BOOK V

Produced by Al Haines

TWO MEN:

A ROMANCE OF SUSSEX

BY

ALFRED OLLIVANT

_Necessity the Spring of Faith

and Mould of Character_

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1919

_Copyright, 1919, by_

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

_All rights reserved, including that of

translation into foreign languages,

including the Scandinavian_

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

Bob, Son of Battle

Danny

The Gentleman

Redcoat Captain

The Taming of John Blunt

The Royal Road

The Brown Mare

Boy Woodburn

TO

BEACHBOURNE

AND THE FRIENDS I MADE THERE

1901-1911

CONTENTS

BEAU-NEZ

BOOK I

FATHER AND SON

CHAPTER

I Mr. Trupp

II Edward Caspar

III Anne Caspar

IV Old Man Caspar

V Ernie Makes His Appearance

VI The Manor-House

VII Hans Caspar's Will

BOOK II

THE TWO BROTHERS

VIII Beachbourne

IX The Two Boys

X Old and New

XI The Study

XII Alf Shows His Colours

XIII Alf Makes a Remark

XIV Evil

XV Mr. Trupp Introduces the Lash

XVI Father, Mother and Son

XVII Ernie Goes for a Soldier

BOOK III

THE SOLDIER

XVIII Ernie Goes East

XIX The Regiment

XX Ernie in India

XXI The Return of the Soldier

XXII Old Town

XXIII The Changed Man

XXIV Alf

XXV The Churchman

XXVI Mr. Pigott

BOOK IV

RUTH BOAM

XXVII The Hohenzollern Hotel

XXVIII The Third Floor

XXIX The Man of Affairs

XXX Reality

XXXI The Ride on the Bus

XXXII On The Hill

XXXIII Under the Stars

BOOK V

CAPTAIN ROYAL

XXXIV His Arrival

XXXV His Origin

XXXVI The Captain Begins His Siege

XXXVII He Drives a Sap

XXXVIII The Serpent

XXXIX The Lash Again

XL Clash of Males

XLI The Decoy Pond

XLII The Captain's Flight

XLIII The Ebb-Tide

XLIV Ernie Leaves the Hotel

BOOK VI

THE QUEST

XLV Old Mus Boam

XLVI Ernie Turns Philosopher

XLVII Alf Tries to Help

XLVIII Two Meetings

XLIX Alf Marks Time

BOOK VII

THE OUTCAST

L The Crumbles

LI Evelyn Trupp

LII The Return of the Outcast

LIII The Find

LIV The Brooks

BOOK VIII

TREASURE TROVE

LV The Pool

LVI Frogs' Hall

LVII The Surprise

LVIII The Dower-House

LIX Alf Tries to Save a Soul

LX The End of a Chapter

BEAU-NEZ

BOOK I

FATHER AND SON

TWO MEN

BEAU-NEZ

Old Beau-Nez shouldered out into the sea, immense, immovable, as when

the North-men, tossing off him in their long-boats, had first named him

a thousand years before.

Like a lion asleep athwart the doors of light, his head massive upon

his paws, his flanks smooth as marble, he rested.

The sea broke petulantly and in vain against the boulders that strewed

his feet. He lay squandered in the sunshine that filled the hollows in

his back and declared the lines of his ribs gaunt beneath the pelt.

Overhead larks poured down rivulets of song from the brimming bowl of

heaven. The long-drawn swish of the sea, a sonorous under-current that

came and went in rhythmical monotone, rose from the foot of the cliff

to meet the silvery rain of sound and mingle with it in deep and

mysterious harmony.

It was May. The sides of the coombes were covered with cloth of gold:

for the gorse was in glory, and filled the air with heavy fragrance;

while the turf, sweet with thyme, was bejewelled with a myriad variety

of tiny flowers.

In earth and sea and sky there was a universal murmuring content, as

though after labour, enduring for æons, the Mother of Time had at last

brought forth her Son and, as she nursed him, crooned her thankfulness.

Out of the West, along the back of the Downs, dipping and dancing to

the curve of the land like the wake of a ship over a billowy sea, a

rough road swept up to the head, passing a dew-pond, the old

race-course still fenced in, and a farm amid stacks at the head of a

long valley that curled away towards a lighthouse pricking up white

against the blue on the summit of the cliff in the eye of the misty

morning sun.

The name of the lighthouse was Bel- or Baal-tout, reminding men by its

title of the god their fathers worshipped on high places here and

elsewhere throughout the world with human sacrifices--the god of the

Philistine of every age and country, and not least our own.

On Beau-nez itself a tall flagstaff overtopped a little cluster of

white coast-guard stations, outside which a tethered goat grazed.

Beside the flagstaff stood a man, watching a tan-sailed Thames barge

leisurely flapping across the shining floor of water beneath.

He too was massive: a big man with swarthy eyes set in a pale face,

very sure of himself. So much you could tell by the carriage of his

head, and the way he stood on his feet. He was not used to opposition,

it was clear, and would not brook it; while the coat with the astrakhan

collar he was wearing added to his air of consequence.

Behind him in the road stood the dingy fly and moth-eaten horse that

had brought him up the hill.

The big man turned his back on the sun and walked slowly to the top of

the steep coombe which overlooked the town that lay beneath him like a

fairy city in the mists along the foam-lined edge of the bay, reaching

out over the Levels to the East, and flinging its red-coated

skirmishers up the lower slopes of the Downs.

"How the town grows!" mused the big man.

A brown excrescence on the smooth turf of the coombe beneath him caught

his eye. At first he mistook it for a badger's earth; then he saw that

it was a man lying on his back. The man's hands were behind his head,

and his soft hat over his eyes; but he was not sleeping. One lank leg

was crossed over a crooked knee, and the dangling foot kicked

restlessly to and fro.

That foot was sandalled.

The man in the astrakhan coat slowly descended towards the recumbent

figure. His eyes were ironical, his expression almost grim.

For a moment he stood looking down upon the unconscious dreamer whose

pale brown hair peeped from beneath a hat of a shape more familiar in

the Quartier Latin than on English shores.

Then he prodded the other in the side with his toe.

