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Title: One Woman: Being the Second Part of a Romance of Sussex

Author: Alfred Ollivant

Release date: August 5, 2018 [eBook #57641]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57641

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE WOMAN:
BEING THE SECOND PART OF A ROMANCE OF SUSSEX ***

ONE WOMAN:

Being the Second Part
of a Romance of Sussex
BY

ALFRED OLLIVANT

Après a'voir souffert il faut souffrir encore

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40, MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1

First published in 1921

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

DANNY
OWD BOB
BOY WOODBURN
THE GENTLEMAN
THE ROYAL ROAD
THE BROWN MARE

THE NEXT STEP
THE TAMING OF JOHN BLUNT
TWO MEN

TO
MY COUNTRY

CONTENTS

THE CARRIER'S CART

PART I

DEEPENING DUSK

I THE HOSTEL
II COW GAP
III THE WATCHMAN ON THE HEAD
IV ALF
V THE CREEPING DEATH
VI THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET
VII THE MAN FROM THE NORTH
VIII THE CHERUB
IX THE SHADOW OF ROYAL
X BOBS
XI THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN
XII RUTH WAKES
XIII NIGHTMARE
XIV SHADOWS
XV THE LANDLORD

XVI THE GRANDMOTHER
XVII THE CHALLENGE
XVIII A SKIRMISH
XIX PITCHED BATTLE
XX THE VANQUISHED
XXI THUNDER

PART II

TROUBLED DAWN

XXII THE BETRAYAL
XXIII THE COLONEL FACES DEFEAT
XXIV THE PILGRIMS
XXV RED IN THE MORNING
XXVI THE AVALANCHE MOVES
XXVII THE GROWING ROAR
XXVIII OLD TOWN
XXIX FOLLOW YOUR LEADER
XXX THE END OF THE WORLD
XXXI THE COLONEL
XXXII THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
XXXIII BEAU-NEZ
XXXIV THE STATION
XXXV IN THE EVENING
XXXVI RUTH FACES THE STORM
XXXVII MRS. LEWKNOR
XXXVIII SUSPENSE
XXXIX THE VALLEY OF DECISION
XL VICTORY AND REVENGE

THE COMFORTER

THE CARRIER'S CART

An old-fashioned carrier's cart, such as you may still meet on the roads
of Sussex, tilted, one-horsed, and moving at the leisurely pace of a bye-
gone age, turned East at the Turnpike, and made slowly along the Lewes-
Beachbourne road under the northern scarp of the Downs one evening of
autumn in 1908. In it, at the back of the driver, were a young man and a
young woman, the only passengers, ensconced among hen-coops, flitches
of bacon, and baskets of greens.

They sat hand-in-hand.

The woman was a noble creature, about her the majestic tranquillity of a
great three-decker that comes to rest in sunset waters after its Trafalgar. The
man, but for a certain wistfulness about his eyes which betokened undue
sensibility, was not remarkable. Till he spoke you would have said he was a
gentleman—that is to say if your eyes confined their scrutiny to his face and
refused to see his hands, his boots, his clothes. When he spoke you would
have recognised at once that he was Sussex of the soil as, surely, was the
woman beside him; though the speech of both was faintly marred with the
all-pervading cockney accent of those who have passed beyond the village-
green into the larger world of the England of to-day.

Both ca-a-ad musically enough; but less by far than the little carrier,
whose round back blocked the view of the road, and the twitching ears of
old mare Jenny. For nearly fifty years, man and boy, Isaac Woolgar had
travelled twice a day, six days a week, the road on which he was travelling
now. He had seen the long-horns—those "black runts" so familiar to old-
world Sussex—give place to horses in the plough upon the hill; the horses
in their turn supplanted on the road by motors; and men using the legs God
had given them to trundle wheels instead of walk. Undisturbed, he plodded
on his way, accompanied always by the wires lifted on tall black poles,
crowned with tiers of tiny porcelain chimney-pots unknown in his youth,

which had linked Lewes with Beachbourne these forty years; and he would
so plod until he died. The Star on the hill in Old Town, Beachbourne,
marked one end of his day's journey; and the equally ancient Lamb, at
Aldwoldston, black-timbered and gabled too, marked the other. He had
never been further "oop country," as he called it, than Heathfield. Lewes
was the utmost term of his wanderings West, Beau-nez East; while the sea
at Newhaven had bounded him on the South. Within this tiny quadrilateral,
which just about determined also the wanderings of an old dog-fox in
Abbot's Wood, he had passed his life; and nothing now would ever induce
him to pass the bounds he had allotted himself.

To the man and woman in the cart old Mus. Woolgar had been a familiar
figure from childhood. The little girl skipping by the market-cross in
Aldwoldston would stop to watch him start; the little boy would wait at
Billing's Corner on the top of the hill to see him come along the New Road
past Motcombe at the end of his journey. Long before either had been aware
of the other's existence the old carrier had served as an invisible link
between them.

Now the two were married.

Ruth Boam had become Mrs. Ernie Caspar that afternoon in the
cathedral-church of Aldwoldston, on the mound among the ash-trees above
Parsons' Tye and the long donkey-backed clergy-house that dates from the
fourteenth century.

It had been a very quiet wedding. The father and mother of the bride had
stumped across from Frogs' Hall, at the foot of the village, Ruth
accompanying them, her little daughter in her arms. For the rest, Dr. and
Mrs. Trupp had come over from Beachbourne with Mr. Pigott and his wife
in the chocolate-bodied car driven by the bridegroom's brother.

Alf had not entered the church to see Ernie married. He had mouched
sullenly down to the river instead, and stood there during the service, his
back to the church, looking across the Brooks to old Wind-hover's dun and
shaven flank with eyes that did not see, and ears that refused to hear.

After the ceremony the car-party returned to Beachbourne by way of the
sea—climbing High-'nd-over, to drop down into Sea-ford, and home by
Birling Gap and Beau-nez. From the almost violent gesture with which Alf
had set his engines in motion and drawn out of the lane under the pollarded
willows of Parson's Tye, he at least had been glad to turn his back on the
scene.

Ruth and her husband had returned to Frogs' Hall with the old folk.

Later, as the sun began to lower behind Black Cap into the valley of the
Ouse, they went up River Lane and picked up the carrier's cart by the
market-cross.

For the moment they were leaving little Alice with her grandmother
while they settled into the Moot, Old Town, where Ernie had found a
cottage close to his work, not a quarter of a mile from the home of his father
and mother in Rectory Walk.

The carrier's cart moved slowly on under the telegraph wires on which
the martins were already gathering: for it was September. Now and then
Ernie raised the flap that made a little window in the side of the tilt, and
looked out at the accompanying Downs, mysterious in the evening.

"They're still there," he announced comfortably, "and like to be yet a bit,
I reckon."

"They move much same pace as us doos, seems to me," said Ruth.

"We should get there afoor them yet though," answered Ernie.

"Afoor the Day of Judgment we might, if so be we doosn't die o
breathlessness first," the woman replied.

"You'd like a car to yourself you would," chaffed Ernie. "And Alf drivin
you."

Ruth turned in her lips.

They moved leisurely forward, leaving Folkington clustered about its
village-green upon the right, passing the tea-gardens at Wannock, and up
the long pull to Willingdon, standing among old gardens and pleasant fig-
trees. Once through the village the woods of Hampden Park green-bosomed
upon the left, blocked out the marshes and the splendid vision of Pevensey
Bay. Now the road emerged from the shelter of hedges and elm-trees and
flowed with a noble billowy motion between seas of corn that washed the
foot of the Downs and swept over Rodmill to the outposts of Beachbourne.
Between the road and the Downs stood Motcombe, islanded in the ruddy
sea, amongst its elms and low piggeries. Behind the farm, at the very foot of
the hill, was Huntsman's Lodge where once, when both were boys, Alf had
betrayed his brother on the occasion of the looting of the walnut-tree.

Ern pointed out the spot to his bride and told the tale. Ruth listened with
grim understanding.

"That's Alf," she said.

"Mr. Pigott lived there that time o day," Ern continued. "One of the five
Manors of Beachbourne, used to be—I've heard dad say. Belonged to the
Salwyns of Friston Place over the hill—the clergy-folk. The farm's where
the Manor-house used to be; and the annual sheep-fair was held in a field
outside from William the Conqueror till a few years back."

He pointed to one of a little row of villas on the left which looked over
the allotment gardens to the Downs.

"That's where Mr. Pigott lives now. My school-master he were that time
o day."

"Who's Mr. Pigott?" Ruth asked.

Ernie rootled her with a friendly elbow.

"My guv'nor, stoopid! Manager of the Southdown Transport Company.
Him that was at the wedding—with the beard. Settin along o Mrs. Trupp."

"Oh, Mr. Pigott!" answered Ruth. Now that the strain of the last two
years was over at last, she brimmed over with a demure naughtiness. "Well,
why couldn't you say so, then? You are funny, men are."

The cart climbed the steep hill to Billing's Corner and Ernie looked
down the familiar road to the Rectory and even caught a peep of the back of
his old home. Then they turned down Church Street with its old-world
fragrance of lavender and yesterday.

On the left the parish-church, long-backed and massive-towered upon
the Kneb, brooded over the centuries it had seen come and go.

"Dad says the whole history of Beachbourne's centred there," said Ernie
in awed voice. "Steeped in it, he says."

Ernie, who had been leaning forward to peep at the Archdeacon posed in
the entrance of St. Michael's, now dropped back suddenly, nudging his
companion.

A lean woman with white hair and wrathful black eyebrows, her
complexion still delicate as a girl's, was coming up the hill.

"Mother," whispered Ernie.

It was Ruth's turn to raise the flap and peer forth stealthily at the figure
passing so close and so unconsciously on the pavement.

So that was the woman who had opposed her marriage with such
malevolent persistency!

Ruth observed her enemy with more curiosity than hostility, and
received a passing impression of a fierce unhappy face.

"She don't favour you no-ways," she said, as she relapsed into a corner.
"Where's dad though?"

Ernie shook his head.

"He's never with her," he said. "I ca-a-n't call to mind as ever I've seen
them out together, not the pair of them."

"I'd ha liked him to have been at the wedding," murmured Ruth a
thought discontentedly.

"And he'd ha liked it too, I'll lay," Ernie answered. "Only she'd never
have let him."

The cart stopped; and the two passengers descended at the old Star
opposite the Manor-house, which bore the plate of Mr. William Trupp, the
famous surgeon.

On the Manor-house steps a tall somewhat cadaverous man was
standing. He was so simply dressed as almost to be shabby; and his straw
hat, tilted on the back of his head, disclosed a singularly fine forehead.
There was something arresting about the man and his attitude: a delicious
mixture of mischievous alertness and philosophical detachment. He might
have been a mediæval scholar waiting at the door of his master; or a
penitent seeking absolution; or, not least, a youth about to perpetrate a run-
away knock.

Ernie across the road watched him with eyes in which affection and
amusement mingled. Then the door opened, and the scholar-penitent-youth
was being greeted with glee by Bess Trupp.

Ernie turned to his wife.

"My old Colonel," he said confidentially. "What I was in India with. Best
Colonel the Hammer-men ever had—and that's saying something."

"Colonel Lewknor, aren't it?" asked Ruth.

"That's him," said Ernie keenly. "Do you knaw him?"

"He was over at Auston last summer," answered Ruth, "lecturin we got
to fight Germany or something. I went, but I didn't pay no heed to him. No
account talk, I call that."

Together they dropped down Borough Lane and turned to the left along
the Moot where dwelt the workers of Old Town—a few in flint cottages set
in gardens, rank with currant bushes, a record of the days, not so long ago,
when corn flowed down both sides of Water Lane, making a lake of gold
between the village on the hill and the Sea-houses by the Wish; and most in
the new streets of little red houses that looked up, pathetically aware of
their commonness, to the calm dignity of the old church upon the Kneb
above.

At one of these latter Ernie stopped and made believe to fumble with a
key. Ruth, who had not seen her new home, was thrilling quietly, as she had
been throughout the journey, though determined not to betray her emotion
to her mate.

The door opened and they entered.

A charming voice from the kitchen greeted them.

"Ah, there you are—punctual to the minute!"

A woman, silver-haired and gracious, turned from deft busy-ness at the
range.

"Oh, Mrs. Trupp!" cried Ruth, looking about her.

The table was laid already, and gay with flowers; the fire lit, the kettle on
the boil, the supper ready.

"It is kind," said Ruth. "Was this you and Miss Bess?"

"Perhaps we had a hand in it," laughed the other. "She couldn't be here,
as she's got a meeting of her Boy Scouts. But she sent her best wishes. Now
I hand over the key to the master; and my responsibilities are over!" And
she was gone with the delicious ripple of laughter Ernie had loved from
babyhood.

Ruth was now thirsting to explore her new home, but Ernie insisted on
supping first. This he did with malicious deliberation. When at length he

was satisfied they went upstairs together, he leading the way.

"This is our room!" he said with ill-disguised complacency, stepping
aside.

The bridal chamber was swept and garnished. In it were more flowers,
bowls of them; and the furniture simple, solid, and very good, was of a
character rarely found in houses of that class.

Ernie enjoyed the obvious pleasure of his bride as she touched and
glanced and dipped like some large bird flitting gracefully from piece to
piece.

Then she paused solemnly and looked about her.

"Reckon it must ha cost a tidy penny," she said.

"It did," Ernie answered.

She cocked a soft brown eye at him.

"Could you afford it, Ernie?"

"I could not," said Ernie, standing grimly and with folded arms.

At the moment her eyes fell on a card tied to the bed-post on which was
written: From Mr., Mrs. and Miss Trupp. Ruth's eyes caressed the bed, and
her fingers stroked the smooth wood.

"It's like them," she said. "None o your cheap trash."

"Ah," answered Ernie. "Trust them. They're just all right, they are."

Before the looking-glass on the chest of drawers Ruth now took off her
hat.

She was perhaps too simple, too natural, too near to earth to be shy at
this the supreme moment of a woman's life. At least she was too wary to
show it.

"Rich folks they have two little beds laid alongside, these days," she
said, speaking from her experience as a maid. "I wouldn't think it was right
myself. Only you mustn't judge others." She added in her slow way, as she
patted her hair—"I wouldn't feel prarperly married like only in a prarper
two-bed."

Ernie drew down the blind.

Then he marched upon his bride deliberately and with remorseless eyes.
Suddenly she turned and met him with a swift and lovely smile, dropping
her mask, and discovering herself to him in the surprising radiance of a
moon that reveals its beauty after long obscurity. She laid her hands upon
his shoulders in utter surrender. He gathered her gradually in his arms; and
closing his eyes, dwelt on her lips with the slow and greedy passion of a
bee, absorbed in absorption, and drinking deep in the cloistered seclusion of
a fox-glove bell,

"You're prarperly married all right," he said. "And you ca-a-n't get out of
it—not no-ways."

PART I
DEEPENING DUSK

CHAPTER I

THE HOSTEL

Dr. Trupp of Beachbourne, as he was generally known—Mr. Trupp, to
give him his correct title—was a genuinely great man.

His father had been a book-seller in Torquay; and he himself never lost
the greater qualities of the class from which he sprang. He was very simple
and very shrewd. Science had not blunted the fine intuitions which his
brusque manner half concealed. Moreover, he trusted those intuitions
perhaps unconsciously as do few men of his profession; and they rarely
played him false. In early manhood his integrity, his sound common sense,
and practical idealism had won for him the love of a singularly noble girl
who might have married one of the best of her inevitably artificial class.
Later in life indeed Evelyn Trupp often would amuse her father and annoy
her mother by affirming that she was far prouder of being the wife of Mr.
Trupp of Beachbourne than of having been Miss Moray of Pole. And she
had good cause. For her husband was no longer the country doctor at whom
the county families had sniffed. He was "Trupp of Beachbourne," whose
fame had spread, quietly it is true, from Sussex, through England to the
outer world. And if there was some difference of opinion as to whether Mr.
Trupp had made Beachbourne, or Beachbourne had made him, there was no
question that the growth of the town, and its deserved popularity as a
health-resort was coincident with his residence there.

At least the event justified the young surgeon's courage and originality in
the choice of a site for his life-long campaign. Indeed had he stayed in

London it is certain that he would never have achieved the work he was
able to consummate in the town girdled by the southern hills and washed by
Northern Seas. And that work was no mean contribution to the welfare of
the race. Mr. Trupp was a pioneer in the organized attack on perhaps the
deadliest and most pertinacious enemy that threatens the supremacy of Man
—the tubercle bacillus. And his choice of a point-d'appui from which to
conduct his offensive was no small factor in his success.

He was, moreover, one of the men who in the last years of the nineteenth
century and the earlier years of this set himself to stem the tide of luxury
which in his judgment was softening the spines of the younger generation.
And the helpful buffets which gave him his name, and were responsible at
least for some of his triumphs, were not the outcome of spasms of
irritability but of a deliberate philosophy.

For Mr. Trupp, despite his kind heart, never forgot that Man with all his
aspirations after heaven had but yesterday ceased to be an animal and still
stood on the edge of the slough from which he had just emerged, up to his
hocks in mud, the slime yet trickling from his shaggy sides.

"Don't give him sympathy," he would sometimes say to an astonished
father. "What he wants is the Big Stick ... Stop his allowance. He'll soon get
well. Necessity's the best doctor.... Take her mother away from her. The
mothers make half the invalids.... Let her get up early in the morning and
take the kitchen-maid tea in bed. She's a useful citizen at all events."

He saw his country, so he believed, sinking into a dropsical coma before
his eyes, just for want of somebody to kick it awake; and the sight made
him sick and fearful.

Often riding with his daughter of evenings after the day's work he would
pause a moment beside the flag-staff on Beau-nez and look North East
across the waste of sea dull or shining at his feet.

"Can you hear him growling, Bess?" he asked his companion once.

"Who?"

"The Brute."

Bess knew her father's ogre, and the common talk.

"Is Germany the Brute?" she asked.

Her father shook his head.

"One of them," he answered. "Wherever Man is there the Brute is—keep
that in mind when you're married, my dear. And he's always sleeping after a
gorge or ravenous before one. Our Brute's asleep now he's got his belly full.
Theirs"—nodding across the water—"is prowling for his prey."

To Mr. Pigott he confided his belief that there was only one thing that
could save England.

"What's that?" asked the old school-master.

"A bloody war," replied Mr. Trupp.

Many other men were saying the same thing, but few of his intellectual
calibre, and none of his radical views.

His own part in staying the rot that in his belief threatened to corrupt the
country he loved with such a deep if critical love, was clear enough. It was
the business of him and his colleagues to give the nation the health that
made for character, just as it was that of the school-master to give them the
character that made for health. And he tackled his side of national education
with a will: the Sun, the Sea, the Air being the assistants in whom he
trusted.

His old idea, cherished through a life-time, of an open-air hostel, where
he could have under his immediate supervision children without their
mothers, and wives without their husbands, sought always more urgently
for expression as the years slipped by. It was not, however, till the twentieth
century was well upon its way, that all the conditions necessary for the safe
launching of his project were fulfilled.

His chance came when Colonel Lewknor and his wife crossed his path
on retirement from the Sendee.

Rachel Lewknor took up the old surgeon's plan with the fierce yet wary
courage of her race.

Here was her chance, heaven-sent. Thus and thus would she fulfil her
cherished dream and make the money to send her grandson, Toby, to Eton
like his father and grandfather before him.

Like most soldiers, she and the Colonel were poor. All through their
working lives any money they might have saved against old age they had
invested in the education of their boy; stinting themselves in order to send
young Jock to his father's school and afterwards to start him in his father's
regiment. On retirement therefore they had little but a pittance of a pension
on which to live. The question of how to raise the capital to buy the site and
build the hostel was therefore the most urgent of the earlier difficulties that
beset Mrs. Lewknor.

Mr. Trupp said frankly that he could lend the money and would do so at
a pinch; but he made it clear that he would rather not. He, too, was starting
his boy Joe in the Hammer-men, and like all civilians of those days had an
exaggerated idea of the expenses of an officer in the Army. Moreover, he
had determined that when the time and the man came Bess should marry
where she liked; and the question of money should not stand in her way.

Happily Mrs. Lewknor's problem solved itself as by miracle.

Alf Caspar, who had his garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old Town and,
in spite of the continued protests of Mrs. Trupp and Bess, still drove for Mr.
Trupp (the old surgeon refusing steadfastly to keep a car of his own), had
from the start evinced an almost prurient interest in the conception of the
hostel. In the very earliest days when Mr. Trupp and Mrs. Lewknor talked it
over as they drove through Paradise, the beech-hangar between old Town

and Meads, to visit the prospective site in Cow Gap, he would sit at his
wheel manipulating his engine to ensure the maximum of silent running, his
head screwed round and big left ear reaching back to lick up what was
passing between the two occupants of the body of the car.

Later, when it had actually been decided to embark upon the scheme, he
said to Mr. Trupp one day in his brightest manner:

"Should be a paying proposition, sir, with you behind it."

The old surgeon eyed his chaffeur through his pince-nez shrewdly.

"If you like to put £3,000 or so into it, Alfred, you wouldn't do yourself
any harm," he said.

Alf sheathed his eyes in that swift bird-like way of his, and tittered.

"Three thousand pounds!" he said. "Me!" ....

A few days later when Mr. Trupp called at the Colonel's tiny villa in
Meads. Mrs. Lewknor ran out to him, eager as a girl.

She had received from Messrs. Morgan and Evans, the solicitors in
Terminus Road, an offer of the sum required on behalf of a client on the
security of a first mortgage.

"It's a miracle!" she cried, her eyes sparkling like jewels.

"Or a ramp!" said the Colonel from behind. "D'you know anything about
the firm, Trupp?"

"I've known and employed em ever since I've been here," replied the old
surgeon. "They're as old as Beachbourne and a bit older. A Lewes firm
really, and they still have an office there. But as the balance of power
shifted East they shifted with it."

"They don't say who their client is," commented the Colonel.

"I'll ask em," the other answered.

That afternoon he drove down to Terminus Road, and leaving Alf in the
car outside, entered the office.

He and Mr. Morgan were old friends who might truly be accounted
among the founders of modern Beachbourne.

"Who's your client?" asked Mr. Trupp, gruff and grinning. "Out with it!"

Mr. Morgan shook his smooth grey head, humour and mystery lurking
about his mouth and in his eyes.

"Wishes to remain anonymous," he said. "We're empowered to act on his
behalf."

He strolled to the window and peeped out, tilting on his toes to overlook
the screen which obscured the lower half of it.

What he saw seemed to amuse him, and his amusement seemed to re-act
in its turn on Mr. Trupp.

"Is he a solid man?" asked the surgeon.

"As a rock," came the voice from the window.

The other seemed satisfied; the contract forthwith was signed; and Mrs.
Lewknor bought her site.

Cow Gap was an ideal spot for the hostel.

It is carved out of the flank of Beau-nez; the gorse-covered hill
encircling it in huge green rampart that shelters it from the prevailing Sou-
West gales. Embedded in the majestic bluff that terminates the long line of
the South Downs and juts out into the sea in the semblance of a lion asleep,
head on his paws, it opens a broad green face to the sea and rising sun. The
cliff here is very low, and the chalk-strewn beach, easy of access from
above, is seldom outraged by skirmishers from the great army peopling the
sands along the front towards the Redoubt and the far Crumbles. A spur of

the hill shuts it off from the aristocratic quarter of the town, known as
Meads, which covers with gardened villas the East-ward foot-hills of Beau-
nez and ceases abruptly at the bottom of the Duke's Drive that sweeps up
the Head in graceful curves.

In this secluded coombe, that welcomes the sun at dawn, at dusk holds
the lingering shadows, and is flecked all day with the wings of passing sea-
birds, after many months of delay and obstructions victoriously overcome,
Mrs. Lewknor began to build her house of bricks and mortar in the spring of
the year Ruth and Ernie Caspar set out together to construct the future in a
more enduring medium.

The house, long and low, with balconies broad as streets, and windows
everywhere to catch the light, rose layer by layer out of the turf on the edge
of the cliff. All the summer and on into the autumn it was a-building. A
white house with a red roof, plain yet picturesque, it might have been a
coastguard station and was not. Partaking of the character of the cliffs on
which it stood and the green Downs in which it was enclosed, it seemed a
fitting tenant of the great coombe in which, apart from a pair of goal-posts
under the steep of the hill at the back, it was the only evidence of the
neighbourhood of Man.

Mr. Trupp watched the gradual realisation of the dream of a lifetime with
the absorbed content of a child who observes the erection of a house of
wooden bricks. And he was not alone.

When at the end of the day's work Alf now drove his employer, as he
often did, to Cow Gap to study progress, he, too, would descend and poke
and pry amid skeleton walls and crude dank passages with sharp eyes and
sharper whispered questions to labourers, foreman, and even the architect.
Never a Sunday passed but found him bustling across the golf-links before
church, to ascend ladders, walk along precarious scaffoldings, and march
with proprietory air and incredible swagger along the terraces of the newly
laid-out gardens that patched with brown the green quilt of the coombe.

Once, on such a Sunday visit, he climbed the hill at the back to obtain a
bird's-eye view of the building. Amid spurting whin-chats and shining
gossamers, he climbed in the brilliant autumn morning till he had almost

reached the crest. He was lost to the world and the beauty lavished all about
him; his eyes shuttered to the whispered suggestions of the infinite; his
heart closed to the revealing loveliness of Earth, round-limbed and bare, as
he revolved in the dark prison-house of self the treadmill of his insect
projects. The sidesman of St. Michael's, spruce, scented, oiled, in fancy
waistcoat, with boots of glace kid, and waxed moustache, moving
laboriously between sky and sea, was civilised man at the height of his
imperfection and vain-glorious in his fatuous artificiality.

Suddenly a bare head and collarless stark neck blurted up out of a deep
gorse-clump before him.

"Who goes there?" came a challenge, deep and formidable, as the roar of
some jungle lord disturbed in his covert.

Alf collapsed as a soap-bubble, blown from a clay pipe and brilliant in
the sunshine, bursts at the impact of an elemental prickle. He fled down the
hill incontinently.

The man who had barked, shoulder-deep in gorse, his eyes still flashing,
turned to the woman squandered beneath him in luxurious splendour.
Native of the earth on which she lay, and kin to it as some long-limbed hind
of the forest, she regarded him with amused content. The sudden battle-call
of her male roused what there was of primitive in her, soothed, and flattered
her womanhood. Comfortably she fell back upon the sense of security it
called up, delighting behind half-drawn lids in the surprising ferocity of her
man. That roar of his, startling the silence like a trumpet-note, had spoken
to her deeps. Swiftly, and perhaps for the first time, she recognised what the
man above her stood for in her life, and why one with whom she did not
pretend to be in love so completely satisfied her most urgent present need.
He was a break-water behind which she lay with furled sails after a
hazardous voyage over uncharted deeps. Outside was still the roar and
batter of seas. The sound of guns booming overhead as she lay, stripped of
her canvas, and rocking pleasantly in the inner waters, did not alarm, rather
indeed lulled, her to sleep: for they spoke to her of protection at last.

"Who was it, Ernie?" she murmured, raising a lazy head from the hands
on which they were pillowed, the dark hair strewn about her like wind-

slashed rain.

The man turned, outraged still and bristling.

"Alf!" he snorted. "Just bob me head over the hawth at him. That was
enough—quite enough! I knaw the colour of Alf's liver."

He stood above her with his air of a fighting male.

She had never seen him like that before; and she regarded him critically
and with approval.

"Ern," she called quietly, with a chuckle, deep and secret as the gurgle of
water pouring from a long-throated jug; and with a faint movement of her
hips she made room for him in the sand beside her.

CHAPTER II

COW GAP

Honeymoons are not for the class that does the world's dirty work; but
joy can be seized by the simple of heart even in the conditions we impose
upon the poor.

Ernie Caspar after his marriage with Ruth Boam settled down with his
bride in Old Town to enjoy the fruits of victory.

The young couple had been lucky to find a cottage in the Moot; for even
in those days accommodation for the working-class was as hard to find in
Beachbourne as elsewhere. The cottage, too, was appropriately situated for
them in every way. It was close to the yard of the Southdown Transport
Company, where Ernie's work lay; and at the bottom of Borough Lane, at
the top of which was the Manor-house, where lived Mr. and Mrs. Trupp,

who had seen Ruth through her trouble, and had befriended Ernie from his
boyhood.

"D'you remember that first time ever we rode up to Old Town together
tarp o the bus?" asked Ernie of his bride, one evening as they passed the
great doctor's house on the way to Beau-nez.

"Hap I do," Ruth answered, amused at her lover's intense seriousness.

"And do you remember what I said to you?" insistently.

"Ne'er a word," answered Ruth, casual and teasing—"only it was no-
account talk. That's all I remember."

"I pointed you out Mr. Trupp's house," Ernie continued solemnly, "and I
says to you—He brought me into the world, I says. That's what he done."

The old roguish black-bird look, which after her winter of despair had
been creeping slowly back to Ruth's face in this new spring, gleamed
sedately now.

"I mind me now," she said. "Leastwise I don't remember what you said,
but I remembers what I answered."

"What did you answer then?" asked Ernie, suspiciously.

"He done well, was what I says," answered the young woman gravely.

"He did," replied Ernie with exaggerated pomp. "And he done better to
settle issalf at my door so I could be his friend if so be he ever gotten into
trouble."

"One thing I knaw," said Ruth, serious in her turn now. "They're the two
best friends e'er a workin woman had."

"They are," Ernie agreed. "And she's my god-mother."

It was the fact in his life of which on the whole he was most proud and
certainly the one for which he was least responsible. "And she aren't yours,"

he continued, puffed up and self-complacent. "And never will be." He
added finally to curb her arrogance. "See she was dad's friend afore ever
they married, eether of them."

Ruth checked her husband's snobbishness with a tap.

"You are grand," she said.

Close to the cottage of the young couple was the lovely old Motcombe
garden, public now, pierced by the bourne from which the town derives its
name. The garden with its ancient dove-cot, ivy-crowned, its splendid
weeping ashes, its ruined walls, compact of native flint and chalk, the
skeletons of afore-time barns and byres, stands between the old parsonage
house and older parish-church that crowns the Kneb above and, with its
massive tower, its squat shingled spire peculiar to Sussex, set four-square to
the winds of time, seems lost in a mist of memories.

Beyond the church, a few hundred yards further up the hill, at the back
of Billing's Corner in Rectory Walk, Ernie's parents still dwelt.

Anne Caspar did not visit Ruth. Indeed, she ignored the presence of her
daughter-in-law; but those steel-blue eyes of hers sought out and recognized
in a hard flash the majestic peasant girl who now haunted Church Street at
shopping hours as the woman who had married her son. Ernie's mother was
in fact one of those who make it a point of duty, as well as a pleasure, never
to forgive. She had neither pardoned Ruth for daring to be her daughter-in-
law, nor forgotten her sin. And both offences were immeasurably
accentuated by Ruth's crime in establishing herself in the Moot.

"Settlin on my door-step," she said. "Brassy slut!"

"Just like her," her second son answered; and added with stealthy malice,
"Dad visits em. I seen im."

Alf, for all his acuteness, had never learned the simple lesson that his
mother would not tolerate the slightest criticism of her old man.

"And why shouldn't he?" she asked sharply. "Isn't Ern his own flesh-and-
blood? He's got a heart, dad has, if some as ought to ave aven't."

"No reason at all," answered Alf, looking down his nose. "Why shouldn't
he be thick in with her—and with her child for the matter of that? I see him
walkin in the Moot the other day near the Quaker meeting-house hand-in-
hand with little Alice. Pretty as a Bible picture it struck me."

Anne Caspar stared stonily.

"Who's little Alice?" she asked.

"Her love-child," answered Alf. "Like your grand-child as you might say
—only illegit o course."

His mother breathed heavily.

"Is Ern the father?" she asked at last in a sour flat voice.

"Not him!" jeered Alf. "She's a rich man's cast-off, Ruth is. Made it
worth Ern's while. That's where it was. See, cash is cash in this world."

Anne laid back her ears as she rummaged among her memories,

"I thought you told me," she began slowly, "as Ern—"

"Never!" cried Alf. "Ern had nothin to do with it, who-ever had."

"Who was the father?" asked Anne, not above a little feminine curiosity.

Alf shook his head cunningly.

"Ah," he said, "now you're askin!" and added after a moment's pause:—

"She was all-the-world's wench one time o day, your daughter was.
That's all I can tell you."

Anne stirred a saucepan thoughtfully. She did not believe Alf: for she
knew that Ernie was far too much his father's son to be bought

disgracefully, and she remembered suddenly a suggestion that Mr. Pigott
had lately thrown out to the effect that Alf himself had not been altogether
proof against the seductions of this seductive young woman his brother had
won. It struck her now that there might be something in the story after all,
unlikely as it seemed: for she remarked that Alf always pursued his sister-
in-law with the covert rancour and vindictiveness of the mean spirit which
has met defeat.

But however doubtful she might be in her own heart of Alf's tale, the
essential facts about Ruth were not in dispute: her daughter-in-law was the
mother of an illegitimate child and had settled down with that child not a
quarter of a mile away. Everybody knew the story, especially of course the
neighbours she would least wish to know it—the Archdeacon and Lady
Augusta in the Rectory across the way. For over thirty years Anne had lived
in her solid little blue-slated house, the ampelopsis running over its good
red face, the tobacco plants sweet on summer evenings in the border round
the neat and tidy lawn, holding her nose high, too high her enemies averred,
and priding herself above all women on her respectability—and now!

No wonder Ernie, bringing home his bride and his disgrace, infuriated
her.

"Shamin me afore em all!" she muttered time and again with sullen
wrath to the pots and pans she banged about on the range.

She never saw the offender now except on Sundays when he came up to
visit his father, which he did as regularly as in the days before his marriage.
The ritual of these visits was always the same. Ernie would come in at the
front-door; she would give him a surly nod from the kitchen; he would say
quietly—"Hullo, mum!" and turn off into the study where his dad was
awaiting him.

The two, Anne remarked with acrimony, grew always nearer and—what
annoyed her most—talked always less. Edward Caspar was an old man
now, in body if not in years; and on the occasion of Ernie's visits father and
son rarely strolled out to take the sun on the hill at the back or lounge in the
elusive shade of Paradise as in former days. They were content instead to sit
together in the austere little study looking out on to the trees of the Rectory,

Lely's famous Cavalier, the first Lord Ravensrood, glancing down from the
otherwise bare walls with wistful yet ironic eyes on his two remote
descendants enjoying each other beneath in a suspicious communion of
silence.

Thus Anne always found the pair when she brought them their tea; and
the mysterious intimacy between the two was all the more marked because
of her husband's almost comical unawareness of his second son. The
genuine resentment Anne experienced in the matter of Edward's unvarying
attitude towards his two sons she visited, regardless of justice, upon Alf.

