thaw. But, as I have said, I think Churchill understood. He smiled his kindly, short-sighted smile over canvas after canvas, praised the right thing in each, remembered having seen this and that in such and such a year, and Jenkins thawed.
He happened to leave the room—to fetch some studies, to hurry up the tea or for some such reason. Bereft of his presence the place suddenly grew ghostly. It was as if the sun had died in the sky and left us in that nether world where dead, buried pasts live in a grey, shadowless light. Jenkins’ palette glowed from above a medley of stained rags on his open colour table. The rush-bottom of his chair resembled a wind-torn thatch.
“One can draw morals from a life like that,” I said suddenly. I was thinking rather of Jenkins than of the man I was talking to.
“Why, yes,” he said, absently, “I suppose there are men who haven’t the knack of getting on.”
“It’s more than a knack,” I said, with unnecessary bitterness. “It’s a temperament.”
“I think it’s a habit, too. It may be acquired, mayn’t it?”
“No, no,” I fulminated, “it’s precisely because it can’t be acquired that the best men—the men like ...” I stopped suddenly, impressed by the idea that the thing was out of tone. I had to assert myself more than I liked in talking to Churchill. Otherwise I should have disappeared. A word from him had the weight of three kingdoms and several colonies behind it, and I was forced to get that out of my head by making conversation a mere matter of temperament. In that I was the stronger. If I wanted to say a thing, I said it; but he was hampered by a judicial mind. It seemed, too, that he liked a dictatorial interlocutor, else he would hardly have brought himself into contact with me again. Perhaps it was new to him. My eye fell upon a couple of masks, hanging one on each side of the fireplace. The room was full of a profusion of little casts, thick with dust upon the shoulders, the hair, the eyelids, on every part that projected outward.
“By-the-bye,” I said, “that’s a death-mask of Cromwell.”
“Ah!” he answered, “I knew there was....”
He moved very slowly toward it, rather as if he did not wish to bring it within his field of view. He stopped before reaching it and pivotted slowly to face me.
“About my book,” he opened suddenly, “I have so little time.” His briskness dropped into a half complaint, like a faintly suggested avowal of impotence. “I have been at it four years now. It struck me—you seemed to coincide so singularly with my ideas.”
His speech came wavering to a close, but he recommenced it apologetically—as if he wished me to help him out.
“I went to see Smithson the publisher about it, and he said he had no objection....”
He looked appealingly at me. I kept silence.
“Of course, it’s not your sort of work. But you might try.... You see....” He came to a sustained halt.
“I don’t understand,” I said, rather coldly, when the silence became embarrassing. “You want me to ‘ghost’ for you?”
“‘Ghost,’ good gracious no,” he said, energetically; “dear me, no!”
“Then I really don’t understand,” I said.
“I thought you might see your ... I wanted you to collaborate with me. Quite publicly, of course, as far as the epithet applies.”
“To collaborate,” I said slowly. “You....”
I was looking at a miniature of the Farnese Hercules—I wondered what it meant, what club had struck the wheel of my fortune and whirled it into this astounding attitude.
“Of course you must think about it,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I muttered; “the idea is so new. It’s so little in my line. I don’t know what I should make of it.”
I talked at random. There were so many thoughts jostling in my head. It seemed to carry me so much farther from the kind of work I wanted to do. I did not really doubt my ability—one does not. I rather regarded it as work upon a lower plane. And it was a tremendous—an incredibly tremendous—opportunity.
“You know pretty well how much I’ve done,” he continued. “I’ve got a good deal of material together and a good deal of the actual writing is done. But there is ever so much still to do. It’s getting beyond me, as I said just now.”
I looked at him again, rather incredulously. He stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat. The slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness. He so much meant what he said that he ignored what his hands were doing, or his body or his head. He had taken a very small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turning over the rusty leaves, while he talked with his head bent over it. What was I to him, or he to me?
“I could give my Saturday afternoons to it,” he was saying, “whenever you could come down.”
“It’s immensely kind of you,” I began.
“Not at all, not at all,” he waived. “I’ve set my heart on doing it and, unless you help me, I don’t suppose I ever shall get it done.”
“But there are hundreds of others,” I said.
“There may be,” he said, “there may be. But I have not come across them.”
I was beset by a sudden emotion of blind candour.
“Oh, nonsense, nonsense,” I said. “Don’t you see that you are offering me the chance of a lifetime?”
Churchill laughed.
“After all, one cannot refuse to take what offers,” he said. “Besides, your right man to do the work might not suit me as a collaborator.”
“It’s very tempting,” I said.
“Why, then, succumb,” he smiled.
