My lady stopped and sighed from a broad bosom. “What could I say?” she went on again. “I know Mr. Churchill and I like him—and everyone that knows him likes him. I’m one of the stalwarts, mind you; I’m not for giving in to popular clamour; I’m for the ‘saner policy,’ like Churchill. But, as the man said: ‘There’s a many that believe the hintings.’ And I almost wish Churchill. … However, you understand what I meant when I said that one had had to suffer.”
“Oh, I understand,” I said. I was beginning to. “And Churchill?” I asked later, “he gives no sign of relenting?”
“Would you have him?” she asked sharply; “would you make him if you could?” She had an air of challenging. “I’m for the ‘saner policy!’ cost what it may. He owes it to himself to sacrifice himself, if it comes to that.”
“I’m with you too,” I answered, “over boot and spur.” Her enthusiasm was contagious, and unnecessary.
“Oh, he’ll stick,” she began again after consultation with the parasol fringe. “You’ll hear him after a minute. It’s a field day today. You’ll miss the other heavy guns if you stop with me. I do it ostentatiously—wait until they’ve done. They’re all trembling; all of them. My husband will be on the platform—trembling too. He is a type of them. All day long and at odd moments at night I talk to him—out-talk him and silence him. What’s the state of popular feeling to him? He’s for the country, not the town—this sort of thing has nothing to do with him. It’s a matter to be settled by Jews in the City. Well, he sees it at night, and then in the morning the papers undo all my work. He begins to talk about his seat—which I got for him. I’ve been the ‘voice of the county’ for years now. Well, it’ll soon be a voice without a county. … What is it? ‘The old order changeth.’ So, I’ve arranged it that I shall wait until the trembling bigwigs have stuttered their speeches out, and then I’m going to sail down the centre aisle and listen to Churchill with visible signs of approval. It won’t do much today, but there was a time when it would have changed the course of an election. … Ah, there’s Effie’s young man. It’s time.”
She rose and marched, with the air of going to a last sacrifice, across the deserted sward toward a young man who was passing under the calico flag of the gateway.
“It’s all right, Willoughby,” she said, as we drew level, “I’ve found someone else to face the music with me; you can go back to Effie.” A bronzed and grateful young man murmured thanks to me.
“It’s an awful relief, Granger,” he said; “can’t think how you can do it. I’m hooked, but you. …”
“He’s the better man,” his mother-in-law-elect said, over her shoulder. She sailed slowly up the aisle beside me, an almost heroic figure of a matron. “Splendidly timed, you see,” she said, “do you observe my husband’s embarrassment?”
It was splendid to see Churchill again, standing there negligently, with the diffidence of a boy amid the bustle of applause. I understood suddenly why I loved him so, this tall, gray man with the delicate, almost grotesque, mannerisms. He appealed to me by sheer force of picturesqueness, appealed as some forgotten medieval city might. I was concerned for him as for some such dying place, standing above the level plains; I was jealous lest it should lose one jot of its glory, of its renown. He advocated his saner policy before all those people; stood up there and spoke gently, persuasively, without any stress of emotion, without more movement than an occasional flutter of the glasses he held in his hand. One would never have recognised that the thing was a fighting speech but for the occasional shiver of his audience. They were thinking of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly, to treat them as rational people.
It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by that wall of people all of one type, of one idea; the idea of getting back; all conscious that a force of which they knew nothing was dragging them forward over the edge of a glacier, into a crevasse. They wanted to get back, were struggling, panting even—as a nation pants—to get back by their own way that they understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the weighted rope that was dragging them forward. Churchill stood up there and repeated: “Mine is the only way—the saner policy,” and his words would fly all over the country to fall upon the deaf ears of the panic-stricken, who could not understand the use of calmness, of trifling even, in the face of danger, who