"Might not be a son to your father the way you go on!" she said
censoriously.

"And what about him," cried Alf, not without reason. "Might not be a
father to your son, seems to me."

It would, however, have taken more than Anne Caspar's passionate
indignation at the action of Ernie and his bride in establishing themselves in
the Moot to cloud the lives of the newly-married couple. Ern was now
twenty-eight, and Ruth four years younger. They had the present, which
they enjoyed; they did not worry about the future; and the past inevitably
buries itself in time.

"We're young yet, as Mr. Trupp says," remarked Ernie. "We've got it all
afore us. Life's not so bad for all they say. I got you: and you got me; and
the rest don't matter."

They were lying on Beau-nez in the dusk above Cow Gap, listening to
the long-drawn swish of the sea, going and coming with the tranquil rhythm
that soothes the spirit of man, restless in Time, with rumours of forgotten
Eternity.

"And we both got little Alice," murmured Ruth, eyes resting on his with
affectionate confidence, sure of his love for her and the child that was not
his.

"Keep me cosy, Ern," whispered the luxurious creature with a delicious
mixture of entreaty and authority snuggling up against him. She was lying,
her face lifted flower-wise to the moon that hung above her bubble-like and
benignant, her eyes closed, her lips tilted to tempt the pollen-bearing bee,
while about them the lovely laughter brimmed and dimpled.

"I'll keep you cosy, my beauty," replied Ernie, with the busy seriousness
of the male intent on love. "I'll give you plenty beside little Alice to think of
afore I'm done with you. I'll learn you. Don't you worrit. I know what you
want."

"What then?" asked Ruth, deep and satisfied.

"Why, basketfuls o babies—armfuls of em, like cowslips till you're fairly
smothered, and spill em over the field because you can't hold em all."

Perhaps he was right. Certainly after the battle and conflict of the last
two years Ruth felt spiritually lazy. She browsed and drowsed, content that
Ernie for the time being should master her. It was good for him, too, she
saw, so long as he would do it, correcting his natural tendency to slackness;
and she had little doubt that she could assume authority at will in the future,
should it prove necessary. Meanwhile that spirit of adventure which lurked
in her; distinguished her from her class; and had already once led her into
danger and catastrophe, was lulled to sleep for the moment.

The hill at the back of Cow Gap is steep, and towards the crest the gorse
grows thick and very high. In the heart of this covert, dense enough to
satisfy the most jealous lovers, Ernie had made a safe retreat. He had cut
away the resisting gorse with a bill-hook, rooted up the stumps, stripped the
turf and made a sleeping-place of sand brought up from the shore. In a
rabbit-hole hard by, he hid a spirit-lamp and sundry stores of tea and
biscuits; while Mrs. Trupp routed out from her coach-house an immense old
carriage umbrella dating from Pole days which, when unfurled, served to
turn a shower.

Ruth and Ernie called their hiding-place the Ambush; for in it they could
harbour, seeing all things, yet themselves unseen. And there, through that
brilliant autumn, they would pass their week-ends, watching Under-cliff, as

the hostel was called, rising up out of the saucer of the coombe beneath
them. They would leave little Alice with a neighbour, and lock up the
cottage in the Moot, which Ruth was swiftly transfiguring into a home. On
Saturday evenings, after a hard afternoon's work, stripping, papering,
painting, making the old new and the dull bright, the pair would walk up
Church Street, turn to the left at Billing's Corner, and dropping down Love
Lane by the Rectory, cross the golf links and mount the hill by the rabbit-
walk that leads above Paradise, past the dew-pond, on to the broad-strewn
back of Beau-nez. Up there, surrounded by the dimming waters and
billowing land, they would wait till the Head was deserted by all save a
tethered goat and watchful coastguard; till in the solitude and silence the
stars whispered, and the darkening turf, grateful for the falling dew,
responded sweetly to their pressing feet. Then the young couple, taking
hands, would leave the crest and find their way with beating hearts along
the track that led through the covert to their couching-place, where none
would disturb them except maybe a hunting stoat; and only the moon would
peep at them under the shaggy eyebrow of the gorse as they rejoiced in their
youth, their love, their life.

And then at dawn when the sun glanced warily over the brim of the sea
and none was yet astir save the kestrel hovering in the wind; and the pair of
badgers—who with the amazing tenacity of their kind still tenanted the
burrows of their ancestors within a quarter of a mile of the tents and
tabernacles of man—rooted and sported clumsily on the dewy hillside
beneath; they would rise and slip bare-foot down the hill, past the hostel, on
to the deserted beach, there to become one with the living waters, misty and
lapping, as at night they had entered into communion with earth and sky
and the little creaking creatures of the dark.

"This is life," Ernie said on one such Sabbath dawn, sinking into the
waters with deep content. "Wouldn't old dad just love this?"

"If it were like this all the time!" Ruth answered a thought wistfully as
she floated with paddling hands, sea and sky, as it was in the beginning,
enveloping her. "Like music in church. Just the peace that passeth
understanding, as my Miss Caryll'd say."

"Ah," said Ernie, speaking with the profound sagacity that not seldom
marks the words of the foolish. "Might be bad for us. If there was nothing
to fight we'd all be like to go to sleep. That's what Mr. Trupp says."

"Some of us might," said Ruth, the girl slyly peeping forth from her
covering womanhood.

"Look at Germany!" continued the wise man, surging closer. "Look at
what the Colonel said the other night at the Institute. We're the rabbits; and
Germany's the python, the Colonel says."

"That for Germany!" answered Ruth, splashing the water with the flat of
her hand in the direction of the rising sun.

"And she's all the while a-creepin—a-creepin—closer acrarst the sea,"
said Ernie, edging nearer—"for to SWALLOW US UP!" And with a rush he
engulfed her young body in his arms.

CHAPTER III

THE WATCHMAN ON THE HEAD

On one of the last days of that brilliant October, just before the grey
curtain of rains descended to blot out autumn fields and twinkling waters,
Colonel Lewknor and his wife moved into the hostel.

On that first evening Mrs. Lewknor came down the broad stair-case in
"review order," as she called it, to celebrate the consummation of the first
stage of her project, and found her husband standing at the sea-ward
window of the hall, a Mestophelian figure, holding back the curtain and
peeping out. Quietly she came and stood beside him, about her shoulders
the scarlet cape a Rajput Princess had given her after Lord Curzon's durbar.

The house, which was the solitary building in the great coombe, stood
back some hundred yards from the cliff along which the coast-guard's path
to Beau-nez showed up white-dotted in the darkness. The Colonel was
staring out over the misty and muffled waters, mumbling to himself, as was
his way.

"We shall get a nice view from here, anyway," he said with his satyr-like
chuckle.

She laid her hand upon his shoulder.

"Of what?" she asked.

"The landing," he replied.

She rippled off into a delicious titter. After thirty years of married life her
Jocko was still for Rachel Lewknor the most entertaining of men.

"You and Mr. Trupp!" she said. "A pair of you!" For the two men had
drawn singularly close since the Colonel on retirement had established
himself in Meads.

The old soldier in truth came as something of a revelation to the great
surgeon, who delighted in the other's philosophical mind, his freedom from
the conventional limitations and prejudices of the officer-caste, his wide
reading and ironical humour.

On his evening ride one day about this time Mr. Trupp and Bess came
upon the Colonel halted at the flag-staff on the top of the Head, and gazing
out over the wide-spread waters with solemn eyes, as though watching for a
tidal wave to sweep up out of the East and overwhelm his country. Mr.
Trupp knew that the old soldier was often at that spot in that attitude at that
hour, a sentinel on guard at the uttermost end of the uttermost peninsula that
jutted out into the Channel; and he knew why.

"Well, is it coming?" the doctor growled, half serious, half chaffing.

The Colonel, standing with his hat off, his fine forehead and cadaverous
face thrusting up into the blue, answered with quiet conviction.

"It's coming all right."

"It's been coming all my time," answered the other sardonically. "If it
don't come soon I shall miss it. In the seventies it was Russia. Any fool,
who wasn't a criminal or a traitor or both, could see that a clash was
inevitable. Two great races expanding at incredible speed in Asia, etc., etc.
Then in the nineties it was France. Any man in his right mind could see it. It
was mathematically demonstrable. Two great races expanding in Africa,
etc., etc.... And now it's Germany..." He coughed and ended gruffly, "Well,
you may be right this time."

"We were right about William the Conqueror," said the Colonel urbanely.
"He came."

"But that was some time ago, my daughter tells me," replied Mr. Trupp.
"And you've been wrong every time since."

Bess giggled; and the Colonel adjusted his field-glasses with delicate
precision.

"If you say it's going to rain and keep on saying it long enough you'll
probably prove right in the end," he remarked. "It's dogged as does it in the
realm of speculation as elsewhere in my experience."

The old surgeon and his daughter turned their backs on the flagstaff and
the solitary watchman beside it, and jogged towards the sunset red-strewn
behind the white bluff of the Seven Sisters Newhaven-way.

Two figures topped the brow of Warren Hill in front and came swiftly
over the short turf towards them. It was Saturday: Ruth and Ernie were on
their way to their secret covert above Cow Gap as usual.

"About your last week-end up here before the weather breaks, I should
say," chaffed the old surgeon as he passed them.

Ernie laughed a little nervously.

"Yes, sir. Just what I were a-sayin to Ruth," he answered. He had thought
his secret known to none.

"Well, I hope the police won't catch you," remarked the other with a grin
as he rode on.

"Never!—not unless someone was to give us away, sir!" said Ruth
demurely, as she looked across the sea under lowered brows.

Bess called back reassuringly over her shoulder:

"You're all right, Ruth. I'll square Mr. Trupp."

The riders struck Duke's Drive and dropped down into Meads.

"How happy Ernie looks now!" said Bess. "It's delightful to see him."

"Yes," replied her father—"too happy. He's going to sleep again—just
what I told you. And when he's well away in the land of dreams IT'll pounce
on him once more."

That evening over his coffee Mr. Trupp returned to the subject, which
was a favourite with him.

"I always knew how it would be," he said with gloomy complacency.

"Of course," answered Mrs. Trupp, glancing mischievously at Bess.

"Makes him too comfortable," the wise man continued. "Fatal mistake.
What he wants is an occasional flick with the whip to keep him up to the
mark. We all do."

It was not, indeed, in Ruth's nature to use the whip or inspire the fear
which few of us as yet are able to do without. And at present she did not
bother much. For at first her beauty and spiritual power were quite enough
to hold Ernie. He found in her the comfort and the stay the tree finds in the
earth it is rooted in. She was the element in which he lived and moved and

had his being. She satisfied his body and his spirit as the sea satisfies the
fish which dwells in it. She steadied him and that was what he needed.

The marriage, indeed, proved as successful as are most. That is to say it
was not a failure, in that both the contracting parties were on the whole the
happier for it. Certainly Ern was: for there was no doubt that he was in love
with Ruth, nor that his love was real and enduring.

Ruth on her side was fond of Ern, and grateful to him, if only because of
little Alice; although her feeling was more that of the mother for the child
than of the woman for her mate. She was full of pity for him and
occasionally unuttered resentment. That was inevitable because Ern was
weak. She had continually to prop him up, though she would rather have let
him do the propping. And perhaps for her own growth it was good that she
must give support rather than receive it.

In a way she was not the ideal wife for Ern: her strength was her
weakness. She appeared almost too big of soul and tranquil of spirit. But
there was another side of her, largely undeveloped, that had as yet only
revealed itself in gleams, or rather, to be exact, in one lurid flash of
lightning which had thrown her firmament into ghastly and twittering relief.
Her quiet was the hushed and crouching quiet of the young lilac in winter,
lying secretly in wait for the touch of April sun, to leap forth from its covert
in an amazing ecstasy of colour, fragrance, loveliness and power.

For the time being Ruth was glad to lie up, as a tigress in whelp, after
long hunting, is content to harbour in the green darkness, drinking in
draughts of refreshing through sleep, while her mate prowls out at dusk to
find meat. But that would not last for ever. Her life must be full and
brimming over or her insatiable vitality and that all-devouring spirit of hers,
reaching out like a creeper to embrace the world, might find outlet in
mischief, innocent enough in the intention, and yet, as experience had
already proved, catastrophic in its consequences.

In her secret deeps, indeed, Ruth was one to whom danger was the
breath of life, although she was still unaware of it: an explorer and pioneer,
gay and gallant, sailing her skiff over virgin oceans, reckless of the sunken
reefs that might at any moment rip the bottom out of her frail craft. The

outward sedateness of the Sussex peasant was liable at any moment to
sudden overthrow, as some chance spark caused the southern blood in her
veins to leap and frolic into flame; and that Castilian hidalgo, her remote
ancestor, who lurked behind the arras of the centuries, called her away from
the timid herd to some dear and desperate enterprise of romance.

Mrs. Trupp alone was aware of this buccaneer quality hidden in the
young woman's heart and undiscovered of the world. Ruth's Miss Caryll
had told her friend of it long ago when the girl was in her service at the
Dower-house, Aldwoldston.

"It's the Spaniard in her," Miss Caryll had said.

And when at the time of her distress Ruth had told her story to the wife
of the great surgeon who had succoured her, Mrs. Trupp, keen-eyed for all
her gentleness, had more than once detected the flash of a sword in the
murk of the tragedy.

The girl had dared—and been defeated. She would dare again—until she
found her conqueror: thus Mrs. Trupp envisaged the position.

Was Ernie that man?

CHAPTER IV

ALF

Then a child lifted its tiny sail on the far horizon. Its rippling approach
across the flood-tides absorbed Ruth and helped Ernie: for he had in him
much of his father's mysticism, and was one of those men who go through
life rubbing their eyes as the angels start up from the dusty road, and they
see miracles on every side where others only find the prosaic permutations
and combinations of mud. And this particular miracle, taking place so

deliberately beneath his roof, a miracle of which he was the unconscious
agent, inspired and awed him.

"Makes you sweat to think of it," he said to a mate in the yard.

"By then you've had half-a-dozen and got to keep em, you'll sweat less,"
retorted his friend, who had been married several years.

Mr. Trupp looked after Ruth.

Great man as he was now, he still attended faithfully those humble
families who had supported him when first he had established himself in
Old Town thirty years before, young, unknown, his presence fiercely
resented by the older practitioners.

When Ruth's time came, Ernie sat in the kitchen, shaken to the soul, and
listening to the feet in the room above.

It was a dirty night, howling, dark and slashed with rain. Outside in the
little dim street that ran below the Kneb on which loomed the shadowy bulk
of the parish-church, solid against the cloud-drift, stood the doctor's car.

Once Ernie went to the rain-sluiced window and saw Alf with his collar
turned up crouching behind the wheel.

Ernie went out into the flapping night.

"Ere, Alf!" he said hoarsely. "We can't go on like this. Tain't in nature.
After all, we're brothers."

The two had not spoken since the one had possessed the woman the
other had desired.

Alf now showed himself curiously complacent.

"I am a Christian all right," he confided to his brother; and added with
the naïve self-satisfaction of the megalomaniac, as he shook hands: "I wish
there was more like me, I do reelly."

"Come in, then," said Ern, who was not listening. "I can't abear to see
you out here such a night as this and all."

Alf came in.

The two brothers sat over the fire in the kitchen, Alf uplifted, his gaitered
legs crossed. He looked about him brightly with that curious proprietory air
of his.

"You've a decent little crib here, Ern, I see," he said.

"None so bad," Ernie answered briefly.

"Done it up nice too," the other continued. "Did your landlord do that
now?"

"No; me and Ruth atween us."

"Ah, he'll raise your rent against you."

"Like em," said Ern. "They're all the same."

Somebody moved overhead.

Ern, stirred to his deeps, rose and stood, leaning his forehead on the
mantel-piece, his ears aloft.

"This is a bad job, Ern," said Alf—"a shockin bad job."

"It's killin me," Ern answered with the delicious egoism of the male at
such moments.

There was a lengthy silence. Then Alf spoke again—casually this time.

"She never said nothin to you about no letter, did she?"

"It's burned," replied Ernie curtly.

Alf glanced at his brother sharply. Then, satisfied that the other was in
fact telling the truth, he resumed his study of the fire.

"Not as there was anythink in it there shouldn't have been," he said
complacently. "You can ask anyone." He was silent for a time. Then he
continued confidentially, leaning forward a little—"When you see her tell
her I'm safe. May be that'll ease her a bit."

Ernie came to himself and glowered.

"What ye mean?" he asked.

Alf cocked his chin, knowing and mysteriously.

"Ah," he said. "You just tell her what I tell you—Alf won't let on; Alf's
safe. Just that. You'll see."

There was a stir and a movement in the room above: then the howl of a
woman in travail.

Ern was panting. Silence succeeded the storm. Then a tiny miaowing
from the room above came down to them.

Alf started to his feet.

"What's that?" he cried.

"My child," answered Ernie deeply, lifting a blind face to the ceiling.

Alf was afraid of many things; but most of all he feared children, and
was brutal to them consequently, less from cruelty, as the unimaginative
conceived, than in self-defence. And the younger the child the more he
feared it. The presence in the house of this tiny creature, emerging suddenly
into the world from the darkness of the Beyond with its mute and
mysterious message, terrified him.

"Here! I'm off!" he said. "This ain't the place for me," and he left the
house precipitately.

Mrs. Trupp of course went to visit the young mother. Ruth in bed,
nursing her babe, met her with a smile that was radiant yet wistful.

"It's that different to last time," she said, and nodded at little Alice
playing with her beads at the foot of the bed. "See, she'd no one—only her
mother ... and you ... and Mr. Trupp. They were all against her—poor lamb!
—as if it was fault of her'n." She gasped, choking back a sob.—"This'n's got
em all on her side."

"That's all over now, Ruth," said Mrs. Trupp gently.

"I pray so, with all my heart I do," answered Ruth. "You never knaw.
Seems to me some things are never over—not in this world anyways."

She blinked back tears, drew her hand across her eyes, and flashed up
bravely.

"Silly, ain't it?" she laughed. "Only times it all come back so—what we
went through, she and me. And not through any fault of mine—only
foolishness like."

Ruth was one of those women who are a standing vindication of our
civilisation and a challenge to all who indict it. She was up and about in an
incredibly short time, the firmer in body and soul for her adventure.

One morning Alf came round quietly to see her. She was at the wash-tub,
busy and bare-armed; and met him with eyes that were neither fearful nor
defiant.

"I'm not a-goin to hurt you, Ruth," he began caressingly, with a
characteristic lift of his chin. "I only come to say it's all right. You got
nothink against me now and I'll forget all I know about you. A bargain's a
bargain. And now you've done your bit I'll do mine."

The announcement, so generous in its intention, did not seem to make
the expected impression.

"I am a gentleman," continued Alf, leaning against the door-post.
"Always ave been. It's in me blood, see? Can't help meself like even if I was
to wish to." He started off on a favourite theme of his. "Lord Ravensrood—
him that made that speech on the Territorials the other night in the House of
Lords, he's my second cousin. I daresay if enough was to die I'd be Lord
Ravensrood meself. Often whiles I remember that. I'm not like the rest of
them. I got blue blood running through me veins, as Reverend Spink says.
You can tell that by the look of me. I'm not the one to take advantage."

Ruth, up to her elbows in soap-suds, lifted her face.

"I'm not afraid o you, Alf," she said quite simply. "Now I got my Ern."

The announcement annoyed Alf. He rolled his head resentfully.

"No one as does right has anythink to fear from me," he said harshly.
"It's only wrong-doers I'm a terror to. Don't you believe what they tell you.
So long as you keep yourself accordin and don't interfere with nobody,
nobody won't interfere with you, my gurl."

Ruth mocked him daintily.

"I'm not your girl," she said, soaping her beautifully moulded arms. "I'm
Ern's girl, and proud of it." Her lovely eyes engaged his, teasing and
tempting. "That's our room above—his and mine. It's cosy."

"Ah," said Alf, smouldering. "I'd like to see it."

"You can't do that," answered Ruth gravely. "Besides, there's nothing to
see only the double-bed Mrs. Trupp gave us and the curtains to close it at
night and that, so that no one shan't peep at what they should'nt."

The touch of southern blood, wild and adventurous, which revealed itself
in her swarthy colouring and black hair, stung her on to darings demure as
they were provocative. Alf, sour of eye, changed the subject.

"Yes, it's a nice little bit of a crib," he said, glancing round. "What might
be your rent?"

"More'n it ought to be," answered Ruth.

"That's a pity," said Alf. "What's Ern's money now?"

"I shan't tell you."

Alf thrust his huge head forward with an evil grin.

"I'll tell you," he said. "It's twenty-four, and that's the limit. Pigott won't
raise him no more. I know Pigott." He gloated over his victim. "Yes, old
Ern makes in the week what I'd make in a day if I was to do nothink only
loll against the wall with me mouth open to catch the interest on me money
that'd roll into it. And I'm makin all the time: for God's give me brains and
I'm usin em. I'm not a-going to drive for somebody else all my life. I'm the
comin man in this town—you ask my bankers. There's plenty doin you don't
know nothin of, and more to come. And I'm at the back of it!—I'm the man
what makes things move—that's what I am!" He swelled like a little bull-
frog. "I'm a gentleman—that's Alf." He shot his face forward and wagged a
finger at her. "And that's just the difference between Ern and me. I'm in the
position to live on me own money and never do a hand's turn for it: while
Ern has to sweat for his handful of coppers. And then it ain't enough to keep
his wife from the wash-tub. I'd like to see my wife at that!—Now then!" He
folded his arms and struck an attitude.

Ruth soused and wrung and rinsed quite unmoved.

"That aren't the only difference, Alf," she said soothingly. "See, Ern's got
me. That makes up to him a lot, he says. He says he don't care nothing so
long as he's got me to issalf, he says.... Strawberries and cream and plenty
of em, he calls me when he's got the curtains draw'd up there, and me a-
settin on his knee."

Alf retreated, burning and baffled. She came to the door drying her arms,
and pursued her victim with eyes in which the lightning played with
laughter; as fastidious and dainty in her cruelty as a cat sporting with a
mouse.

A little way down the street he paused and turned. Then he came back a
pace or two stealthily. His face was mottled and he was tilting his chin,
mysterious and confidential.

"Never hear e'er a word from the Captain?" he asked, in a hushed voice.

Ruth flashed a terrible white and her bosom surged.

"I do times," continued the tormentor, and bustled on his way with a
malignant chuckle.

CHAPTER V

THE CREEPING DEATH

One evening at the club, Mr. Trupp asked the Colonel what had
happened to Captain Royal.

"He went through the Staff College, and now he's at the War Office, I
believe," the other answered curtly.

"Ever hear from him?" asked Mr. Trupp, warily.

"No," said the Colonel. "He's not a friend of mine." And to save himself
and an old brother-officer for whom he had neither liking nor respect, he
changed the conversation to the theme that haunted him.

Mr. Trupp might chaff the Colonel about his idée fixe, but he, too, like
most men of his class, had the fear of Germany constantly before his eyes
and liked nothing better than to discuss the familiar topic with his friend
over a cigar.

"Well, how are we getting on?" he asked encouragingly.

"Not so bad," the Colonel answered through the smoke. "Haldane's sent
for Haig from India."

"Who's Haig?" puffed the other.

"Haig's a soldier who was at Oxford," the Colonel answered. "You didn't
know there was such a variety, did you?"

"Never mind about Oxford," grunted the great surgeon. "Oxford turns
out as many asses as any other institution so far as I can see. Does he know
his job? That's the point."

"As well as you can expect a soldier to know it," replied the other, still in
the ironic vein. "Sound but slow's his reputation. He and Haldane are the
strongest combination there's been at the War Office in my time." He added
more seriously—"They ought to get a move on between 'em, if anybody
can."

"In time?" asked Mr. Trupp.

The Colonel, in spite of the recurrent waves of despair, which inundated
him, was at heart an unrepentant optimist.

"I don't see why not," he said. "Bobs says Germany can't strike till the
Kiel Canal's open for battleships. That won't be till 1912 or so."

The old doctor moved into the card-room with a cough.

"Gives you time to get on with your job, too, Colonel," he said. "I wish
you well. Good-night."

The Colonel was retired now; but his brain was as active as ever, his
heart as big, if his body was no longer so sure an instrument as it once had
been. And Lord Roberts, when he asked his old comrade in arms to
undertake work which he did not hesitate to describe as vital to the Empire,
knew that the man to whom he was appealing possessed in excelsis the
quality which has always made the British Army the nursery of spirits who
put the good of the Service before their own advancement. The little old

hero, like all great soldiers, had his favourite regiments, the result of
association and experience; and it was well known that the Hammer-men
stood at the top of the list. Fifty years before the date of this story they had
sweated with him on the Ridge before Delhi; under his eyes had stormed
the Kashmir Gate; with him had watched Nicholson die. Twenty years later
they had gone up the Kurrum with the young Major-General, and made
with him the famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Another twenty years
and they were making the pace for the old Field Marshal in the great trek
from Paardeberg to Bloemfontein. He knew most of the officers, some of
them intimately. And on hearing that Jocko Lewknor had settled down at
Beachbourne wrote at once and asked him to become Secretary of the local
branch of the National Service League, which existed to establish in
England universal military training on the lines of Switzerland's Militia.

The Colonel made one of his rare trips to London and lunched at the Rag
with the leader who had been his hero ever since as a lad he had gone up the
Peiwar Khotal with the First Hammer-men at the order of Bahadur Bobs.

The Field Marshal opened the Colonel's eyes to the danger threatening
the Empire.

"The one thing in our favour is this," he said, as they parted at the hall-
door. "We've yet time."

The Colonel, inspired with new life, returned to Beachbourne and told
his wife. She listened with vivid interest.

"You've got your work cut out, my Jocko," she said. "And I shan't be
able to help you much."

"No," replied the Colonel. "You must stick to the hostel. I'll plough my
own furrow."

Forthwith he set to work with the quiet tenacity peculiar to him. From
the start he made surprising headway, perhaps because he was so unlike the
orthodox product of the barrack-square; and like his leader he eschewed the
party politics he had always loathed.

When he took up the work of the League he found it one of the many
non-party organisations, run solely by the Conservatives quartered in Meads
and Old Town, because, to do them justice, nobody else would lend a hand.
Liberalism, camped in mid-town about Terminus Road, was sullenly
suspicious; Labour, at the East-end, openly hostile. The opposition of
Liberalism, the Colonel soon discovered, centred round the leader of
Nonconformity in the town, Mr. Geddes, the powerful Presbyterian minister
at St. Andrew's; the resistance of Labour, inchoate as yet and ineffective as
the Labour Party from which it sprang, was far more difficult to tackle as
being more vague and imponderable.

In those days, always with the same end in view, the Colonel spent much
time in the East-end, winding his way into the heart of Industrial
Democracy. He sloughed some old prejudices and learnt some new truths,
especially the one most difficult for a man of his age and tradition to imbibe
—that he knew almost nothing of modern England. Often on Sundays he
would walk across from Meads to Sea-gate and spend his afternoon
wandering in the Recreation Ground, gathering impressions on the day that
Labour tries to become articulate.

On one such Sunday afternoon he came on a large old gentleman in gold
spectacles, fair linen, and roomy tailcoat, meandering on the edge of a dirty
and tattered crowd who were eddying about a platform. The old gentleman
seemed strangely out of place and delightfully unconscious of it; wandering
about, large, benevolent and undisturbed, like a moon in a stormy sky.

"Well, Mr. Caspar," said the Colonel quietly. "What do you make of it
all?"

The large soft man turned his mild gaze of a cow in calf on the lean tall
one at his side. It was clear he had no notion who the speaker was; or that
they had been at Trinity together forty years before.

"To me it's extraordinarily inspiring," he said with an earnestness that
was almost ridiculous. "I feel the surge of the spirit beating behind the bars
down here as I do nowhere else.... It fills me with an immense hope."

The Colonel, standing by the other like a stick beside a sack, sighed.

"They fill me with a fathomless despair," he said gently. "One wants to
help them, but they won't let you."

The other shook a slow head.

"I don't look at it like that," he replied. "I go to them for help."

The Colonel made a little moue.

"D'you get it?" he asked

"I do," Mr. Caspar replied with startling conviction.

The Colonel moved sorrowfully upon his way. He was becoming a man
of one idea—Germany....

A few nights later, after supper, he strolled up Beau-nez under a harvest-
moon spreading silvery wings moth-like over earth and sea. He was full of
his own thoughts, and and for once heavy, almost down-hearted, as he took
up his familiar post of vigil beside the flagstaff on the Head and looked out
over the shining waters. The Liberals were moving at last, it seemed. The
great cry for Dreadnoughts, more Dreadnoughts,

We want eight!
We won't wait!

had gone up to the ears of Government from millions of middle-class
homes; but the Working Man still slept.

Would nothing rouse him to the Terror that stalked by night across those
quiet waters? ... The Working Man, who would have to bear the brunt of it
when the trouble came.... The Working Man...?

The Head was deserted save for the familiar goat tethered outside the
coast-guard station. The moon beamed down benignantly on the silver-
sabled land, broad-bosomed about him, and the waters stirring far beneath
him with a rustle like wind in corn. Then he heard a movement at his back,
and turned to see behind him, shabby, collarless, sheepish, the very Working
Man of whom he had been thinking.

The Colonel regarded the mystic figure, gigantic in the moonlight, a type
rather than an individual, with an interest that was half compassionate and
half satirical.

Yes. That was the feller! That was the chap who would take it in the
neck! That man with the silly smile—God help him!

"Come to look for it?" he said to the shadow, half to himself—"wiser
than your kind?"

"Look for what, sir?"

"The Creeping Death that's stealing across the sea to swallow you and
yours."

The shadow sidled towards him.

"Is that you, sir?" a voice said. "I thought it were."

The Colonel emerged from his dream.

"What, Caspar!" he replied. "What are you doing up here at this time of
night?"

"Just come up for a look round before turning in, me and my wife, sir,"
the other answered. "Ruth," he called, "it's the Colonel."

A young woman with an orange scarf about her hair issued from the
shadow of the coast-guard station and came forward slowly.

"I've heard a lot about you from Ern, sir," she said in a deep voice that
hummed like a top in the silvery silence. "When you commanded his
battalion in India and all."

The Colonel, standing in the dusk, listened with a deep content as to
familiar music, the player unseen; and was aware that his senses were
stirred by a beauty felt rather than seen...... Then he dropped down the hill
to the hostel twinkling solitary in the coombe beneath.

"Your friend Caspar's married," he told his wife on joining her in the
loggia. The little lady scoffed.

"Married!" she cried. "He's been married nearly a year. They spent their
honeymoon on the hill at the back last autumn. I could see them from my
room."

"Why ever didn't you tell me?" asked the Colonel. "I'd have run em in
for vagrancy."

"No, you wouldn't," answered Mrs. Lewknor.

"Why not?"

"Because, my Jocko, she's a peasant Madonna. You couldn't stand up
against her. No man could."

"A powerful great creature from what I could see of her," the Colonel
admitted. "A bit of a handful for Master Ernie, I should guess."

Mrs. Lewknor's fine face became firm. She thought she scented a
challenge in the words and dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in
them.

"Ernie'll hold her," she said. "He could hold any woman. He's a
gentleman like his father before him."

He reached a long arm across to her as he sat and raised her fingers to
his lips.

Years ago a bird had flashed across the vision of his wife, coming and
going, in and out of the darkness, like the sparrow of the Saxon tale; but this
had been no sparrow, rather a bird of Paradise. The Colonel knew that; and
he knew that the fowler who had loosed the jewel-like bird was that baggy
old gentleman who lived across the golf links in the little house that
overlooked the Rectory. He knew and understood: for years ago the same
bird had flashed with radiant wings across the chamber of his life too,
swiftly coming, swiftly going.

CHAPTER VI

THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET

If the Colonel in his missionary efforts for the National Service League
made little impression on the masses in the East-end, he was astonishingly
successful with such labour as existed in Old Town; which in political
consciousness lagged fifty years behind its tumultuous neighbour on the
edge of the Levels, and retained far into this century much of the
atmosphere of a country village. There the Church was still a power
politically, and the workers disorganised. The Brewery in the Moot and the
Southdown Transport Company were the sole employers of labour in the
bulk; and Mr. Pigott the only stubborn opponent of the programme of the
League.

Archdeacon Willcocks backed the Colonel with whole-hearted ferocity,
and lent him the services of the Reverend Spink, who, flattered at working
with a Colonel D.S.O., showed himself keen and capable, and proposed to
run the Old Town branch of the League in conjunction with the Church of
England's Men's Society.

"I've got a first-rate secretary as a start," he told the Colonel importantly.

"Who's that?"

"Caspar."

"Ernest Caspar!" cried the Colonel. "The old Hammer-man!"

"No, his brother. Twice the man. Alfred—Mr. Trupp's chauffeur."

A few days later, when leaving the curate's lodgings, the Colonel ran up
against Ernie in Church Street.

"Your brother's joined us," he said. "Are you going to?"

Ernie's charming face became sullen at once.

"I would, sir," he said. "Only for that."

"Only for what?"

"Alf."

"You won't join because your brother has!" grinned the Colonel.

Ernie rolled a sheepish head.

"It's my wife, sir," he muttered. "See, he persecutes her somethink
shameful."

Next afternoon the Colonel was crossing Saffrons Croft on his way to
the Manor-house for tea, when a majestic young woman, a baby in her
arms, sauntering under the elms watching the cricket, smiled at him
suddenly.

He stopped, uncertain of her identity.

"I'm Mrs. Caspar, sir," she explained. "We met you the other night on the
Head—Ern and me."

"Oh, I know all about you!" replied the Colonel, glancing at the baby
who lifted to the sky a face like a sleeping rose. "My word!—she's a bonny
un."

"She grows, sir," replied Ruth, cooing and contented. "We gets her all
the air we can. So we come here with the children for a blow of the coolth
most in general Saraday afternoons. More air than in the Moot."

"Where's Caspar?" asked the Colonel.

"Yonder under the ellums, sir, along with a friend. Come about the
classes or something I did hear."

"The class-war?" asked the Colonel grimly.

"No, sir," answered Ruth. "Classes for learning you learning, I allow.
Man from the North, I yeard say. Talks funny—foreign talk I call it."

Just then the Colonel's glance fell on a child, slim as a daisy stalk, and
with the healthy pallor of a wood-anemone, hiding behind Ruth's skirt and
peeping at the stranger with fearless blue eyes that seemed somehow
strangely familiar.

"And what's your name, little Miss Hide-away?" he asked, delighted.

"Little Alice," the child replied, bold and delicate as a robin.

The fact that the child was obviously some four years old while Ernie
had not been married half that time did not occur to the Colonel as strange.
He glanced at the young mother, noble in outline, and in her black and red
beauty of the South so unlike the child.