I could not find arguments against him, and I succumbed as Jenkins re-entered the room.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After that I began to live, as one lives; and for forty-nine weeks. I know it was forty-nine, because I got fifty-two atmospheres in all; Callan’s and Churchill’s, and those forty-nine and the last one that finished the job and the year of it. It was amusing work in its way; people mostly preferred to have their atmospheres taken at their country houses—it showed that they had them, I suppose. Thus I spent a couple of days out of every week in agreeable resorts, and people were very nice to me—it was part of the game.
So I had a pretty good time for a year and enjoyed it, probably because I had had a pretty bad one for several years. I filled in the rest of my weeks by helping Fox and collaborating with Mr. Churchill and adoring Mrs. Hartly at odd moments. I used to hang about the office of the Hour on the chance of snapping up a blank three lines fit for a subtle puff of her. Sometimes they were too hurried to be subtle, and then Mrs. Hartly was really pleased.
I never understood her in the least, and I very much doubt whether she ever understood a word I said. I imagine that I must have talked to her about her art or her mission—things obviously as strange to her as to the excellent Hartly himself. I suppose she hadn’t any art; I am certain she hadn’t any mission, except to be adored. She walked about the stage and one adored her, just as she sat about her flat and was adored, and there the matter ended.
As for Fox, I seemed to suit him—I don’t in the least know why. No doubt he knew me better than I knew myself. He used to get hold of me whilst I was hanging about the office on the chance of engaging space for Mrs. Hartly, and he used to utilise me for the ignoblest things. I saw men for him, scribbled notes for him, abused people through the telephone, and wrote articles. Of course, there were the pickings.
I never understood Fox—not in the least, not more than I understood Mrs. Hartly. He had the mannerisms of the most incredible vulgarian and had, apparently, the point of view of a pig. But there was something else that obscured all that, that forced one to call him a wonderful man. Everyone called him that. He used to say that he knew what he wanted and that he got it, and that was true, too. I didn’t in the least want to do his odd jobs, even for the ensuing pickings, and I didn’t want to be hail-fellow with him. But I did them and I was, without even realising that it was distasteful to me. It was probably the same with everybody else.
I used to have an idea that I was going to reform him; that one day I should make him convert the Hour into an asylum for writers of merit. He used to let me have my own way sometimes—just often enough to keep my conscience from inconveniencing me. He let me present Lea with an occasional column and a half; and once he promised me that one day he would allow me to get the atmosphere of Arthur Edwards, the novelist.
Then there was Churchill and the Life of Cromwell that progressed slowly. The experiment succeeded well enough, as I grew less domineering and he less embarrassed. Toward the end I seemed to have become a familiar inmate of his house. I used to go down with him on Saturday afternoons and we talked things over in the train. It was, to an idler like myself, wonderful the way that essential idler’s days were cut out and fitted in like the squares of a child’s puzzle; little passages of work of one kind fitting into quite unrelated passages of something else. He did it well, too, without the remotest semblance of hurry.
I suppose that actually the motive power was his aunt. People used to say so, but it did not appear on the surface to anyone in close contact with the man; or it appeared only in very small things. We used to work in a tall, dark, pleasant room, book-lined, and giving on to a lawn that was always an asylum for furtive thrushes. Miss Churchill, as a rule, sat half forgotten near the window, with the light falling over her shoulder. She was always very absorbed in papers; seemed to be spending laborious days in answering letters, in evolving reports. Occasionally she addressed a question to her nephew, occasionally received guests that came informally but could not be refused admittance. Once it was a semi-royal personage, once the Duc de Mersch, my reputed employer.
The latter, I remember, was announced when Churchill and I were finally finishing our account of the tremendous passing of the Protector. In that silent room I had a vivid sense of the vast noise of the storm in that twilight of the crowning mercy. I seemed to see the candles a-flicker in the eddies of air forced into the gloomy room; the great bed and the portentous uncouth form that struggled in the shadows of the hangings. Miss Churchill looked up from the card that had been placed in her hands.
“Edward,” she said, “the Duc de Mersch.”
Churchill rose irritably from his low seat. “Confound him,” he said, “I won’t see him.”
“You can’t help it, I think,” his aunt said, reflectively; “you will have to settle it sooner or later.”
