Chapter 9 - Page 2

from inconveniencing me. He let me present Lea with an
occasional column and a half; and once he promised me that one day he
would allow me to get the atmosphere of Arthur Edwards, the novelist.

Then there was Churchill and the _Life of Cromwell_ that progressed
slowly. The experiment succeeded well enough, as I grew less domineering
and he less embarrassed. Toward the end I seemed to have become a
familiar inmate of his house. I used to go down with him on Saturday
afternoons and we talked things over in the train. It was, to an idler
like myself, wonderful the way that essential idler's days were cut out
and fitted in like the squares of a child's puzzle; little passages of
work of one kind fitting into quite unrelated passages of something
else. He did it well, too, without the remotest semblance of hurry.

I suppose that actually the motive power was his aunt. People used to
say so, but it did not appear on the surface to anyone in close contact
with the man; or it appeared only in very small things. We used to work
in a tall, dark, pleasant room, book-lined, and giving on to a lawn that
was always an asylum for furtive thrushes. Miss Churchill, as a rule,
sat half forgotten near the window, with the light falling over her
shoulder. She was always very absorbed in papers; seemed to be spending
laborious days in answering letters, in evolving reports. Occasionally
she addressed a question to her nephew, occasionally received guests
that came informally but could not be refused admittance. Once it was a
semi-royal personage, once the Duc de Mersch, my reputed employer.

The latter, I remember, was announced when Churchill and I were finally
finishing our account of the tremendous passing of the Protector. In
that silent room I had a vivid sense of the vast noise of the storm in
that twilight of the crowning mercy. I seemed to see the candles
a-flicker in the eddies of air forced into the gloomy room; the great
bed and the portentous uncouth form that struggled in the shadows of the
hangings. Miss Churchill looked up from the card that had been placed in
her hands.

"Edward," she said, "the Duc de Mersch."

Churchill rose irritably from his low seat. "Confound him," he said, "I
won't see him."

"You can't help it, I think," his aunt said, reflectively; "you will
have to settle it sooner or later."

I know pretty well what it was they had to settle--the Greenland affair
that had hung in the air so long. I knew it from hearsay, from Fox,
vaguely enough. Mr. Gurnard was said to recommend it for financial
reasons, the Duc to be eager, Churchill to hang back unaccountably. I
never had much head for details of this sort, but