“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 absentmindedly 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 sleepwalker.
“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.
VII
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