I know pretty well what it was they had to settle—the Greenland affair that had hung in the air so long. I knew it from hearsay, from Fox, vaguely enough. Mr. Gurnard was said to recommend it for financial reasons, the Duc to be eager, Churchill to hang back unaccountably. I never had much head for details of this sort, but people used to explain them to me—to explain the reasons for de Mersch’s eagerness. They were rather shabby, rather incredible reasons, that sounded too reasonable to be true. He wanted the money for his railways—wanted it very badly. He was vastly in want of money, he was this, that, and the other in certain international-philanthropic concerns, and had a finger in this, that, and the other pie. There was an “All Round the World Cable Company” that united hearts and hands, and a “Pan-European Railway, Exploration, and Civilisation Company” that let in light in dark places, and an “International Housing of the Poor Company,” as well as a number of others. Somewhere at the bottom of these seemingly bottomless concerns, the Duc de Mersch was said to be moving, and the Hour certainly contained periodically complimentary allusions to their higher philanthropy and dividend-earning prospects. But that was as much as I knew. The same people—people one met in smoking-rooms—said that the Trans-Greenland Railway was the last card of de Mersch. British investors wouldn’t trust the Duc without some sort of guarantee from the British Government, and no other investor would trust him on any terms. England was to guarantee something or other—the interest for a number of years, I suppose. I didn’t believe them, of course—one makes it a practice to believe nothing of the sort. But I recognised that the evening was momentous to somebody—that Mr. Gurnard and the Duc de Mersch and Churchill were to discuss something and that I was remotely interested because the Hour employed me.
Churchill continued to pace up and down.
“Gurnard dines here to-night,” his aunt said.
“Oh, I see.” His hands played with some coins in his trouser-pockets. “I see,” he said again, “they’ve ...”
The occasion impressed me. I remember very well the manner of both nephew and aunt. They seemed to be suddenly called to come to a decision that was no easy one, that they had wished to relegate to an indefinite future.
She left Churchill pacing nervously up and down.
“I could go on with something else, if you like,” I said.
“But I don’t like,” he said, energetically; “I’d much rather not see the man. You know the sort of person he is.”
“Why, no,” I answered, “I never studied the Almanac de Gotha.”
“Oh, I forgot,” he said. He seemed vexed with himself.
Churchill’s dinners were frequently rather trying to me. Personages of enormous importance used to drop in—and reveal themselves as rather asinine. At the best of times they sat dimly opposite to me, discomposed me, and disappeared. Sometimes they stared me down. That night there were two of them.
Gurnard I had heard of. One can’t help hearing of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The books of reference said that he was the son of one William Gurnard, Esq., of Grimsby; but I remember that once in my club a man who professed to know everything, assured me that W. Gurnard, Esq. (whom he had described as a fish salesman), was only an adoptive father. His rapid rise seemed to me inexplicable till the same man accounted for it with a shrug: “When a man of such ability believes in nothing, and sticks at nothing, there’s no saying how far he may go. He has kicked away every ladder. He doesn’t mean to come down.”
This, no doubt, explained much; but not everything in his fabulous career. His adherents called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set him down a mere politician. He was a man of forty-five, thin, slightly bald, and with an icy assurance of manner. He was indifferent to attacks upon his character, but crushed mercilessly every one who menaced his position. He stood alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was afraid of him.
Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table ornaments; the Duc de Mersch glowed with light and talked voluminously, as if he had for years and years been starved of human society. He glowed all over, it seemed to me. He had a glorious beard, that let one see very little of his florid face and took the edge away from an almost non-existent forehead and depressingly wrinkled eyelids. He spoke excellent English, rather slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to his health. It struck me that he seemed to treat Churchill in nuances as an inferior, whilst for the invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of nervous self-assertion. He had apparently come to dilate on the Système Groënlandais, and he dilated. Some mistaken persons had insinuated that the Système was neither more nor less than a corporate exploitation of unhappy Esquimaux. De Mersch emphatically declared that those mistaken people were mistaken, declared it with official finality. The Esquimaux were not unhappy. I paid attention to my dinner, and let the discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean Protectorate lapse into an unheeded murmur. I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.
Suddenly, however, it struck me that de Mersch was talking at me; that he had by the merest shade raised his intonation. He was dilating upon the immense international value of the proposed Trans-Greenland Railway. Its importance to British trade was indisputable; even the opposition had no serious arguments to offer. It was the obvious duty of the British Government to give the financial guarantee. He would not insist upon the moral aspect of the work—it was unnecessary. Progress, improvement, civilisation, a little less evil in the world—more light! It was our duty not to count the cost of humanising a lower race. Besides, the thing would pay like another Suez Canal. Its terminus and the British coaling station would be on the west coast of the island.... I knew the man was talking at me—I wondered why.
Suddenly he turned his glowing countenance full upon me.
“I think I must have met a member of your family,” he said. The solution occurred to me. I was a journalist, he a person interested in a railway that he wished the Government to back in some way or another. His attempts to capture my suffrage no longer astonished me. I murmured:
“Indeed!”
“In Paris—Mrs. Etchingham Granger,” he said.
I said, “Oh, yes.”
