Now I should have to pick the letters up again, all of them; set to work desolately to pick up the threads of the past; and work it back into life as one does half-drowned things.  I set about it listlessly.  There remained of that time an errand for my aunt, an errand that would take me to Etchingham; something connected with her land steward.  I think the old lady had ideas of inducting me into a position that it had grown tacitly acknowledged I was to fill.  I was to go down there; to see about some alterations that were in progress; and to make arrangements for my aunt’s return.  I was so tired, so dog tired, and the day still had so many weary hours to run, that I recognised instinctively that if I were to come through it sane I must tire myself more, must keep on going—­until I sank.  I drifted down to Etchingham that evening, I sent a messenger over to Churchill’s cottage, waited for an answer that told me that Churchill was there, and then slept, and slept.

I woke back in the world again, in a world that contained the land steward and the manor house.  I had a sense of recovered power from the sight of them, of the sunlight on the stretches of turf, of the mellow, golden stonework of the long range of buildings, from the sound of a chime of bells that came wonderfully sweetly over the soft swelling of the close turf.  The feeling came not from any sense of prospective ownership, but from the acute consciousness of what these things stood for.  I did not recognise it then, but later I understood; for the present it was enough to have again the power to set my foot on the ground, heel first.  In the streets of the little town there was a sensation of holiday, not pronounced enough to call for flags, but enough to convey the idea of waiting for an event.

The land steward, at the end of a tour amongst cottages, explained there was to be a celebration in the neighbourhood—­a “cock-and-hen show with a political annex”; the latter under the auspices of Miss Churchill.  Churchill himself was to speak; there was a possibility of a pronouncement.  I found London reporters at my inn, men I half knew.  They expressed mitigated delight at the view of me, and over a lunch-table let me know what “one said”—­what one said of the outside of events I knew too well internally.  They most of them had the air of my aunt’s solicitor when he had said, “Even I did not realise....” their positions saving them the necessity of concealing surprise.  “One can’t know everything.”  They fumbled amusingly about the causes, differed with one another, but were surprisingly unanimous as to effects, as to the panic and the call for purification.  It was rather extraordinary, too, how large de Mersch loomed on the horizon over here.  It was as if the whole world centred in him, as if he represented the modern spirit that must be purified away by burning before things could return to their normal state.  I knew what he represented ... but there it was.