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.