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    A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05
    A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05
    A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05

    By Winston Churchill

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05
    Author

    Winston Churchill

    Sir Winston Churchill was a British military man, statesman, and Nobel-prize winning author, and, by virtue of his service during both the First and Second World Wars, is considered to be one of the greatest wartime leaders of the twentieth century. Born to the aristocracy, Churchill pursued a career in the British Army, seeing action in British India and in the Second Boer War, and later drew upon his experiences in these historic conflicts in his work as a war correspondent and writer. After retiring from active duty, Churchill moved into politics and went on to hold a number of important positions in the British government. He rose to the role of First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War and later to the role of prime minister, a position that he held twice, from 1940-1945 and from 1951-1955. A visionary statesman, Churchill was remarkable for his ability to perceive emerging threats to international peace, and predicted the rise of Nazi Germany, the Second World War, and the Iron Curtain. In his later years Churchill returned to writing, penning the six-volume Second World War series, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and many other historical and biographical works. Winston Churchill died in 1965 and, after one of the largest state funerals to that point in time, was interred in his family’s burial plot.

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      A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05 - Winston Churchill

      Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 5, by Winston Churchill

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 5

      Author: Winston Churchill

      Release Date: October 19, 2004 [EBook #5378] [Last updated: July 16, 2011]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN CHRONICLE, VOLUME 5 ***

      Produced by David Widger

      A MODERN CHRONICLE

      By Winston Churchill

      BOOK III

      Volume 5.

      CHAPTER I

      ASCENDI

      Honora did not go back to Quicksands. Neither, in this modern chronicle, shall we.

      The sphere we have left, which we know is sordid, sometimes shines in the retrospect. And there came a time, after the excitement of furnishing the new house was over, when our heroine, as it were, swung for a time in space: not for a very long time; that month, perhaps, between autumn and winter.

      We need not be worried about her, though we may pause for a moment or two to sympathize with her in her loneliness—or rather in the moods it produced. She even felt, in those days, slightly akin to the Lady of the Victoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enough occasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with an expression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes four times a day.

      Sympathy! We have seen Honora surrounded by friends—what has become of them? Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of the most desirable houses in New York. What more could be wished for? To jump at conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a heroine with an Ideal. She had these things, and—strange as it may seem—suffered.

      Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especially beautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it was not taste. Honora sat in it and wondered: wondered, as she looked back over the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal, whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn. The farther she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land of unrealities. The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and which she had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not have been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a scene in a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them. They did not belong to her, nor she to them.

      Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified in looking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own: and children's children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carved stone mantel. The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats might appropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Would not the warriors and the wits, the patient ladies of high degree and of many children, and even the 'precieuses ridicules' themselves, turn over in their graves if they could so much as imagine the contents of the single street in modern New York where Honora lived?

      One morning, as she sat in that room, possessed by these whimsical though painful fancies, she picked up a newspaper and glanced through it, absently, until her eye fell by chance upon a name on the editorial page. Something like an electric shock ran through her, and the letters of the name seemed to quiver and become red. Slowly they spelled—Peter Erwin.

      The argument of Mr. Peter Erwin, of St. Louis, before the Supreme Court of the United States in the now celebrated Snowden case is universally acknowledged by lawyers to have been masterly, and reminiscent of the great names of the profession in the past. Mr. Erwin is not dramatic. He appears to carry all before him by the sheer force of intellect, and by a kind of Lincolnian ability to expose a fallacy: He is still a young man, self-made, and studied law under Judge Brice of St. Louis, once President of the National Bar Association, whose partner he is….

      Honora cut out the editorial and thrust it in her gown, and threw the newspaper is the fire. She stood for a time after it had burned, watching the twisted remnants fade from flame colour to rose, and finally blacken. Then she went slowly up the stairs and put on her hat and coat and veil. Although a cloudless day, it was windy in the park, and cold, the ruffled waters an intense blue. She walked fast.

      She lunched with Mrs. Holt, who had but just come to town; and the light, like a speeding guest, was departing from the city when she reached her own door.

      There is a gentleman in the drawing-room, madam, said the butler. He said he was an old friend, and a stranger in New York, and asked if he might wait.

      She stood still with presentiment.

      What is his name? she asked.

      Mr. Erwin, said the man.

      Still she hesitated. In the strange state in which she found herself that day, the supernatural itself had seemed credible. And yet—she was not prepared.

      I beg pardon, madam, the butler was saying, perhaps I shouldn't—?

      Yes, yes, you should, she interrupted him, and pushed past him up the stairs. At the drawing-room door she paused—he was unaware of her presence. And he had not changed! She wondered why she had expected him to change. Even the glow of his newly acquired fame was not discernible behind his well-remembered head. He seemed no older—and no younger. And he was standing with his hands behind his back gazing in simple, silent appreciation at the big tapestry nearest the windows.

      Peter, she said, in a low voice.

      He turned quickly, and then she saw the glow. But it was the old glow, not the new—the light in which her early years had been spent.

      What a coincidence! she exclaimed, as he took her hand.

      Coincidence?

      It was only this morning that I was reading in the newspaper all sorts of nice things about you. It made me feel like going out and telling everybody you were an old friend of mine. Still holding his fingers, she pushed him away from her at arm's length, and looked at him. What does it feel like to be famous, and have editorials about one's self in the New York newspapers?

      He laughed, and released his hands somewhat abruptly.

      It seems as strange to me, Honora, as it does to you.

      How unkind of you, Peter! she exclaimed.

      She felt his eyes upon her, and their searching, yet kindly and humorous rays seemed to illuminate chambers within her which she would have kept in darkness: which she

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