"She doesn't take after her mother and father," he said, with the reckless
indiscretion of his sex.

Then he saw his mistake. Ruth has run up signals of distress. Ernie, who
had now joined them, as always at his best in an emergency, came quickly
to the rescue.

"Favours her grandmother, sir, I say," he remarked.

"Like my boy," commented the Colonel, recovering himself. "I don't
think anybody'd have taken our Jock for his father's son when he joined us
at Pindi in 1904—eh, Caspar?"

The two old Hammer-men chatted over days in India. Then the Colonel
went on up the hill, the eyes of the child still haunting him.

The Manor-house party were having tea on the lawn, under the
laburnum, looking over the sunk fence on to Saffrons Croft beyond, when
the Colonel joined them. Mrs. Lewknor was already there; and young
Stanley Bessemere, the Conservative candidate for Beachbourne East. He

and Bess were watching a little group of people gathered about a man who
was standing on a bench in Saffrons Croft haranguing.

"Lend me your bird-glasses, Miss Trupp," said her companion eagerly.

He stood up, a fine figure of a man, perfectly tailored,

"Yes," he said. "I thought so. It's my friend."

"Who's that?" asked the Colonel.

"Our bright particular local star of Socialism," the other answered. "The
very latest thing from Ruskin College. I thought he confined himself to the
East-end, but I'm glad to find he gives you Old Towners a turn now and
then, Miss Trupp. And I hope he won't forget you up at Meads, Colonel."

"What's his name?" asked Bess, amused.

"Burt," replied the other. "He comes from the North—and he's welcome
to go back there to-morrow so far as I'm concerned."

"You're from the North yourself, Mr. Bessemere," Mrs. Trupp reminded
him.

"I am," replied the young man, "and proud of it. But for political
purposes, I prefer the South. That's why I'm a candidate for Beachbourne
East."

A few minutes later he took his departure. The Colonel watched him go
with a sardonic grin. Philosopher though he might be, he was not above
certain of the prejudices common to his profession, and possessed in an
almost exaggerated degree the Army view of all politicians as the enemies
of Man at large and of the Services in particular.

Bess was still observing through her glasses the little group about the
man on the bench.

"There's Ruth!" she cried—"and Ernie!"

"Listening to the orator?" asked the Colonel, joining her.

"Not Ruth!" answered Bess with splendid scorn. "No orators for her,
thank you!—She's listening to the baby. Ernie can listen to him."

The Colonel took the glasses and saw Ruth and Ernie detach themselves
from the knot of people and come slowly up the hill making for Borough
Lane.

"That really is a magnificent young woman of Caspar's," he said to his
host.

"She's one in a million," replied the old surgeon.

"William's always been in love with her," said his wife.

"All the men are," added Mrs. Lewknor, with a provocative little nod at
her husband.

"Where did he pick up his pearl?" asked the Colonel. "I love that droning
accent of hers. It's like the music of a rookery."

"She can ca-a-a away with the best of them when she likes," chuckled
Bess. "You should hear her over the baby!"

"An Aldwolston girl," said Mrs. Trupp. "She's Sussex to the core—with
that Spanish strain so many of them have." She added with extreme
deliberation,—"She was at the Hohenzollern for a bit one time o day, as we
say in these parts."

Mrs. Lewknor coloured faintly and looked at her feet. Next to her Jocko
and his Jock the regiment was the most sacred object in her world. But the
harm was done. The secret she had guarded so long even from her husband
was out. The word Hohenzollern had, she saw, unlocked the door of the
mystery for him.

Instantly the Colonel recalled Captain Royal's stay at the hotel on the
Crumbles a few years before ... Ernie Caspar's service there ... the clash of
the two men on the steps of the house where he was now having tea ...

Royal's sudden flight, and the rumours that had reached him of the reasons
for it.

The eyes which had looked at him a few minutes since in Saffrons Croft
from beneath the fair brow of little Alice were the eyes of his old adjutant.

Then Mr. Trupp's voice broke in upon his reverie.

"Ah," said the old surgeon, "I see you know."

"And I'm glad you should," remarked Mrs. Trupp with the almost
vindictive emphasis that at times characterised this so gentle woman.

"Everybody does, mother," Bess interjected quietly...

As the Colonel and his wife walked home across the golf links he turned
to her.

"Did you know that, Rachel?" he inquired.

She looked straight in front of her as she walked.

"I did, my Jocko ... Mrs. Trupp told me."

The Colonel mused.

"What a change!—from Royal to Caspar!" he said.

She glanced up at him.

"You don't understand, Jocko," she said quietly. "Ruth was never Royal's
mistress. She was a maid on the Third Floor at the Hohenzollern when he
was there. He simply raped her and bolted."

The Colonel shrugged.

"Like the cad," he said.

They walked on awhile. Then the Colonel said more to himself than to
his companion,

"I wonder if she's satisfied?"

The little lady at his side made a grimace that suggested—"Is any
woman?"

But all she said was,

"She's a good woman."

"She's come a cropper once," replied the Colonel.

"She was tripped," retorted the other almost tartly. "She didn't fall."

CHAPTER VII

THE MAN FROM THE NORTH

A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, the Colonel was sitting in the
loggia of the hostel looking out over the sea when he saw two men coming
down the shoulder of Beau-nez along the coast-guard path.

The tall man in black with flying coat-tails he recognised at once. It was
Mr. Geddes, the one outstanding minister of the Gospel in Beachbourne: a
scholar, yet in touch with his own times, eloquent and broad, with a more
than local reputation as a Liberal leader. His companion was a sturdy fellow
in a cap, with curly black hair and a merry eye.

The Colonel, who never missed a chance, went out to waylay the pair.
Mr. Geddes introduced his friend—Mr. Burt, who'd come down recently
from Mather and Platt's in the North to act as foreman fitter at Hewson and
Clarke's in the East-end.

The Colonel reached out a bony hand, which the other gripped fiercely.

"I know you're both conspirators," he said with a wary smile. "What
troubles are you hatching for me now?"

Mr. Geddes laughed, and the engineer, surly a little from shyness and
self-conscious as a school-boy, grinned.

"Mr. Burt and I are both keen on education," said the minister. "He's
been telling me of Tawney's tutorial class at Rochdale. We're hatching a
branch of the W.E.A. down here. That's our only conspiracy."

"What's the W.E.A.?" asked the Colonel, always keen.

"It's the Democratic wing of the National Service League," the engineer
answered in broad Lancashire—"Workers' Education Association."

The Colonel nodded.

"He's getting at me!" he said. "I'm always being shot at. Will you both
come in to tea and talk?—I should like you to meet my wife, Burt. She'll
take you on. She's a red-hot Tory and a bonnie fighter."

But Mr. Geddes had a committee, and—"A must get on with the
Revolution," said Burt gravely.

"What Revolution's that?" asked the Colonel.

"The Revolution that begun in 1906—and that's been going on ever
since; and will go on till we're through!" He said the last words with a kind
of ferocity; and then burst into a sudden jovial roar as he saw the humour of
his own ultra-seriousness.

Mrs. Lewknor, who had been watching the interview from the loggia,
called to her husband as he returned to the house.

"Who was that man with Mr. Geddes?" she asked.

"Stanley Bessemere's friend," the Colonel answered. "A red
Revolutionary from Lancasheer—on the bubble; and a capital good fellow
too, I should say."

That evening the Colonel rang up Mr. Geddes to ask about the engineer.

"He's the new type of intellectual artizan," the minister informed him.
"The russet-coated captain who knows what he's fighting for and loves what
he knows. Unless I'm mistaken he's going to play a considerable part in our
East-end politics down here." He gave the other the engineer's address,
adding with characteristic breadth,

"It might be worth your while to follow him up perhaps, Colonel."

Joe Burt lodged in the East-end off Pevensey Road in the heart of the
new and ever-growing industrial quarter of Seagate, which was gradually
transforming a rather suburban little town of villas with a fishing-station
attached into a manufacturing city, oppressed with all the thronging
problems of our century. There the Colonel visited his new friend. Burt was
the first man of his type the old soldier, who had done most of his service in
India, had met. The engineer himself, and even more the room in which he
lived, with its obvious air of culture, was an eye-opener to the Colonel.

There was an old sideboard, beautifully kept, and on it a copper kettle
and spirit lamp; a good carpet, decent curtains. On the walls were Millais's
Knight Errant, Greiffenhagen's Man with a Scythe, and Clausen's Girl at the
Gate. But it was the books on a long deal plank that most amazed the old
soldier; not so much the number of them but the quality. He stood in front
of them and read their titles with grunts.

Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics lolled up against the Webbs'
Industrial Democracy; Bradley's lectures on the tragedies of Shakespeare
hobnobbed with Gilbert Murray's translations from Euripides. Few of the
standard books on Economics and Industrial History, English or American,
were missing. And the work of the modern creators in imaginative
literature, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett were mixed with Alton Locke,
Daniel Deronda, Sybil, and the essays of Samuel Butler and Edward
Carpenter.

"You're not married then?" said the Colonel, throwing a glance round the
well-appointed room.

"Yes, A am though," the engineer answered, his black-brown eyes
twinkling. "A'm married to Democracy. She's ma first loov and like to be
ma last."

"What you doing down South?" asked the Colonel, tossing one leg over
the other as he sat down to smoke.

"Coom to make trouble," replied the other.

"Good for you!" said the Colonel. "Hotting things up for our friend Stan.
Well, he wants it. All the politicians do."

His first visit to Seagate Lane was by no means his last: for the
engineer's courage, his integrity, his aggressive tactics, delighted and
amused the scholarly old soldier; but when he came to tackle his man
seriously on the business of the National Service League he found he could
not move him an inch from the position he invariably took up: The Army
would be used by the Government in the only war that matters—the
Industrial war; and therefore the Army must not be strengthened.

"If the Army was used for the only purpose it ought to be used for—
defence—A'd be with you. So'd the boolk of the workers. But it's not. They
use it to croosh strikes!" And he brought his fist down on the table with a
characteristic thump. "That's to croosh us!—For the strike's our only
weapon, Colonel."

The power, the earnestness, even the savagery he displayed, amazed the
other. Here was a reality, an elemental force of which he had scarcely been
aware. This was Democracy incarnate. And whatever else he might think he
could not but admire the sincerity and strength of it. But he always brought
his opponent back to what was for him the only issue.

"Germany!" he said.

"That's blooff!" replied the other. "They'll get the machine-guns for use
against Germany, and when they've got em they'll use them against us.
That's the capitalists' game.—Then there's the officers."

"What about em?" said the Colonel cheerfully. "They're harmless
enough, poor devils."

"Tories to a man. Coom from the capitalist class."

"What if they do?"

"The Army does what the capitalist officer tells it. And he knows where
his interest lies aw reet."

"Well, of course you know the British officer better than I do, Burt,"
replied the Colonel, nettled for once.

His opponent was grimly pleased to have drawn blood.

"In the next few years if things go as they look like goin we shall see,"
was his comment. "Wait till we get a Labour Government in power!"

The Colonel knocked out his pipe.

"Well, Burt, I'll say this," he remarked. "If we could get half the passion
into our cause you do into yours, we should do."

"We're fighting a reality, Colonel," the other answered. "You're fighting a
shadow, that's the difference."

"I hope to God it may prove so!" said the Colonel, as they shook hands.

The two men thoroughly enjoyed their spars. And the battle was well
matched: for the soldier of the Old Army and the soldier of the New were
both scholars, well-read, logical, and fair-minded.

On one of his visits the Colonel found Ernie Caspar in the engineer's
room standing before the book-shelf, handling the books. Ernie showed
himself a little shame-faced in the presence of his old Commanding Officer.

"How do they compare to your father's, Caspar?" asked the Colonel,
innocently unaware of the other's mauvaise honte and the cause of it.

"Dad's got ne'er a book now, sir," Ernie answered gruffly. "Only just the
Bible, and Wordsworth, and Troward's Lectures. Not as he'd ever anythink
like this—only Carpenter. See, dad's not an economist. More of a
philosopher and poet like."

"I wish they were mine," said the Colonel, turning over Zimmeni's Greek
Commonwealth.

"They're all right if so be you can afford em," answered Ernie shortly,
almost sourly.

"Books are better'n beer, Ernie," said Joe Burt, a thought maliciously;
and added with the little touch of priggishness that is rarely absent from
those who have acquired knowledge comparatively late in life—"They're
the bread of life and source of power."

"Maybe," retorted Ernie with a snort; "but they aren't the equal of wife
and children, I'll lay."

He left the room surlily.

Burt grinned at the Colonel.

"Ern's one o the much-married uns," he said.

"D'you know his wife?" the Colonel asked.

Joe shook his bull-head.

"Nay," he said. "And don't wish to."

"She's a fine woman all the same," replied the Colonel.

"Happen so," the other answered. "All the more reason a should avoid
her. They canna thole me, the women canna. And A don't blame em."

"Why can't they thole you?" asked the Colonel curiously.

"Most Labour leaders rise to power at the expense of their wives," the
other explained. "They go on; but the wives stay where they are—at the
wash-tub. The women see that; and they don't like it. And they're right."

"What's the remedy?"

"There's nobbut one." Joe now not seldom honoured the Colonel by
relapsing into dialect when addressing him. "And that's for the Labour
leader to remain unmarried. They're the priests of Democracy—or should
be."

"You'll never make a Labour leader out of Caspar," said the Colonel
genially. "I've tried to make an N.C.O. of him before now and failed."

"A'm none so sure," Joe said, and added with genuine concern: "He's on
the wobble. Might go up; might go down. Anything might happen to yon
lad now. He's just the age. But he's one o ma best pupils—if he'll nobbut
work."

"Ah," said the Colonel with interest. "So he's joined your class at St.
Andrew's Hall, has he?"

"Yes," replied the other. "Mr. Chislehurst brought him along—the new
curate in Old Town. D'ye know him?"

"He's my cousin," replied the Colonel. "I got him here. He'd been
overworking in Bermondsey—in connection with the Oxford Bermondsey
Mission."

"Oh, he's one of them!" cried the other. "That accounts for it. A know
them. They were at Oxford when A was at Ruskin. They're jannock,—and
so yoong with it. They think they're going to convert the Church to
Christianity!" He chuckled.

"In the course of history," remarked the Colonel, "many Churchmen
have thought that. But the end of it's always been the same."

"What's that?" asked the engineer.

"That the Church has converted them."

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHERUB

The advent of Bobby Chislehurst to Old Town made a considerable
difference to Bessie Trupp. She was not at all in love with him and he only
pleasantly so with her; but as she told her friend the Colonel,

"He's the first curate we've ever had in Old Town you can be like that
with."

"Like that is good," said the Colonel. "Give me my tables. Meet it is I
write it down.—It says nothing and expresses everything."

Now if the clergy in Old Town with the exception of Bess's pet
antipathy, the Reverend Spink, were honest men worthy of respect, as
everybody admitted, they were also old-fashioned; and Bobby Chislehurst
was a new and disturbing element in their midst. Shy and unassuming
though he was, the views of the Cherub, as the Colonel called his cousin,
when they became known, created something of a mild sensation in the
citadel which had been held for Conservatism against all comers by the
Archdeacon and his lady for nearly forty years.

Even Mr. Pigott was shocked.

"He's a Socialist!" he confided to Mr. Trupp at the Bowling Green
Committee.

The old Nonconformist had passed the happiest hours of a militant life in
battle with the Church as represented by his neighbour, the Archdeacon, but

of late it had been borne in upon him with increasing urgency that the time
might come when Church and Chapel would have to join forces and present
a common front against the hosts of Socialism which he feared more than
ever he had done the Tory legions.

But if the Church was going Socialist! ...

And Mr. Chislehurst said it was...

The new curate and Bess Trupp had much in common, especially Boy
Scouts, their youth and the outstanding characteristic of their generation—a
passionate interest and sympathy for their poorer neighbours. Both spent
laborious and happy hours in the Moot, listening a great deal, learning
much, even helping a little. Bess, who had known most of the dwellers in
the hollow under the Kneb all her life, had of course her favourites whom
she commended to the special care of Bobby on his arrival; and first of
these were the young Caspars.

She told him of Edward Caspar, her mother's old friend, scholar,
dreamer, gentleman, with the blood of the Beauregards in his veins, who
had married the daughter of an Ealing tobacconist, and lived in Rectory
Walk; of Anne Caspar, the harsh and devoted tyrant; of the two sons of this
inharmonious couple, and the antagonism between them from childhood; of
Alf's victory and Ernie's enlistment in the Army; his sojourn in India and
return to Old Town some years since; and she gave him a brief outline of
Ruth's history, not mentioning Royal's name but referring once or twice
through set teeth to "that little beast."

"Who's that?" asked the Cherub.

"Ernie's brother," she answered. "Alfred, who drives for dad."

"Not the sidesman?"

"Yes."

Bobby looked surprised.

"Mr. Spink," Bess explained darkly. "He got him there."

Apart from Bess's recommendation, Mr. Chislehurst's contact with Ruth
was soon established through little Alice, who attended Sunday School.
Ruth, moreover, called herself a church-woman, and was sedately proud of
it, though the Church had no apparent influence upon her life, and though
she never attended services.

On the latter point, the Cherub, when he had rooted himself firmly in her
regard, remonstrated.

"See, I ca-a-n't, sir," said Ruth simply.

"Why not?" asked Bobby.

"He's always there," Ruth answered enigmatically.

Bobby was puzzled and she saw it.

"Alf," she explained. "See, he wanted me same as Ernie. Only not to
marry me. Just for his fun like and then throw you over. That's Alf, that is.
There's the difference atween the two brothers." She regarded the young
man before her with the lovely solicitude of the mother initiating a sensitive
son into the cruelties of a world of which she has already had tragic
experience. "Men are like that, sir—some men." She added with tender
delicacy, "Only you wouldn't know it, not yet."

The Cherub might be innocent, but no man has lived and worked in the
back-streets of Bermondsey without learning some strange and ugly truths
about life and human nature.

"He's not worrying you now?" he asked anxiously.

"Nothing to talk on," answered Ruth. "He wants me still, I allow. Only
he won't get me—not yet a bit anyways." She seemed quite casual about the
danger that threatened her, Bobby noticed; even, he thought, quietly
enjoying it.

That evening, when the Cherub touched on the point to his colleague,
Mr. Spink turned in his india-rubber lips.

"It's an honour to be abused by a woman like that," he said. "She's a bad
character—bad."

"She's not that, I swear!" cried Bobby warmly. "She may have
exaggerated, or made a mistake, but bad she's not."

"I believe I've been in the parish longer than you have, Chislehurst,"
retorted the other crisply. "And presumably I know something about the
people in it."

"You've not been in as long as Miss Trupp," retorted Bobby. "She's been
here all her life."

Mr. Spink puffed at his cigar with uplifted chin and smiled.

"How's it getting on?" he asked.

"Pah!" muttered Bobby—"Cad!" and went out, rather white.

That was not the end of the matter, however.

A few days later Joe Burt and Bobby had paused for a word at the Star
corner when Mr. Spink and Alf Caspar came down Church Street together.

"Birds of a feather," said Alf loudly, nudging his companion, just as they
passed the standing couple.

"That's not very courteous, Caspar," called Bobby quietly after him.

Mr. Spink walked on with a smirk; but Alf came back with hardly
dissimulated truculence.

"Sorry you've been spreading this about me, Mr. Chislehurst," he said,
his sour eyes blinking.

"What?" asked the Cherub, astonished.

"Dirt," Alf retorted. "And I know where you got it from too."

"I haven't," cried Bobby with boyish indignation. "What d'you mean?"

"I know you have though," retorted Alf. "So it's no good denying it." He
was about to move on with a sneer when Joe Burt struck in.

"That's a foonny way to talk," he said.

"Foonny it may be," mocked Alf. "One thing I'll lay: it's not so foonny as
your lingo."

The engineer shouldered a pace nearer.

"Throw a sneer, do you?"

"Ah," said Alf, secure in the presence of the clergyman. "I know all
about you."

"Coom to that," retorted the Northerner, "I know a little about you. One
o Stan's pups, aren't you?"

Bobby moved on and Alf at once followed suit.

"You keep down in the East-end, my lad!" he called over his shoulder.
"We don't want none of it in Old Town. Nor we won't have it, neether."

Joe stood four-square at the cross-roads, bristling like a dog.

"Called yourself a Socialist when yo were down, didn't you?" he
shouted. "And then turned Church and State when yo began to make. I
know your sort!"

He dropped down Borough Lane, hackles still up, on the way to meet
Ernie by appointment in the Moot.

At the corner he waited, one eye on Ern's cottage, which he did not
approach. Then Ruth's face peeped round her door, amused and malicious,

to catch his dark head bobbing back into covert as he saw her. The two
played I spy thus most evenings to the amusement of one of them at least.

"He's there," she told Ernie in the kitchen—"Waitin at the corner.—
Keeps a safe distance, don't he?—What's he feared on?"

"You," answered Ernie, and rose.

Ruth snorted. The reluctance to meet her of this man with the growing
reputation as a fighter amused and provoked her. Sometimes she chaffed
with Ernie about it; but a ripple of resentment ran always across her
laughter.

Ern now excused his friend.

"He's all for his politics," he said. "No time for women."

"Hap, he'll learn yet," answered Ruth with a fierce little nod of her head.

CHAPTER IX

THE SHADOW OF ROYAL

That evening Alf called at Bobby's lodgings and apologised frankly.

"I know I said what I shouldn't, sir," he admitted. "But it fairly tortured
me to see you along of a chap like that Burt."

"He's all right," said Bobby coldly.

Alf smiled that sickly smile of his.

"Ah, you're innocent, Mr. Chislehurst," he said. "Only wish I knew as
little as you do."

Alf in fact was moving on and up again in his career; walking warily in
consequence, and determined to do nothing that should endanger his
position with the powers that be. This was the motive that inspired his
apology to Mr. Chislehurst and caused him likewise to make approaches to
his old schoolmaster, Mr. Pigott.

The old Nonconformist met the advances of his erstwhile pupil with
genial brutality.

"What's up now, Alf?" he asked. "Spreading the treacle to catch the flies.
Mind ye don't catch an hornet instead then!"

The remark may have been made in innocence, but Alf looked sharply at
the speaker and retired in some disorder. His new stir of secret busyness
was in fact bringing him into contact with unusual company, as Mrs. Trupp
discovered by accident. One evening she had occasion to telephone on
behalf of her husband to the garage. A voice that seemed familiar replied.

"Who's that?" she asked.

The answer came back, sharp as an echo,

"Who's that?"

"I'm Mrs. Trupp. I want to speak to Alfred Caspar."

Then the voice muttered and Alfred took the receiver.

Later Mrs. Trupp told her husband of the incident.

"I'm certain it was Captain Royal," she said with emphasis.

The old surgeon expressed no surprise.

"I daresay," he said. "Alf's raising money for some business scheme. He
told me so."

Now if Alf's attempts on Ruth in the days between the birth of the child
and her marriage to Ernie were known to Mrs. Trupp, the connection of the

little motor-engineer and Royal was only suspected by her. A chance word
of Ruth's had put her on guard; and that was all. Now with the swift natural
intuition for the ways of evil-doers, which the innocent woman, once
roused, so often reveals as by miracle, she flashed to a conclusion.

"Alf's blackmailing him!" she said positively.

"I shouldn't be surprised," her husband answered calmly.

His wife put her hand upon his shoulder.

"How can you employ a man like that, William?" she said, grave and
grieved.

It was an old point of dispute between them. Now he took her hand and
stroked it.

"My dear," he said, "when a bacteriologist has had a unique specimen
under the microscope for years he's not going to abandon it for a scruple."

A few days later Mrs. Trupp was walking down Borough Lane past the
Star when she saw Alf and Ruth cross each other on the pavement fifty
yards in front. Neither stopped, but Alf shot a sidelong word in the woman's
ear as he slid by serpent-wise. Ruth marched on with a toss of her head, and
Mrs. Trupp noted the furtive look in the eyes of her husband's chaffeur as he
met her glance and passed, touching his cap.

Mindful of her conversation with her husband, she followed Ruth home
and boarded her instantly.

"Ruth," she asked, "I want to know something. You must tell me for your
own good. Alfred's got no hold over you?"

Ruth drew in her breath with the sound, almost a hiss, of a sword
snatched from its scabbard. Then slowly she relaxed.

"He's not got the sway over me not now," she said in a still voice, with
lowered eyes. "Only thing he's the only one outside who knaws Captain
Royal's the father of little Alice."

Mrs. Trupp eyed her under level brows.

"Oh, he does know that?" she said.

Ruth was pale.

"Yes, 'M," she said. "See Alf used to drive him that summer at the
Hohenzollern."

Mrs. Trupp was not entirely satisfied.

"I don't see how Alfred can hold his knowledge over you," she remarked.

"Not over me," answered Ruth, raising her eyes. "Over him."

"Over who?"

"Captain Royal," said Ruth; and added slowly—"And I'd be sorry for
anyone Alf got into his clutches—let alone her father."

Her dark eyes smouldered; her colour returned to her, swarthy and
glowing; a gleam of teeth revealed itself between faintly parted lips.

Mrs. Trupp not for the first time was aware of a secret love of battle and
danger in this young Englishwoman whose staid veins carried the wild
blood of some remote ancestress who had danced in the orange groves of
Seville, watched the Mediterranean blue flecked with the sails of Barbary
corsairs, and followed with passionate eyes the darings and devilries of her
matador in the ring among the bulls of Andalusia.

Mrs. Trupp returned home, unquiet at heart, and with a sense that
somehow she had been baffled. She knew Ruth well enough now to
understand how that young woman had fallen a prey to Royal. It was not
the element of class that had been her undoing, certainly not the factor of
money: it was the soldier in the man who had seized the girl's imagination.
And Mrs. Trupp, daughter herself of a line of famous soldiers, recognised
that Royal with all his faults, was a soldier, fine as a steel-blade, keen,
thorough, searching. It was the hardness and sparkle and frost-like quality
of this man with a soul like a sword which had set dancing the girl's hot

Spanish blood. Royal was a warrior; and to that fact Ruth owned her
downfall.

Was Ernie a warrior too?

Not for the first time she asked herself the question as she turned out of
the Moot into Borough Lane. And at the moment the man of whom she was
thinking emerged from the yard of the Transport Company, dusty, draggled,
negligent as always, and smiling at her with kind eyes—too kind, she
sometimes thought.

As she crossed the road to the Manor-house Joe Burt passed her and
gave his cap a surly hitch by way of salute. Mrs. Trupp responded
pleasantly. Her husband, she knew, respected the engineer. She herself had
once heard him speak and had admired the fire and fearlessness in him.
Moreover, genuine aristocrat that she was, she followed with sympathy his
lonely battle against the hosts of Toryism in the East-end, none the less
because she was herself a Conservative by tradition and temperament.

That man was a warrior to be sure....

That evening the old surgeon dropped his paper and looked over his
pince-nez at his wife and daughter.

"My dears," he said, "I've some good news for you."

"I know," replied Bess, scornfully. "Your Lloyd George is coming down
in January to speak on his iniquitous Budget. I knew that, thank you!"

"Better even than that," her father answered. "Alfred Caspar's leaving me
of his own accord."

The girl tossed her skein of coloured silk to the ceiling with a splendid
gesture.

"Chuck-her-up!" she cried. "Do you hear, mother?"

"I do," answered Mrs. Trupp severely. "Better late than never."

"And I'm losing the best chauffeur in East Sussex," Mr. Trupp continued.

Alf, indeed, who had paddled his little canoe for so long and so
successfully on the Beachbourne mill-pond, was now about to launch a
larger vessel on the ocean of the world in obedience to the urge of that
ambition which, apart from a solitary lapse, had been the consuming
passion of his life. Unlike most men, however, who, as they become
increasingly absorbed in their own affairs, tend to drop outside interests, he
persisted loyally in old-time activities. Whether it was that his insatiable
desire for power forbade him to abandon any position, however modest,
which afforded him scope; or that he felt it more necessary than ever now,
in the interests of his expanding career, to maintain and if possible improve
his relations with the Church and State which exercised so potent a control
in the sphere in which he proposed to operate; or that the genuinely honest
workman in him refused to abandon a job to which he had once put his
hand, it is the fact that he continued diligent in his office at St. Michael's,
and manifested even increased zeal in his labours for the National Service
League.

Alf, indeed, so distinguished himself by his services to the League that at
the annual meeting at the Town Hall, he received public commendation
both from the Archdeacon and the Colonel, who announced that "the
admirable and indefatigable secretary of our Old Town branch, Mr. Alfred
Caspar, has agreed to become District Convener."

That meeting was a red-letter day in the history of the Beachbourne
National Service League, for at it the Colonel disclosed that Lord Roberts
was coming down to speak.

CHAPTER X

BOBS

The old Field-Marshal, wise and anxious as a great doctor, was sitting
now at the bedside of the patient that was his country. His finger was on her
pulse, his eye on the hourglass, the sands of which were running out; and he
was listening always for the padding feet of that Visitor whose knock on the
door he expected momentarily.

After South Africa he had sheathed at last the sword which had not
rested in its scabbard for fifty years; and from that moment his eyes were
everywhere, watching, guiding, cherishing the movement to which he had
given birth.

He followed the activities and successes of Colonel Lewknor on the
South Coast with a close attention of which the old Hammer-man knew
nothing; and to show his appreciation of the Colonel's labours, he
volunteered to come down to Beachbourne and address a meeting.

The offer was greedily accepted.

Mrs. Lewknor, who, now that the hostel was in full swing, was more free
to interest herself in her husband's concerns, flung herself into the project
with enthusiasm. And the Colonel went to work with tact and resolution. On
one point he was determined: this should not be a Conservative
demonstration, run by the Tories of Old Town and Meads. Mr. Glynde, a
local squire, the member for Beachbourne West, might be trusted to behave
himself. But young Stanley Bessemere, who, as the Colonel truly said, was
for thrusting his toe into the crack of every door, would need watching—he
and his cohorts of lady-workers.

The Committee took the Town Hall for the occasion, and arranged for
the meeting to be at eight in the evening so that Labour might attend if it
would.

The Colonel journeyed down to the East-end to ask Joe Burt to take an
official part in the reception; but the engineer refused, to the Colonel's
chagrin.

"A shall coom though," said Joe.

"And bring your mates along," urged the Colonel. "The old gentleman's
worth seeing at all events. Mr. Geddes is coming."

"I was going to soop with Ernie Caspar and his missus," replied the
engineer, looking a little foolish. "And we were coomin along together
afterwards."

"Ah," laughed the Colonel, as he went out. "She's beat you!—I knew she
would. Back the woman!"

Joe grinned in the door.

"Yes," he said. "Best get it over. That's my notion of it."

Bobs was still the most popular of Englishmen, if no longer the figure of
romance he had been in the eyes of the British public for a few minutes
during the South African war. His name drew; and the Town Hall was
pleasantly full without being packed. Many came to see the old hero who
cared little for his subject. Amongst these was Ruth Caspar who at Ernie's
request for once had left her babes to the care of a friend. She stood at the
back of the hall with her husband amongst her kind. Mrs. Trupp, passing,
invited her to come forward; but Ruth had spied Alf at the platform end, a
steward with a pink rosette, very smart, and deep in secret counsel with the
Reverend Spink. Joe Burt, with critical bright eye everywhere, supported
the wall next to her. The Colonel, hurrying by, threw a friendly glance at
him.

"Ah," he said, "so you've found each other."

"Yes, sir," replied Ruth mischievously. "He's faced me at last, Mr. Burt
has."

"And none the worse for it, I hope," said the Colonel.

"That's not for me to say, sir," answered Ruth, who was in gay mood.

Joe changed the subject awkwardly.

"A see young Bessemere's takin a prominent part in the proceedings," he
said, nodding towards the platform. "He's two oughts above nothing, that
young mon."

"Yes, young ass," replied the Colonel cheerfully. "Now if you'd come on
the Committee as I asked you, you'd be there to keep him in his place. You
play into the hands of your enemy!"

Then Bobby Chislehurst stopped for a word with Ruth and Ernie and
their friend.

"Coom, Mr. Chislehurst!" chaffed the engineer. "A'm surprised to see
you here. A thought you was a Pacifist."

"So I am," replied the other cheerily. "That's why I've come. I want to
hear both sides."

Joe shook his bullet-head gravely.

"There's nobbut two sides in life," he said. "Right and Wrong. Which
side is the Church on?"

Then the little Field-Marshal came on to the platform with the swift and
resolute walk of the old Horse-gunner. He was nearly eighty now, but his
figure was that of a youth, neat, slight, alert. Ruth remarked with interest
that the hero was bow-legged, which she did not intend her children to be.
For the rest, his kindly face of a Roman-nosed thoroughbred in training, his
deep wrinkles, and close-cropped white hair, delighted her.

The great soldier proved no orator; but his earnestness more than
compensated for his lack of eloquence.

After the meeting he came down into the body of the hall and held an
informal reception. The Colonel introduced Mr. Geddes, and left the two
together while he edged his way down to Joe Burt.

"Well, what d'you think of him?" he asked.

The engineer, his hands glued to the wall behind him, rocked to and fro.

"A like him better than his opinions," he grinned.

"You come along and have a word with him," urged the Colonel.

Joe shook a wary head.

"He's busy with Church and State," he said, nodding down the hall. "He
don't need Labour."

Then Ruth chimed in almost shrilly for once.

"There's young Alf shook hands with him!"

"Always shovin of issalf!" muttered Ernie sourly. "He and Reverend
Spink."

The old Field-Marshal was now coming slowly down the hall with a
word here and a handshake there. Church and State, as Joe had truly said,
were pressing him. Mrs. Trupp, indeed, and Mrs. Lewknor were fighting a
heavy rearguard action against the Archdeacon and Stanley Bessemere and
his cohorts, to cover the old soldier's retirement.

As the column drifted past Ernie and Ruth the Colonel stopped.

"An old Hammer-man, sir," he said. "And the mother of future Hammer-
men."

Lord Roberts shook hands with Ruth, and turned to Ernie.

"What battalion?" he asked in his high-pitched voice.

"First, sir," answered Ernie, rigid at attention, in a voice Ruth had never
heard before.

"Ah," said the old Field-Marshal. "They were with me in the march to
Kandahar. Never shall I forget them!" He ran his eye shrewdly over the
other. "Are you keeping fit?"

"Pretty fair, considering, sir," answered Ernie, relaxing suddenly as he
had braced.

"Well, you'll be wanted soon," said Bobs, and passed on. "How these
men run to seed, directly they leave the service, Lewknor!" he remarked to
the Colonel on the stairs. "Now I daresay that fellow was a smart
upstanding man when he was with you."

Ernie, thrilled at his adventure, went out into the cool night with Ruth,
quietly amused at his excitement, beside him.

