“If you wanted to save me pain,” I maintained, “you would have done with de Mersch ... for good.”  I had an idea that the solution was beyond me.  It was as if the controlling powers were flitting, invisible, just above my head, just beyond my grasp.  There was obviously something vibrating; some cord, somewhere, stretched very taut and quivering.  But I could think of no better solution than:  “You must have done with him.”  It seemed obvious, too, that that was impossible, was outside the range of things that could be done—­but I had to do my best.  “It’s a—­it’s vile,” I added, “vile.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” she said, “for you....  And I’m even sorry.  But it has to be gone on with.  De Mersch has to go under in just this way.  It can’t be any other.”

“Why not?” I asked, because she had paused.  I hadn’t any desire for enlightenment.

“It isn’t even only Churchill,” she said, “not even only that de Mersch will bring down Churchill with him.  It is that he must bring down everything that Churchill stands for.  You know what that is—­the sort of probity, all the old order of things.  And the more vile the means used to destroy de Mersch the more vile the whole affair will seem.  People—­the sort of people—­have an idea that a decent man cannot be touched by tortuous intrigues.  And the whole thing will be—­oh, malodorous.  You understand.”

“I don’t,” I answered, “I don’t understand at all.”

“Ah, yes, you do,” she said, “you understand....”  She paused for a long while, and I was silent.  I understood vaguely what she meant; that if Churchill fell amid the clouds of dust of such a collapse, there would be an end of belief in probity ... or nearly an end.  But I could not see what it all led up to; where it left us.

“You see,” she began again, “I want to make it as little painful to you as I can; as little painful as explanations can make it.  I can’t feel as you feel, but I can see, rather dimly, what it is that hurts you.  And so ...  I want to; I really want to.”

“But you won’t do the one thing,” I returned hopelessly to the charge.

“I cannot,” she answered, “it must be like that; there isn’t any way.  You are so tied down to these little things.  Don’t you see that de Mersch, and—­and all these people—­don’t really count?  They aren’t anything at all in the scheme of things.  I think that, even for you, they aren’t worth bothering about.  They’re only accidents; the accidents that—­”

“That what?” I asked, although I began to see dimly what she meant.

“That lead in the inevitable,” she answered.  “Don’t you see?  Don’t you understand?  We are the inevitable ... and you can’t keep us back.  We have to come and you, you will only hurt yourself, by resisting.”  A sense that this was the truth, the only truth, beset me.  It was for the moment impossible to think of anything else—­of anything else in the world.  “You must accept us and all that we mean, you must stand back; sooner or later.  Look even all round you, and you will understand better.  You are in the house of a type—­a type that became impossible.  Oh, centuries ago.  And that type too, tried very hard to keep back the inevitable; not only because itself went under, but because everything that it stood for went under.  And it had to suffer—­heartache ... that sort of suffering.  Isn’t it so?”