The young fellow roused with a start and blinked up into the big man's

face.

"Hullo, f--father," he cried with a slight stutter, and rose in

perturbation: a ramshackle young fellow, taller even than his father,

but entirely lacking the other's girth and authoritative presence. A

soft beard framed his long face, and he was wearing the low flannel

collar that in the seventies was the height of bad form.

"Just like you, Ned," said the elder with a grimness that was not

entirely unkind.

The son bent and brushed his knees unnecessarily. His face twitched,

but he did not attempt to answer.

"Your mother's very ill," said the big man casually. He took a letter

from his pocket and thrust it towards his son.

The young man read it and handed it back.

"Is she h--happy?" he asked, his face moved and moving.

"She's away all the time--like her son," the other answered; and added

more mildly--"She doesn't know any one now--not even the latest

parson." He turned and climbed the hill again.

On the summit by the flagstaff he paused and looked round deliberately.

"Might build an hotel here," he said thoughtfully. "Should pay."

BOOK I

FATHER AND SON

CHAPTER I

MR. TRUPP

When in the late seventies young Mr. Trupp, abandoning the use of

Lister's spray, but with meticulous antiseptic precautions derived from

the great man at University Hospital, performed the operation of

variotomy on the daughter of Sir Hector Moray, and she lived, his

friends called it a miracle, his enemies a lucky fluke.

All were agreed that it had never been done before, and the more

foolish added that it would never be done again.

Sir Hector was a well-known soldier; and the operation made the growing

reputation of the man who performed it.

William Trupp was registrar at the Whitechapel at the time, and a

certainty for the next staff appointment. When, therefore, while the

columns of the Lancet were still hot with the controversy that raged

round the famous case, the young man told Sir Audrey Rivers, whose

house-surgeon he had been, that he meant to leave London and migrate to

the country, the great orthopædist had said in his grim way to this his

favourite pupil:

"If you do, I'll never send you a patient."

Even in his young days Mr. Trupp was remarkable for the gruff geniality

which characterized him to the end.

"Very well, sir," he said with that shrewd smile of his. "I must go

all the same."

Next day Sir Audrey read that his understudy was engaged to Evelyn,

only daughter of Sir Hector Moray of Pole.

Evelyn Moray came of warrior ancestry; and her father, known on the

North-West Frontier as Mohmund Moray, was not the least distinguished

of his line. The family had won their title as Imperialists, not on

the platform, but by generations of laborious service in the uttermost

marches of the Empire. The Morays were in fact one of those rare

families of working aristocrats, which through all the insincerities of

Victorian times remained true to the old knightly ideal of service as

the only test of leadership.

Evelyn then had been brought up in a spacious atmosphere of high

endeavour and chivalrous gaiety remote indeed from the dull and narrow

circumstance of her lover's origin. Profoundly aware of it, the young

man was determined that his lady should not suffer as the result of her

choice.

Moreover he loved the sea; he loved sport; and, not least, he was

something of a natural philosopher. That is to say, he cherished

secret dreams as to the part his profession was to play in that gradual

Ascent of Man which Darwin had recently revealed to the young men of

William Trupp's generation. Moreover he held certain theories as to

the practice of his profession, which he could never work out in Harley

Street. It was his hope to devote his life to a campaign against that

enemy of the human race--the tubercle bacillus. And to the realization

of his plans the sea and open spaces were necessary.

A colleague at the Whitechapel, who was his confidant, said one day:--

"Why don't you look at Beachbourne? It's a coming town. And you get

the sea and the Downs. It's ideal for your purpose."

"It's so new," protested the young surgeon. "I can't take that girl

out of that home and plant her down in a raw place like Beachbourne.

She'd perish like a violet in Commercial Road."

"There's an Old Town," replied the other....

In those days, Mr. Trupp kept greyhounds at the _Pelham Arms_, Lewes,

and spent his Saturday afternoon scampering about Furrel Beacon and

High-'nd-Over and the flanks of the hills above Aldwoldston and the

Ruther Valley.

In the evening, after his sport, he would ride over to spend the night

at Pole, which lay "up country," as the shepherds and carters in the

Down villages still called the Weald.

One spring evening he arrived very late by gig instead of on horseback,

and coming from the East instead of from the South. The beautiful

girl, awaiting him somewhat coldly at the gate, was about to chide him,

when she saw his face; and her frosts melted in a moment.

"My dear," he said, dismounting and taking her by both hands, "I've

done it."

"What have you done?" she cried, a-gleam like an April evening after

rain.

"Taken the Manor-house at Beachbourne."

Six months later Mr. Trupp was settled in his home, with for capital

the love of a woman who believed in him, his own natural capacity and

shrewd common sense, and a blue greyhound bitch called She.

CHAPTER II

EDWARD CASPAR

The days when the parish priest knew the secrets of every family within

his cure have long gone by, never to return.

His place in the last generation has been taken to a great extent by

the family doctor, who in his turn perhaps will give way to the

psycho-therapist in the generation to come.

Mr. Trupp had not been long in Beachbourne before he began to know

something of the inner histories of many of the families about him.

Those shrewd eyes of his, peering short-sightedly through pince-nez as

he rolled about the steep streets of Old Town, or drove in his hooded

gig along the broad esplanades of New, allowed little to escape them.

Moreover he was a man of singular discretion; and his fellow citizens,

men alike and women, learned soon to trust him and never had cause to

regret their confidence.

It was quite in the early days of his residence in the little township

on the hill that the young surgeon received a letter from Mr. Caspar,

the famous railway contractor, asking him to look after--_my boy, Ned,

who has seen good to pitch his tent on your accursed Downs--heaven

knows why_.

Hans Caspar owed his immense success in life as much to his habit of

almost brutal directness as to anything, save perhaps his equally

brutal energy.

A Governor of the Whitechapel Hospital, and a regular attendant at the

Board-meetings, he knew the young surgeon well, believed in him, and

did not hesitate to tell the naked truth about his son.

_He's not a scamp_, he wrote. _Nobody could say that of Ned. He's got

no enemies but himself. You know his trouble. His address is 60,

Rectory Walk. Look him up. He won't come to you--shy as a roe-deer.

