Part 21 (1/2)

”I want you,” I said--”I want you, I want you, I want you.” It was unbearable to myself.

”Oh, be quiet,” she said at last. ”Be quiet! If you had wanted me I have been here. It is too late. All these days; all these--”

”But ...” I said.

From without someone opened the great shutters of the windows, and the light from the outside world burst in upon us.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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 pa.s.sed an infinity of aeons 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 pa.s.sed 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 owners.h.i.+p, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 ”c.o.c.k-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 p.r.o.nouncement. 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 s.p.a.ce, surveyed me through tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. ”You see!... Not even commended!--and I a.s.sure 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 a.s.sure you that after breakfast I have had the sc.r.a.ps 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 pa.s.sed for humour in the county, and, being delivered with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses. ”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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sure 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 cla.s.s 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--princ.i.p.ality? 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.