"Didn't 'alf look, Alf didn't, when he talked to you!" chuckled Ruth.

That was the main impression she had derived from the meeting, that
and Lord Roberts's ears and the way they were stuck on to his head; but
Ernie's mind was still in tumult.

"Where's Joe then?" he cried suddenly, and turned to see his pal still
standing somewhat forlorn on the steps of the Town Hall.

He whistled and beckoned furiously.

"Come on, Joe!" he called. "Just down to the Wish and have a look at the
sea."

But the engineer shook his head and turned slowly away down Grove
Road.

"Nay, A know when A'm not wanted," he called. "Yoong lovers like to be
alone."

"Sauce!" said Ruth, marching on with a little smile.

Ernie rejoined her.

"What d'you think of him?" he asked keenly.

"O, I liked him," said Ruth, cool and a trifle mischievous. "He's like a
little bird—so alife like. And that tag of white beard to his chin like a billy-
goat!—I did just want to pluck it!" She tittered and then recollected herself.

"I didn't mean Lord Roberts, fat-ead," retorted Ernie. "I meant Joe."

"O, that chap!" answered Ruth casually. "I didn't pay much heed to him.
There's a lot o nature to him, I should reckon. Most in general there is—
them black chaps, bull-built, wi curly tops to em."

She drifted back to Lord Roberts and the meeting.

"Only all that about war!—I don't like that. Don't seem right, not to my
mind. There's a plenty enough troubles seems to me without them a-shoving
great wars on top o you all for love."

Ernie felt that the occasion demanded a lecture and that he was pointed
out as the man to give it. The chance, moreover, might not recur; and he
must therefore make the most of it. He had this feeling less often perhaps
than most men, and for that reason when he had it he had it strong. At the
moment he was profoundly aware of the immense superiority of his sex; the
political sagacity of Man; his power of taking statesmanlike views denied
apparently to Woman.

"And what if Germany attacks us!" he asked censoriously. "Take it
laying down, I suppose!—Spread yourself on the beach and let em tread on
you as they land, so they don't wet their feet!"

"Germany won't interfere with you if you don't interfere with her, I
reckon," Ruth answered calmly. "It's just the same as neighbours in the
street. You're friends or un-friends, accordin as you like."

"What about Mrs. Ticehurst?" cried Ernie, feeling victory was his for
once. "You didn't interfere with her, did you? Yet she tip the dust bin a-top o
little Alice over the back-wall—to show she loved you, I suppose."

Ruth tilted a knowing chin.

"She aren't a neighbour, Mrs. Ticehurst aren't—not prarperly."

They were relapsing into broad Sussex as they always would when
chaffing.

"What are she then?"

"She's a cat, sure-ly."

The night air, the thronged and brilliant sky, the rare change, the little bit
of holiday, inspired and stimulated her. The Martha of much busyness had
given place to the girl again. Immersed in the splendid darkness, she was in
a delicious mood, cool, provocative, ironical; as Ernie had known her in
that brief April of her life before Captain Royal had thrown a shadow across
her path.

He threaded his arm through hers. Together they climbed the little Wish
hill on the sea-front. From the top, by the old martello tower, they looked
across the sea, white beneath the moon. Ernie's mood of high statesmanship
had passed already.

"I don't see this Creeping Death they talk on," he said discontentedly.

"Ah," Ruth answered, sagacious in her turn. "Hap it's there though."

Ernie turned on her.

"I thart you just said..."

"No, I didn't then," she answered with magnificent unconcern. "All I say
is—War and that, what's it got to do wi' we?"

As they came off the hill they met Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor crossing
Madeira Walk on their way home.

"Where's your friend?" asked the Colonel.

"Gone back to his books and learning, sir, I reckon," replied Ruth. "He
don't want us."

"Ah, you scared him, Mrs. Caspar," chaffed the Colonel.

"Scared him back to his revolution," commented Mrs. Lewknor.

Ruth laughed that deep silvery bell-like laughter of hers that seemed to
make the night vibrate.

"He'd take some scaring, I reckon, that chap would," she said.

CHAPTER XI

THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN

Joe Burt had been born at Rochdale of a mother whose favourite saying
was:

"With a rocking-chair and a piece o celery a Lancasheer lass is aw reet."

At eight, she had entered the mill, doffing. Joe had entered the same mill
at about the same age, doffing too. He worked bare-footed in the ring-room
in the days when overlookers and jobbers carried straps and used them.

When he was fifteen his mother died, and his father married again.

"Thoo can fend for self," his step-mother told him straightway, with the
fine directness of the North.

Joe packed his worldly possessions in a chequered handkerchief,
especially his greatest treasure—a sixpenny book bought off a second-hand
bookstall at infinite cost to the buyer and called The Hundred Best
Thoughts. Then he crossed the common at night, falling into a ditch on the
way, to find the lodging-house woman who was to be his mother for the
next ten years drinking her Friday pint o beer. He was earning six shillings a
week at the time in a bicycle-shop. Later he entered a big engineering firm

and, picking up knowledge as he went along, was a first-class fitter when he
was through his time.

Those were the days when George Barnes was Secretary of the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and leading the great engineers' strike
of the early nineties. Labour was still under the heel of Capital, but
squealing freely. Socialism, apart from a few thinkers, was the gospel of
noisy and innocuous cranks; and advanced working-men still called
themselves Radicals.

Young Joe woke up sooner than most to the fact that he was the slave of
an environment that was slowly throttling him because it denied him
opportunity to be himself—which is to say to grow. He discarded chapel for
ever on finding that his step-mother was a regular worshipper at Little
Bethel, and held in high esteem amongst the congregation. He read Robert
Blatchford in the Clarion, went to hear Keir Hardie, who with Joey Arch
was dodging in and out of Parliament during those years, heralds of the
advancing storm, and took some part in founding the local branch of the
newly-formed Independent Labour Party. When his meditative spirit tired of
the furious ragings of the Labour Movement of those early days, he would
retire to the Friends' Meeting-house on the hill and ruminate there over the
plain tablet set in the turf which marks appropriately the resting place of the
greatest of modern Quakers.

The eyes of the intelligent young fitter were opening fast now; and the
death of the head of his firm completed the process and gave him sight.

"Started from nothing. Left £200,000. Bequeathed each of his servants
£2 for every year of service; but nothing for us as had made the money."

Joe was now a leading man in the local A.S.E. His Society recognised
his work and sent him in the early years of our century to Ruskin College,
Oxford. The enemies of that institution are in the habit of saying that it
spoils good mechanics to make bad Labour leaders. The original aim of the
College was to take men from the pit, the mill, the shop, pour into them
light and learning in the rich atmosphere of the most ancient of our
Universities, and then return them whence they came to act amongst their
fellows as lamps in the darkness and living witnesses of the redeeming

power of education. The ideal, noble in itself, appealed to the public; but
like many such ideals, it foundered on the invincible rock of human nature.
The miners, weavers, and engineers, who were the students, after their year
amid the towers and courts of Oxford, showed little desire to return whence
they came. Rather they made their newly-acquired power an instrument to
enable them to evade the suffocating conditions under which they were
born; and who shall blame them? They became officials in Labour Bureaux,
Trade Union leaders, Secretaries of Clubs, and sometimes the hangers-on of
the wealthy supporters of the Movement.

Burt was a shining exception to the rule. At the end of his academic year
he returned to the very bench in the very shop he had left a year before,
with enlarged vision, ordered mind, increased conviction; determined from
that position to act as Apostle to the Gentiles of the Old Gospel in its new
form.

He was the not uncommon type of intellectual artisan of that day who
held as the first article of his creed that no working-man ought to marry
under the economic conditions that then prevailed; and that if Nature and
circumstance forced him to take a wife that he was not morally justified in
having children. This attitude involving as it inevitably must a levy on the
only capital that is of enduring value to a country—its Youth—was thrust
upon thoughtful workers, as Joe was never tired of pointing out, by the
patriotic class, who refused their employees the leisure, the security, the
material standards of life necessary to modern man for his full
development.

Joe practised what he preached, and was himself unmarried. Apart,
indeed, from an occasional fugitive physical connection as a youth with
some passing girl, he had never fairly encountered a woman; never sought a
woman; never, certainly, heard the call that refuses to be denied, spirit
calling to spirit, flesh to flesh, was never even aware of his own deep need.
Women for him were still a weakness to be avoided. They were the
necessaries of the feeble, an encumbrance to the strong. That was his view,
the view of the crude boy. And he believed himself lucky to be numbered
among the uncalled for he was in fact a sober fanatic, living as selflessly for
his creed as ever did those first preachers of unscientific Socialism, the

Apostles and Martyrs of the first centuries of our era. Even in the shop he
had his little class of students, pouring the milk of the word into their ears
as he set their machines, and the missionary spirit drove him always on to
fresh enterprise.

The Movement, as he always called it, was well ablaze by the second
decade of the century in the Midlands and the North, but in the South it still
only smouldered. And when Hewson and Clarke started their aeroplane
department at Beachbourne, and began to build machines for the
Government, Joe Burt, a first-rate mechanic, leapt at the chance offered him
by the firm and crossed the Thames with his books, his brains, his big heart,
to carry the Gospel of Redemption by Revolution to the men of Sussex as
centuries before, his spiritual ancestor, St. Wilfrid, he too coming from the
North, had done. In that strange land with its smooth-bosomed hills, its
shining sea, its ca-a-ing speech, he found everything politically as he had
expected. And yet it was in the despised South that he discovered the
woman who was to rouse in him the fierce hunger of which till then he had
been unaware except as an occasional crude physical need.

As on Saturday or Sunday afternoons at the time the revelation was
coming to him he roamed alone, moody and unmated, the rogue-man, amid
the round-breasted hills he often paused to mark their resemblance to the
woman who was rousing in his deeps new and terrible forces of which he
had previously been unaware. In her majestic strength, her laughing
tranquillity, even in her moods, grave or gay, the spirit mischievously
playing hide-and-seek behind the smooth appearance, she was very much
the daughter of the hills amid which she had been bred.

Ruth was as yet deliciously unaware of her danger. She was, indeed,
unaware of any danger save that which haunts the down-sitting and up-
rising of every working woman throughout the world—the abiding spectre
of insecurity.

She liked this big man, surly and self-conscious, and encouraged his
visits. Not seldom as she moved amid her cups and saucers in the back-
ground of the kitchen, she would turn eye or ear to the powerful stranger
with the rough eloquence sucking his pipe by the fire and holding forth to
Ernie on his favourite theme. It flattered her that he who notoriously

disliked women should care to come and sit in her kitchen, lifting an
occasional wary eyelid as he talked to look at her. And when she caught his
glance he would scowl like a boy detected playing truant.

"I shan't hurt you then, Mr. Burt," she assured him with the caressing
tenderness that is mockery.

His chin sunk on his chest.

"A'm none that sure," he growled.

Ernie winked at Ruth.

"Call him Joe," he suggested. "Then hap he'll be less frit."

"Wilta?" asked Ruth, daintily mimicking the accent of her guest.

"Thoo's mockin a lad," muttered Joe, delighted and relapsing into
broader Lancashire.

"Nay, ma lad," retorted Ruth. "A dursena. A'm far ower scared."

CHAPTER XII

RUTH WAKES

Apart from such occasional sallies Ruth paid little attention to her
husband's friend or, indeed, to anything outside her home. Now that she had
dropped her anchor in the quiet waters of love sheltered by law, and had her
recovered self-respect to buttress her against the batterings of a wayward
world, she was snug, even perhaps a little selfish with the self-absorption of
the woman who is wrapped up in that extension of herself which is her
home, her children, and the man who has given them her.

After her stormy flight she had settled down in her nest, and seldom
peeped over at the cat prowling beneath or at anybody, indeed, but the cock-
bird bringing back a grub for supper; and him she peeped for pretty often.
She was busy too with the unending busyness of the woman who is her own
cook, housekeeper, parlourmaid, nurse and laundress. And happily for her
she had the qualities that life demands of the woman who bears the world's
burden—a magnificent physique to endure the wear and tear of it all, the
invaluable capacity of getting on well with her neighbours, method in her
house, tact with her husband, a way with her children.

And there was no doubt that on the whole she was happy. The reaction
from the sturm-und-drang period before her marriage was passing but had
not yet wholly passed. Her spirit still slept after the hurricane. Naturally a
little indolent, and living freely and fully, if without passion, her nature
flowed pleasantly through rich pastures along the channels grooved in earth
by the age-long travail of the spirit.

Jenny and little Ned followed Susie, just a year between each child.
Ernie loved his children, especially always the last for the time being; but
the element of wonder had vanished and with it much of the impetus that
had kept him steady for so long.

"How is it now?" asked his mate, on hearing of the birth of the boy.

"O, it's all right," answered Ernie, wagging his head. "Only it ain't quite
the same like. You gets used to it, as the sayin is."

"And you'll get use-ter to it afore you're through, you'll see," his friend
answered, not without a touch of triumphant bitterness. He liked others to
suffer what he had suffered himself.

As little by little the romance of wife and children began to lose its
glamour, and the economic pressure steadily increased, the old weakness
began at times to re-assert itself in Ernie. He haunted the Star over much.
Joe Burt chaffed him.

"Hitch your wagon to a star by all means, Ern," he said. "But not that
one."

Mr. Pigott too cautioned him once or twice, alike as friend and employer.

"Family man now, you know, Ernie," he said.

The sinner was always disarming in his obviously sincere penitence.

"I knaw I've unbuttoned a bit of late, sir," he admitted. "I'll brace up. I
will and I can."

And at the critical moment the fates, which seemed as fond of Ernie as
was everybody else, helped him.

Susie, his first-born, caught pneumonia. The shock stimulated Ernie; as
shock always did. The steel that was in him gleamed instantly through the
rust.

"Say, we shan't lose her!" he asked Mr. Trupp in staccato voice.

Mr. Trupp knew Ernie, knew his weakness, knew human nature.

"Can't say," he muttered. "Might not."

Ern went to the window and looked out on the square tower of the old
church on the Kneb above him. His eyes were bright and his uncollared
neck seemed strangely long and thin.

"She's got to live," he muttered defiantly.

The doctor nodded grimly.

The Brute had pounced on Ernie sleeping and was shaking him as a dog
shakes a rat. Mr. Trupp, who had no intention of losing Susie, was by no
means sorry.

"If it's got to be, it's got to be," said Ruth, busy with poultices. "Only it
won't be if I can help it."

She was calm and strong as Ernie was fiercely resentful. That angered
Ernie, who was seeking someone to punish in his pain.

When Mr. Trupp had left he turned on Ruth.

"You take it cool enough!" he said with a rare sneer.

She looked at him, surprised.

"Well, where's the sense in wearin yourself into a fret?" answered Ruth.
"That doosn't help any as I can see."

"Ah, I knaw!" he said. "You needn't tell me."

She put down the poultice and regarded him with eyes in which there
was a thought of challenge.

"What d'you knaw, Ern?"

There was something formidable about her very quiet.

"What I do, then," he said, and turned his back on her. "If it was
somebody else, we should soon see."

She came to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and turned him so that
she could read his face. He did not look at her.

She turned slowly away, drawing in her breath as one who rouses
reluctantly from sleep.

"That's it, is it?" she said wearily. "I thart it'd come to that some day."

Just then little Alice danced in from the street, delicate, pale sprite, with
anemone-like health and beauty.

"Daddy-paddy!" she said, smiling up at him, as she twined her fingers
into his.

He bent and kissed her with unusual tenderness.

"Pray for our little Sue, Lal," he muttered.

The child looked up at him with fearless eyes of forget-me-not blue.

"I be," she said.

He gave her a hand, and they went out together into Motcombe Garden:
for they were the best of friends.

Ruth was left. In her heart she had always known that this would come:
he would turn on her some day. And she did not blame him: she was too
magnanimous. Men were like that, men were. They couldn't help
theirsalves. Any one of them but Ernie would have thrown her past up at her
long before. She was more grateful for his past forbearance than resentful at
his present vindictiveness. Now that the blow, so long hovering above her
in the dimness of sab-consciousness, had fallen she felt the pain of it, dulled
indeed by the fact that she was already suffering profoundly on Susie's
account. But the impact braced her; and it was better so. There was no life
without suffering and struggle. If you faced that fact with your eyes open,
never luxuriating in the selfishness of make-believe, compelling your teeth
to meet on the granite realities of life, then there would be no dreadful
shock as you fell out of your warm bed and rosy dreams into an icy pool.

Ruth went back to her hum-drum toil. She had been dreaming. Now she
must awake. It was Ernie who had roused her from that dangerous lethargy
with a brutal slash across the face; and she was not ungrateful to him.

When he returned an hour later with little Alice she was unusually tender
to him, though her eyes were rainwashed. He on his side was clearly
ashamed and stiff accordingly. He said nothing; instead he was surly in self-
defence.

To make amends he sat up with the child that night and the next.

"Shall you save her, sir?" asked the scare-crow on the third morning.

"I shan't," replied the doctor. "Her mother may."

Next day when Mr. Trupp came he grunted the grunt, so familiar to his
patients, that meant all was well.

When the corner was turned Ern did not apologise to Ruth, though he
longed to do so; nor did she ask it of him. To save himself without
undergoing the humiliation of penance, and to satisfy that most easily
appeased of human faculties, his conscience, he resorted to a trick ancient
as Man: he went to chapel.

Mr. Pigott who had stood in that door at that hour in that frock-coat for
forty years past, to greet alike the sinner and the saved, welcomed the lost
sheep, who had not entered the fold for months.

"I know what this means," he said, shaking hands. "You needn't tell me. I
congratulate you. Go in and give thanks."

Ern bustled in.

"I shall come regular now, sir," he said. "I've had my lesson. You can
count on me."

"Ah," said Mr. Pigott, and said no more.

Next Sunday indeed he waited grimly and in vain for the prodigal.

"Soon eased off," he muttered, as he closed the door at last. "One with a
very sandy soil."

The Manager of the Southdown Transport Company went home that
evening to the little house on the Lewes Road in unaccomodating mood.

"His trousers are coming down all right," he told his wife. "I've said it
before, and I'll say it again. Once you let go o God——"

"God lets go o you," interposed Mrs. Pigott. "Tit for tat."

CHAPTER XIII

NIGHTMARE

A few days later on his way back to the Manor-house from visiting his
little patient in the Moot, the old surgeon met Mr. Pigott, who stopped to
make enquiries.

"She'll do now," said Mr. Trupp.

"And that fellow?"

"Who?"

"Her father."

Mr. Trupp looked at the windy sky, torn to shreds and tatters by the Sou-
west wind above the tower of the parish-church.

"He wanted the Big Stick and he got it," he said. "If it came down on his
shoulders once a week regularly for a year he'd be a man. Steady pressure is
what a fellow like that needs. And steady pressure is just what you don't get
in a disorganised society such as ours."

The old Nonconformist held up a protesting hand.

"You'd better go to Germany straight off!" he cried. "That's the only
place you'd be happy in."

Mr. Trupp grinned.

"No need," he said, "Germany's coming here. Ask the Colonel!"

"Ah!" scolded the other. "You and your Colonels! You go and hear
Norman Angell on the Great Illusion at the Town Hall on Friday. You go
and hear a sensible man talk sense. That'll do you a bit of good. Mr. Geddes
is going to take the chair."

The old surgeon turned on his way, grinning still.

"The Colonel's squared Mr. Geddes," he said. "He's all right now."

What Mr. Trupp told Mr. Pigott, more it is true in chaff than in earnest,
was partially true at least. Liberalism was giving way beneath the Colonel's
calculated assault. After Lord Roberts's visit to Beachbourne the enemy
dropped into the lines of the besiegers sometimes in single spies and
sometimes in battalions. Only Mr. Pigott held out stubbornly, and that less
perhaps from conviction than from a sense of personal grievance against the
Colonel. For three solid years the pugnacious old Nonconformist had been
trying to fix a quarrel on the man he wished to make his enemy; but his
adversary had eluded battle with grace and agility. That in itself happily
afforded a good and unforgiveable cause of offence.

"They won't fight, these soldiers!" he grumbled to his wife.

"They leave that to you pacifists," replied the lady, brightly.

"Pack o poltroons!" scolded the old warrior. "One can respect the
Archdeacon at least because he has the courage of his opinions. But this
chap!"

Yet if Liberalism as a whole was finding grace at last, Labour in the
East-end remained obdurate, as only a mollusc can; and Labour was gaining
power for all men to see.

In the general elections of 1910, indeed, the two Conservative
candidates, Stanley Bessemere, East, and Mr. Glynde, West, romped home.
The Colonel was neither surprised nor deceived by the results of the
elections. He knew now that in modern England in the towns at all events,
among the rising generation, there were few Conservative working men—
though there were millions who might and in fact did vote for Conservative
candidates; and not many Radicals—apart from a leaven of sturdy middle-
aged survivors of the Gladstonian age. The workers as a whole, it was clear,
as they grew in class-consciousness, were swinging slow as a huge tide, and
almost as unconscious, towards the left. But they were not articulate; they
were not consistent; they changed their labels as they changed their clothes,

and as yet they steadfastly refused to call themselves Socialists. Indeed, in
spite of the local Conservative victory, the outstanding political feature of
the moment, apart from the always growing insurgency of Woman, was the
advance of Labour, as the Colonel and many other thoughtful observers
noted. He began, moreover, to see that behind the froth, the foam, and
arrant nonsense of the extreme section of the movement, there was
gathering a solid body of political philosophy. The masses were becoming
organised—an army, no longer a rabble; with staff, regimental officers, plan
of campaign, and an always growing discipline. And, whether you agreed
with it or not, there was no denying that the Minority Report of the Poor
Law Commission was a political portent.

When Joe Burt came up to Undercliff, as he sometimes did, to smoke
and chat with the Colonel, Mrs. Lewknor, a whole-hearted Tory, would
attack him on the tyranny of Trade Unions with magnificent fury.

She made no impression on the engineer, stubborn as herself.

"War is war; and discipline is discipline. And in war it's the best
disciplined Army that wins. A should have thought a soldier'd have realised
that much. And this isna one o your little wars, mind ye! This is the Greatest
War that ever was or will be. And we workers are fighting for our lives."

"Discipline is one thing and tyranny is quite another!" cried Mrs.
Lewknor, with flashing eyes.

The Colonel, who delighted in these pitched battles, sat and sucked his
pipe on the fringe of the hub-bub; only now and then turning the cooling
hose of his irony on the combatants.

"It is," he said in his detached way. "Discipline is pressure you exert on
somebody else. And tyranny is pressure exerted by somebody else upon
you."

And it was well he was present to introduce the leaven of humour into
the dough of controversy, for Mrs. Lewknor found the engineer a
maddening opponent. He was so cool, so logical, and above all so dam

provocative, as the little lady remarked with a snap of her still perfect teeth.
He gave no quarter and asked none.

"I don't like him," she said with immense firmness to the Colonel after
one of these encounters, standing in characteristic attitude, her skirt a little
lifted, and one foot daintily poised on the fender-rail. "I don't trust him one
inch."

"He is a bit mad-doggy," the other said, entwining his long legs. "But he
is genuine."

Then two significant incidents cast the shadow of coming events on the
screen of Time.

In July, 1911, Germany sent the Panther to Agadir. There ensued a
sudden first-class political crisis; and a panic on every Stock Exchange in
Europe.

Even Ernie was moved. This man who, in spite of Joe Burt's teaching,
took as yet little more account of political happenings than does the field-
mouse of the manoeuvres of the reaping machine that will shortly destroy
its home, crossed the golf links one evening and walked through Meads to
find out what the Colonel thought.

"What's it going to be, sir?" he asked.

The other refused to commit himself.

"Might be anything," he said. "Looks a bit funny."

"Think the reservists will be called up?"

The old soldier evinced a curious restrained keenness as of a restive
horse desiring to charge a fence and yet uncertain of what it will find on the
far side. The Colonel, appraising him with the shrewd eyes of the man used
to judging men, was satisfied.

"I shouldn't be surprised," was all he would say.

The old Hammer-man walked away along the cliff in the direction of
Meads, and dropped down on to the golf links to go home by the ha-ha
outside the Duke's Lodge. Then he swung away under the elms of Compton
Place Road and turned into Saffrons Croft, where Ruth and the children
were to have met him. He looked about for them in vain. The cricketers
were there as always, the idlers strolling from group to group, but no Ruth.
Ernie who had been looking forward to a quiet half-hour's play with little
Alice and Susie on the turf in the shade of the elms before bed-time felt
himself thwarted and resentful. Ruth as a rule was reliable; but of late, ever
since his unkindness to her at the time of Susie's illness, three weeks since,
he had marked a change in her, subtle perhaps but real. True she denied him
nothing; but unlike herself, she gave without generosity, coldly and as a
duty.

Nursing his grievance, he dropped down the steep hill under the Manor-
house wall, past the Greys, into Church Street.

At the Star a little group was gossiping, heads together. As he crossed
the road they turned and looked at him with curiosity and in silence. Then a
mate of his in the Transport Company called across,

"Sorry to hear this, Ern."

Ernie, thinking the man referred to the probabilities that he would be
called back to the Army, and proud of his momentary fortuitous importance,
shouted back with an air of appropriate nonchalance,

"That's all right, Guy. I wouldn't mind a spell with the old regiment again
—that I wouldn't."

At the foot of Borough Lane he met Alf bustling along. His brother did
not pause, but gave Ernie a searching look as he passed and said, "Watch it,
Ern!"

Ern experienced a strange qualm as he approached his home. The door
was open; nobody was about; there was not a sound in the house—neither
the accustomed chirp of the children, nor the voice and movements of their
mother.

The nightmare terrors that are wont to seize the sensitive at such times,
especially if their conscience is haunted, laid hold of him. The emptiness,
the silence appalled him. Death, so it seemed to his imaginative mind,
reigned where the life and warmth and pleasant human busyness the woman
and her children create had formerly been. Ever since that dark moment
when he had let loose those foul and treacherous words, he had been uneasy
in his mind; and yet, though usually the humblest of men, some stubborn
imp of pride had possessed him and refused to allow him to express the
contrition he genuinely felt. Perhaps the very magnitude of his offence had
prevented him from making just amends.

Ruth on her side had said nothing; but she had felt profoundly the wound
he had inflicted on her heart. So much her silence and unusual reserve had
told him. Had he gone too far? Had her resentment been deeper than he had
divined? Had he by his stupid brutality in a moment of animal panic and
animal pain snapped the light chain that bound him to this woman he loved
so dearly and knew so little? And none was more conscious than he how
fragile was that chain. Ruth had never been immersed in love for him: she
had never pretended to be. He knew that. She had been an affectionate and
most loyal friend; and that was all.

On the threshold of his home he paused and stared down with the
frightened snort of a horse suddenly aware of an abyss gaping at his feet.

For the first time in his married life the instant sense of his insecurity,
always present in his subconsciousness, leapt into the light of day.

He gathered himself and marched upstairs as a man marches up the steps
of the scaffold to pay the merited punishment for his crimes.

Then he heard a little noise. The door of the back room where the
children, all but the baby, slept, was open. He peeped in. Susie was there,
and Jenny with her. Hope returned to him. They were sitting up in bed still
in outdoor clothes. Then he noticed that the baby's cot which stood of wont
in the front room beside the big bed was here too. His sudden relief changed
to anguish. He saw it all: his children, the three of them, packed away
together like fledgelings in a nest—for him to mother; and the mother-bird
herself and her child flown!

And he had brought his punishment on to his own head!

Susie waved a rag-doll at him and giggled.

"Neddy seeps with Susie!" she cried. "Susie nurse him! Mummy's gone
with man!"

Brutally Ernie burst into the bedroom.

Two people stood beside the bed—his wife and a man; one on either side
of it.

The man was Joe Burt; the woman Ruth.

On the bed between them lay little Alice, wan as a lily, her eyes closed
apparently in death.

As he entered Joe raised a hushing finger.

"It's all right, Ern. She isna dead," said the engineer, comfortably.

Ruth, who was the colour of the child on the bed, had turned to him and
now wreathed her arms about him.

"O Ern!" she cried in choking voice. "I am that glad you've come."

For a moment she hung on him, dependent as he had never known her.

Then the child stirred, opened her eyes, saw Ernie at the foot of the bed,
and smiled.

"Daddy," came her sweet little voice.

Her eyes fell on Joe; her lovely brow crumpled and she wailed,

"Don't want man."

"That's me," said Joe gently, and stole towards the door on tip-toe. Ern
followed him out.

Mr. Trupp met them on the stairs.

At the outer door Joe gave a whispered account of what had happened.
He had been crossing Saffrons Croft on the way up to see Ernie, when he
had noticed Ruth and the children under the elms. Little Alice had seen him
and come rushing through the players towards her friend. A cricket-ball had
struck her on the forehead; and he had carried her home like a dead thing.
Outside the cottage they had met Alf, and Ruth had asked him to go for Mr.
Trupp.

Ernie ran back upstairs.

The old surgeon, bending over the child, gave him a reassuring glance.

"The child's all right," he said. "See to the mother!" and nodded to Ruth,
who was holding on to the mantel-piece.

She was swaying. Ern gathered her to him. The whole of her weight
seemed on him. His eyes hung on her face, pale beneath its dark crown as
once, and only once, he had seen it before—that time she lay on the bed in
Royal's dressing-room on the dawn of her undoing.

"Ruth," he called quietly.

Slowly she returned to life, opening her eyes, and drawing her hand
across them.

"Is that you, Ern?" she sighed. "O, that's right. I come all over funny
like. Silly! I'm all right now."

Ernie lowered her into a chair.

She sat a moment, gathering herself. Then she looked up at him—and
remembered. She had been caught. Fear came over her, and she began to
tremble.

He bent and kissed her.

"I'm sorry I said that, Ruth," he whispered in her ear.

A lovely light welled up into her eyes. At that moment she was nearer
loving him than she had ever been. Regardless of Mr. Trupp's presence, she
put a hand on either of his shoulders, and regarded him steadfastly, a
baffling look on her face.

"Dear Ern!" she said. "Only I'd liefer you didn't say it again. See, it do
hurt from you."

CHAPTER XIV

SHADOWS

Ern was not called up after all.

The trap-door through which men had peered aghast into the fires of
hell, closed suddenly as it had opened. Only the clang of the stokers
working in the darkness under the earth could still be heard day and night at
their infernal busyness by any who paused and laid ear to the ground.

England and the world breathed again.

"Touch and go," said Mr. Trupp, who felt like a man coming to the
surface after a deep plunge.

"Dress rehearsal," said the Colonel.

"It'll never be so near again!" Mr. Pigott announced pontifically to his
wife. "Never!"

"Thank you," replied that lady. "May we take it from you?"

When it was over the Colonel found that the walls of Jericho had fallen:
the Liberal Citadel had been stormed. Mr. Geddes took the chair at a
meeting at St. Andrew's Hall to discuss the programme of the League.

"It looks as if you were right after all," the tall minister said to the
Colonel gravely.

"Pray heaven I'm not," the other answered in like tones.

The second significant incident of this time, which occurred during a lull
before the final flare-up of the long-drawn Agadir crisis, had less happy
results from the point of view of the old soldier.

In August, suddenly and without warning, the railway-men came out.
The Colonel had been up to London for the night on the business of the
League, and next morning had walked into Victoria Street Station to find it
in possession of the soldiers: men in khaki in full marching order, rifle,
bayonet, and bandolier; sentries everywhere; and on the platform a Union
official in a blue badge urging the guard to come out.

The guard, a heavy-shouldered middle-aged fellow, was stubbornly
lumping along the platform on flat feet, swinging his lantern.

"I've got a heart," he kept on reiterating. "I've got a wife and children to
think of."

"So've I," replied the official, dogging him. "It's because I am thinking of
them that I'm out."

"Silly 'aound!" said a bystander

"No, he ain't then!" retorted a second.

"Yes, he is!" chipped in a third. "Makin trouble for isself and everybody
else all round. Calls isself the workers' friend!—Hadgitator, I call him!"

All the way down to Beachbourne in the train the Colonel marked
pickets guarding bridges; a cavalry patrol with lances flashing from the
green covert of a country lane; a battery on the march; armies on the move.

Joe Burt's right, he reflected, it's war.

"I never thought to see the like of that in England," said a fellow-
traveller, eyes glued to the window.

"Makes you think," the Colonel admitted.

Arrived home he found there was a call for special constables. That
evening he went to the police station to sign on, and found many of the
leading citizens of Beachbourne there on like errand. Bobby Chislehurst,
his open young face clouded for once, and disturbed, was pressing the point
of view of the railway-men on Stanley Bessemere, who was listening with
the amused indifference of the man who knows.

"I'm afraid there is no doubt about it," the politician was saying, shaking
the sagacious head of the embryo statesmen. "They're taking advantage of
the international situation to try to better themselves."

"But they say it's the Government and the directors who are taking
advantage of it to try and put them off—as they've been doing for years!"
cried Bobby, finely indignant.

"I believe I know what I am talking about," replied the other, unmoved
from the rock of his superiority. "I don't mind telling you that the European
situation is still most precarious. The men know that, and they're trying to
squeeze the Government. I should like to think it wasn't so."

Then the Archdeacon's voice loudly uplifted overwhelmed all others.

"O, for an hour of the Kaiser!—He'd deal with em. The one man left in
Europe—now my poor Emperah's gone. Lloyd George ... Bowing the knee
to Baal ... Traitors to their country ... Want a lesson ... What can you
expect?" He mouthed away grandiloquently in detached sentences to the air
in general; and nobody paid any attention to him.

Near by, Mr. Pigott, red and ruffled, was asking what the Army had to do
with it?—who wanted the soldiers?—why not leave it to the civilians?—
with a provocative glance at the Colonel.

Then there was a noise of marching in the street, and a body of working-
men drew up outside the door.

"Who are those fellows?" asked the Archdeacon loudly.

"Workers from the East-end, old cock," shouted one of them as
offensively through the door. "Come to sign on as Specials! And just as
good a right here as you have...."

The leader of the men in the street broke away from them and
shouldered into the yard, battle in his eye.

It was Joe Burt, who, as the Colonel had once remarked, was sometimes
a wise statesman, and sometimes a foaming demagogue. To-day he was the
latter at his worst.

"What did I tell yo?" he said to the Colonel roughly. "Bringin oop the
Army against us. Royal Engineers driving trains and all! It's a disgrace."

The Colonel reasoned with him.

"But, my dear fellow, you can't have one section of the community
holding up the country."

"Can't have it!" surly and savage. "Yo've had five hundred dud plutocrats
in the House of Lords holding up the people for years past. Did ye shout
then? If they use direct action in their own interests why make a rout when
500,000 railway men come out for a living wage?—And then you coom to
the workers and ask them to strengthen the Army the Government'll use
against them!—A wonder yo've the face!" He turned away, shaking.