But once you're established connection he'll love you like a dog. I've

told him I'm sending you_.

In a postscript he added,

_I'll foot the bill. I keep the boy mighty short. It's the one thing

I can do to help him_.

Mr. Trupp, in those days none too busy, went....

The Manor, a solid Queen Anne house, fronted on to the street opposite

the black-timbered _Star_, where of old pilgrims who had landed from

the continent at Pevensey would, after a visit to Holy Well in

Coombe-in-the-Cliff under Beau-nez, pass their first night before

taking the green-way that led along the top of the Downs to the _Lamb_

at Aldwoldston on the road to the shrine of good St. Richard-de-la-Wych

at Chichester.

Mr. Trupp, muffled to the chin--for even in those days he was

cultivating the cold which he was to cherish to the end--climbed Church

Street, little changed for centuries, passed the massive-towered St.

Michael's on the Kneb, and turned to the left at Billing's Corner.

Here at once were evidences of the change that had driven Squire Caryll

to forsake the home of his fathers and retreat westward to the valley

of the Ruther before the onrush of those he called the barbarians.

"They've squeezed me out, the ----!" the old man said with tears in his

eyes. "But, by God, I've made em pay!"

The Manor farm had been cut up into building lots; the Moot, as the

land under the Kneb crowned by the parish-church was still called,

would shortly follow suit; and Saffrons Croft, with its glory of great

elms that stood like a noble tapestry between the Downs and the sea,

was being turned by a progressive Town Council into a public park.

At the back of Church Street old and new met and clashed unhappily; a

walnut peeping amid houses, an ancient fig tree prisoned in a back

yard, a length of grim flint wall patching red brick.

Here a row of substantial blue-slated houses, larger than cottages,

less pretentious than villas, each with its tiny garden characteristic

of its occupant, stood at right angle to the Downs and looked across

open ground to Beech-hangar and the spur which hides Beau-nez from

view. A white house across the way, standing apart in pharisaic

aloofness amid a gloom of unhappy-seeming trees, told that this was

Rectory Walk. At the end of the Walk a new road set a boundary to the

town. Beyond the road a dark crescent-sea of cultivated land washed

the foot of the Downs which rose here steep as a green curtain,

shutting off with radiant darkness the wonder-world that lay beyond in

the light of setting suns.

No. 60 was almost opposite the Rectory.

Mr. Trupp, as he entered the gate, remarked that in the upper window of

the house there was a chocolate coloured card, on which was printed in

deep grooved silver letters the word _Apartments_.

A woman opened to him, but kept the door upon the chain. Through the

crack he glanced at her, and saw at once that but for her hardness she

would have been beautiful, while even in her hardness there was

something of the quality of a sword.

"Is Mr. Caspar in?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered.

Whether the woman was surly or suspicious, he wasn't sure; but she

undid the chain.

"Will you step inside?" she said, thawing ever so little. "Mr. Trupp,

isn't it?"

She stood back to let him pass. Her blue overall, falling straight to

her feet, showed the fine lines of her figure; her eyes met his

straight as the point of a lance and much the colour of one; her lips

were fine almost to cruelty, her nose fine; she was fine all through as

an aristocrat, if her accent and manner were those of a small

shop-keeper; and her colouring was of finest porcelain.

She showed him into the room upon the right.

The room was unusual. There was little furniture in it, and that

little exquisite; no carpet, but a lovely Persian rug lay before the

fire. All round the walls and half-way up them, were oak book-shelves

with glass doors of a pattern new to Mr. Trupp, but designed he was

sure in Germany. On the top of one of them was a Jacobean tankard with

a crest upon it; in the bow a broad writing-table with the new

roll-top. On the brown wall were two pictures, both familiar to the

young surgeon who was interested in Art and knew something of it:

Botticelli's _Primavera_ and a perfect print of young Peter Lely's

famous _Cavalier_--Raoul Beauregard, the long-faced languorous first

Earl Ravenwood, who died so beautifully in his master's arms at Naseby.

"I had rather lost my crown," the stricken monarch had remarked, so we

all as children read in our nursery histories.

"Sire," the wounded man had answered. "You are losing little. I am

gaining all...."

As Mr. Trupp entered, a very tall man, smoking by the fireside, put

down a volume of Swinburne, and rose. He was as unusual as the room in

which he lived. Young though he was, he had a soft brown beard that

suited his weak and charming face and served partially to hide an

uncertain mouth and chin. It was noon, but he was wearing slippers and

a quilted dressing gown, with the arms of a famous Cambridge College

worked in silk on the breast-pocket. Certainly he was hardly the type

you expected to find in the little room of a tiny house in a backwater

of a seaside resort.

His long face had something of the contour of a sheep, and something of

a sheep's expression. In a flash of recognition Mr. Trupp glanced from

it to that of the love-locked cavalier on the wall above his head.

Edward Caspar too had those unforgettable eyes--shy, fugitive, and

above all far too sensitive. He had, moreover, the delightful ease of

manner of one who has been bred at the most ancient of public schools

and universities and has responded to the somewhat stagnant atmosphere

of those old-world treasuries of dignity and peace. But a less shrewd

eye than Mr. Trupp's would have detected behind the apparent assurance

a complete lack of self-confidence.

"My father tut--tut--told me you were going to be kind enough to

lul--lul--look me up," the young man said with a stutter in the perfect

intonation of his kind. "It's good of you to come."

"Just looked in for a chat," growled Mr. Trupp, unusually shy for some

reason.

The two young men talked awhile at random--of the Hospital, of Mr.

Caspar Senior and the Grand Northern Railway, of Beachbourne, old and

new, its origin, growth, and prospects.

Then conversation flagged.

Edward Caspar, it was clear, was trying to say something and found it

difficult. He stood before the fire, wrapping his dressing-gown about

him, and moving elephant-wise from one foot to the other. His brow

puckered; his face wrought; his eyes were on the floor.

Mr. Trupp, intuitive and sympathetic as few would have believed, gave

him every chance and mute encouragement.

At last the thing came out.

