“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 schoolmaster, and he swallowed it.
We reached the broad marketplace of a little, red and grey, home county town; a place of but one street dominated by a great inn-signboard atop 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 signpost. 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 gateposts, 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 signboard, 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 tomorrow. 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 regimes 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