Just then happily there was a diversion. The yard-door, which a
policeman had shut, burst open; and a baggy old gentleman lumbered
through it with the scared look of a bear lost in a busy thoroughfare and
much the motions of one.

Holding on to his coat-tails like a keeper came Ruth. She was panting,
and a little dishevelled; in her arms was her baby, and her hat was a-wry.

"He would come!" she said, almost in tears. "There was no stoppin him.
So I had just to come along too."

Joe, aware that he had gone too far, and glad of the interruption, stepped
up to Ruth and took the baby from her arms. The distressed woman gave
him a look of gratitude and began to pat and preen her hair.

At this moment Ernie burst into the yard. He was more alert than usual,
and threw a swift, almost hostile, glance about him. Then he saw Ruth busy
tidying herself, and relaxed.

"Caught him playing truant, didn't you, in Saffrons Croft?" he said. "The
park-keeper tell me."

Ruth was recovering rapidly.

"Yes," she laughed. "I told him it was nothing to do with him—strikes
and riots and bloodshed!—Such an idea!"

A baby began to wail; and Ernie turned to see Joe with little Ned in his
arms.

"Hallo! Joe!" he chaffed. "My baby, I think."

He took his own child amid laughter, Joe surrendering it reluctantly.

Just then Edward Caspar appeared in the door of the office. He looked at
them over his spectacles and said quietly, as if to himself.

"It's Law as well. We must never forget that."

The Colonel turned to Ernie.

"What's he mean?" he asked low.—"Law as well."

Ernie, dandling the baby, drew away into a corner where he would be out
of earshot of the Archdeacon.

"It's a line of poetry, sir," he explained in hushed voice—

"O, Love that art remorseless Law,
So beautiful, so terrible."

"Go on!" said the Colonel, keenly. "Go on!—I like that."

But Ernie only wagged a sheepish head.

"That's all," he said reluctantly. "It never got beyond them two lines." He
added with a shy twinkle—"That's dad, that is."

A chocolate-bodied car stopped in the street opposite.

Out of it stepped Mr. Trupp.

In it the Colonel saw a lean woman with eyes the blue of steel, fierce
black brows, and snow-white hair.

She was peering hungrily out.

"It's mother come after dad," Ernie explained. "In Mr. Trupp's car. That's
my brother driving."

The old surgeon, crossing the yard, now met the run-agate emerging
from the office and took him kindly by the arm.

"No, no, Mr. Caspar," he scolded soothingly. "They don't want old
fellows like you and me to do the bludgeon business. Our sons'll do all
that's necessary in that line."

He packed the elderly truant away in the car.

Mr. Caspar sat beside his wife, his hands folded on the handle of his
umbrella, looking as determined as he knew how.

Mrs. Caspar tucked a rug about his knees.

Ernie, who had followed his father out to the car, and exchanged a word
with his brother sitting stiff as an idol, behind his wheel, now returned to
the yard, grinning.

"Well!" said Joe.

Ernie rolled his head.

"Asked Alf if he was goin to sign on?" he grinned.

"Is he?" asked the Colonel ingenuously.

Ernie laughed harshly.

"Not Alf!" he said. "He's a true Christian, Alf is, when there's scrapping
on the tape..."

At the club a few days later, when the trouble had blown over, the
Colonel asked Mr. Trupp if Ernie was ill.

"He seemed so slack," he said, with a genuine concern.

"So he is," growled the old surgeon. "He wants the Lash—that's all."

"Different from his brother," mused the Colonel—"that chauffeur feller
of yours. He's keen enough from what I can see."

Mr. Trupp puffed at his cigar.

"Alf's ambitious," he said. "That's his spur. Starting in a big way on his
own now. Sussex is going to blossom out into Caspar's Garages, he tells me.
I'm going to put money in the company. Some men draw money. Alf's one."

CHAPTER XV

THE LANDLORD

Alf's great scheme indeed was prospering.

Thwarted by the Woman, and driven back upon himself, he had taken up
the career of action at the point where he had left it to pursue an adventure
that had brought him no profit and incredible bitterness.

Fortune had favoured him.

Just at the moment Ruth had baffled him, another enemy of his, the Red
Cross Garage Syndicate, which in the early days of his career had throttled
him, came to grief.

Alf saw his chance, and flung himself into the new project with such
characteristic energy as to drown the bitterness of sex-defeat. He had no
difficulty in raising the necessary capital for the little Syndicate he proposed
to start. Some he possessed himself; his bank was quite prepared to give
him accommodation up to a point; and there was a third source he tapped
with glee. That source was Captain Royal. Alf was in a position to squeeze
the Captain; and he was not the man to forego an advantage, however
acquired.

Royal put a fifth of his patrimony into the venture, and was by no means
displeased to do so. Thereby he became the principal shareholder in the
concern, with a predominant voice in its affairs. That gave him the leverage
against Alf, which, with the instinct of a commander, he had seen to be
necessary for the security of his future directly that young man showed a
blackmailing tendency. Moreover Royal was not blind to the consideration
that the new Syndicate, under able management, bid fair to be a singularly
profitable investment.

Backed then by Royal and his bank, Alf bought up certain of the garages
of the defaulting company at knockout prices. Thereafter, if he still coveted
Ruth, he was far too occupied to worry her; while she on her side, purged

by the busyness and natural intercourse of married life of all the disabling
morbidities that had their roots in a sense of outlawry and the forced
restraint put upon a roused and powerful temperament, had completely lost
her fear of him.

Ruth, surely, was changing rapidly now. At times in family life she
assumed the reins not because she wished to, but because she must; and on
occasion she even took the whip from the socket.

Ernie had, indeed, climbed a mountain peak and with unbelievable effort
and tenacity won to the summit, which was herself. But then, instead of
marching on to the assault of the peak which always lies beyond, he had sat
down, stupidly content; with the inevitable consequence that he tended to
slither down the mountain-side and lose all he had gained in growth and
character by his hard achievement.

The pair had been married four years now; and Ruth knew that her house
was built on sand. That comfortable sense of security which had
accompanied the first years of her married life, affording her incalculable
relief after the hazards which had preceded them, had long passed. Dangers,
less desperate perhaps in the appearance than in the days of her darkness,
but none the less real, were careering up from the horizon over a murky sea
like breakers, roaring and with wrathful manes, to overwhelm her. In
particular the threat that haunts through life the working-woman of all lands
and every race beset her increasingly. Her man was always skirting now the
bottomless pit of unemployment. One slip and he might be over the edge,
hurtling heavily down into nothingness, and dragging with him her and the
unconscious babes.

The home, always poor, began to manifest the characteristics of its
tenants, as homes will. When the young man came for the rent on Monday
mornings, Ruth would open just a crack so that he might not see inside,
herself peeping out of her door, wary as a woodland creature. Apart from
Joe Burt, whom she did not count, there was indeed only one visitor whom
Ruth now received gladly; and that was Mr. Edward Caspar, whose
blindness she could depend upon.

There had grown up almost from the first a curious intimacy between the
dreamy old gentleman, fastidious, scholarly, refined, and the young peasant
woman whom destiny had made the mother of his grandchildren. Nothing
stood between them, not even the barrier of class. They understood each
other as do the children of Truth, even though the language they speak is
not the same.

The old man was particularly devoted to little Alice.

"She's like a water-sprite," he said,—"so fine and delicate."

"She's different from Ernie's," answered Ruth simply. "I reck'n it was the
suffering when I was carrying her."

"She's a Botticelli," mused the old man. "The others are Michael
Angelos."

Ruth had no notion what he meant—that often happened; but she knew
he meant something kind.

"I'd ha said Sue was more the bottled cherry kind, myself," she answered
gently.

Her visitor came regularly every Tuesday morning on the way to the
Quaker meeting-house, shuffling down Borough Lane past the Star, his
coat-tails floating behind him, his gold spectacles on his nose, with
something of the absorbed and humming laziness of a great bee. Ruth
would hear the familiar knock at the door and open. The old man would sit
in the kitchen for an hour by the latest baby's cot, saying nothing, the child
playing with his little finger or listening to the ticking of the gold watch
held to its ear.

After he was gone Ruth would always find a new shilling on the dresser.
When she first told Ernie about the shilling, he was surly and ashamed.

"It's his tobacco money," he said gruffly. "You mustn't keep it."

Next Tuesday she dutifully handed the coin back to the giver,

"I don't like to take it, sir," she said.

The old man was the grandfather of her children, but she gave him
always, and quite naturally, the title of respect.

He took it from her and laid it back on the dresser with the other he had
brought. Then he put his hand on her arm, and looked at her affectionately
through dim spectacles.

"You go to the other extreme," he said. "You're too kind."

After that she kept the money and she was glad of it too, for she was
falling behind with her rent now.

Then one Monday morning, the rent-collector making his weekly call,
little brown book in hand, gave her a shock.

He was a sprightly youth, cocky and curly, known among his intimates
as Chirpy; and with a jealously cherished reputation for a way with the
ladies.

"Say, this is my last visit," he announced sentimentally, as he made his
entry in the book, and poised his pencil behind his ear. "We can't part like
this, can we?—you and me, after all these years. Too cold like." He drew
the back of his hand significantly across his mouth.

Ruth brushed his impertinence aside with the friendly insouciance which
endeared her to young men.

"Got the sack for sauce, then?" she asked.

Chirpy shook his head ruefully.

"Mr. Goldmann's sold the house."

"Over our heads!" cried Ruth, aghast.

She hated change, for change spelt the unknown, which in its turn meant
danger.

"Seems so," the youth replied. "No fault o mine, I do assure you." He
returned to his point. "Anythink for Albert?"

Ruth was thoroughly alarmed. Even in those days cottages in Old Town
were hard to come by.

"Who's our new landlord?" she asked.

"Mr. Caspar, I heard say in the office."

Ruth felt instant relief.

"Mr. Edward Caspar?—O, that's all right."

"No; Alf—of the Garridges. Him they call All-for-isself Alfie!"

Ruth caught her breath.

"Thank you," she said, and closed the door swiftly.

The youth was left titupping on the door-step, his nose against the panel
like a seeking spaniel.

Within, Ruth put her hand to her heart to stay its tumult. She was
thankful Ernie was not there to witness her emotion, for she felt like a rabbit
in the burrow, the stoat hard on its heels. All her old terrors revived....

The new landlord soon paid his first visit, and Ruth was ready for him.

"You want to see round?" she asked, with the almost aggressive
briskness of the woman who feels herself threatened.

"Yes, as your landlord I got the right of entry." He made the
announcement portentously like an emperor dictating terms to a conquered
people.

Ruth showed him dutifully round. He paid no attention to his property:
his eyes were all for her; she did not look at him.

Then they went upstairs where it was dark.

There was a closed door on the left. Alf thrust it open without asking
leave; but Ruth barred his passage with an arm across the door.

"What's that?" he asked, prying.

"Our room. You can't go in there. That's where my children was born."

Alf tilted his chin at her knowingly.

"All but little Alice," he reminded her. His eyes glittered in the dark.
"Does he stand you anything for her?" he continued confidentially. "Should
do—a gentleman. Now if you could get an affiliation order against him
that'd be worth five or six bob a week to you. And that's money to a woman
in your position—pay me my rent and all too. Only pity is," he ended,
thoughtfully, "can't be done. You and me know that if Ern don't."

Ruth broke fiercely away.

Leisurely he followed her down the stairs with loud feet. He was greatly
at his ease. His hat, which he had never taken off, was on the back of his big
head. He was sucking a dirty pencil, and studying his rent-book, as he
entered the kitchen.

"You're a bit behind, I see," casually.

"Only two weeks," as coldly.

"As yet."

He swaggered to the door with a peculiar roll of his shoulders.

"If you was to wish to wipe it off at any time you've only got to say the
word. I might oblige."

He stood with his back to her, looking out of the door, and humming.

She was over against the range.

"What's that?" she panted.

Standing on the threshold he turned and leered back at her out of half-
closed eyes.

She sneered magnificently.

"Ah, I knaw you," she said.

"What's it all about?" he answered, cleaning his nails. "Only a little bit of
accommodation. No thin out o the way."

"Thank you. I knaw your accommodation," she answered deeply.

"Well," he retorted, picking his teeth. "There's no harm in it. What's the
fuss about?"

"I'll tell Mr. Trupp," Ruth answered. "That's all."

Alf turned full face to her, jeering.

"What's old Trupp to me, then?" he cried. "I done with him. I done with
em all. I'm me own master, I am—Alfred Caspar, Hesquire, of Caspar's
Garridges, Company promoter. Handlin me thousands as you handle
coppers."

He folded his arms, thrust out a leg, and looked the part majestically
without a snigger. It was clear he was extraordinarily impressive to himself.

Ruth relaxed slowly, deliciously, like an ice-pack touched by the
laughing kiss of spring.

She eyed her enemy with the amused indifference of some big-boned
thoroughbred mare courted by an amorous pony.

"You're mad," she said. "That's the only why I don't slosh the sauce-pan
over you. But I shall tell Ern all the same. And he'll tell em all."

"And who's goin to believe Ern?" jeered her tormentor. "'Old Town
Toper,' they call him. Fairly sodden."

"Not to say Archdeacon Willcocks and Mr. Chislehurst," continued Ruth,
calmly.

Alf shot his finger at her like a crook in a melodrama, looking along it as
it might have been a pistol and loving his pose.

"And would they believe you against me? Do you attend mass? Are you
a sidesman?"

"I was confirmed Church afore ever you was," retorted Ruth with spirit.
"I've as good a right to the sacraments, as you have then. And I'll take to em
again if I'm druv to it—that I will!"

Something about this declaration tickled Alf. The emperor was forgotten
in the naughty urchin.

"So long, then!" he tittered. "Appy au-revoir! Thank-ye for a pleasant
chat. This day week you can look forward to. I'll collect me rent meself
because I know you'd like me to."

He turned, and as he was going out ran into a man who was entering.

"Now then!" said a surly voice. "Who are you? O, it's you, is it?—I
know all about you."

"What you know o me?" asked Alf, aggressively.

"Why, what a beauty you are."

The two men eyed each other truculently. Then Joe barged through the
door. The entrance cleared, Alf went out, but as he passed on the pavement
outside he beat a rat-tan on the window with insolent knuckles.

Joe leaped back to the door and scowled down the road at the back of the
little chauffeur retreating at the trot. Alf excelled physically in only one
activity: he could run.

The engineer returned to the kitchen, savage and smouldering. Ruth,
amused at the encounter, met him with kind eyes. There was in this man the
quality of the ferocious male she loved. He marched up to her, his head low
between his shoulders like a bull about to charge.

"Is yon lil snot after you?" he growled, almost menacing.

She regarded him with astonishment, amused and yet defensive.

"You're not my husband, Mr. Burt," she cried. "You've no grievance
whoever has."

The engineer retreated heavily.

"Hapen not," he answered, surly and with averted eyes. "A coom next
though."

She looked up, saw his face, and trembled faintly.

He prowled to the door without a word, without a look.

"Won't you stop for Ern?" she asked.

"Nay," he said, and went out.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GRANDMOTHER

Ruth and her mother-in-law frequently met in the steep and curling
streets of Old Town as they went about their business. They knew and
tacitly ignored each other. But Ernie's children were not to be ignored. They
knocked eternally at their granny's heart. When of summer evenings their
mother took her little brood to Saffrons Croft and sat with them beneath the
elms, her latest baby in her arms, the others clouding her feet like giant
daisies, Anne Caspar, limping by on flat feet with her string bag, would be
wrung to the soul.

She hungered for her grand-children, longed to feel their limbs, and see
their bodies, to hold them in her lap, to bathe them, win their smiles, and
hear their prattle.

Pride, which she mistook for principle, stood between her and happiness.

Ruth knew all that was passing in the elder woman's heart, and felt for
the other a profound and disturbing sympathy. She had the best of it; and
she knew that Anne Caspar, for all her pharisaic air of superiority, knew it
too. Ruth had learnt from Mrs. Trupp something of the elder woman's story.
Anne Caspar too, it seemed, had loved out of her sphere; but she, unlike
Ruth, had achieved her man. Had she been happy? That depended on
whether she had brought happiness to her husband—Ruth never doubted
that. And Ruth knew that she had not; and knew that Anne Caspar knew that
she had not.

Moreover, all that Ernie told her about his mother interested her
curiously: the elder woman's pride, her loneliness, her passion for her old
man.

"Alf's mother over again," Ern told Ruth, "with all her qualities only one
—but it's the one that matters. He's a worker same as she is. He means to

get on, same as she done. There's just this difference atween em: Alf can't
love; Mother can—though it's only one." ...

A week after his first visit Alf appeared again on Ruth's door-step.

Ruth opened to him with so bright a smile that he was for once taken
completely by surprise. He had expected resistance and come armed to
meet it.

"Come in, won't you?" she said.

Then he understood. She had thought better of her foolishness.

"That's it, is it?" he said, licking his lips. "That's a good gurl."

"Yes," said Ruth. "Very pleased to see you, I'm sure." She was smarter
than usual too, he noticed—to grace the occasion no doubt. And the plain
brown dress, the hue of autumn leaves, with the tiny white frill at the collar,
revealed the noble lines of her still youthful figure.

The conqueror, breathing hard, entered the kitchen, to be greeted by a
cultivated voice from the corner.

"Well, Alfred," it said.

Alf, whose eyes had been on the floor, glanced up with a start.

His father was sitting beside the cradle, beaming mildly on him through
gold spectacles.

"Hullo, dad," said Alf, surlily. This large ineffectual father of his had
from childhood awed him. There was a mystery about even his mildness,
his inefficiency, which Alf had never understood and therefore feared. "I
didn't expect to find you here."

It seemed to Alf that the bottle-imp was twinkling in the old man's eyes.
Alf remembered well the advent of that imp to the blue haunts he had never
quitted since. That was during the years of Ern's absence in India. Now it

struck him suddenly that his father, so seeming-innocent, so remote from
the world, was in the joke against him.

A glance at Ruth, malicious and amused, confirmed his suspicion.

"I'm glad you come and visit your sister sometimes, Alfred," said the old
man gently.

"Yes," purred Ruth, "he comes reg'lar, Alf do now—once a week. And all
in the way of friendship as the savin is. See, he's our landlord now."

"That's nice," continued the old man with the dewy innocence of a babe.
"Then he can let you off your rent if you get behind."

"So he could," commented Ruth, "if only he was to think of it. Do you
hear your dad, Alf?"

She paid the week's rent into his hand, coin by coin, before his father's
eyes. Then he turned and slouched out.

"Good-night, Alf," Ruth said, almost affectionately. "It 'as been nice
seein you and all."

Determined to enjoy her triumph to the full, she followed him to the
door. In the street he turned to meet her mocking glance, in which the
cruelty gleamed like a half-sheathed sword. His own eyes were impudent
and familiar as they engaged hers.

"Say, Ruth, what's he after?" he asked, cautiously, in lowered voice.

"Who?"

"That feller I caught you with the other night—when Ern wasn't there.
Black-ugly. What's he after?"

"Same as you, hap."

He sniggered feebly.

"What's that?"

"Me."

She stood before him; a peak armoured through the ages in eternal ice
and challenging splendidly in the sun.

He hoiked and spat and turned away.

"Brassy is it?" he said. "One thing, my lass, you been in trouble once,
mind. I saved you then. But I mightn't be able to a second time."

Behind Ruth's shoulder a dim face, bearded and spectacled, peered at
him with the mild remorselessness of the moon.

"Alfred," said a voice, dreadful in its gentle austerity.

When the old man said good-bye to Ruth ten minutes later he kissed her
for the first time.

She smiled up at him gallantly.

"It's all right, dad," she said, consolingly. "I'm not afraid o him whatever
else."

It was the first time she had called him dad, and even now she did it
unconsciously.

Edward Caspar ambled home.

He did not attempt to conceal from his wife where he went on Tuesday
mornings. Indeed, as he soared on mysterious wings, he seemed to have lost
all fear of the woman who had tyrannised over him for his own good so
long. Time, the unfailing arbitrator, had adjusted the balance between the
two. And sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Trupp, observing quietly as she had
done for thirty years, that in the continuous unconscious struggle that
persists inevitably between every pair from the first mating till death, the
victory in this case would be to the man intangible as air.

That morning, as Edward entered the house, his wife was standing in the
kitchen before the range.

Anne Caspar was white-haired now. Her limbs had lost much of their
comeliness, her motions their grace. She was sharp-boned and gaunt of
body as she had always been of mind—not unlike a rusty sword.

As the front-door opened, and the well-trained man sedulously wiped his
boots upon the mat, she looked up over her spectacles, dropping her chin,
grim and sardonic.

"I know where you been, dad," she taunted.

He stayed at the study-door, like a great pawing bear.

Then he answered suddenly and with a smile.

"I've been in heaven."

She slammed the door of the range; smiling, cruel, the school-girl who
teases.

"I know where your tobacco money goes, old dad," she continued.

His mind was far too big and vague and mooning often to be able to
encounter successfully the darts his wife occasionally shot into his large
carcase.

"He's a beautiful boy," was all he now made answer, as he disappeared.

Whether the wound he dealt was deliberately given in self-defence, or
unconsciously because he had the power over her, his words stung Anne
Caspar to the quick.

She turned white, and sat down in the lonely kitchen her wrung old
hands twisted in her lap, hugging her wound.

Then she recovered enough to take reprisals.

"Alf's their landlord, now," she cried after him, the snakes in her eyes
darting dreadful laughter.

Edward Caspar turned in the door.

"Anne," he said, "I wish you to pay Ruth's rent in future out of the
money my father left you."

The voice was mild but there was a note of authority, firm if faint,
running through it.

Anne rose grimly to her feet, thin as a stiletto, and almost as formidable.

"That woman!"

He nodded at her down the passage.

"My daughter."

Anne turned full face.

"D'you know she's had a love-child?" she shrilled, discordant as a
squeaking wheel.

The old gentleman, fumbling at the door of his study, dropped his
bearded chin, and beamed at the angry woman, moonwise over his
spectacles.

"Why shouldn't she?" he asked.

There was something crisp, almost curt, in the interrogation.

"But she's not respectable!"

Again he dropped his chin and seemed to gape blankly.

"Why should she be?" he asked.

She heard the key turn, and knew that she was locked out for the night.

Later she crept in list-slippers to the door and knocked with the slow and
solemn knuckles of fate, a calculated pause between each knock.

"Alf's going up, Ern's going down," she said, nodding with grim relish.
"Good-night, old dad."

Next evening Joe called at the cottage, to fetch Ernie for the class. He
arrived as he sometimes had done of late, a little before Ernie was due home
from the yard. At this hour the little ones had already been put to bed; and
Ruth would be alone with Alice, between whom and the engineer there had
sprung up a singular intimacy ever since the evening on which he had
carried her home like a dead thing in his arms from Saffrons Croft.

Ruth had not seen him since his clash with Alfred in the door; and he had
obviously avoided her.

Now she thrilled faintly. Was he in love with her?—she was not sure.

He entered without speaking and took his seat as always before the fire,
broad-spread and slightly huddled in his overcoat, chin on chest, staring
into the fire.

Ruth, busy baking, her arms up to the elbow in dough, made her decision
swiftly. She would meet him, face him, fight him.

"Well, Joe," she said, not looking at him.

It was the first time she had called him that.

He peeped up at her, only his eyes moving, small, black-brown, and
burning like a bear's.

"That's better," he muttered.

She flashed up at him. Innocence and cunning, the schoolboy and the
brute, Pan and Silenus fought, leered, and frolicked in his face.

Ruth dropped her gaze and kneaded very deliberately.

Yes ... it was so ... Now she would help him; and she could hold him.
She would transmute his passion into friendship. She would bridle her bull,
ride him, tame him. It was dangerous, and she loved danger. It was sport;
and she loved sport. It was an adventure after the heart of a daring woman.
He was a fine man, too, and fierce, warrior and orator; worth conquering
and subduing to her will. His quality of a fighting male called to her. She
felt the challenge and answered it with singing blood.

That laughing hidalgo who in Elizabethan days had landed from his
galleon in the darks at the Haven to bring terror and romance to some
Sussex maid; that Spaniard who lurked obscurely in her blood, gave her her
swarthy colouring, her indolent magnificence and surprising quality, was
stirring uneasily within her once again.

She lifted her eyes from the froth of yeast and looked across at him,
accepting battle—if he meant battle. And he did: there was no doubt of that.
He sat there, hunched, silent, breathing heavily. Then little Alice slipped
down from the kitchen table on which she had been sitting at her mother's
side, danced across to her friend, and climbed up on his knee. Ruth took her
arms out of the bowl, white to the elbow with flour, came across to the pair,
firm-faced, and deliberately removed the child.

Joe rose and went out. In the outer door he stumbled on a man half-
hidden on the threshold.

"That you, Joe?" said Ernie quietly. "There he is! Alf—on the spy. See
his head bob—there! At the bottom of Borough Lane—It's her he's after."

Joe peeped over his friend's shoulder, his bullet head thrust out like a dog
who scents an enemy.

"That sort; is he?" he muttered. "I'll after him!"

CHAPTER XVII

THE CHALLENGE

Joe Burt had that passion for saving souls which is the hall-mark of the
missionary in every age. Had he been a child of the previous generation he
would have become a minister in some humble denomination and done his
fighting from the pulpit, Bible in hand, amid the pot-banks of a Black
Country township or the grimy streets of a struggling mining village in the
North. As it was he appealed to the mass from the platform, and, a true
fisher of men, flung his net about the individual in the class-room and at
conferences.

Always seeking fresh fields to conquer, he had established a political
footing now even in Tory Old Town. He had opened a discussion at the
Institute, and actually given an address to the local Church of England's
Men's Society on Robert Owen and early English Socialists; and he owed
his triumph in the main to Bobby Chislehurst.

It is not without a pang that we part from the most cherished of our
prejudices, and as Joe launched out into an always larger life it had come to
him as something of a shock to find amongst the younger clergy some who
preserved an attitude of firm and honest neutrality in the great battle to
which he had pledged his life, and even a few, here and there, who took
their stand on the side of the revolutionaries of the Spirit.

And such a one was Bobby.

Because of that, the young curate, who was up and down all day amid
the humble dwellers in the Moot, innocent and happy as a child, was
forgiven his solitary sin. For Bobby was a Scout-master, unashamed; and
Joe Burt, like most of his battle-fellows of that date looked askance on the
Boy-Scout Movement as one of the many props of militarist Toryism none
the less effective because it was unavowed.

The Cherub, bold, almost blatant in sin, passed his happiest hours in a
rakish sombrero, shorts, and a shirt bedizened with badges, tramping the

Downs at the head of the Old Town Troop of devoted Boy-Scouts, lighting
forbidden fires in the gorse, arguing with outraged farmers, camping in
secluded coombes above the sea.

Up there on the hill, between sky and sea, Joe Burt, he too with his little
flock of acolytes from the East-end, would sometimes meet the young
shepherd on Saturday afternoons, trudging along, in his hand a pole in place
of a crook.

"I forgive you Mr. Chislehurst, because I know you don't know what
you're doing," he once said, gravely. "You're like the Israelite—without
guile."

"The greatest of men have their little failings," giggled the sinner.

The two men, besides their political sympathies, had another point in
common: they meant to save Ernie from himself. But Joe was no longer
single-eyed. He saw now in Ernie two men—a potential recruit of value for
the cause of Labour, and the man who possessed the woman he loved.

In the troubled heart of the engineer there began to be a confused
conflict between the fisher of men and the covetous rival. Ernie was entirely
unconscious of the tumult in the bosom of his friend of which he was the
innocent cause. Not so Ruth.

She was rousing slowly now like a hind from her lair in the bracken, and
sniffing the air at the approach of the antlered stranger. As he drew always
nearer with stops and starts and dainty tread, and she became increasingly
aware of his savage presence, his fierce intentions, she withdrew
instinctively for protection towards her rightful lord. He grazed on the hill-
side blind to his danger, blind to hers, blind to the presence of his enemy.
Ernie's indeed was that innocence, that simplicity, which rouses in the heart
of primitive woman not respect but pity; and in the rose-bud of pity, unless
it be virgin white, lurks always the canker of contempt and the worm of
cruelty.

Sometimes of evenings, as Ernie dozed before the fire in characteristic
negligé, collarless, tie-less, somnolent as the cat, she watched him with

growing resentment, comparing him to that Other, so much the master of
himself and his little world.

"You are slack," she said once, more to herself than him.

"I got a right to be, I reck'n, a'ter my day's work," he answered sleepily.

"Joe's not like that," she answered, wetting her thread. "He's spry, he is.
Doos a long day's work too—and earns big money, Joe do. Brings home
more'n twice as much what you do Saraday—and no wife nor children
neether."

Ernie looked up and blinked. For a moment she hoped and feared she
had stung him to eruption. Then he nodded off again. That was what
annoyed Ruth. He would not flare. He was like his father. But qualities a
woman admires in an old man she may despise in her lover. As she retired
upon him she felt him giving way behind her. She was seeking support and
finding emptiness.

And as that Other, shaggy-maned and mighty, stole towards her with his
air of a conqueror, trampling the heather under-foot, the inadequacy of her
own mate forced itself upon her notice always more.

Ruth, now thirty, was in the full bloom of her passionate womanhood;
drawing with her far-flung fragrance the pollen-bearing bee and drawn to
him. The girl who had been seized and overthrown by a passing brigand
was a woman now who looked life in the face with steadfast eyes and
meant to have her share of the fruits of it. The old Christian doctrines of
patience, resignation, abnegation of the right to a full life, made no appeal
to her. Richly dowered herself, she would not brook a starved existence.
She who was empty yearned for fulness. After her catastrophe, itself the
consequence of daring, Ern had come into her life and given her what she
had needed most just then—rest, security, above all children. On that score
she was satisfied now; and perhaps for that very reason her spirit was all the
more a-thirst for adventure in other fields. She was one of those women
who demand everything of life and are satisfied with nothing less. Like
many such her heart was full of children but her arms were empty. For her
fulfilment she needed children and mate. Some women were content with

one, some with the other. Great woman that she was, nothing less than both
could satisfy her demands; and her emptiness irked her increasingly.

Ruth's in fact was the problem of the unconquered woman—a problem at
least as common among married women who have sought absorption and
found only dissatisfaction as amongst the unmarried. Royal had seized her
imagination for a moment; to Ernie she had submitted. But that complete
immersion in a man and his work which is for a full woman love, she had
never experienced, and longed to experience. After five years of marriage
Ernie was still outside her, an accretion, a circumstance, a part of her
environment, necessary perhaps as her clothes, but little more: for there was
no purpose in his life.

And then just at the moment her lack was making itself most felt, the
Man had come—a real man too, with a work; a pioneer, marching a-head,
axe in hand, hewing a path-way through the Forest, and calling to her with
ever increasing insistency to come out to him and aid him in his enterprise.

But always as she fingered in her dreams the bolts of the gate that, once
opened, would leave her face to face with the importunate adventurer, there
came swarming about her, unloosing her fingers as they closed upon the
bolts, the children. And as one or other of them stirred or called out in sleep
in the room above her, she would start, wake, and shake herself. Yet even
the pull of the children was not entirely in one direction. There were four of
them now; and they were growing, while Ernie's wages were standing still.
That was one of the insistent factors of the situation. Were they too to be
starved?

Often in her dim kitchen she asked herself that question. For if in her
dreams she was always the mate of a man, she was in fact, and before all
things, the mother of children. Who then was to save them and her?—
Ernie? who was now little more than a shadow, an irritating shadow,
wavering in the background of her life? If so, God help them all....

One evening she was in the little back-yard taking down the washing,
when she heard a man enter the kitchen. She paid no heed. If it was Joe he
could wait; if it was Ernie she needn't bother. Then she heard a second man
enter, and instantly a male voice, harsh with challenge.

She went in hastily. There was nobody in the kitchen; but Ern was
standing at the outer door. His back was to her, but she detected instantly in
the hunch of his shoulders a rare combativeness.

"You know me," he was growling to somebody outside. "None of it
now!"

He turned slowly, a dark look in his face which did not lighten when he
saw her.

"Who was it, Ern?" she asked.

"Alf," he answered curtly.

That night as he sat opposite her she observed him warily as she worked
and put to herself an astonishing question: Was there another Ernie?—an
Ernie asleep she had not succeeded in rousing? Was the instrument sound
and the fault in her, the player?

A chance phrase of Mrs. Trupp's now recurred to her.

"There's so much in Ernie—if you can only get it out."

The man opposite rose slowly, came slowly to her, bent slowly and
kissed her.

"I ask your pardon if I was rough with you this evening, Ruth," he said.
"But Alf!—he fairly maddens me. I feel to him as you shouldn't feel to any
human being, let alone your own brother. You know what he's after?" he
continued.

She stirred and coloured, as she lifted her eyes to his, dark with an
unusual tenderness.

"Reckon so, Ern," she said.

He stood before the fire, for once almost handsome in his vehemence.

"Layin his smutty hands on you!" he said.

That little scene, with its suggestion of passion suppressed, steadied
Ruth.... And it was time. That Other was always drawing nearer. And as she
felt his approach, the savage power of him, his fierce virility, and was
conscious of the reality of the danger, she resolved to meet it and fend it off.
He should save Ernie instead of destroying her. And the way was clear. If
this new intellectual life, the seeds of which the engineer had been sowing
so patiently for so long in the unkempt garden of Ernie's spirit became a
reality for him, a part of himself, growing in such strength as to strangle the
weeds of carelessness, he was saved—so much Ruth saw.

"Once he was set alight to, all his rubbish'd go up in a flare, and he'd
burn bright as aflame," she told the engineer once seizing her chance; and
ended on the soft note of the turtle-dove—"There's just one could set him
ablaze—and only one. And that's you, Joe."

At the moment Joe was sitting before the fire in characteristic attitude,
hands deep in his pockets, legs stretched out, the toes of his solid boots in
the air.

For a moment he did not answer. It was as though he had not heard.
Then he turned that slow, bull-like glare of his full on her.

"A'm to save him that he may enjoy you—that's it, is it?" he said. "A'm
to work ma own ruin."

It was the first time he had openly declared himself. Now that it had
come she felt, like many another woman in such case, a sudden instant
revulsion. Her dreams blew away like mist at the discharge of cannon. She
was left with a sense of shock as one who has fallen from a height. At the
moment of impact she was ironing, and glad of it. Baring her teeth
unconsciously she pressed hard down on the iron with a little hiss.

"You've no call to talk to me like that, Joe. It's not right."

Deliberately he rose and turned his back.

"A don't know much," he growled in his chest, "but A do know that
then."

Her heart thumped against her ribs.

"I thart you were straight, Joe," she said.

He warmed his hands at the blaze; and she knew he was grinning, and
the nature of the grin.