"You know what my tut--tut--trouble is," said the young man,

over-riding obstacles with motions of the head. "I find it hard to

keep off it." He nodded to the writing-desk on which stood a

soda-water syphon and a glass.

"We must see what can be done," the other answered. "You're young.

You've got life before you. It's worth making a fight."

The young man showed himself troubled and eager as a child.

"D'you think there's hup--hup--hope for me?" he asked.

"Every hope," replied Mr. Trupp with the gruff cheerfulness that so

often surprised his patients. "You're honest with yourself. That's

the main thing. First thing we must do is to find you a job."

The other stared into the fire.

"I've got a job," he said at last reluctantly.

"What's that?"

Edward Caspar answered after a pause and much facial emotion.

"I'm writing a book on the Philosophy of M--Mysticism." He wound

himself up and his speech flowed more freely. "It'll take me my

lifetime. Professor Zweibrucker of Leipzig is helping me. That's why

I've settled here. At least," he corrected, stumbling once again,

"that's one reason why. To be quiet and near the Public Library."

Mr. Trupp nodded.

"It's the best in the South of England bar Brighton," he said. "And

it'll beat that soon." He rose to go.

"Does that woman look after you properly?" he asked.

The young man's colour changed; and the momentary glow of enthusiasm

roused in him as he touched on his work vanished. Edward Caspar was

too weak or too honest to make a good conspirator.

He became self-conscious, and blinked rapidly as he stared at the fire.

"What--wow--woman's that?" he asked in a flustered way.

"Your landlady."

The other's face wrought. His stammer possessed him. He flapped about

like a wounded bird in a tumult of fear and pain.

"What?" he said. "She?--She's all right."

He did not show his visitor to the door. Mr. Trupp noticed it and

wondered: for his host's manners were obviously perfect both by nature

and tradition.

In the passage was the woman who had admitted him, feigning to dust.

She opened the door for him as he wound himself elaborately up in his

muffler.

"D'you let lodgings?" he asked.

Those steel blue eyes of hers were on him challenging and armed for

resistance.

"He's my lodger."

"Yes," said Mr. Trupp. "But have you other rooms? I see your card's

up."

"Sometimes."

"Because my patients ask me now and then if I can recommend them

lodgings."

The woman was clearly resentful rather than grateful.

Mr. Trupp, amused, pursued his mild persecution with the glee of the

tormenting male.

"Let me see. What's your name?"

For a second the woman hesitated--baffled it seemed and fighting. Then

she said with a note of obvious relief as of one who has overcome a

difficulty.

"Anne, I believe."

"Thank you, Mrs. Anne, I'll remember."

He rolled on his way chuckling to himself.

The woman watched his back suspiciously from the door.

Then she retired, not into the kitchen, but into her lodger's

sitting-room.

"Your father's spy," she said tartly.

"Nonsense, nonsense," the young man answered with the desperate

exasperation of the neurotic. "My f--father's not like that."

CHAPTER III

ANNE CASPAR

Edward Caspar, something of the scholar, something of the artist, even

a little of the saint, was notoriously bad at keeping secrets.

"Old Ned leaks," his friends at Harrow and Trinity used to say. The

charge was unfortunately true. It was because he had a secret it was

important he should keep that, knowing his own weakness, he had settled

in Old Town, to be out of danger.

Up there on the hill he would meet none of his quondam friends, who, if

they came to Beachbourne at all, would go to one of the fine hotels in

New Town along the sea front by the Wish.

But Nature, which has no mercy on weakness in any form, was too much

for the soft young man.

It was barely a week after his first visit to 60 Rectory Walk that Mr.

Trupp was sent for again.

The same woman opened to him with the same fierce, almost defiant face.

"Well?" he said.

"It's pleurisy, he says," she answered. "Pretty sharp."

He unwound himself in the passage.

"He may want a nurse then."

"He won't," cried the woman, the note of challenge in her voice. "I'll

nurse him."

"Can you manage it--with your work?"

"If I can't no one else shan't," the woman snorted, almost

threateningly. "First door on the left."

Mr. Trupp, grinning to himself, went up the stairs, and was aware that

the woman was standing at the foot watching his back. She did not

follow.

The young surgeon climbed thoughtfully, absorbing his environment, as

the good doctor does. The varnished paper on the wall, the cheap

carpet under his feet, the sham drain-pipe that served as an

umbrella-stand in the passage; they were all the ordinary appurtenances

of the house of this class, commonplace, even a little coarse, and

affording a strange contrast to the almost exotic refinement and

distinction of the sitting-room on the ground floor. The house too was

bright and clean as a hospital, hard too, he thought, as its landlady.

There was no lodging-house smell, his nose, trained in the great wards

of the Whitechapel, noted with approval. Windows were kept clearly

open, sunshine admitted as a friend. He trailed his fingers up the

bannisters and examined them, when he had turned the corner and was out

of sight of the woman watching in the passage. Not a trace of dust!

Yes, when he was in a position to start his Open-air Hostel on the

cliff for tuberculous patients, this was the woman he should get for

housekeeper.

He knocked at the door on the left, suddenly remembering that this must

be the room in the window of which hung the chocolate-coloured

_Apartments_ card.

Young Caspar's voice bid him enter.

The room was a bed-room and contained a double bed. In the window,

where dangled the card, was a dressing-table, and on it, undisguised,

the paraphernalia of a woman's toilet.

Edward Caspar lay in bed, breathing shortly, his face pinched with

physical and spiritual suffering.

Beside the bed was a chair and on it a manuscript.

Mr. Trupp glanced at the inscription--_The Philosophy of Mysticism.

Part I. The History of Animism_.

"You've fuf--fuf--found us out early," gasped the young man with a

ghastly smile.

"Nothing very terrible," said Mr. Trupp.

"I'm not ashamed of it," answered the other. "She's a good woman.

Only my f--father's a bit old-fashioned. You see, I'm the only son."

"I don't suppose he knows," grunted Mr. Trupp.

"No, he don't know."

"And I don't see any reason why he should," continued the doctor.

Edward Caspar raised his wistful eyes.

"Thank you, Mr. Trupp," he stuttered in his pathetic and dependent way.

