“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 hardworking man—all his life, and now it turns out that that prospectus came about by the man de Mersch’s manoeuvres—“wildcat 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 than me in the world, and they can’t all know him. Well, here’s the papers saying—or they don’t say it, but they hint, which is worse in a way—that he must be, or he wouldn’t stick up for the