"A thought so maself till A found A wasn't," he answered. "No man
knows what's in him till he's tried—that's ma notion of it. Then he'll have a
good few surprises, same as A've done. A man's a very funny thing when
he's along of a woman he loves—that's ma experience."

Ruth trembled, and her hand swept to and fro with the graceful motions
of a circling eagle over the child's frock she was ironing.

"You make me feel real mean," she said.

He kept a sturdy back to her.

"Then A make you feel just same gate as A feel maself."

There was a pause.

"You ought to marry, Joe—a man like you with all that nature in you."

"Never—only if so be A can get the woman A want."

She said with a gulp,

"And I thart you was Ern's friend!"

He looked up at the ceiling.

"So A am—trying to be."

There was another silence. Then the woman spoke again, this time with
the hushed curiosity of a child.

"Are all men like that?"

"The main of em, A reck'n."

Her hand swooped rhythmically; and there was the gentle accompanying
thud of the iron taking the table and circling smoothly about its work.

"My Ern isn't."

"Your Ern's got what he wants—and what A want too."

Boots brushing themselves on the mat outside made themselves heard.
Then the door opened.

Joe did not turn.

"Coom in, Ern," he said. "Just right. Keep t' peace atween us. She and
me gettin across each other as usual."

CHAPTER XVIII

A SKIRMISH

A few days later Ernie came home immediately after work instead of
repairing to the Star. As he entered the room Ruth saw there was something
up. He was sober—terribly so.

"I done it, Ruth, old lass," he said.

She knew at once.

"Got the sack?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I've no one to blame only meself," he said, disarming her, as he
disarmed everyone by his Christian quality.

Ruth did not reproach him: that was not her way. Nor did she sit down
and cry: she had expected the catastrophe too long. She took the boy from
the cradle and opened her bodice.

"You shan't suffer anyways," she said, half to herself, half to the child,
and stared out of the window, babe at breast, rocking gently and with
tapping foot.

Ern slouched out; and Ruth was left alone, to face as best she could the
spectre that haunts through life the path of the immense majority of the
human race. She had watched its slinking approach for years. Now with a
patter of hushed feet, dreadful in the fury of its assault, it was on her.
Remorseless in attack as in pursuit it was hounding her and hers slowly
down a dreary slope to a lingering death, of body and spirit alike, in that
hungry morass, the name of which is Unemployment.

Two days later when Joe entered the cottage he found Ruth for once
sitting, listless. All the children were in bed, even little Alice. He saw at
once why. There was no fire, though it was January.

"Where's Ern, then?" he asked.

"Lookin for work," Ruth answered.

Joe stared, aghast.

"Is he out?" he asked.

Ruth rose and turned her shoulder to him.

"Yes. They've stood him off. And I don't blame em."

"What for?" Joe was genuinely concerned.

"He didn't say. Bad time, I reckon. Only don't tell anyone, Joe, for dear's
sake, else they'll stop my credit at the shop—and I'll be done."

Her eyes filled and she bit her lip.

"Four of em," she said. "And nothing a week to do it on—let alone the
rent" ...

She might hush it up; but the news spread.

Alf, with his ears of a lynx, was one of the first to hear. For a moment he
hovered in a dreadful state of trepidation. It was a year and a half since he
had stalked his white heifer, bent on a kill, only to be scared away by the
presence of that mysterious old man he had found at her side in the heart of
the covert. But his lust was by no means dead because it had been for the
time suppressed. Ruth had baffled him; and Alf had not forgotten it. Ern
possessed a beautiful woman he longed for; and Alf had not forgiven him.

Perhaps because he had beaten down his desire for so long, it now
rushed out ravening from its lair, and drove all else before it. Throwing
caution to the winds, he came stealing along like a stoat upon the trail,
licking his lips, wary yet swift. First he made sure that Ernie was out,
looking for a job of work. Then he came down the street.

Ruth met her enemy blithely and with taunting eyes. In battle she found
a certain relief from the burthen of her distress. And here she knew was no
question of pity or consideration.

"Monday's your morning, isn't it?" she said. "Come along then, will you,
Alf? And you'll see what I got for you."

Alf shook a sorrowful head, studying his rent-book.

"It can't go on," he said in the highly moral tone he loved to adopt. "It
ain't right." He raised a pained face and looked away. "Of course if you was
to wish to wipe it off and start clean——"

Ruth was cold and smiling. She handled Alf always with the caressing
contempt with which a cat handles a mouse.

"Little bit of accommodation," she said. "No thank you, Alf. I shouldn't
feel that'd help me to start clean."

"See Ern's down and out," continued the tempter in his hushed and
confidential voice. "Nobody won't give him a job."

Ruth trembled slightly, though she was smiling still and self-contained.

"You'll see to that now you're on high, won't you?" she said—"for my
children's sake."

"It'd be doin Ern a good turn, too," Alf went on in the same low
monotone.

"Brotherly," said Ruth. "But he mightn't see it that way."

"He wouldn't mind," continued Alf gently. "See he's all for Joe Burt and
the classes now. Says you're keeping him back. Nothin but a burthen to him,
he says. Her and her brats, as he said last night at the Institute. Don't give a
chap a chance." Alf wagged his head. "Course he shouldn't ha said it. I
know that. Told him so at the time afore them all. Tain't right—I told him
straight—your own wife and all."

"My Ern didn't say that, Alf," Ruth answered simply.

His eyes came seeking hers furtively, and were gone instantly on
meeting them.

"Then you won't do him a good turn?"

Ruth's fine eyes flashed and danced, irony, laughter, scorn, all crossing
swords in their brown deeps. There were aspects of Alf that genuinely
amused her.

"Would you like to talk it over with him?" she asked.

"And supposing I have?"

"He'll be back in a moment," she said, sweet and bright. "I'll ask him."

Alf was silent, fumbling with his watch-chain. Then he began again in
the same hushed voice, and with the same averted face.

"And there's another thing between us." His eyes were shut, and he was
weaving to and fro like a snake in the love-dance. "Sorry you're trying to
make bad blood between me and my old dad," he said. "Very sorry, Ruth."

"I aren't," Ruth answered swiftly. "You was always un-friends from the
cradle, you and dad. See he don't think you're right." She added a little stab
of her own—"No one does. That's why they keep you on as sidesman, Mr.
Chislehurst says. Charity-like. They're sorry for you. So'm I."

The words touched Alf's vital spot—the conceit that was the most
obvious symptom of his insanity. His face changed, but his voice remained
as before, stealthy and insinuating. He came a little closer, and his eyes
caressed her figure covetously.

"You see I wouldn't annoy me, not too far, not if I was you, Ruth. You
can go too far even with a saint upon the cross."

Ruth put out the tip of her tongue daintily.

"Crook upon the cross, don't you mean, Alf?"

He brushed the irrelevancy aside, shooting his head across to hers. His
face was ugly now, and glistening. With deliberate insolence he flicked a
thumb and finger under her nose.

"And I do know what I do know, and what nobody else don't know only
you and me and the Captin, my tuppenny tartlet."

She was still and white, formidable in her very dumbness. He proceeded
with quiet stealth.

"See that letter I wrote you used to hold over against me before you
married—that's destroyed now. And a good job, too, for it might have meant
trouble for Alfured. But it's gone! I know that then. Ern told me. He's a

drunkard, old Ern is; but he's not a liar. I will say that for my brother; I will
stick up for him if it was ever so; I will fight old Ern's battles for him."

"As you're doin now," said Ruth.

Alf grinned.

"And the short of it all is just this, Ruthie," he continued, and reaching
forth a hand, tapped her upon the shoulder—"I got you, and you ain't got
me. And I can squeeze the heart out of that great bosom o yours"—he
opened and clenched his hand in pantomine—"if I don't get my way any
time I like. So just you think it over! Think o your children if you won't
think of nothing else!"

Outside in the road he ran into Joe, who gripped him.

"What you come after?" asked the engineer ferociously.

"After my rent," answered Alf, shouting from fear. Joe looked
dangerous, but loosed his hold.

"How much?" he asked, taking a bag from his pocket.

"Sixteen shilling. You can see for yourself."

Obliging with the obligingness of the man who is scared to death, Alf
produced his book. Joe, lowering still, examined it. Then he paid the money
into the other's hand. That done he escorted Alf policemanwise to the
bottom of Borough Lane.

"If A find you mouchin round here again A'll break your bloody little
back across ma knee," he told the other, shouldering over him. "A mean it,
sitha!"

Alf withdrew up the hill towards the Star. At a safe distance he paused
and called back confidentially, his face white and sneering,

"Quite the yard-dog, eh? Bought her, ain't yer?"

Joe returned to the cottage and entered.

At the head of the stairs a lovely little figure in a white gown that
enfolded her hugely like a cloud, making billows about the woolly red
slippers which had been Bess Trupp's Christmas gift, smiled at him.

"Uncle Joe," little Alice chirped, "please tell Mum I are ready."

He ran up the stairs, gathered her in his arms, and bore her back to bed in
the room where Susie and Jenny already slept.

"Hush!" she whispered, laying a tiny finger on his lips—"The little
ones!"

He tucked her up and kissed her.

"You're the proper little mother, aren't you?" he whispered.

In the kitchen he found Ruth, a row of tin-tacks studding her lips, soling
Alice's boots. The glint of steel between her lips, and the inward curl of her
lips, gave her a touch of unusual grimness.

"Always at it," he said.

"Yes," she answered between muffled lips. "Got to be. Snob this time.
Only the soles are rotten. It's like puttin nails into wet brown paper."

She was suffering terribly—he felt it; and suppressed accordingly. But if
her furnaces were damped down, he could hear the flames roaring behind
closed doors; and her passion, which typified for him the sufferings of those
innocent millions to the redemption of whom he had consecrated his life,
moved him profoundly.

He flung the bag on the table before her almost savagely. It jingled as it
fell and squatted there, dowdy, and lackadaisical as a dumpling in a swoon.

Ruth eyed it, her lips still steel-studded.

"How much?" she mumbled.

"Ten pound," he answered.

"That's not what I mean."

"What do you mean, then?"

"What's the price?"

He glared at her; then thumped the table with a great fist.

"Nothin then!" he shouted. "What doest' take me for?"

She munched her tin-tacks sardonically, regarding him.

How sturdy he was, with his close curly black hair, and on his face the
set and resolute look of the man approaching middle-age, who knows that
he wants and how to win it!

"A man, Joe."

He snorted sullenly.

"Better'n a no-man any road," he sneered.

The words stung her. All the immense and tender motherliness of her
nature rose up like a wave that curls in roaring majesty to a fall. She swept
the tin-tacks from her mouth and met him, flashing and glorious.

"See here, Joe!" she cried, deep-voiced as a bloodhound. "Ne'er a word
against my Ern! I won't have it."

"Your Ern!"

She was white and heaving.

"Yes, my Ern! He's down and out, and you take advantage to come up
here behind his back and insult him—and me. You're the one to call anudder
man a no-man, aren't you?" Taking the bag of money she tossed it at him
with a flinging scorn that was magnificent.

"Take your filth away—and yourself with it!"

He went, humbled and ashamed.

She watched him go—this sanguine, well-conditioned man, with his
good boots, his sensible clothes, his air of solid prosperity.

Then she sat down, spent. Her savagery had been largely defensive. Like
the brave soldier she was she had attacked to hide the weakness of her
guard. She was sick at heart; worn out. These men ... first Alf, then Joe ...
This champing boar, foam in the corner of his lips ... that red-eyed weasel
squealing on the trail....

An hour later Ern came home.

She knew at once from the wan look of him that he had been tramping
all day on an empty stomach. That, with all his faults, was Ern. So long as
there was a crumb in the cupboard she and the children should share it: he
would tighten his belt. Even now he just sat down, an obviously beaten
man, and did not ask for a bite. What she had she put before him; and it was
not much.

"Any luck, Ern?" she asked with a touch of tenderness.

Sullenly he shook his head.

"Walked my bloody legs off on an empty belly, and got a mouthful of
insults at the end of it," he muttered. "That's all I got. That's all they give the
working man in Old England. Joe's right. Sink the country! Blast the bloody
Empire! That's all it's good for!"

It was the first time he had ever used bad language in her presence. That
gradual demoralisation which unemployment, however caused, and its
consequences brings inevitably in its train was already showing its corrupt
fruits. The tragedy of it moved her.

"Joe's been up," she said after a bit.

"I met him," he answered. He was warmer after his meal, less sullen, and
drew up his chair from habit before the fireless range. "He wants me to go
North—to his folk. Says his brother-in-law can find me a job. Runs a
motor-transport business in Oldham."

Her back was to him at the moment.

"Does he?" she asked quietly. "What about me and my children?"

"That's what I says to him."

"What did he say?"

"Said he'd look after you and them."

Ruth was still as a mouse awaiting the cat's pounce.

"And what did you say to that?"

"Told him to go to hell."

Ruth stirred again and resumed her quiet busyness.

"Alf's been up again," she told him. "Messin round."

CHAPTER XIX

PITCHED BATTLE

Mrs. Trubb happened on Ernie's mother next day in Church Street. The
surgeon's wife, whenever she met Mrs. Edward Caspar, acted always
deliberately on the assumption, which she knew to be unfounded, that
relations between Ruth and her mother-in-law were normal.

"It's a nuisance this about Ernie," she now said. "Such a worry for Ruth."

The hard woman with the snow-white hair and fierce black eye-brows
made a little sardonic moue.

"She's all right," she answered. "You needn't worry for her. There's a
chap payin her rent."

Mrs. Trupp changed colour.

"I don't believe it," she said sharply.

"You mayn't believe it," retorted the other sourly. "It's true all the same.
Alf's her landlord. He told me."

Mrs. Trupp, greatly perturbed, reported the matter to her husband. He
tackled Alf, who at the moment was driving for his old employer again in
the absence of the regular chauffeur.

Alf admitted readily enough that the charge against his sister-in-law was
true.

"That's it, sir," he said. "It's that chap Burt. And he don't do what he done
for nothin, I'll lay; a chap like that don't."

He produced his book from his pocket, and held it out for the other to
see, half turning away with becoming modesty.

"I don't like it, sir—me own sister-in-law. And I've said so to Reverend
Spink. Makes talk, as they say. Still it's no concern of mine."

Mrs. Trupp, on hearing her husband's report, went down at once to see
Ruth and point out the extraordinary unwisdom of her action.

Ruth met her, fierce and formidable as Mrs. Trupp had never known her.

"It's a lie," she said, deep and savage as a tigress.

"It may be," Mrs. Trupp admitted. "But Alfred did show Mr. Trupp his
book. And the rent had been paid down to last Monday. I think you should
ask Mr. Burt."

That evening when Joe came up Ruth straightway tackled him.

She was so cold, so terrible, that the engineer was frightened, and lied.

"Not as I'd ha blamed you if you had," said Ruth relaxing ever so little.
"It's not your fault I'm put to it and shamed afore em all."

The bitterness of the position in which Ern had placed her was eating her
heart away. That noon for the first time she had taken the three elder
children to the public dinner for necessitous children at the school. Anne
Caspar who had been there helping to serve had smirked.

When Joe saw that the weight of her anger was turned against Ernie and
not him, he admitted his fault.

"A may ha done wrong," he said. "But A acted for the best. Didn't want
to see you in young Alf's clutches."

"You bide here," Ruth said, "and keep house along o little Alice. I'll be
back in a minute."

Hatless and just as she was, she marched up to the Manor-house.

"You were right, 'M," she told Mrs. Trupp. "It were Joe. He just tell me.
Only I didn't knaw nothin of it."

"It'll never do for you to be in his debt, Ruth," said the lady.

"No," Ruth admitted sullenly.

Mrs. Trupp went to her escritoire and took out sixteen shillings. Ruth
took it.

"Thank-you," was all she said, and she said that coldly. Then she
returned home with the money and paid Joe.

An hour later Ernie came in.

Ruth was standing at the table waiting him, cold, tall, and inexorable.

"Anything?" she asked.

Surly in self-defence, he shook his head and sat down.

She gave him not so much as a crumb of sympathy.

"No good settin down," she told him. "You ain't done yet. You'll take that
clock down to Goldmann's after dark, and you'll get sixteen shillings for it.
If he won't give you that for it, you'll pop your own great coat."

Ernie stared at her. He was uncertain whether to show fight or not.

"Dad's clock?—what he give me when I married?"

"Yes. Dad's clock."

She regarded him with eyes in which resentment flamed sullenly.

"Can I feed six on the shilling a week he gives me—rent and all?"

Ernie went out and brought back the money. She took it without a word,
and wrapping it up in a little bit of paper, left it at the Manor-house.

Mrs. Trupp, who was holding a council with Bess and Bobby
Chislehurst, unwrapped the packet and showed the money.

"She's put something up the spout," said the sage Bobby.

The three talked the situation over. There was only one thing to be done.
Somebody must go round to Mr. Pigott and intercede for Ernie. Bobby was
selected.

"You'll get him round if anybody can," Bess told her colleague
encouragingly.

Bobby, shaking a dubious head, went. Mr. Pigott, like everybody else in
Old Town, was devoted to the young curate; but he presented a firm face
now to the other's entreaties.

"Every chance I've given him." he said, and scolded and growled as he
paced to and fro in the little room looking across Victoria Drive on to the
allotments. "He's a lost soul, is Ernie Caspar. That's my view, if you care for
it."

Bobby retreated, not without hope, and bustled round to Ruth.

"You must go and see him!" he rapped out almost imperiously
—"yourself—this evening—after work—at 6.30—to the minute." He would
be praying at that hour.

Ruth, who was fighting for her life now, went.

Mr. Pigott, at the window, saw her coming.

"Here she comes," he murmured. "O dear me! You women, you know,
you're the curse of my life. I'd be a good and happy man only for you."

Mrs Pigott was giggling at his elbow.

"She'll get round you, all right, my son," she said. "She'll roll you up in
two ticks till you're just a little round ball of nothing in particular, and then
gulp you down."

"She won't!" the other answered truculently. "You don't know me!" And
he swaggered masterfully away to meet the foe.

Mrs. Pigott proved, of course, right.

Ruth's simplicity and beauty were altogether too much for the
susceptible old man. He put up no real fight at all; but after a little bluff and
bounce surrendered unconditionally with a good many loud words to salve
his conscience and cover his defeat.

"It's only postponing the evil day, I'm afraid," he said; but he agreed to
take the sinner back at a lower wage to do a more menial job—if he'd come.

"He'll come, sir," said Ruth. "He's humble. I will say that for Ern."

"Send him to me," said the old schoolmaster threateningly. "I'll dress him
down. What he wants is to get religion."

"He's got religion, sir," answered simple Ruth. "Only where it is it's no
good to him."

That evening, when Ern entered, heavy once again with defeat, she told
him the news. At the moment she was standing at the sink washing up, and
did not even turn to face him. He made as though to approach her and then
halted. Something about her back forbade him.

"It shan't happen again, Ruth," he said.

She met him remorseless as a rock of granite.

"No, not till next time," she answered.

He stood a moment eyeing her back hungrily. Then he went out.

He was hardly gone when his father lumbered into the kitchen. The old
gentleman's eyes fell at once on the clock-deserted mantel-piece.

"Gone to be mended," he said to himself, and took out of his waistcoat
pocket the huge old gold watch with a coat of arms on the back, beloved of
the children, that had itself some fifteen years before made a romantic
pilgrimage to Mr. Goldmann's in Sea-gate. Then he bustled to the cupboard
where was the box containing a hammer and a few tools. He put a nail in
the wall, hammered his thumb, sucked it with a good deal of slobber, but
got the nail in at last.

"Without any help too," he said to himself, not without a touch of
complacency as he hung the watch on it. Ruth watched him with wistful
affection. Pleased with himself and his action, as is only the man who rarely
uses his hands, he stood back and admired his work.

"There!" he said. "Didn't know I was a handy man, did you? It'll keep
you going anyway till the clock comes back."

He left more hurriedly than usual, and when he was gone Ruth found
two shillings on the mantel-piece.

The old man's kindness and her own sense of humiliation were too much
for Ruth. She went out into the back-yard; and there Joe found her, standing
like a school-girl, her hands behind her, looking up at the church-tower.

Quietly he came to her and peeped round at her face, which was
crumpled and furrowed, the tears pouring down.

"I'd as lief give up all together for all the good it is," she gulped between
her sobs.

He put out his hand to gather her. She turned on him, her eyes
smouldering and sullen beneath the water-floods.

"Ah, you, would you?" she snarled.

As she faced him he saw that the brooch she usually wore at her throat
was gone, and her neck, round and full, was exposed.

She saw the direction of his eyes.

"Yes," she said, "that's gone too. I'll be lucky soon if I'm left the clothes I
stand up in."

He put out a sturdy finger and stroked her bare throat. She struck it aside
with ferocity.

"What do you want then?" he asked.

"You know what I want," she answered huskily.

"What's that?"

"A man—to make a home and keep the children."

"Well, here's one a-waitin."

She flung him off and moved heavily into the kitchen.

Just then there was a tap at the window. It was little Alice calling for her
mother to come and tuck her up.

CHAPTER XX

THE VANQUISHED

When Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor called at the Manor-house a few days
later, Mrs. Trupp told them what had happened.

"Burt paid her rent?" queried the Colonel.

"Without her knowledge," said Mrs. Trupp.

The Colonel shrugged.

"I'm afraid our friend Ernie's a poor creature," he said. "Wishy-washy!
That's about the long and short of it."

"And yet he's got it in him!" commented Mrs. Trupp.

"That's what I say," remarked Mrs. Lewknor with a touch of
aggressiveness. The little lady, with the fine loyalty that was her
characteristic, never forgot whose son Ernie was, nor her first meeting with
him years before in hospital at Jubbulpur. "He's got plenty in him; but she
don't dig it out."

"He got a good fright though, this time," said Bess. "It may steady him."

Mr. Trupp shot forth one of his short epigrams, solid and chunky as a
blow from a hammer.

"Men won't till they must," he said. "It's Must has been the making of
Man. He'll try when he's got to, and not a moment before."

Ten minutes later Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor were walking down
Church Street towards the station. Just in front of them a woman and two
men were marching a-breast. The woman was flanked by her comrades.

"What a contrast those two men make," remarked the Colonel. "That
feller Burt's like a bull!"

"Too like," retorted Mrs. Lewknor sharply. "Give me the fellow who's
like a gentleman."

The Colonel shook his head.

"Flame burns too feebly."

"But it burns pure," snapped the little lady.

Both parties had reached the foot of the hill at the Goffs when the
woman in front swerved. It was the motion of the bird in flight suddenly
aware of a man with a gun. She passed through the stile and fled swiftly
across Saffrons Croft. The men with her, evidently taken by surprise,
followed.

Only the Colonel saw what had happened.

A tall man, coming from the station, had turned into Alf's garage.

"Royal," he said low to his companion.

Captain Royal had come down to Beachbourne to see Alf Caspar, who
wanted more capital for his Syndicate which was prospering amazingly.
Alf, indeed, now that he had established his garages in every important

centre in East Sussex, was starting a Road-touring Syndicate to exploit for
visitors the hidden treasures of a country-side amazingly rich in historic
memories for men of Anglo-Saxon blood. The Syndicate was to begin
operations with a flourish on the Easter Bank Holiday, if the necessary
licence could be obtained from the Watch Committee; and Alf anticipated
little real trouble in that matter.

Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, who had never forgiven Alf for being Alf,
watched the growing prosperity of the Syndicate and its promoter with
undisguised annoyance.

"It beats me," said Bess, "why people back the little beast. Everybody
knows all about him."

Next day as they rode down the valley towards Birling Gap, Mr. Trupp
expounded to his daughter the secret of Alf's success.

"When you're as old as I am, my dear, and have had as long an
experience as I have of this slip-shod world, you'll know that people will
forgive almost anything to a man who gets things done and is reliable. Alf
drove me for nearly ten years tens of thousands of miles; and I never knew
him to have a break-down on the road. Why?—because he took trouble."

Alf, indeed, with all his amazing deficiencies, mental and moral, was a
supremely honest workman. He never scamped a job, and was never
satisfied with anything but the best. He was gloriously work-proud. A hard
master, he was hardest on himself, as all the men in his yard knew. One and
all they disliked him; one and all they respected him—because he could
beat them at their own job. His work was his solitary passion, and he was an
artist at it. Here he was not even petty. Good work, and a good workman,
found in him their most wholehearted supporter.

"That's a job!" he'd say to a mechanic. "I congratulate you."

"You should know, Mr. Caspar," the man would answer, pleased and
purring. For Alf's reputation as the best motor-engineer in East Sussex was
well-established and well-earned. And because he was efficient and
thorough the success of his Syndicate was never in doubt.

Alf was on the way now, in truth, to becoming a rich man. Yet he lived
simply enough above his original garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old
Town. And from that eyrie, busy though he was, he still made time to watch
with interest and pleasure his brother's trousers coming down and indeed to
lend a helping hand in the process: for he worked secretly on his mother,
who regarded Ernie when he came to Rectory Walk to take his father out
with eyes of increasing displeasure; for her eldest son was shabby and
seedy almost now as in the days when he had been out of work after leaving
the Hohenzollern. The word failure was stamped upon him in letters few
could mis-read. And Anne Caspar had for all those who fail, with one
exception, that profound sense of exasperation and disgust which finds its
outlet in the contemptuous pity that is for modern man the camouflaged
expression of the cruelty inherent in his animal nature. It seemed that all the
love in her—and there was love in her as surely there is in us all—was
exhausted on her own old man. For the rest her attitude towards the fallen in
the arena was always Thumbs down—with perhaps an added zest of rancour
and resentment because of the one she spared.

"She has brought you low," she commented one evening to Ernie in that
pseudo-mystical voice, as of one talking in her sleep, from the covert of
which some women hope to shoot their poisoned arrows with impunity.
This time, however, she was not to escape just punishment.

Ernie flared.

"Who says she has then?"

Anne Caspar had struck a spark of reality out of the moss-covered flint;
and now—as had happened at rare intervals throughout his life—Ernie
made his mother suddenly afraid.

"Everyone," she said, lamely, trying vainly to cover her retreat.

"Ah," said Ernie, nodding. "I knaw who, and I'll let him knaw it too."

"Best be cautious," replied his mother with a smirk. "He's your landlord
now. And you're behind."

Ernie rose.

"He may be my landlord," he cried. "But I'm the daddy o he yet."

Sullenly he returned to the house that was now for him no home: for the
woman who had made it home was punishing not without just cause the
man who had betrayed it.

Ruth was standing now like a rock in the tide-way, the passions of men
beating about her, her children clinging to her, the grey sky of circumstance
enfolding her.

She had sought adventure and had found it. Battle now was hers; but it
was battle stripped of all romance. Danger beset her; but it was wholly
sordid. The battle was for bread—to feed her household; and soap—to keep
her home and children clean. The danger was lest all the creeping diseases
and hideous disabilities contingent upon penury, unknown even by name
except in their grossest form to the millions whose lot it is to face and fight
them day in, day out, should sap the powers of resistance of her and hers,
and throw them on the scrap-heap at the mercy of Man, the merciless.

Tragic was her dilemma. To Ruth her home was everything because it
meant the environment in which she must grow the souls and bodies of her
children. And her home was threatened. That was the position, stark and
terrible, which stared her in the eyes by day and night. The man provided
her by the law had proved a No-man, as Joe called it. He was a danger to
the home of which he should have been the support. And while her own
man had failed her, another, a true man as she believed, was offering to take
upon his strong and capable shoulders the burthen Ernie was letting fall.

Ruth agonised and well she might. For Joe was pressing in upon her,
overpowering her, hammering at her gate with always fiercer insistence.
Should she surrender?—should she open the gate of a citadel of which the
garrison was starved and the ammunition all but spent?—should she fight
on?

Through the muffled confusion and darkness of her mind, above the
tumult of cries old and new besetting her, came always the still small voice,
heard through the hubbub by reason of its very quiet, that said—Fight.
Inherently spiritual as she was, Ruth gave ear to it, putting forth the whole
of her strength to meet the enemy, who was too much her friend, and
overthrow him.

Yet she could not forget that she owed her position to Ernie, since at
every hour of every day she was being pricked by the ubiquitous pin of
poverty. Fighting now with her back to the wall, for her home and children,
and stern because of it, she did not spare him. When Ernie called her hard,
as he was never tired of doing, she answered simply,

"I got to be."

"No need to bully a chap so then," Ernie complained. "A'ter all I am a
human being though I may be your husband."

"You're not the only one I got to think of," replied Ruth remorselessly.
"And it's no good talking. I shan't forgive you till you've won back the
position you lost when he sack you. Half a dollar a week makes just the
difference between can and can't to me. See, I can't goo to the wash-tub
now as I could to make up one time o day when I'd only the one. So I must
look to you. And if I look in vain you got to hear about it. I mean it, Ernie,"
she continued. "I'm fairly up against it. There's no gettin round me this time.
And if you won't think o me, you might think o the children. It's they who
suffer."

She had touched the spot this time.

"Steady with it then!" cried Ernie angrily. "Don't I think o you and the
children?"

"Not as you should," answered Ruth calmly. "Not by no means. We
should come first. Four of them now—and twenty-two bob to keep em on.
Tain't in reason."

She faced him with calm and resolute eyes.

"And it mustn't happen again, Ern," she said. "See, it's too much.
Nobody's fault but your own."

Ernie went out in sullen mood, and for the first time since the smash
turned into the Star. He had not been there many minutes when a navvy,
clouded with liquor, leaned over and inquired friendly how his barstards
were.

Ern set down his mug.

"What's this then?" he asked, very still.

The fellow leaned forward, leering, a great hand plaistered on either
knee.

"Don't you know what a bloody barstard is?" he asked. He was too drunk
to be afraid; too drunk to be accountable. Ernie dealt with him as a doctor
deals with a refractory invalid—patiently.

"Who's been sayin it?" he asked.

"Your own blood-brother—Alf."

Ernie tossed off his half-pint, rose, and went out.

He walked fast down the hill to the Goffs. People marked him as he
passed, and the look upon his face: he did not see them.

Alf was in his garage, talking to a man. The man wore a burberry and a
jaeger hat, with a hackle stuck in the riband. There was something jaunty
and sword-like about him. Ern, as he drew rapidly closer, recognised him. It
was Captain Royal. The conjunction of the two men at that moment turned
his heart to steel.

He was walking; but he seemed to himself to be sliding over the earth
towards his enemies, swift and stealthy as a hunting panther. As he went he
clutched his fists and knew that they were damp and very cold.

When Ernie was within a hundred yards of him Royal, all unconscious
of the presence of his enemy, swung out of the garage and walked off in his
rapid, resolute way.

Alf went slowly up the steps into his office.

He was grinning to himself.

"'Alf a mo then!" said Ernie quietly, hard on his heels. "Just a word with
you, Alf."

Alf turned, saw his brother crossing the yard, marked the danger-flare on
his face, remembered it of old, and bolted incontinently, without shame,
locking the house door behind him.

Ern hammered on the door.

Alf peeped out of an upper window, upset a jug of water over his
brother, and in his panic fury flung the jug after it. It broke on Ernie's head
and crashed to pieces on the step.

Ernie, gasping, and bleeding from the head, staggered back into the road,
half-stunned. Then he began to tear off his sopping clothes and throw them
down into the dust at his feet. His voice was quiet as his face, smeared with
blood, was moved.

"You've got to ave it!" he called up to his brother. "May as well come
and ave it now as wait for it."

There had been a big football match on the Saffrons, and the crowd were
just flocking away, in mood for a lark. The drenched and bleeding man
stripping in the road, the broken crockery on the door-step, the white-faced
fellow at the window, promised just the sensation they sought. Joyfully they
gathered to see. Here was just the right finale pleasant Saturday afternoon.

"I'm your landlord!" screamed Alf. "Remember that! I'll make you pay
for this!"

"Will you?" answered Ernie, truculent and cool. "Then I'll have my
money's worth first."

This heroic sentiment was loudly applauded by the crowd, who felt an
added sympathy for Ern now they knew he was attacking his landlord, one
of a class loathed by all good men.

Just then Joe Burt emerged from the crowd and took the tumultuous
figure of Ernie in his arms.

"Coom, then!" he said. "This'll never do for a Labour Leader. This isna
the Highway you should be trampin along."

The crowd protested. It was an exhilarating scene—better than the
pictures, some opined. And here was a blighter, who talked funny talk,
interfering.

"Just like these hem furriners," said an old man. "Ca-a-n't let well a-be."

Then, happily, or unhappily, the police, who exist to spoil the people's
fun, appeared on the scene.

They made a little blue knot round Ernie, who stood in the midst of
them, stripped and dripping, with something of the forlorn look of a shorn
ewe that has just been dipped.

Alf, secure now in the presence of the officers of the law, descended
from his window and came down the steps of his house towards the
growing crowd. A tall man joined him. The pair forced their way through
the press to the police.

"I'm Captain Royal," said the tall man, coldly. "I saw what happened."

Joe turned on the new-comer. His clothes, his class, a touch of insolence
about his tone and bearing, roused all the combative instincts of the
engineer.

"You wasn't standin by then!" he said ferociously. "You only just come
up. A saw you."

The other ignored him, drawing a card from an elegant case.

"Here's my card," he said to the police. "If you want my evidence you'll
know where to find me."

Joe boiled over.

"That's the gentleman of England touch!" he sneered. "Swear away a
workin man's life for the price of half a pint, they would!"

"Ah! I know him!" muttered Ernie, white still, and trembling.

"Enough of it now," growled a big policeman, making notes in his
pocket-book.

Just then the crowd parted and a woman came through. A shawl was
wrapped about her head and face. Only her eyes were seen, dark under dark
hair.

A moment she stood surrounded by the four men who had desired or
possessed her. Then she put her hand on the shirt-sleeve of her husband.

"Ern," she said, and turned away.

He followed her submissively through the crowd, slipping his shirt over
his head.

Swiftly the woman walked away up the hill. Her scarecrow, his trousers
sopping and sagging about his boots, trudged behind.

The crowd looked after them in silence. Then Joe broke away and
followed at a distance.

Ruth looked back and saw him.

"Let us be, Joe," she called.

Joe turned away. His eyes were full of tears.

CHAPTER XXI

THUNDER

The two brothers had to appear before the Bench on Monday. As it
chanced Mr. Pigott, Colonel Lewknor and Mr. Trupp were the only
magistrates present.

Ernie, who appeared with his head bandaged, admitted his mistake.

"Went to pass the time o day with my brother," he said. "And all he done
was to lean out of the window and crash the crockery down on the roof o
me head. Did upset me a bit, I admit."

"He meant murder all right," was Alf's testimony, sullenly given. "He
knows that."

Joe corroborated Ernie's statement.