"Thank you. Very good of you, I'm sure. We're fond of each other,

Anne and I. I owe her a lot. And my father's getting an old man."

On the mantelpiece was the photograph of a lady in court dress. Mr.

Trupp studied the long and refined face. There was no mistaking the

type. It was Beauregard all through, exhibiting the same sheep-like

contour as that of the man in the bed, the same unquenchable spiritual

longings as the Cavalier in the room below--added in this case to that

exasperating weakness which provokes a pagan world to blows.

"Is that your mother?" asked Mr. Trupp.

"Yes."

"She's like you."

"She's supposed to be."

When the doctor left the sick room and went downstairs he was aware

that the door of the sitting-room was open.

The woman was inside, standing duster in hand, under the picture of the

Cavalier, whose eyes seemed now to the young doctor faintly ironical.

Mr. Trupp entered quietly and shut the door behind him.

"We're married," she said, blurting the words at him.

"I know," he grunted.

She looked at him suspiciously.

"Did he tell you?"

"That you were married?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Who did?" fiercely.

"Your face."

She relaxed slowly.

"You mean I don't look the sort to stand any nonsense." She nodded,

grimly amused. "You're right. That's me. I'm chapel." Then she let

herself go. "I'm fond of Ned," she flashed. "I wouldn't have married

him else, for all his family. He's reel gentry, Ned is. I don't mean

his mother being Lady Blanche, I'm not that kind. I mean in

him--here." She put her hand on her chest. "I know I'm not his sort.

But I can help him. And he needs help. Think any of _them_ could

support him up?" with scorn. "Too flabby by half. Can't support

emselves, some of em. Lays on their backs in bed and drinks tea out of

a spout before they can get up o mornings. I know. My sister's in

service." She stopped abruptly. "What do you think about it yourself?

Straight now."

"I think," said Mr. Trupp, sententious and dour, "the only sensible

thing he ever did in his life was to marry you."

She eyed him shrewdly, sweetly. Then the hard young woman softened,

and her face became beautiful, the lovely colour deepening.

She was still wearing the blue over-all in which he had first seen her.

"You see me how I am," she said.

"I can guess," answered Mr. Trupp.

"Will you see me through?"

"With pleasure."

"I don't want no one else, only you. Mr. Pigott--the

schoolmaster--told me of you."

Mr. Trupp nodded.

"He's chapel too," he said.

Her eyes became ironical.

"Yes," she answered. "He's a good man though. You'll be church, I

suppose. Manor-house always is."

Mr. Trupp shook his head forcibly.

"I'm an agnostic," he replied. The word, recently coined by Huxley,

was on the lips of all the young men of Science of the day. "That's a

kind of honest heathen," he added, seeing she did not understand.

She nodded at him with a gleam of almost merry malice.

"Hope for the best and fear the worst sort," she said. "I know em."

Then she returned to her subject, and her face became grave and sweet

again.

"I'm due in April," she said.

"That's the right time," he answered. "All children should be born in

the spring. Then they're greeted with a song--because Nature wants em;

and they've got the summer before them to get established in. I'll

come and look you up in a day or two."

"And Ned?"

"He's all right. Keep him in bed. I'll send him round some medicine

to ease the pain."

She eyed him shrewdly.

"I didn't mean that. I meant the big thing. What chance has he?"

Mr. Trupp buttoned himself up.

"He's honest with himself. That's the great thing. For the rest it

depends mostly on you. You may pull him up. He's young. Is he

ambitious?"

She shook her head.

"What about his writing?"

"_The Basis of Animalism_," said Mrs. Caspar thoughtfully. "That's the

essay that got him the Fellowship at King's--only he gave it up after a

year. Too drudgeryfied. See where it is," confidentially, "he's got

the brains, Ned has. The teachers at Cambridge thought no end of him.

I've seen their letters. _You can do what you like_,--the Head Teacher

wrote. _Question is--Do you like_? And that's where it is with him.

There's no stay in Ned. He'll write away one day, and then drop it for

a month. Then he'll paint a bit; and after that a bit of poetry. _But

he don't go at it_. He don't understand work. That sort don't," with

scorn. "They've no need. A man works when he's got to--and not

before. Dad worked. He was a tobacconist at Ealing in a small way.

Cleared three pound a week if he kept at it steady and went under if he

didn't. Why should a man work when he's only got to open his mouth and

the pocket-money'll drop in. 'Tain't in Nature."

Mr. Trupp nodded quiet approval.

"_Must's_ the only word that matters," he said. "_Must's_ the man.

He's the boy to kill your _can't_."

The woman followed him to the door.

"Of course if old Mr. Caspar knew he'd disinherit him. And Ned could

never earn."

"And you'd be done?" queried Mr. Trupp with quiet glee.

"Never!" cried the woman, up in arms at once. "I could keep us both at

a pinch, I'll lay then."

"I'll lay you could," answered the other. "But Mr. Caspar won't know,

so you'll be all right."

The two lingered for a moment in the door, as do those who find

themselves in sympathy.

"He's a hard un's Old Man Caspar," said Anne.

"And he's not the only one," grinned the young doctor. "And a good job

too."

CHAPTER IV

OLD MAN CASPAR

That was how it came about that Mr. Trupp helped young Ernie Caspar

into the world. There was no doubt who the lad took after.

"He's his father's child," said the young surgeon.

Whether Mrs. Caspar was angry with her son for his resemblance to her

husband, it was hard to say, but she was fierce even in her mothering.

Now she nodded at the photograph of the woman in court-dress upon the

mantelpiece.

"It's her he favours," she said shortly, one stern eye on the sucking

infant. "He's the spit of her--same as Ned. None of Old Man Caspar

about him."

"Have you seen him?" asked Mr. Trupp, washing his hands.

"The Old Man?--Yes. Once. He came to lunch. Met Ned on Beau-nez. I

was landlady that day." She nodded grimly at the window where hung the

card. "That's why I keep that up--lest he should come down on us

sudden. We're done if he finds us out."

Mr. Trupp grunted as he dried his hands.

"I'm not so sure," he said.

"Well, that's what Ned says," the woman retorted.

"He would," replied the surgeon.

She looked at him sharply.

