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.