He had been in the Saffrons on Saturday afternoon and had seen Ernie
coming down the hill from Old Town. Having a message to give him he had
started to meet him. Ernie had gone up the steps of his brother's house; and
as he did so, Alf had leaned out of the upper window and thrown a jug
down on his brother.

Alf's solicitor cross-examined the engineer at some length.

"What were you doing on the Saffrons?"

"Watching the football."

"You were watching the football; and yet you saw Caspar coming down
Church Street?"

"I did."

"I suggest that you did nothing of the sort; and that you only appeared on
the scene at the last moment."

"Well," retorted Joe, good-humouredly. "A don't blame you for that. It's
what you're paid to suggest."

A witness who was to have given evidence for Alf did not appear; and
the Bench agreed without retiring. Neither of the brothers had been up
before the magistrates before and both were let off with a caution, Ernie
having to pay costs.

"Your tongue's altogether too long, Alfred Caspar," said Mr. Pigott, the
Chairman, and added—quite unjudicially—"always was. And you're
altogether too free with your fists, Ernest Caspar."

Ernie left the court rejoicing; for he knew he had escaped lightly.
Outside he waited to thank his friend for his support.

"Comin up along?" he coaxed.

"Nay, ma lad," retorted the engineer with the touch of brutality which not
seldom now marked his intercourse with the other. "You must face the
missus alone. Reck'n A've done enough for one morning."

Ern went off down Saffrons Road in the direction of Old Town, crest-
fallen as is the man whose little cocoon of self-defensive humbug has
suddenly been cleft by a steel blade.

Joe marched away down Grove Road. Alf caught him up. The little
chauffeur was smiling that curds-and-whey smile of his.

"Say, Burt!—you aren't half a liar, are you?" he whispered.

Joe grinned genially.

"The Church can't have it all to herself," he said. "Leave a few of the lies
to the laity."

Ern trudged back from the Town Hall, across Saffrons Croft, to the
Moot, in unenviable mood; for he was afraid, and he had cause.

Ruth was who standing in the door came stalking to meet him, holding
little Alice by the hand.

Ern slouched up with that admixture of bluff, lordly insouciance, and
aggrieved innocence that is the honoured defence of dog and man alike on
such occasions.

"You've done us," she said almost vengefully.

"What are I done then?" asked the accused, feigning abrupt indignation.

Ruth dismissed the child, and turned on Ernie.

"Got us turn into the street—me and my babies," she answered,
splendidly indignant. "A chap's been round arter the house, while you was
up before the beaks settlin whether you were for Lewes Gaol or not. Says
Alf's let it him a week from Saraday, and we got to go. I wouldn't let him
in."

"Ah," said Ernie stubbornly, "don't you worry. Alf's got to give us notice
first. And he daren't do that."

Ruth was not to be appeased.

"Why daren't he, then?" she asked.

"I'll tell you for why," answered Ernie. "He's goin up before the Watch
Committee come Thursday to get his licence for his blessed Touring
Syndicate. We've friends on that Committee, good friends—Mr. Pigott, and
the Colonel, not to say Mr. Geddes; and Alf knaws it. He ain't goin to do
anythink to annoy them just now. Knaws too much, Alf do."

Ruth was not convinced.

"We got no friends," she said sullenly. "We shall lose em all over this. O
course we shall, and I don't blame em. A fair disgrace on both of you, I call

it. You're lucky not to have to do a stretch. And as to Alf, they've sack him
from sidesman over it, and he'll never forgive us."

They were walking slowly back to the cottage, the man hang-dog, the
woman cold.

Outside the door she paused.

"All I know is this," she said. "If you're out again through your own fault
I'm done with it, and I'll tell you straight what I shall do, Ern."

She was very quiet.

"What then?"

"I shall leave you with your children and go away with mine." She stood
with heaving bosom, immensely moved. "I ca-a'nt keep the lot. But I can
keep one. And you know which one that'll be."

Ernie, the colour of dew, went indoors without a word.

The rumour that Alf had been dismissed from his position as sidesman at
St. Michael's, owing to the incident in the Goffs, was not entirely true, but
there was something in it.

The Archdeacon had his faults, but there was no more zealous guardian
of the fair fame of the Church and all things appertaining to her.

Alf's appearance before the magistrates was discussed at the weekly
conference of the staff at the Rectory.

Both Mr. Spink and Bobby Chislehurst were present. The former stoutly
defended his protégé, and the Archdeacon heard him out. Then he turned to
Bobby.

"What d'you say, Chislehurst?" he asked.

Bobby, in fact, could say little.

Ernie had no scruples whatever in suggesting what was untrue to the
magistrates, who when on the Bench at all events were officials, and to be
treated accordingly, but he would never lie to a man who had won his heart.
He had, therefore, in answer to the Cherub's request given an unvarnished
account of what had occurred. Bobby now repeated it reluctantly, but
without modification.

"Exactly," said Mr. Spink. "There's not a tittle of evidence that Alfred
really did say what he's accused of saying. And he denies it, point-blank."

"I think I'd better see him," said the Archdeacon.

Alf came, sore and sulking.

Mottled and sour of eye, he stood before the Archdeacon who flicked the
lid of his snuff-box, and asked whether he had indeed made the remark
attributed to him.

"I never said nothing of the sort," answered Alf warmly, almost rudely.
"Is it likely? me own sister-in-law and all! See here!" He produced his rent-
book. "I'm her landlord. She's months behind. See for yourself! Any other
man only me'd have turned her out weeks ago. But, of course, she takes
advantage. She would. She's that sort. I never said a word against her."

"And there is plenty you could say," chimed in Mr. Spink, who had
escorted his friend.

"Maybe there is," muttered Alf.

The Archdeacon made a grimace. In the matter of sex indeed if in no
other, he was and always had been a genuine aristocrat—sensitive, refined,
fastidious.

"Two of them get soaking together in the Star," continued Alf. "Then
they start telling each other dirty stories and quarrellin. Ern believes it all
and comes and makes a fuss. Mr. Pigott's chairman on the Bench. Course he

lays it all on me—Mr. Pigott would. Ern can't do no wrong in his eyes—
never could. Won't listen to reason and blames me along of him—because
I'm a Churchman. See, he's never forgiven me leaving the Chapel, Mr.
Pigott hasn't; and that's the whole story."

It was a good card to play; and it did its work.

"It's a cleah case to my mind of more sinned against than sinning," said
the Archdeacon with a genuinely kind smile. "You had bad luck, Caspar—
but a good friend." He shook hands with both young men. "I wish you well
and offer you my sympathy. I think you should go and have a word of
explanation with our friend, Mr. Pigott, though."

"Yes, sir," said Alf. "I'm goin now. I couldn't let it rest there."

Alf went straight on to interview the erring chairman in the little villa in
Victoria Drive.

The latter, summing up his old pupil with shrewd blue eye in which there
was a hint of battle, refused to discuss the case or his judgment.

"What's done is done," he said. "The law's the law and there's no goin
back on it. You were lucky to get off so light; that's my notion of it."

Alf stood before him, hang-dog and resentful.

"He'll kill me one of these days," he muttered. "Little better than a
bloody murderer."

There was a moment's pause, marked by a snort from Mr. Pigott.

Then the jolly, cosy man, with his trim white beard and neat little
paunch, rose and opened the window with some ostentation.

"First time that word's ever crossed my threshold," he said. "And I've
lived in this house ten year come Michaelmas." He turned with dignity on
the offender. "Is that what they teach you in the Church of England, then,
Alfred Caspar?" he asked. "It wasn't what we taught you in the Wesleyan
Chapel in which you was bred. Never heard the like of it for language in all

me life—never!" Before everything else in life Mr. Pigott was a strong
chapel-man; and in his judgment Ern's weakness was as nothing to Alf's
apostasy.

Alf looked foolish and deprecatory.

"I didn't mean in it the swearin way," he said—"not as Ernest would
have meant it. I never been in the Army meself. I only meant he'll be the
end o me one of these days. Good as said he would in the Star Saturday."

Mr. Pigott turned away to hide the twinkle in his eye. He knew Alf well,
and his weakness.

"He don't like you, I do believe," he admitted. "And he's a very funny
fellow, Ern, when his hackle's up."

Alf's eyes blinked as they held the floor.

"And now," he said, "I suppose the Watch Committee'll not grant my
licence for the Road-Touring Syndicate when it comes up afore em on
Thursday. And I'll be a ruined man."

"I shouldn't be surprised," answered Mr. Pigott, who was an alderman
and a great man on the Town Council.

Alf was furious. He was so furious, indeed, that he did a thing he had not
done for years: he took his trouble to his mother.

"It's a regular plot," he said, "that's what it is. To get my licence stopped
and ruin me. Raised the money; ordered the buses; engaged the staff and all.
And then they spring this on me!—It ain't Ernie. I will say that for him. I
know who's at the bottom of it."

"Who then?" asked his mother, faintly interested.

"Her Ern keeps."

Mrs. Caspar roused instantly.

"Isn't she married to him then?" she cried, peering over her spectacles.

"Is she?" sneered Alf. "That's all."

He leaned forward, his ugly face dreadful with a sneer.

"Do you know where she'd be if everyone had his rights?"

"Where then?"

"Lewes Gaol."

His message delivered, he sat back with a nod to watch its effect.

"And she would be there too," continued Alf, "only for me."

"What do you mean?" Mrs. Caspar asked.

"I mean," answered Alf, "as I keep her out of prison by keepin me mouth
shut." He dropped his voice. "And that ain't all. She's at it again ... Her
home's a knockin-shop.... All the young men.... The police ought to
interfere.... I shall tell the Archdeacon.... A kept woman.... That chap Burt....
That's how Ern makes good.... She makes the money he spends at the
Star.... And your grand-children brought up in that atmosphere!" He struck
the table. "But I'm her landlord all the same; and I'll make her know it yet."

Anne Caspar was genuinely disturbed not for the sake of Ruth, but for
that of the children.

"You could never turn her out!" she said—"not your own sister-in-law
and four children! Look so bad and all—and you a sidesman too."

Alf snorted.

"Ah, couldn't I?" he said. "You never know what a man can do till he
tries."

That evening the Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor walked over to the Manor-
house to discuss Ern's latest misadventure. They found Mr. Pigott there
clearly on the same errand; but the old Nonconformist rose to go with
faintly exaggerated dignity on seeing his would-be enemy.

"There's only one thing'll save him now," he announced in his most
dogmatic style.

"What's that?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

"H'a h'earthquake," the other answered.

When the Colonel and his wife left the Manor-house half-an-hour later
there were three people walking abreast down the hill before them, just as
there had been on a previous occasion. Now, as then, the centre of the three
was Ruth. Now, as then, on her left was Joe. But on her right instead of Ern
was little Alice.

The Colonel pointed to the three.

"I'll back Caspar all the way," said Mrs. Lewknor firmly.

"Myself," replied the Colonel shrewdly, "I'll back the winner."

Then he paused to read a placard which gave the latest news of the
Ulster campaign.

PART II
TROUBLED DAWN

CHAPTER XXII

THE BETRAYAL

The Ulster Campaign was moving forward now with something of the
shabby and theatrical pomp of a travelling circus parading the outskirts of a
sea-side town before a performance. A dromedary with an elongated upper
lip, draped in the dirty trappings of a pseudo-Oriental satrap, led the
procession, savage and sulking. Behind the dromedary came the mouldy
elephant, the mangy bear, the fat woman exposing herself in tights on a gilt-
edged Roman chariot, the sham cow-boys with gaudy cummerbunds, and
Cockney accents, on untamed bronchos hired from the local livery stables,
the horse that was alleged to have won the Derby in a by-gone century, etc.
And the spectators gaped on the pavement, uncertain whether to jeer or to
applaud.

As the Campaign rolled on its way, the wiser Conservatives shook their
heads, openly maintaining that the whole business was a direct abnegation
of everything for which their party had stood in history, while the Liberals
became increasingly restive: Mr. Geddes, uneasy at the inaction of the
Government, Mr. Geddes truculent to meet the truculence of the enemy. The
only man who openly rejoiced was Joe Burt.

"The Tory Reds have lit such a candle by God's grace in England as'll
never be put out," he said to Ernie.

The engineer had always now a newspaper cutting in his waistcoat
pocket, and a quotation pat upon his lips.

"They're all shots for the locker in the only war that matters," he told the
Colonel. "And they'll all coom in handy one day. A paste em into a lil book
nights: Tips for Traitors; an ammunition magazine, A call it."

For him Sir Edward Carson's famous confession of faith, I despise the
Will of the People—words Joe had inscribed as motto on the cover of his
ammunition magazine—gave the key to the whole movement. And he never
met the Colonel now but he discharged a broadside into the helpless body
of his victim.

It was not, however, till early in 1914, just when his pursuit of Ruth was
at the hottest, that he woke to the fact that the Tories were tampering with
the Army. That maddened Joe.

"If this goes on A shall go back to ma first love," he told Ruth with a
characteristic touch of impudence.

"And a good job too," she answered tartly. "I don't want you."

"And you can go back to your Ernie," continued the engineer, glad to
have got a rise.

"I shan't go back to him," retorted Ruth, "because I never left him."

The statement was not wholly true: for if Ruth had not left Ernie, since
the affair of the Goffs she had according to her promise turned her back on
him. When on the first opportunity that offered she had announced his fate
to the offender, he had blinked, refused to understand, argued, insisted,
coaxed—to no purpose.

"You got to be a man afoor I marry you again," she told him coldly. "I'm
no'hun of a no-man's woman."

Ernie at first refused to accept defeat. He became eloquent about his
rights.

"They're nothing to my wrongs," Ruth answered briefly; and turned a
deaf ear to all his pleas.

Thereafter Ernie found himself glad to escape the home haunted by the
woman he still loved, who tantalised and thwarted him. That was why when
Joe girded on his armour afresh and went forth to fight the old enemy in the
new disguise, Ernie accompanied him.

The pair haunted Unionist meetings, Ernie quiescent, the other
aggressive to rowdiness. Young Stanley Bessemere, who had returned from
Ireland (where he now spent all his leisure caracoling on a war-horse at the
distinguished tail of the caracoling Captain Smith) to address a series of
gatherings in his constituency in justification of the Ulster movement, and
his own share in it, was the favoured target for his darts. Joe followed him
round from the East-end to Meads, and from Meads to Old Town, and even
pursued him into the country. He acquired a well-earned reputation as a
heckler, and was starred as dangerous by the Tory bloods. Mark that man!
the word went round.

Joe knew it, and was only provoked to increased aggressiveness.

"Go on, ma lad!" he would roar from the back of the hall. "Yon's the
road to revolution aw reet!"

There came a climax at a meeting in the Institute, Old Town. Joe at
question time had proved himself unusually bland and provocative. The
stewards had tried to put him out; and there had been a rough and tumble in
the course of which somebody had hit the engineer a crack on the head
from behind with the handle of a motor-car. Joe dropped; and Ernie stood
over him in the ensuing scuffle. The news that there was trouble drew a
little crowd. Ruth, on her evening marketings in Church Street, looked in.
She found Joe sitting up against the wall, dazed; and Ernie kneeling beside
him and having words with Stanley Bessemere, who was strolling towards
the door.

"Brought his troubles on his own head," said the young member
casually.

"Hit a man from behind!" retorted Ernie, quiet but rather white.
"English, ain't it?"

"It was your own brother, then!" volunteered an onlooker.

Joe rallied, rubbed his head, looked up, saw Ruth and reassured her.

"A'm maself," he said.

He rose unsteadily on Ernie's arm.

"He must come home along of us," said Ruth.

"Of course he must then," Ernie answered with the asperity of the
thwarted male.

The night-air revived the wounded man. Arrived at the cottage he sat in
the kitchen, still a little stupid, but amused with his adventure.

"They'd ha kicked me in stoomach when A was down only for you, Ern,"
he said. "That's the Gentlemen of England's notion of politics, that is."

"You'd ha done the same by them, Joe, if you'd the chance," answered
Ern.

The other grinned.

"A would that, by Guy—and all for loov," he admitted.

Ruth brought him a hot drink. He sipped it, one eye still on his saviour.

"I owe this to you, Ern. Here's to you!"

"Come to that, Joe, I owe you something," Ernie answered.

"What's that then?" Joe sat as a man with a stiff neck, screwing up his
eye at the other.

Ern nodded significantly at Ruth's back.

"Why that little bit o tiddley you done for me afore the beaks," he
whispered.

"That's nowt," answered Joe sturdily. "What was it Saul said to Jonathan
—If a feller can't tiddle it a liddel bit for his pal, what the hell use is he?—
Book o Judges."

Ruth in the background watched the two men. It was as though she were
weighing them in the balance. There was a touch of masterful tenderness
about Ern's handling of his damaged friend that surprised and pleased her.

Joe made an effort to get up.

"A'd best be shiftin," he said.

"Never!" cried Ern, authoritatively. "You'll bide the night along o us.
She'll make you a bed on the couch here."

"Nay," said Ruth. "You'll sleep in the bed along o Ernie."

Joe eyed her.

"Where'll you sleep then?" he asked.

"In the spare room," Ruth answered, winking at Ernie.

There was no spare room; but she made up a shake-down for herself on
the settle in the kitchen. Ernie, after packing away the visitor upstairs, came
down to help her. It also gave him an opportunity to ventilate his grievance.

"One thing. It won't make much difference to me," he said.

"Your own fault," Ruth answered remorselessly. "And you aren't the only
one, though I know you think you are. Men do ... We'd be out in the street
now, the lot of us, only for Joe telling lies for you."

Next morning she took her visitor breakfast in bed and kept him there till
Mr. Trupp had come, who told Joe he must not return to work for a week.

The engineer got up that afternoon and was sitting in the kitchen still
rather shaky, when Alf, who had not fulfilled his threat and given Ruth
notice, called for the rent.

Ruth greeted him with unusual friendliness.

"Come in, won't you?" she said—"while I get the money."

Alf, who in some respects was simple almost as Ernie, entered the trap to
find Joe, huddled in a chair and glowering murder at him. He tried to
withdraw, but Ruth stood between him and the door, twice his size, and
with glittering eyes.

"There's a friend of yours," she said. "Saw him last night, at the meeting,
didn't you?—I thart you'd be glad to meet him."

Alf quaked.

"Been in the wars then?" he said shakily.

"What d'you know about it?" rumbled Joe.

"I don't know nothin," answered Alf sharply, almost shrilly.

Just then little Alice entered. Alf took advantage of her entrance to
establish his line of retreat. Once set in the door with a clear run for the
open his courage returned to him.

"And what may be your name?" he asked the child with deliberate
insolence.

"Alice Caspar," she answered, staring wide-eyed.

Alf sneered.

"That it ain't—I know," he said, and went out without his rent, and
laughing horribly.

Little Alice ran out again.

"What's he mean?" asked Joe.

Ruth regarded him with wary curiosity.

"Didn't Ern never tell you then?" she asked.

"Never!" said Joe.

Ruth was thoughtful. That was nice of Ern—like Ern—the gentleman in
him coming out.

That night she softened to him. He noticed it in a flash and approached
her—only to be repulsed abruptly.

"No," she said. "I don't care about you no more. You've lost me. That's
where it is."

"O, I beg pardon," answered Ernie, quivering. "I thart we was married."

"So we was one time o day, I believe," Ruth answered. "And might be
again yet. Who knaws?"

He stood over her as she composed herself for the night on the settle.

"How long's that Joe going to stop in my house?" he asked.

"Just as long as I like," she answered coolly.

Next day when Joe came in for tea he found Ruth sitting in the kitchen,
nursing little Alice, who was crying her heart out on her mother's shoulder.

"They've been tormenting her at school," Ruth explained. "It's Alf."

"I'll lay it is," muttered Joe. "Ern and me, we'll just go round when he
comes back from work."

Ruth looked frightened.

"Don't tell Ern for all's sake, Joe!" she whispered.

"Why not then?"

"He'd kill Alf."

Joe's face betrayed his scepticism.

"Ah, you don't knaw Ern, when he's mad," Ruth warned him.

An hour later Ernie came home. He was still, suppressed, as often now.
There was nobody in the kitchen but Ruth.

"Where's your Joe, then?" he asked.

"He's left," Ruth answered.

Ernie relaxed ever so little.

"He might ha stopped to say good-bye," he muttered.

Ruth rose.

"I got something to tell you, Ern," she said.

He turned on her abruptly.

"It's little Alice. They've been getting at her at school—that!—you
knaw."

Ernie was breathing hard.

"Who split?"

"Alf. He told Mrs. Ticehurst—I see him; and she told the lot."

Ern went out slowly, and slowly up the stairs in the dark to the children's
room.

A little voice called—"Daddy!"

"I'm comin, sweet-heart," he answered tenderly.

He felt his way to the child's bed, knelt beside it, and struck a match. A
tear like a star twinkled on her cheek. She put out her little arms to him and

clasped him round the neck.

"Daddy, you are my daddy, aren't you?" she sobbed, her heart breaking
in her voice.

He laid his cheek against hers. Both were wet.

"Of course I am," he answered, the water floods sounding in his throat.
"I'm your daddy; and you're my darling. And if we got nobody else we got
each other, ain't we?"

Ruth, in the dark at the foot of the stairs, heard, gave a great gulp, and
crept back to the kitchen.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE COLONEL FACES DEFEAT

The Colonel, who throughout his life while making a great show of
radical opinions in the mess for the benefit of his brother-officers had
always voted quietly for the Conservative party on the ground that they
made upon the whole less of a hash of Imperial affairs than their Liberal
opponents was profoundly troubled by the proceedings in Ulster.

"The beggars are undermining the morale of Ireland," he told Mr. Trupp.
"And only those who've been quartered there know what that means."

"If you said they were undermining the foundations of Society I'd
agree," the other answered. "Geddes says they've poisoned the wells of
civilisation, and he's about right."

The Presbyterian minister, indeed, usually so sane and moderate, had
been roused to unusual vehemence by the general strike against the law
engineered by the Conservative leaders.

"It's a reckless gamble in anarchy with the country's destiny at stake," he
said.

"And financed by German Jews," added Joe Burt.

As the Campaign developed and the success of the Unionists in
tampering with the Army became always more apparent, the criticisms of
the two men intensified. They hung like wolves upon the flank of the
Colonel, pertinacious in pursuit, remorseless in attack.

"You can't get away from the fact that the whole Campaign is built on
the power of the Unionists to corrupt the officers of the Army," said the
minister. "Without that the whole thing collapses."

"And so far," chimed in Joe, "A must say it looks as if they were
building on a sure foundation."

The Colonel, outwardly gay, was inwardly miserable that his beloved
Service should be dragged in the mud.

"What can you say to them?" he groaned to Mr. Trupp.

"Why," said the old surgeon brusquely, "tell em to tell their own rotten
Government to govern or get out. Let em hang half a dozen politicians for
treason, and shoot the same number of soldiers for sedition—and the thing's
done."

And the bitterness of it was that it looked increasingly as if the critics
were right.

The Colonel came home one night from a rare visit to London in black
despair.

"The British officer never grows up," he complained to his wife. "He's a
perfect baby." His long legs writhed themselves into knots, as he sucked at
his pipe. "Do you remember that charming little feller Cherry Dugdale, who
commanded the Borderers at Umballa?"

"The shikari?—rather."

"He's joined the Ulster Volunteers as a private."

Mrs. Lewknor chuckled. She was a Covenanter sans phrase, fierce
almost as the Archdeacon and delighting in the embarrassments of the
Government.

"Just like him," she said. "Little duck!"

Then came the crash.

The Commander-in-Chief in Ireland sent for General Gough,
commanding the 3rd Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, and asked him what
his action would be in the event of the Government giving him and his
Brigade the alternative of serving against Ulster or resigning. Gough
forthwith called a conference of his officers, and seventy out of seventy-five
signified their intention to resign.

"We would rather not shoot Irishmen," they said.

On the evening after the news came through the Colonel was walking
down Terminus Road when he heard a provocative voice behind him.

"What about it, Colonel?"

He turned to find Joe Burt at his heels.

"What about what?" asked the Colonel.

"This mutiny of the officers at the Curragh."

The Colonel affected a gaiety he by no means felt.

"Well, what's your view?"

Joe was enthusiastic.

"Why, it's the finest example of Direct Action ever seen in this coontry.
And it's been given by the Army officers!—That's what gets me."

"What's Direct Action?" asked the Colonel. The phrase in those days was
unknown outside industrial circles.

"A strike, and especially a strike for political purposes," answered Joe.
"General Gough and his officers have struck to prevent Home Rule being
placed on the Statute Book. What if a Trade Union had tried to hold up the
coontry same road? It's what A've always said," the engineer continued,
joyously aggressive. "The officers of the British Army aren't to be trusted
except when their own party's in power."

The Colonel walked on to the club.

There he found young Stanley Bessemere, just back from Ireland, sitting
in a halo of cigar-smoke, the hero of an amused and admiring circle,
recording his latest military exploits.

"We've got the swine beat," he was saying confidently between puffs.
"The Army won't fight. And the Government can do nothing."

The Colonel turned a vengeful eye upon him.

"Young man," he said, "are you aware that Labour's watching you?
Labour's learning from you?"

"Labour be damned!" retorted the other with jovial brutality. "We'll deal
with Labour all right when we've got this lot of traitors out of office."

"Traitors!" called Mr. Trupp, harshly from his chair. "You talk of traitors!
—you Tories!—I voted for you at the last General Election for the first time
in my life on the sole ground of national defence. D'you think I or any self-
respecting man would have done so if we'd known the jackanape tricks
you'd be up to?"

The two elderly men retired in dudgeon to the card-room.

"There's only one thing the matter with Ireland," grumbled the old
surgeon. "And its always been the same thing."

"What's that?" asked the Colonel.

"The English politician," replied the other—"Ireland's curse."

Hard on the heels of the Curragh affair came the landing of arms from
Krupp's, with the connivance, if not with the secret co-operation of the
German Government, at Larne under the cover of the rebel Army, mobilised
for the purpose. The Government wept a few patient tears over the outrage
and did nothing.

The Colonel was irritated; Mr. Trupp almost vituperative.

"Geddes may say what he likes," remarked the former. "But I can't acquit
the Government. They're encouraging the beggars to play it up."

"Acquit them!" fulminated the old surgeon. "I'd impeach them on the
spot. The law in abeyance! British ports seized under the guns of the British
fleet! Gangs of terrorists patrolling the roads and openly boasting they'll
assassinate any officer of the Crown who does his duty; and the
Episcopalian Church blessing the lot! And the Government does nothing.
It's a national disgrace!"

"It's all very well, Mr. Trupp," said Mr. Glynde, the senior member for
the Borough, who was present. "But Ulster has a case, and we must
consider it."

"Of course Ulster has a case," the other answered sharply. "Nobody but a
fool denies it. I'm attacking the Government, not Ulster. Let them restore
law and order in Ireland. That's their first job. When they've done that it'll
be time enough to consider Ulster's grievances. Where's all this going to
lead us?"

"Hell," said the Colonel gloomily.

He was, indeed, more miserable than he had ever been in his life.

Other old Service men he met, who loathed the Government, looked on
with amused or spiteful complacency at the part the Army was playing in
the huge conspiracy against the Crown. The Colonel saw nothing but the

shame of it, its possible consequences, and effect on opinion, domestic,
imperial and European.

He walked about as one in a maze: he could not understand.

Then Mr. Geddes came to see him.

The tall minister was very grave; and there was no question what he
came about—the Army Conspiracy.

The Colonel looked out of the window and twisted his long legs as he
heard the other out.

"Dear little Gough-y!" he murmured at the end. "The straightest thing
that walks the earth."

He felt curiously helpless, as he had felt throughout the Campaign;
unable to meet his adversaries except by the evasion and casuistical tricks
his spirit loathed.

Mr. Geddes rose.

"Well, Colonel," he said. "I see no alternative but to resign my
membership of the League. It's perfectly clear that if your scheme goes
through it must be run by officers at the War Office. And I'm afraid I must
add that it seems equally clear now that it will be run for political purposes
by men who put their party before their country."

The Colonel turned slowly round.

"You've very kindly lent us St. Andrew's Hall for a meeting of the
League next Friday. Do you cancel that?" he asked.

"Certainly not, Colonel," answered the minister. "By all means hold your
meeting. I shall be present, and I shall speak." ...

It was not a happy meeting at St. Andrew's Hall, but it was a crowded
one: for the vultures had sniffed the battle from afar. The Liberals came in
force, headed by Mr. Pigott; while Joe Burt led his wolves from the East-

end. Ernie was there, very quiet now as always, with Ruth; and Bobby
Chislehurst, seeing them, took his seat alongside.

Fighting with his back to the wall, and well aware of it, the Colonel was
at his very best: witty, persuasive, reasonable. What the National Service
League advocated was not aggression in any shape, but insurance.

He sat down amid considerable and well-earned applause.

Then Mr. Geddes rose.

He had joined the League after Agadir, he said, after much perturbation
and questioning of spirit, because he had been reluctantly convinced at last
that the German menace was a reality. Yet what was the position to-day?
The Conservative Party, which had preached this menace for years, had
been devoting the whole of its energies now for some time past to
fomenting a civil war in Ireland. They had gone so far as to arm a huge
force that was in open rebellion against the Crown with rifles and machine-
guns from the very country which they affirmed was about to attack us. And
more remarkable still certain Generals at the War Office—he wouldn't
mention names—

"Why not?" shouted Mr. Pigott.

It was not expedient; but he had in his pocket a letter from Mr. Redmond
giving the name of the General who was primarily responsible for the
sedition among the officers of the Army—a very highly placed officer
indeed.

"Shame!" cried someone.

He thought so too. And this General, who was in the somewhat
anomalous position of being both technical military adviser to the rebel
army in Ulster and the trusted servant of the Government at the War Office,
was a man who for years past, so he understood, had preached the doctrine
that war with Germany was inevitable, and had been for many years largely
responsible for the preparation of our forces against attack from that
quarter. To suggest that this officer and his colleagues were traitors was

downright silly. What, then, was the only deduction a reasonable man could
draw? The minister paused: Why, that the German peril was not a reality.

The conclusion was greeted with a howl of triumph from the wolves at
the back.

"Hear! hear!" roared Mr. Pigott.

Joe Burt had jumped up.

"A'll tell you the whole truth about the German Bogey!" he bawled. "It's
a put-up game by the militarists to force conscription on the coontry for
their own purposes. Now you've got it straight!"

As he sat down amid tumultuous applause at one end of the hall a figure
on the platform bobbed up as it were automatically. It was Alf.

"Am I not right in thinking that the gentleman at the back of the hall is
about to pay a visit to Germany?" he asked urbanely.

"Yes, you are!" shouted Joe. "And A wish all the workin-men in England
were comin too. That'd put the lid on the nonsense pretty sharp."

Then ensued something of a scene; the hub-bub pierced by Alf's shrill
scream,

"Who's payin for your visit?"

The Archdeacon, a most capable chairman, restored order; and Mr.
Geddes concluded his speech on a note of quiet strength. When he finally
sat down man after man got up and announced his intention of resigning his
membership of the League.

Outside the hall the Colonel stood out of the moon in the shadow of one
of those trees which make the streets of Beachbourne singular and lovely at
all times of the year. His work of the last six years had been undone, and it
was clear that he knew it.

Ruth, emerging from the hall, looked across at the forlorn old man
standing like a dilapidated pillar amid the drift of the dissipating crowd. She
had herself no understanding of the rights and wrongs of the controversy to
which she had just listened; her sympathies were not enlisted by either side.
Only the human element, and the clash of personalities which had made
itself apparent at the meeting, had interested her. But she realised that the
tall figure across the road was the vanquished in the conflict; and her heart
went out to him.

"They aren't worth the worrit he takes over them," she said
discontentedly. "Let them have their war if they want it, I says. And when
they've got it let those join in as likes it, and those as don't stay out. That's
what I say.... A nice man like that, too—so gentle with it.... Ought to be
ashamed of emselves; some of em."

Then she saw Mr. Chislehurst cross the road to his cousin, and she was
comforted.

"He'll walk home with him.—Come on, Ernie."

It was striking ten o'clock. Ruth, who was in a hurry to get back to her
babes, left in the charge of a neighbour, walked a-head. Ernie, on the other
hand, wished to saunter, enjoying the delicious freshness of the spring
night.

"Steady on then!" he said. "That's the Archdeacon in front, and Mr.
Trupp and all."

"I knaw that then," replied Ruth with the asperity she kept for Ernie
alone.

"Well, you don't want to catch them up."

They entered Saffrons Croft, which lay black or silver-blanched before
them, peopled now only with tall trees. The groups of elms, thickening with
blossoms, gathered the stars to their bosoms, and laid their shadows like
patterns along the smooth sward. Beyond the threadbare tapestry of trees
rose the solid earth-work of the Downs, upholding the brilliant night,

encircling them as in a cup, and keeping off the hostile world. Ernie felt
their strength, their friendship, the immense and unfailing comfort of them.
A great quiet was everywhere, brooding, blessed. The earth lay still as the
happy dead, caressed by the moon. But behind the stillness the thrust and
stir and aspiration of new life quickening in the darkness, seeking
expression, made itself manifest. Ernie was deliciously aware of that secret
urge. He opened his senses to the rumour of it, and filled his being with the
breath of this mysterious renaissance.

He stopped and sniffed.

"It's coming," he said. "I can smell it."

"It's come more like," answered Ruth. "The lilacs are out in the Manor-
garden, and the brown birds singing in the ellums fit to choke theirsalves."

They walked on slowly across the turf. The lights of the Manor-house
twinkled at them friendly across the ha-ha. Ernie's heart, which had been
hardening of late to meet Ruth's hardness, thawed at the touch of spring.
The doors of his being opened and his love leapt forth in billows to
surround her. The woman in front paused as if responding to that profound
sub-conscious appeal. Ern did not hurry his pace; but she stayed for him in
a pool of darkness made by the elms. Quietly he came up alongside.

"Ruth," he began, shy and stealthy as a boy-lover.

She did not answer him, but the moon lay on her face, firm-set.

"Anything for me to-night?"

He came in upon her with a quiet movement as of wings. She elbowed
him off fiercely.

"A-done!" she said. "You're not half-way through yet—nor near it."

He pleaded, coaxing.

"I am a man, Ruth."

She was adamant.

"It's just what you are not," she retorted. He knew she was breathing
deep; he did not know how near to tears she was. "You was one time o day
—and you might be yet.—You got to work your ticket, my lad."

He drew back.

She walked on swiftly now, passing out of Saffrons Croft into the road.
He followed at some distance down the hill past the Greys to the Star
corner. A man standing there pointed. He turned round to see Joe pounding
after him.

"The tickets and badges coom to-night," the engineer explained. "A
meant to have given you yours, as A did Mr. Geddes, at the meeting. But
you got away. Good night! Friday! Three o'clock sharp! Don't forget."

Ruth had turned and was coming swiftly back towards them.