"You mean Ned's afraid of the old man?"

The other didn't answer.

"You're right there," said the young mother. "He is. And I don't

wonder. I'm afraid of him--and I've never feared a man before."

"Most people are," replied Mr. Trupp. "He's a bit of a terror; but

he's got his points. You needn't worry," he added as he said good-bye.

"You're not likely to see much of him. He's too busy with his Grand

Northern Railway."

The woman was unconvinced.

"He's that sudden," she said. "There he was in the door--me in me

wrapper and all. Of course Ned never give me no warning. Too

flabbergasted by half. Learnt me a lesson, though, never to sit in the

back-room with my sewing about."

"Did you know him?" asked Mr. Trupp, amused.

"Know him?" cried the other. "Seen his picture in the papers time and

again. Astrakhan coat and all!"

Happily for the peace of mind of the young couple Mr. Trupp proved

right. All the energies of the great contractor were set on driving

the new commercial railway from London to the North, tapping the Black

Country, and linking the Yorkshire ports with the Metropolis by the

most direct route.

It was in fact two years and more before Mr. Caspar made another of his

sudden appearances at the door of 60.

Young Mrs. Caspar, one of those women who is always on her guard,

guessed her visitor by that peremptory knock. She dried her hands,

shut the kitchen-door on the children--there were two now; peeped into

the study, saw that Edward was out, and faced the stranger.

Old Mr. Caspar was not really old: a dark, powerful man, almost

magnificent, in the familiar coat with the astrakhan collar of the

picture papers, and a black-and-silvered beard.

A close observer would have detected a Semitic strain in him and more

than a strain of the South. In fact, Hans Caspar's father came from

Frankfurt and his mother from Trieste, though he had lived in England

from his earliest years and spoke without a trace of accent.

Now his dark eyes met the woman's blue ones, and seemed to approve of

what they saw.

"Mr. Edward Caspar in?" he asked.

"He will be in a moment.--Mr. Hans Caspar, isn't it?"

She showed him into the little back sitting-room.

Then the task before her was to warn her husband before he came

blundering in and began to coo and call to her and the children from

the passage.

Anne Caspar was always at her best in a crisis.

Her baby was asleep; and Ernie was happy bestriding a new hobby-horse

and chanting to himself.

She took off her apron, put on her hat, and paused a moment on the

door-step, looking up and down the road.

Which way had her husband gone?

Once a week or so he went down town to consult the Public Library. For

the rest he always went towards the Downs to lose himself amid the

hollows of the hills. She made for the huge green wall that blocked

the end of the road, shimmering and mysterious in the April sunshine.

Her choice proved right. She saw him coming off the hill above

Beech-hangar, and went to meet him.

He would have blundered past her, oblivious of her presence but that

she stopped him.

Briefly she told him the news and gave him his instructions.

They must not be seen entering the house together.

She would return directly to the house: he must go along the new Road,

down Church Street at the back, and approach by way of Billing's Corner.

Obedient as a child, he lumbered off at that curious bear-like trot of

his, his sandals tapping the pavement.

Ten minutes later, when he entered the back sitting-room, he was

perspiring but as prepared as such a flabby soul could ever be.

He had always been in terror of his father; and Hans Caspar saw nothing

strange in his son's greeting.

"Hullo, Edward," he said in his deep voice. "Just run down to see you."

"Hullo, father," replied the son with the forced cheeriness he always

adopted when addressing his sire. "You'll stop for luncheon?"

"Thank-you. If you can give me a bite."

The young man rang.

His wife came to the door.

"Mr. Caspar'll stay for luncheon," said Edward, lowering his voice

appropriately. "Can you let us have something?"

"Very good," replied his wife surlily.

The father looked after her, grimly amused.

"Don't seem very obliging," he remarked.

Edward laughed uneasily.

"What!" he said. "Oh, she's all right. A bit fuf--funny in her

manner. That's all."

Mr. Caspar prodded his son.

"You'd better mind your eye, Ned. She's masterful, and a fine figure

of a woman too."

Edward tittered foolishly.

"What?--Oh, she--she's married. Children and all that."

"What's her husband do?"

"What--him?--Oh, he does nothing much that I know of."

"Lives on her, I suppose," growled the other. "Scoundrel! I know the

sort. The kind your Gladstones encourage."

He descanted at length and with more than even his usual violence on

the sins of all governments and especially radical ones. Unlike his

usual self, he was clearly talking as a screen to gain time, sheltering

something behind a wall of words. Ned was always embarrassed in his

father's presence; but for once Mr. Caspar seemed himself uneasy in

the presence of this son who had been such a woeful disappointment to

him.

After his political outburst, there was a prolonged pause.

Then Mr. Caspar leaned forward and kicked a cinder into its place.

"Pretty comfortable here?" he asked at last.

"Oh, I get along fuf--first-rate," answered the son.

"Three hundred a year's not much for a man in my position to allow his

only son, I know," the other said gruffly.

It was a new and unexpected note. The young man, chivalrous to the

roots of him, and heir to all the qualities of his mother's family,

instantly answered his father's mute appeal.

"My dear fuf--father, it's a fortune," he said. "We--I live like a

prince. And anyway, it's three hundred a year more than I deserve."

His father was silent.

"I don't know if you've had any expectations from me," he said at last.

"I've been pretty blunt with you in the past."

The young man had risen and was standing before the fire, his face

working.

"I've no need for mum--much money," he explained. "You see I've no

expensive tastes. I don't hunt or shoot or gug--gamble. If I can have

enough for the necessities of life, and to buy an occasional bub--book

or two, that's all I need."

"Ned," said the other, coming firmly to the point, "I've made

arrangements for the three hundred a year I allow you to be continued

throughout your life."

"I think it's mum--most _awfully_ good of you, father," said the young

man with obvious sincerity.

The other grunted.

"I don't know," he replied. "Not every son would take it that way."

He was rarely moved. His son saw it and was wretched.

Then the woman came in with luncheon.

CHAPTER V

ERNIE MAKES HIS APPEARANCE

The little room in which they lunched looked out on a tiny back-garden

bounded by a high old flint-wall.

