Produced by Al Haines
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.