Chapter 6

It was Saturday and, as was his custom during the session, the Foreign Secretary had gone for privacy and rest till Monday to a small country house he had within easy reach of town. I went down with a letter from Fox in my pocket, and early in the afternoon found myself talking without any kind of inward disturbance to the Minister’s aunt, a lean, elderly lady, with a keen eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of European politics. She had a rather abrupt manner and a business-like, brown scheme of coloration. She looked people very straight in the face, bringing to bear all the penetration which, as rumour said, enabled her to take a hidden, but very real part in the shaping of our foreign policy. She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf, before I had given my first answer to her first question.

“You ought to know this part of the country well,” she said. I think she was considering me as a possible canvasser--an infinitesimal thing, but of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the next General Election.

“No,” I said, “I’ve never been here before.”

“Etchingham is only three miles away.”

It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who had taken to literature.

“I met your aunt yesterday,” Miss Churchill continued. She had met everybody yesterday.

“Yes,” I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner, nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged--but I knew that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging on my shortcomings.

“Has she found a companion to suit her yet?” I said, absent-mindedly. I was thinking of an old legend of my mother’s. Miss Churchill looked me in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform malice.

“Why, yes,” she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, “she has adopted a niece.”

The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. “Who starved her governess?” it had inquired.

My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the Hour--but an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was “one of us,” who had temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of great author’s bottle-holder.

A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It seemed to say: “Why any noisy vigour?” It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew real to me--more real than the face of one’s nearest friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before--as if I had begun to realise that the world had moved on.

He said, languidly--almost protestingly, “What am I to do about the Duc de Mersch?”

Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance--a start that meant, “Why wasn’t I warned before?” This irritated me; I knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His attitudes were rather grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence. He stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of looking down from an immense height--of needing a telescope.

“Oh, ah ... Mrs. Granger’s son, I presume ... I wasn’t aware...” The hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get anywhere--not for years and years.

“No,” I said, rather brusquely, “I’m only from the Hour.”

He thought me one of Fox’s messengers then, said that Fox might have written: “Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or...”

He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me by proving that he was aware of my identity.

“Oh,” I said, a little loftily, “I haven’t any message, I’ve only come to interview you.” An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his face.

“To...” he began, “but I’ve never allowed--” He recovered himself sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had found the right track. “Oh, I remember now,” he said, “I hadn’t looked at it in that way.”

The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way, furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was clean-handed in the matter; I hadn’t any axe to grind.

“Ah, yes,” he said, hastily, “you are to draw my portrait--as Fox put it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it--it struck a very nice note. And so--.” He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find the process a bore.