Miss Churchill came to the rescue.
“The Duc de Mersch means our friend, your aunt,” she explained. I had an unpleasant sensation. Through fronds of asparagus fern I caught the eyes of Gurnard fixed upon me as though something had drawn his attention. I returned his glance, tried to make his face out. It had nothing distinctive in its half-hidden pallid oval; nothing that one could seize upon. But it gave the impression of never having seen the light of day, of never having had the sun upon it. But the conviction that I had aroused his attention disturbed me. What could the man know about me? I seemed to feel his glance bore through the irises of my eyes into the back of my skull. The feeling was almost physical; it was as if some incredibly concentrant reflector had been turned upon me. Then the eyelids dropped over the metallic rings beneath them. Miss Churchill continued to explain.
“She has started a sort of Salon des Causes Perdues in the Faubourg Saint Germain.” She was recording the vagaries of my aunt. The Duc laughed.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “what a menagerie—Carlists, and Orleanists, and Papal Blacks. I wonder she has not held a bazaar in favour of your White Rose League.”
“Ah, yes,” I echoed, “I have heard that she was mad about the divine right of kings.”
Miss Churchill rose, as ladies rise at the end of a dinner. I followed her out of the room, in obedience to some minute signal.
We were on the best of terms—we two. She mothered me, as she mothered everybody not beneath contempt or above a certain age. I liked her immensely—the masterful, absorbed, brown lady. As she walked up the stairs, she said, in half apology for withdrawing me.
“They’ve got things to talk about.”
“Why, yes,” I answered; “I suppose the railway matter has to be settled.” She looked at me fixedly.
“You—you mustn’t talk,” she warned.
“Oh,” I answered, “I’m not indiscreet—not essentially.”
The other three were somewhat tardy in making their drawing-room appearance. I had a sense of them, leaning their heads together over the edges of the table. In the interim a rather fierce political dowager convoyed two well-controlled, blond daughters into the room. There was a continual coming and going of such people in the house; they did with Miss Churchill social business of some kind, arranged electoral rarée-shows, and what not; troubled me very little. On this occasion the blond daughters were types of the sixties’ survivals—the type that unemotionally inspected albums. I was convoying them through a volume of views of Switzerland, the dowager was saying to Miss Churchill:
“You think, then, it will be enough if we have....” When the door opened behind my back. I looked round negligently and hastily returned to the consideration of a shining photograph of the Dent du Midi. A very gracious figure of a girl was embracing the grim Miss Churchill, as a gracious girl should virginally salute a grim veteran.
“Ah, my dear Miss Churchill!” a fluting voice filled the large room, “we were very nearly going back to Paris without once coming to see you. We are only over for two days—for the Tenants’ Ball, and so my aunt ... but surely that is Arthur....”
I turned eagerly. It was the Dimensionist girl. She continued talking to Miss Churchill. “We meet so seldom, and we are never upon terms,” she said lightly. “I assure you we are like cat and dog.” She came toward me and the blond maidens disappeared, everybody, everything disappeared. I had not seen her for nearly a year. I had vaguely gathered from Miss Churchill that she was regarded as a sister of mine, that she had, with wealth inherited from a semi-fabulous Australian uncle, revived the glories of my aunt’s house. I had never denied it, because I did not want to interfere with my aunt’s attempts to regain some of the family’s prosperity. It even had my sympathy to a small extent, for, after all, the family was my family too.
As a memory my pseudo-sister had been something bright and clear-cut and rather small; seen now, she was something that one could not look at for glow. She moved toward me, smiling and radiant, as a ship moves beneath towers of shining canvas. I was simply overwhelmed. I don’t know what she said, what I said, what she did or I. I have an idea that we conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,
“Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gurnard.”
As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making toward her—a deliberate, slow progress. She greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes, a woman greets a man she knows intimately. I found myself hating him, thinking that he was not the sort of man she ought to know.
“It’s settled?” she asked him, as he came within range. He looked at me inquiringly—insolently. She said, “My brother,” and he answered:
“Oh, yes,” as I moved away. I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes off him and her. I went and stood against the mantel-piece. The Duc de Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of flourishes as irritating as Gurnard’s nonchalance.
I stood there and glowered at them. I noted her excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empressé, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—there was something ... something. I could not quite make out his face, I never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been, with him and with a fool like de Mersch—I should have been afraid.
As for de Mersch, standing between those two, he seemed like a country lout between confederate sharpers. It struck me that she let me see, made me see, that she and Gurnard had an understanding, made manifest to me by glances that passed when the Duc had his unobservant eyes turned elsewhere.
I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily toward them, drawn in, like a straw toward a little whirlpool. I turned my back in a fury of jealousy.