the time ... but
one forgets; there are so many things." It seemed to me that the man
wished by these detached sentences to convey that he had the weight of a
kingdom--of several kingdoms--on his mind; that he could spare no more
than a fragment of his thoughts for everyday use.

"You must take me to see him," he said, suddenly. "I ought to have
something." I thought of poor white-haired Jenkins, and of his long
struggle with adversity. It seemed a little cruel that Churchill should
talk in that way without meaning a word of it--as if the words were a
polite formality.

"Nothing would delight me more," I answered, and added, "nothing in the
world."

He asked me if I had seen such and such a picture, talked of artists,
and praised this and that man very fittingly, but with a certain
timidity--a timidity that lured me back to my normally overbearing frame
of mind. In such matters I was used to hearing my own voice. I could
talk a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness of things, I
talked Churchill down. The position, even then, struck me as gently
humorous. It was as if some infinitely small animal were bullying some
colossus among the beasts. I was of no account in the world, he had his
say among the Olympians. And I talked recklessly, like any little
school-master, and he swallowed it.

We reached the broad market-place of a little, red and grey, home county
town; a place of but one street dominated by a great inn-signboard a-top
of an enormous white post. The effigy of So-and-So of gracious memory
swung lazily, creaking, overhead.

"This is Etchingham," Churchill said.

It was a pleasant commentary on the course of time, this entry into the
home of my ancestors. I had been without the pale for so long, that I
had never seen the haunt of ancient peace. They had done very little,
the Grangers of Etchingham--never anything but live at Etchingham and
quarrel at Etchingham and die at Etchingham and be the monstrous
important Grangers of Etchingham. My father had had the undesirable
touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian. The Grangers of
Etchingham had cut him adrift and he had swum to sink in other seas. Now
I was the last of the Grangers and, as things went, was quite the best
known of all of them. They had grown poor in their generation; they bade
fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise, and I had come
back to the old places on the arm of one of the great ones of the earth.
I wondered