The view was limited; and yet, for those who knew, it contained much of

the history of Beachbourne. Over the top of the wall could be seen the

chimney-pots and long blue roofs of what was now the Workhouse, which

had, Ned told his father, been a cavalry barracks in the days of

Napoleon. Against the wall a fine fig-tree revealed that the new house

stood where not long since an old garden, its soil enriched by

centuries of the toil of man, had grown the pleasant fruits of the

earth.

The room was dark but singularly clean. It was distinguished,

moreover, by the complete absence of all the ordinary insignia of a

lodging-house. There were no pictures on the walls. The furniture,

what there was of it, was mahogany, solid and plain, the chairs and

sofa horse-hair.

If the room lacked the distinction and delicacy of the study, neither

was it stamped as was the rest of the house with the conventional

hall-mark of the lower middle class. Rather, in its strength and its

simplicity it was like the parlour of a yeoman-farmer.

The two men talked little at their meal; but all went well until they

had resumed their chairs in the sunny front sitting-room that looked

over to the solitary stucco house, gloomy amid trees and evergreens,

behind a high wall across the road.

"The Rectory, I suppose," said the older man, standing in the bow,

picking his teeth. "Always the best house in the parish. D'you know

the man?"

"Just," Edward answered.

"What's his sort?"

"Oh, the ordinary cleric. A bit of a pagan; a bit of a Pharisee; and a

whole-hearted snob. He's a Prebendary who insists on being called a

Canon."

His father flashed a twinkling eye at him. Just sometimes Hans Caspar

wondered whether there might not be more in this poor creature of a son

of his than appeared.

"How like em!" he mused. "Yet I've an immense admiration for the

Church as a commercial concern. Look at the business they've built up.

Look at the property they've accumulated. Look at the way the

Ecclesiastical Commissioners sweat blood out of the foulest slums in

Christendom. They deserve to succeed. Do it all in such style too.

House their head-managers in palaces, and pay em £15,000 a year--and

perks--and plenty of em. The Hanseatic League was nothing to em."

The young man's eyes became quizzical. Then he began to titter in the

feeble and deprecatory way of one who half dissents and dares not say

so.

The door opened quietly. Hans Caspar, standing in the bow, turned

round.

A small brown-smocked figure, a-stride a dappled grey horse, looked in;

and a lovely little singing voice like that of water pouring from a

jug, said in a slight stutter with mysterious intimacy,

"Daddy!"

The little lad stood smiling in the door, the image of his father, of

his father's mother, of the Cavalier upon the wall, of those high-bred,

rather ineffective faces that look down on visitors from the famous

portrait-gallery at Ravensrood, the Somersetshire home of the

Beauregards.

Edward Caspar sat and sweated.

It was of course the elder man who spoke first.

"Hullo, youngster!" he called cheerily. "What might be your name?"

The child's face wrought just like his father's, as he struggled with

some invisible obstacle.

"Ernie Gug--gug--Gaspod," he said at last.

"Ernie Gaspipe," laughed the other. "Is your daddy a plumber?"

The child's hand left his horse's mane and shot out a chubby finger.

"That's my dad--daddy," he said.

There was the sound of swift feet in the passage, a blue arm reached

fiercely forth, and the child was swept back to the kitchen.

Mr. Caspar's eye flashed on his son's grey and quaking face and flashed

away again.

"Nice-looking kiddy," he said calmly. "Just the age to take us all for

his dad."

"Yes," panted Ned, his moist hands gripping the arm of his chair.

"How many's she got?"

"Two, I believe."

"Boys?"

"Yes, both."

The father took a cigar leisurely from his case, cut it and began to

smoke.

"I'd have liked a large family," he said quietly.

The son raised his eyes of a hunted hare.

"I know, father," he stuttered. "I'm afraid I've been a great

dud--disappointment to you."

"Stop it!" grunted the other. "Or I'll go into the kitchen." He

puffed away, lost in his reflections. "It was your mother," he went

on. "She couldn't stand the racket. That sort can't. The English

aristocracy breed in and in too much. That's why they always fail. No

red blood in em." He added, after a pause, "_You_ almost killed her;

and you were only a five-pounder when you were born...."

Before he left Mr. Caspar did go into the kitchen alone.

"I'm going to give that woman half-a-sovereign," he explained. "She

gave me a decent luncheon."

He went down the passage and knocked at the kitchen-door.

"Come in," said a voice.

He entered.

The woman faced him, formidable as a tigress guarding her cubs.

Her enemy eyed her with something more than kindness.

"I've seen one child," he said with the charm he could assume at will.

"Where's tother?"

His manner disarmed her. Half-hidden behind a towel-horse was a cot.

Anne Caspar stood aside while the big man bent over the sleeping child.

"Ern's all right," she said. "This'n's not much to talk on--as yet.

I'd not have rared him only for Mr. Trupp."

"Mr. Trupp's a great man," said the other, and laid two sovereigns on

the table.

"One for each of em," he explained.

The woman coloured faintly.

There was about her the beauty of a clear and frosty day.

"Thank-you," she said.

He held out his hand.

She took it, and he would not let it go, those eyes of his, in which

light and darkness, cruelty and kindness, chased each other, engaging

hers.

"Good-bye," he said. "I don't know what your name is--Look after

_him_," He jerked his head towards the door. "He needs it."

The woman dropped her eyes, the lovely colour deepening in her cheeks.

"I'll try," she said, her natural surliness dashed with ungracious

graciousness.

In the passage he put on his coat.

Edward came out to him.

"Good-bye, Ned," he said. "Good luck," and put his hand almost

affectionately on his son's shoulder. "I'm going down to look in on

Trupp and curse him from the Board for leaving the Whitechapel. Damn

tomfoolery. He'd a career before him, that man."

CHAPTER VI

THE MANOR-HOUSE

When he left his son to carry out his threat, Mr. Caspar struck into

the steep main street of Old Town, which preserved still the somewhat

stagnant atmosphere of a country village. On the left the parish

church, square-towered, massive, grey, stood on a slight eminence over

a green hollow, called still the Moot, in which was a pond that may

have been the source of the original bourne. Beneath the church the

old Star inn hung its sign-board across the way. Here Borough Lane

crossed the street, running steeply down between the church and the inn

and as steeply up under noble beech-trees along the garden-wall of the

Queen Anne mansion which must clearly be the Manor-house.