"Ain't you coming along then, Joe?" she called after him.

"Not to-night, thank-you, Ruth. A got to square up afore we go."

"I am disappointed," said Ruth disconsolately, and turned away down
Borough Lane.

Ernie came up beside her quietly.

"That night!" he said. "Almost a pity you didn't stay where you was in
bed and let Joe take my place alongside you."

"Hap it's what I've thart myself times," Ruth answered sentimentally.

"Only thing," continued Ernie in that same strangely quiet voice, "Joe
wouldn't do it. D'is no fault of his'n. He is a man Joe is; even if so be you're
no'hun of a woman."

The two turned into the house that once had been their home.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE PILGRIMS

Spring comes to Beachbourne as it comes to no other city of earth,
however fair; say those of her children who after long sojourning in other
lands come home in the evenings of their days to sleep.

The many-treed town that lies between the swell of the hills and the
foam and sparkle of the sea sluicing deliciously the roan length of Pevensey
Bay unveils her rounded bosom in the dawn of the year to the kind clear
gaze of heaven and of those who to-day pass and repass along its windy
ways. Birds thrill and twitter in her streets. There earlier than elsewhere the
arabis calls the bee, and the hedge-sparrow raises his thin sweet pipe to bid
the hearts of men lift up: for winter is passed. Chestnut and laburnum
unfold a myriad lovely bannerets on slopes peopled with gardens and gay
with crocuses and the laughter of children. The elms in Saffrons Croft, the
beeches in Paradise, stir in their sleep and wrap themselves about in dreamy
raiment of mauve and emerald. The air is like white wine, the sky of
diamonds; and the sea-winds come blowing over banks of tamarisk to purge
and exhilarate.

On the afternoon of such a day of such a spring in May, 1914, at
Beachbourne station a little group waited outside the barrier that led to the
departure platform.

The group consisted of Joe Burt, Ernie, and Ruth.

Ruth was peeping through the bars on to the platform, at the far end of
which was a solitary figure, waiting clearly, he too, for the Lewes train, and
very smart in a new blue coat with a velvet collar.

"It's Alf," she whispered, keen and mischievous to Joe, "Ain't arf smart
and all."

Joe peered with her.

"He's the proper little Fat," said the engineer. "I'll get Will Dyson draw a
special cartoon of him for the Leader."

Ruth preened an imaginary moustache in mockery of her brother-in-law.

"I'm the Managing Director of Caspar's Touring Syndicate, I am, and
don't you forget it!" she said with a smirk.

"Where's he off to now?"

"Brighton, I believe, with the Colonel. Some meeting of the League,"
replied Ernie dully.

Just then Mr. Geddes joined them, and the four moved on to the
platform.

The train came in and Alf disappeared into it.

A few minutes later the Colonel passed the barrier. He marked the little
group on the platform and at once approached them.

Something unusual about the men struck him at once. All three had
about them the generally degagé air of those on holiday bent. The minister
wore a cap instead of the habitual wide-awake; and carried a rucksack on
his back. Joe swung a parcel by a string, and Ernie had an old kit-bag slung
across his shoulder. Rucksack, parcel, and kit-bag were all distinguished by
a red label. The Colonel stalked the party from the rear and with manifold
contortions of a giraffe-like neck contrived to read on the labels printed in
large black letters, ADULT SCHOOL PEACE PARTY. Then he speared the
engineer under the fifth rib with the point of his stick.

"Well, what y'up to now?" he asked sepulchrally.

"Just off to Berlin, Colonel," cried the other with aggressive
cheerfullness, "Mr. Geddes and I and this young gentleman"—thrusting the
reluctant Ernie forward—"one o your soldiers, who knows better now."

The Colonel began to shake hands all round with elaborate solemnity.

"Returning to your spiritual home while there is yet time, Mr. Geddes,"
he said gravely. "Very wise, I think. You'll be happier there than in our
militarist land, you pacifist gentlemen."

The minister, who was in the best of spirits, laughed. The two men had
not met since the affair of St. Andrew's Hall: and each was relieved at the
open and friendly attitude of the other.

"Cheer up, Colonel," he said. "It's only a ten-days' trip." They moved
towards the train and Ernie got in.

Mr. Geddes was telling the Colonel something of the origin and aims of
the Adult School Union in general and of the Peace Party in particular.

"How many of you are going?" asked the Colonel.

"Round about a hundred," his informant answered—"working men and
women mostly, from every county in England. Most trades will be
represented." They would be billeted in Hamburg and Berlin on people of
their own class and their own ideals. And next year their visit would be
returned in strength by their hosts of this year.

"Interesting," said the Colonel. "But may I ask one question?—What
good do you think you'll do?"

"We hope it will do ourselves some good anyhow," Joe answered in fine
fighting mood. "Get to know each other. Draw the two peoples together.

Nation to nation, land to land.

"Stand oop on the seat, Ernie, and sing em your little Red-Flag piece.—
He sings that nice he do.—And I'll give you a bit of chocolate."

Ernie did not respond and the Colonel came to his rescue.

"Well, I wish you luck," he sighed. "I wish all well-meaning idealists
luck. But the facts of life are hard; and the idealists usually break their teeth
on them.—Now I must join my colleague."

He moved on, catching up Ruth who had prowled along the platform to
see if Alf was tucked safely away. The Colonel had not seen his companion
since her husband had been up before the Bench.

"Well, how's he getting on?" he asked; and turned shrewdly to Ruth.
"Have you been doing him down at home?" Something suppressed about
Ernie had struck him.

Ruth dropped her eyelids suddenly. For a moment she was silent. Then
she flashed up at him swift brown eyes in which the lovely lights danced
mischievously.

"See I've hung him on the nail," she murmured warily; and nodded her
head with the fierce determination of a child. "And I shan't take him off yet
a bit. He's got to learn, Ern has." She was in delicious mood, sportive,
sprightly, as a young hunter mare turned out into May pastures after a hard
season.

They had come to Alf's carriage. He had taken his seat in a corner and
pretended not to see them. Ruth tapped sharply at the window just opposite
his face.

"Hullo, Alf!" she called and fled.

The little chauffeur rose and followed her swift and retreating figure
down the platform. Far down the train Joe who was leaning out of a
window exchanged words with her as she came up.

"I don't like it, sir," Alf said, low. "Dirty business I call it. Somebody
ought to interfere if pore old Ern won't."

Joe now looked along the train at him with a scowl.

"Ah, you!" came the engineer's scolding voice, loud yet low. "Dirty tyke!
Drop it!"

"Well, between you she ought to be well looked after," muttered the
Colonel getting into the carriage.

A fortnight later the Colonel was being driven home by Alf from a
meeting of the League at Battle. Mrs. Lewknor, whose hostel was thriving
now, had stood him the drive and accompanied him. It was a perfect
evening as they slid along over Willingdon Levels and entered the outskirts
of the town. Opposite the Recreation Ground Alf slowed down and, slewing
round, pointed.

On a platform a man, bareheaded beneath the sky, was addressing a
larger crowd than usually gathered at that spot on Saturday evenings.

"What is it?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.

"The German party back," answered Alf. "That's Burt speaking, and Mr.
Geddes alongside him."

The engineer's voice, brazen from much bawling, and yet sounding
strangely small and unreal under the immense arch of heaven, came to them
across the open.

"We've ate with em; we've lived with em; we've talked with em; and we
can speak for em. I tell you there can't be war and there won't be war with
such a people. It'd be the crime of Cain. Brothers we are; and brothers we
remain. And not all the politicians and profiteers and soldiers can make us
other."

The Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor got down and joined the crowd. As they
did so the engineer, who had finished his harangue, was moving a
resolution: That this meeting believes in the Brotherhood of Man and
wishes well to Germany.

"I second that," said the Colonel from the rear of the crowd.

Just then Alf, who had left his car and followed the Colonel, put a
question.

"Did not Lord Roberts say in 1912 at Manchester that Germany would
strike when her hour struck?"

The man on the platform was so furious that he did not even rise from
his chair to reply.

"Yes he did!" he shouted. "And he'd no business to! Direct provocation it
was."

"Will not Germany's hour have struck when the Kiel Canal is open to
Dreadnoughts?" continued the inquisitor smoothly. "And is it not the fact
that the Canal is to be opened for this purpose in the next few days?"

These questions were greeted with booings mingled with cheers.

Mr. Geddes was rising to reply when Joe Burt leapt to his feet, roused
and roaring.

He said men had the choice between two masters—Fear or Faith?—
Which were we for?—Were we the heirs of Eternity, the children of the
Future, or the slaves and victims of the Past?

"For maself A've made ma choice. A'm not a Christian in the ordinary
sense: A don't attend Church or Chapel, like soom folk. But A believe we're
all members one of another, and that the one prayer which matters—if said
from the heart of men who believe in it and work for it—is Our Father: the
Father of Jew and Gentile, English and German. And ma recent visit to
Germany has confirmed me in ma faith in the people, although A couldna
say as much for their rulers. Look about you! What do you see?—The sons
and daughters of God rotting away from tuberculosis in every slum in
Christendom, and the money and labour that should go to redeeming them
spent on altar-cloths and armaments. Altar-cloths and armaments! Do your

rulers never turn their thoughts and eyes to Calvary? There are plenty of em
in your midst and plenty to see on em if you want to."

The engineer sat down.

"Muck!" said Mrs. Lewknor in her husband's ear.

"I'm not sure," replied the Colonel who had listened attentively; but he
didn't wholely like it. Joe had always been frothy; but of old beneath the
froth there had been sound liquor. Now somehow the Colonel saw the froth
but missed the liquor. To his subtle and critical mind it seemed that the
speaker's fury was neither entirely simulated nor entirely real. Habit was as
much the motive of it as passion. It seemed to him the expression of an
emotion once entirely genuine and now only partly so. An alloy had
corrupted the once pure metal. He saw as clearly as a woman that Joe was
no longer living simply for one purpose. Turgid his wife had once called the
engineer. For the first time the Colonel realised the aptness of the epithet.

Then he noticed Ruth on the fringe of the crowd. He was surprised: for it
was a long march from Old Town, and neither Ernie nor the children were
with her.

"Come to be converted by the apostles of pacifism, Mrs. Caspar?" he
chaffed.

"No, sir," answered Ruth simply, her eyes on the platform. "I just come
along to hear Joe. That's why I come." Her face lighted suddenly, "There he
is!" she cried.

The engineer had jumped down from the platform and was making
straight for her. Ruth joined him; and the two went off together, rubbing
shoulders.

The Colonel strolled back towards the car: he was thoughtful, even
grave.

Mrs. Lewknor met him with a little smile.

"It's all right, Jocko," she told him. "She's only playing with the man."

The Colonel shook his head.

"She's put up the shutters, and said she's out—to her own husband. It's a
dangerous game."

"Trust Ruth," replied the other. "She knows her man."

"Perhaps," retorted the Colonel. "Does she know herself?"

CHAPTER XXV

RED IN THE MORNING

Joe Burt's rhetoric might not affect the Colonel greatly; but the
impressions of Mr. Geddes, conveyed to him quietly a few days later in
friendly conversation, were a different matter.

The Presbyterian minister was a scholar, broad-minded, open, honest. He
had moreover finished his education at Berlin University, and had, as the
Colonel knew, ever since his student days maintained touch with his
German friends. Mr. Geddes had come home convinced that Germany was
not seeking a quarrel.

"Hamburg stands to lose by war," he told the Colonel, "And Hamburg
knows it."

"What about Berlin?" the other asked.

"Berlin's militarist," the other admitted. "And Berlin's watching Ulster as
a cat watches a mouse—you find that everywhere; professors, soldiers, men
in the street, even my old host, Papa Schumacher, the carpenter, was agog
about it.—Was Ulster in Shetland?—Was the Ulster Army black?—Would

it attack England?—Well, our War Office must know all about the stir there.
And that makes me increasingly confident that something's happened to
eliminate whatever German menace there may ever have been."

"Exactly what Trupp was saying the other day," the Colonel commented.
"Something's happened. You and I don't know what. You and I never do.
Bonar Law and the rest of em wouldn't be working up a Civil War on this
scale unless they were certain Germany was muzzled; and what's more the
Government wouldn't let em. The politicians may be fools, but they aren't
lunatics."

A few evenings after this talk as the Colonel sat after supper in the
loggia with his wife, overlooking the sea wandering white beneath the
moon, he ruminated between puffs upon the political situation, domestic
and international, with a growing sense of confidence at his heart. Indeed
there was much to confirm his hopes.

The year had started with Lloyd George's famous pronouncement that
the relations between Germany and England had never been brighter. Then
again there was the point Trupp had made: the astonishing attitude of the
Unionist leaders, and the still more astonishing tolerance of the
Government. Lastly, and far more significant from the old soldier's point of
view, there was the action of Mr. Geddes's mystery-man who was no
mystery-man at all. Everybody on the outermost edge of affairs knew the
name of the General in question. Every porter at the military clubs could
tell you who he was. Asquith had never made any bones about it. Redmond
and Dillon had named him to Mr. Geddes. Yet if anybody could gauge the
military situation on the Continent it was surely the man who, as Mr.
Geddes had truly pointed out, had specialized in co-ordinating our
Expeditionary Force with the Armies of France in the case of an attack by
Germany. There he was sitting at the War Office, as he had sat for years
past, in touch with the English Cabinet, lié with the French General Staff,
his ear at the telephone listening to every rumour in every camp in Europe,
and primed by a Secret Service so able that it had doped the public at home
and every chancellery abroad to believe that it was the last word in official
stupidity. This was the man who had thrown in his lot with the gang of
speculating politicians who had embarked upon the campaign that had so

undermined discipline in the commissioned ranks of the Army that for the
first time in history a British Government could no longer trust its officers
to do their duty without question.

Now no one could say this man was hot-headed; nobody could say he
was a fool. Moreover he was a distinguished soldier and to call his
patriotism in question was simply ridiculous, as even Geddes admitted.

The Colonel had throughout steadfastly refused to discuss with friend or
foe the ethics of this officer's attitude, and its effect on the reputation of the
Army. But of one thing he was certain. No man in that officer's position of
trust and responsibility would gamble with the destinies of his country—a
gamble that might involve hundreds and thousands of innocent lives. His
action might be reprehensible—many people did not hesitate to describe it
in plainer terms; but he would never have taken it in view of its inevitable
reaction on military and political opinion on the Continent unless he had
been certain that the German attack, which he of all men had preached for
so long as inevitable, would not mature or would not mature as yet.

What then was the only possible inference?

"Something had happened."

The words his mind had been repeating uttered themselves aloud.

"What's that, my Jocko?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.

The Colonel stretched his long legs, took his pipe out of his mouth, and
sighed.

"If nothing has happened by Christmas 1915 I shall resign the
secretaryship of the League and return with joy to the garden and the
history of the regiment." He rose in the brilliant dusk like a spectre. "Come
on, my lass!" he said. "I would a plan unfold."

She took his arm and they strolled across the lawn past the hostel
towards the solid darkness of the Downs which enfolded them.

The long white house stood still and solitary in the great coombe that
brimmed with darkness and was crowned with multitudinous stars. Washed
by the moon, and warm with a suggestion of human busyness, the hostel
seemed to be stirring in a happy sleep, as though conscious of the good
work it was doing.

Mrs. Lewknor paused to look at it, a sense of comfort at her heart.

The children's beds out on the balcony could be seen; and the nurses
moving in the rooms behind. Groups of parents, down from London for the
week-end, strolled the lawn. A few older patients still lounged in deck-
chairs on the terrace, while from within the house came the sound of
laughter and someone playing rag-time. The little lady regarded the work of
her hands not without a just sense of satisfaction. The hostel was booming.
It was well-established now and had long justified itself. She was doing
good work and earning honest money. This year she would not only pay for
the grandson's schooling, but she hoped at Christmas to make a start in
reducing the mortgage.

"Well," she said, "what about it now, doubting Thomas?"

"Not so bad for a beginning," admitted the Colonel.

"Who's going to send Toby to Eton?" asked the lady, cruelly triumphant.
"And how?"

"Why, I am," replied the Colonel brightly—"out of my pension of five
bob a week minus income tax."

Hugging each other's arms, they climbed the bank to the vegetable
garden, which six years before had been turned up by the plough from the
turf which may have known the tread of Caesar's legionaries. The raw
oblong which had then patched the green with a lovely mauve was already
peopled with trees and bushes, and rank with green stuff. The Colonel
paused and sniffed.

"Mrs. Simpkins coming on ... I long to be back among my cabbages ... I
bet if I took these Orange Pippins in hand myself I'd win first prize at the

East Sussex Show.... That duffer, old Lingfield—He's no good."

They turned off into the yard where Mrs. Lewknor was erecting a
garage, now nearly finished. The Colonel paused and stared up at it.

"My dear," he said, "I've got an idea. We'll dig the Caspars out of that
hole in Old Town and put them in the rooms above the garage. I'll take him
on as gardener and odd-job man. He's a first-rate rough gardener. He was
showing me and Bobby his allotment only the other day. And as you know,
the solitary ambition of my old age has been to have an old Hammer-man
about me."

"And mine for you, my Jocko," mused Mrs. Lewknor, far more wary
than her impulsive husband. "There are only three rooms though, and she's
got four children already and is still only thirty or so."

The Colonel rattled on, undismayed.

"He'll be half a mile from the nearest pub here," he said.

"Yes," replied Mrs. Lewknor—"and further from the clutches of that
Burt man, who's twice as bad as any pub."

"Ha, ha!" jeered the Colonel. "So you're coming round to my way of
thinking at last, are you?"

Next evening, the Colonel, eager always as a youth to consummate his
purpose, bicycled with his wife through Paradise to Old Town.

At the corner opposite the Rectory they met Alf Caspar, who was clearly
in high feather. The Colonel dismounted for a word with the convener of the
League.

"Well, Caspar," he said. "So you've got your licence from the Watch
Committee, I hear."

Alf purred.

"Yes, sir. All O.K.—down to the men that'll blow the horn to give em a
bit o music."

"When do you start?"

"Bank Holiday, sir. I was just coming up to tell mother we were through.
Last char-a-banc came this afternoon—smart as paint."

The Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor walked on towards Church Street. At
Billing's Corner, waiting for the bus, was Edward Caspar. He was peering at
a huge placard advertising expeditions by Caspar's Road-touring Syndicate,
to start on August 3rd.

The Colonel, mischievous as a child, must cross the road to his old
Trinity compeer.

"Your boy's getting on, Mr. Caspar," he observed quietly.

The old man made a clucking like a disturbed hen.

"Dreadful," he said. "Dreadful."

Mrs. Lewknor laid two fingers on his arm.

"Mr. Caspar," she said.

He glanced down at her like a startled elephant. Then he seemed to thrill
as though a wind of the spirit was blowing through him. The roses of a
forgotten youth bloomed for a moment in his mottled cheeks. An incredible
delicacy and tenderness inspired the face of this flabby old man.

"Miss Solomons!" he said, and lifting her little hand kissed it.

The Colonel withdrew discreetly; and in a moment his wife joined him,
the lights dancing in her eyes.

"Pretty stiff!" grinned the Colonel—"in the public street and all."

They turned down Borough Lane by the Star and knocked Ruth up.

She was ironing and did not seem best pleased to see the visitors.
Neither did Joe Burt, who was sitting by the fire with little Alice on his
knees.

The little lady ignored the engineer.

"Where are the other children?" she asked Ruth pleasantly.

"Where they oughrer be," Joe answered—"in bed."

The Colonel came to the rescue.

"Is Caspar anywhere about?" he asked.

"He's on his allotment, I reck'n," Ruth answered coldly. "Mr. Burt joins
him there most in general every evening."

"Yes," said Joe, "and was on the road now when A was interfered with."
He kissed little Alice, put her down, and rose. "Good evening, Colonel."
And he went out sullenly.

Mrs. Lewknor, aware that negotiations had not opened auspiciously, now
broached her project. Ruth, steadily ironing, never lifted her eyes. She was
clearly on the defensive, suspicious in her questions, evasive and
noncommittal in her replies. The Colonel became impatient.

"Mrs. Caspar might accept our offer—to oblige," he said at last.

Ruth deliberately laid down her iron, and challenged him: she said
nothing.

Mrs. Lewknor felt the tension.

"Well, think it over, will you?" she said to Ruth. "There's no hurry."

She went out and the Colonel followed.

"That man's the biggest humbug unhung even for a Labour man,"
snapped the little lady viciously. "Preaching the Kingdom of Heaven on

earth and then this!"

"I'm not sure," replied the Colonel, "not sure. I think he's much the same
as most of us—an honest man who's run off the rails."

They were bicycling slowly along Victoria Drive. On the far side of the
allotments right under the wall of the Downs, blue in the evening, a solitary
figure was digging.

"The out-cast," said the Colonel.

Mrs. Lewknor dismounted from her bicycle and began wheeling it along
the unfenced earthen path between the gardens, towards the digger. Ernie
barely looked up, barely answered her salutation, wiping the sweat off his
brow with the back of his hand as he continued his labour. The lady retired
along the way she had come.

"There's something Christ-like about the feller," said the Colonel quietly
as they reached the road.

"Yes," the little lady answered. "Only he's brought his troubles on his
own head."

The Colonel drew up in haste.

"Hullo," he said, and began to read a newspaper placard, for which class
of literature he had a consuming passion.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE AVALANCHE MOVES

The placard, seen by the Colonel, announced the opening of a new scene
in the Irish tragedy.

The King had summoned a Conference at Buckingham Palace in order if
possible to find a solution of the difficulty. When the Conference met the
King opened it in person and, speaking as a man weighed down by anxiety,
told the members that for weeks he had watched with deep misgivings the
trend of events in Ireland. "To-day the cry of Civil War is on the lips of the
most responsible of my people," he said; and had added, so Mr. Trupp told
the Colonel, in words not reported in the Press, that the European situation
was so ominous as imperatively to demand a solution of our domestic
differences in order that the nation might present a solid front to the world.

"And I bet he knows," ended the old surgeon, as he said good-bye on the
steps of the Manor-house.

"I bet he does," replied the Colonel. "Thank God there's one man in the
country who's above party politics." He climbed thoughtfully on to the top
of the bus outside the Star, and, as it chanced, found himself sitting beside
Ernie, who was deep in his paper and began to talk.

"They ain't got it all their own way, then," he said, grimly. "I see the Irish
Guards turned out and lined the rails and cheered Redmond as he came
down Birdcage Walk back from the Conference."

"I don't like it," replied the Colonel gloomily. "Rotten discipline. The
Army has no politics."

"What about the officers at the Curragh?" asked Ernie almost
aggressively. "They begun it. Give the men a chance too."

"Two wrong things don't make a right," retorted the Colonel sharply.

Ernie got down at the station without a word. Was it an accident the
Colonel, sensitive as a girl, asked himself? was it a deliberate affront? What
was the world coming to? That man an old Hammer-man! One of Bobby
Bermondsey yahoos wouldn't treat him so!

Indeed the avalanche was now sliding gradually down the mountain-
side, gathering way as it went, to overwhelm the smiling villages sleeping
peacefully in the valley.

Next day oppressed by imminent catastrophe, the Colonel, climbing
Beau-nez in the afternoon to take up his habitual post of vigil by the flag-
staff, found Joe Burt and Mr. Geddes already there.

Both men, he marked, greeted him almost sombrely.

"It looks to me very serious," he said. "Austria means to go for Serbia,
that's clear; and if she does Russia isn't going to stand by and see Serbia
swallowed up. What d'you think, Mr. Geddes?"

The other answered him on that note of suppressed indignation which
characterised increasingly his utterance when he touched on this often
discussed subject.

"I think Colonel, what I've thought all along," he answered: "that if we're
in the eve of a European eruption the attitude of the officers of the British
Army is perfectly inexplicable."

He was firm almost to ferocity.

"Hear! hear!" growed Joe.

"But they don't know, poor beggars!" cried the Colonel, exasperated yet
appealing. He felt as he had felt throughout the controversy that he was
fighting with his hands tied behind his back. "Do be just, Mr. Geddes. They
are merely the playthings of the politicians. O, if you only knew the
regimental officer as I know him! He's like that St. Bernard dog over there
by the coast-guard station—the most foolish and faithful creature on God's
earth. Smith pats him on the head and tells him he's a good dorg, and he'll
straightway beg for the privilege of being allowed to die for Smith. What's a
poor ignorant devil of a regimental officer quartered at Aldershot or the
Curragh or Salisbury Plain likely to know of the European situation?"

The tall minister was not to be appeased.

"Ignorance seems to me a poor justification for insubordination in an
Army officer," he said. "And even if one is to accept that excuse for the
regimental officers, one can't for a man like the Director of Military

Strategics, who is said to have specialised in war with Germany. Yet that is
the man who has co-operated, to put it at the mildest, in arming a huge rebel
force with guns from the very country he has always affirmed we're bound
to fight. It's stabbing the Empire in the back, neither more nor less."

He was pale, almost dogmatic.

Then Joe barged in, surly and brutal.

"The whole truth is," he said, "that the officers of the British Army to-
day don't know how to spell the word Duty. Havelock did. Gordon did. And
all the world respected them accordingly. These men don't. They've put
their party before their coontry as A've always said they would when the
pinch came."

The Colonel was trembling slightly.

"If the test comes," he said, "we shall see."

"The test has come," retorted the other savagely, "And we have seen."

The Colonel walked swiftly away. In front of him half a mile from the
flag-staff, he marked a man standing waist-deep in a clump of gorse. There
was something so forlorn about the figure that the Colonel approached, only
to find that it was Ernie, who on his side, seeing the other, quitted the
ambush, and came slowly towards him. To the Colonel the action seemed a
cry of distress. All his resentment at the incident on the bus melted away in
a great compassion.

"She and me used to lay there week-ends when first we married," Ern
said dreamily, nodding towards the gorse he had just left.

"And she and you will live there for many happy years, I hope," replied
the Colonel warmly, pointing towards the garage in the coombe beneath
them.

Ernie regarded him inquiringly.

"What's that, sir?"

"Aren't you coming?"

"Where to?"

"My garage?"

Ernie did not understand and the Colonel explained.

"Didn't Mrs. Caspar tell you?"

"Ne'er a word," the other answered blankly.

The Colonel dropped down to Carlisle Road. There Mr. Trupp picked
him up and drove him on to the club for tea. Fresh news from Ulster was
just being ticked off on the tape. An hour or two before, a rebel unit, the
East Belfast regiment of volunteers, some 5,000 strong, armed with
Mausers imported from Germany, and dragging machine-guns warm from
Krupp's, had marched through the streets of Belfast. The police had cleared
the way for the insurgents; and soldiers of the King, officers and men, had
looked on with amusement.

The Colonel turned away.

"Roll up the map of Empire!" he said. "We'd better send a deputation to
Lajput Rai and the Indian Home Rulers and beg them to spare us a few
baboos to govern us. Its an abdication of Government."

He went into the ante-room.

There was Stanley Bessemere back from Ulster once more. As usual he
sat behind a huge cigar, retailing amidst roars of laughter to a sympathetic
audience his exploits and those of his caracoling chief. The European
situation had not overclouded him.

"There's going to be a Civil War and Smith and I are going to be in it.
We shall walk through the Nationalists like so much paper. They've got no

arms; and they've got no guts either." He laughed cheerily. "Bad men. Bad
men."

The Colonel stood, an accusing figure in the door, and eyed the fair-
haired giant with cold resentment.

"You know Kuhlmann from the German Embassy is over with your
people in Belfast?" he asked.

The other waved an airy cigar.

"You can take it from me, my dear Colonel, that he's not," he answered.

"I'll take nothing of the sort from you," the Colonel answered acridly.
"He's there none the less because he's there incognito."

The young man winced; and the Colonel withdrew.

"Jove!" he said. "I'd just like to know how far these beggars have
trafficked in treason with Germany."

"Not at all," replied Mr. Trupp. "They've humbugged emselves into
believing they're 'running great risks in a great cause,' as they say—or doing
the dirty to make a party score, as you and I'd put it. That's all."

The Colonel walked home, oppressed. After supper, as he sat with his
wife in the loggia, he told her of Ruth's strange secretiveness in the matter
of the garage.

"There she is!" said Mrs. Lewknor quietly nodding over her work. Ruth,
indeed, was strolling slowly along the cliff from the direction of the Meads
in the gorgeous evening. Opposite the hostel a track runs down to the beach
beneath. At that point she paused as though waiting for somebody; and then
disappeared from view.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Lewknor spoke again in the same hushed voice.

"Here's the other!"

The Colonel looked up. Joe was coming rapidly along the cliff from the
direction of Beau-nez. He too disappeared down the way Ruth had already
taken.

The Colonel removed his glasses.

"I shall give em a quarter of an hour to make emselves quite
comfortable," he muttered "and then—"

"Spy," said Mrs. Lewknor.

A moment later, Anne, the parlour-maid, showed Mr. Alfred Caspar on to
the loggia.

The face of the Manager of Caspar's Syndicate was very long. Alf,
cherishing the simple faith that the Colonel because he had been a soldier
must be in the secrets certainly of the War Office and possibly of the
Government, had come to ask what he thought of the European situation.

The Colonel was not reassuring, but he refused to commit himself. Alf
turned away almost sullenly.

"See, it matters to me," he said. "I start Bank Holiday. Don't want no
wars interfering with my Syndicate."

"It matters to us all a bit," replied the Colonel.

Alf departed aggrieved, and obviously suggesting that the Colonel was
to blame. He walked away with downward eyes. Suddenly the Colonel saw
him pause, creep to the cliff-edge, and peep over. Then he came back to the
hostel in a stealthy bustle.

"Go and look for yourself then, sir, if you don't believe me!" he cried in
the tone of one rebuffing an unjust accusation. "You're a Magistrate. Police
ought to stop it I say. Public 'arlotry I call it."

The Colonel's face became cold and very lofty. "No, Caspar. I don't do
that sort of thing," he said.

Alf, muttering excuses, departed. The Colonel watched him walk along
the dotted coast-guard track and disappear round the shoulder of the
coombe. Then he rose and strolled out to meet Ernie who was approaching.

As he did so he heard voices from the beach beneath him and peeped
over. Ruth, on her hands and knees amid the chalk boulders at the foot of
the cliff, was smoothing the sand and spreading something on it.

A few yards away Joe was standing at the edge of the tide, which was
almost high, flinging pebbles idly into the water. Some earth dislodged from
the Colonel's feet and made a tiny land-slide. The woman on her hands and
knees in the growing dusk beneath looked up and saw the man standing
above her. She made no motion, kneeling there; facing him, fighting him,
mocking him.

"Having a nice time together?" he asked genially.

"Just going to, thank-you kindly," Ruth replied and resumed her
occupation of sweeping with her hands.

The Colonel turned to find Ernie standing beside him and burning his
battle-flare.

"Lucky I see you coming, sir," he said, trembling still. "Else I might ha
done him a mischief."

"Who?"

"Alf. Insultin her and me. Met him just along back there in Meads by the
Ship."

"Go easy, Caspar," said the Colonel quietly. "I remember that left-handed
punch of yours of old. It's a good punch too; but keep it for the enemies of
your country."

Ernie was hugging a big biscuit-box under his arm.

"What you got there?" asked the other.

Ernie grinned a thought sheepishly.

"It's Joe's birthday," he said. "We are having a bit of a do under the cliff."

He hovered a moment as though about to impart a confidence to the
other; and then disappeared down the little track to the beach beneath at the
trot, his shoulders back, and heels digging in, carrying a slither of chalk
with him.

"'Come into my parlour,' said the spider to the fly," muttered the Colonel
as he turned into Undercliff. "Poor fly!"

CHAPTER XXVII

THE GROWING ROAR

The avalanche, once started, was moving fast now. The Irish Nationalists
who had lost faith in the power of the Government and the will of the Army
to protect them, had decided at last to arm in view of the default of the law
that they might resist invasion from the North-East.

On the very day after the parade of insurrectionaries in Belfast a famous
Irishman, soldier, sailor, statesman, man of letters, who in his young
manhood had served throughout the long-drawn South African War the
Empire which had refused liberty to his country alone of all her Colonies,
and in the days to come, though now in his graying years, was to be the
hero of one of the most desperate ventures of the Great War, ran the little
Asgarde, her womb heavy with strange fruit, into Howth Harbour while the
Sunday bells peeled across the quiet waters, calling to church.

The arms were landed and marched under Nationalist escort towards
Dublin. The police and a company of King's Own Scottish Borderers met
the party and blocked the way. After a parley the Nationalists dispersed and

the soldiers marched back to Dublin through a hostile demonstration.
Mobbed, pelted, provoked to the last degree, at Bachelor's Walk, on the
quay, where owing to the threatening attitude of the crowd they had been
halted, the men took the law into their own hands and fired without the
order of their officer. Three people were killed.

The incident led to the first quarrel that had taken place between Ernie
and Joe Burt in a friendship now of some years standing.

"Massacre by the military," said Joe. "That's what it is."

The old soldier in Ernie leapt to the alert.

"Well, what would you have had em do?" he cried hotly. "Lay down and
let emselves be kicked to death?"

"If the soldiers want to shoot at all let em shoot the armed rebels,"
retorted Joe.

"Let em shoot the lot, I says," answered Ernie. "I'm sick of it. Ireland!
Ireland! Ireland all the time. No one's no time to think of poor old England.
Yet we've our troubles too, I reck'n."

Joe went out surlily without saying good-night. When he was gone, Ruth
who had been listening, looked up at Ernie, a faint glow of amusement,
interest, surprise, in her eyes.

"First time ever I knaw'd you and Joe get acrarst each other," she said.

Ernie, biting home on his pipe, did not meet her gaze.

"First," he said. "Not the last, may be."

She put down dish-cloth and dish, came to him, and put her hand on his
shoulder.

"Let me look at you, Ern!"

His jaw was set, almost formidable: he did not speak.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

For a moment his eyes hovered on her face.

"D'you mean anything?" he asked.

"Not that," she answered and dropped her hand.

"Then to hell with you!" he cried with a kind of desperate savagery and
thrust her brutally away. "Sporting with a man!"

He put on his cap and went out.

In a few minutes he was back. Paying no heed to her, he sat down at the
kitchen-table and wrote a note, which he put on the mantel-piece.

"You can give this to Alf next time he comes round for the rent," he said.

"What is it?" asked Ruth.

"Notice," Ern answered. "We're going to shift to the Colonel's garage."

Ruth gave battle instantly.

"Who are?" she cried, facing him.

He met her like a hedge of bayonets.

"I am," he answered. "Me and my children."

The volley fired on Bachelor's Walk, as it echoed down the long valleys
of the world, seemed to serve the purpose of Joshua's trumpet. Thereafter
all the walls of civilisation began to crash down one after another with the
roar of ruined firmaments.

Forty-eight hours later Austria declared war.