The brass-plate on the door confirmed the visitor's conjecture.

Yes; Mr. Trupp was in.

The house was beautiful within as it was plain and solid outside. In

the hall wainscoted, spacious, and with shining oaken floors, a

grandfather's clock swung its pendulum rhythmically.

The room into which Mr. Caspar was shown had a wide bow-window looking

out over gracious lawns and laburnum-trees in blossom to the elms in

Saffrons Croft.

Mr. Trupp entered. He was a slight man with a moustache, who tilted

his shrewd, rather sharp face to inspect his visitor through pince-nez.

"Well, Mr. Caspar," he growled genially.

"Ah, you runagate!" scolded the other. "What d'you mean by it?"

The doctor nodded at the window.

A beautiful young woman with chestnut hair, bare to the sun, was

walking with extreme deliberation across the lawn, leaning on the arm

of a nurse.

"That's one reason," he said.

The other gazed.

"Yes; you've given her the right setting," he remarked at last in a

strangely quiet voice, touched with melancholy.

A greyhound emerged from a shrubbery and crossed the lawn after the two

women at a stealthy trot.

"That's another," said Mr. Trupp.

"Sport!" cried the other. "Bah!--and you might have been a great

man!--a credit to the Whitechapel. What's the next?"

"Professional," grunted the Doctor.

"Third and last of course," retorted the other. "That's you English

all over. You don't know what work is. Still, Old Town for your wife

and New Town for your practice--may be something in it after all."

The surgeon opened the window.

"Come and be introduced," he said, and led the way across the lawn.

"She'd like to meet you."

Mrs. Trupp showed herself delightfully shy in her large and royal way.

Mr. Caspar was Mr. Caspar; and the fair creature knew the secret of Mr.

Caspar's son. She was indeed the only woman in Beachbourne who knew

it, and that not because Mr. Trupp had told her, but because she was

the only woman in whom Anne Caspar had confided,--as had, in fact,

Edward too. Her meeting therefore with Mr. Caspar senior was full of

dramatic possibilities. Her innocent soul thrilled with pleasurable

alarm at the perilous character of the situation. She felt a little

guilty and wholly defensive; and her transparent face betrayed every

emotion as a pool reflects a cloud.

Mr. Caspar watched her as she worked, with admiration and amusement.

"You've come down to see your son, I expect," she said in her charming

leisured voice.

"I have," he answered brusquely, the light flashing in his eyes. "He

seems snug enough. Not bad lodgings."

"As lodgings go," said Mrs. Trupp, delicately, bending over her work as

her colour came and went.

"That's a queer creature," continued Mr. Caspar.

"Who?"

"The woman my son's lodging with."

Mrs. Caspar held up her work to inspect it.

"She is a little funny in her manner," she replied, and began to pride

herself on her skill in evading the enemy without telling a downright

lie. "She's a fine cook, I believe."

"She's a fine woman," said Mr. Caspar.

The beautiful creature tossed her head as though he was suggesting

something improper, which no doubt he was.

Mr. Caspar chuckled without shame or mercy; but as he walked back to

the house his mood changed.

"Well," he said gravely, "I congratulate you, Trupp. Children may be

the greatest blessing in a man's life."

Back in the consulting-room he was still very quiet. All the teasing

laughter was gone from him. The mischievous boy, the trampling

conqueror, had disappeared. Their place had been taken by a sad and

even pathetic man.

"What is it?" asked Mr. Trupp, as his visitor sank back in the big

chair.

"I'm sick as herrings," replied the other.

"Labour troubles?"

The big man, with his black hair, pale face and swarthy eyes, shook his

head.

"I wish it was." He put his hand to his heart. "I've got notice to

quit. Rivers gives me eighteen months at most. Damn nuisance." He

stared out of the window at the two women under the elm. "I don't feel

like dying. And there was so much to do."

"Let's see," said the Doctor.

He applied the stethoscope, and then replaced it in his pocket without

comment. It was clear from the negative expression of his face that he

agreed with Sir Audrey Rivers' judgment.

Mr. Caspar, intuitive as his friend, asked no questions.

"That's it," said he. "Machine wearing out. I've rattled her about

too much, I suppose. Well, a man must live--my sort of man at least.

I could never be content to rust. There's nothing to be done. It's

just good-bye and no _au revoir_ this time. That's why I came down. I

wanted to see the boy before I pushed off." He turned suddenly.

"How's he getting on?"

Mr. Trupp shrugged his shoulders.

"No improvement?" asked the other.

"I wouldn't say that. He's put the brake on a bit of late."

"Or had it put on for him," muttered Mr. Caspar.

He mused for some time.

"I'd have taken a peerage but for him," he said at last. "I can't see

Ned as a hereditary legislator."

"Oh, I don't know," mumbled Mr. Trupp. He was an aggressive radical of

the then active school of Dilke and Chamberlain. "I think he'd do very

well in the House of Lords."

The young man had touched the springs of laughter in the other's heart.

Hans Caspar's immense vitality asserted itself again. He resumed

himself with a shout, sweeping the clouds boisterously away.

"Ned's a true Beauregard," he said. "Just his mother over again. So

charming and so ineffectual! Always some weak strain in an hereditary

aristocracy."

"Must be," muttered Mr. Trupp. "They're never weeded out. They're

above the laws of Nature. Case of Survival of the Unfittest--protected

by Law and living on you and me to whom they dictate the Law. Albino

bunnies in a gilded hutch with a policeman watching over em!"

"Good!" cried Mr. Caspar. "Albino bunnies is good. It took my albino

in the way of religious orgies. I prefer Ned's trouble of the two.

Less humbug about it." He got up and began restlessly to pace the

room. "There's nothing like religion to eat a man's soul away,

Trupp--to say nothing of a woman's. _You_ don't let your wife go to

church, I understand. Well, you're a shrewd fellow. That way lies the

bottomless pit. Mine took to it--it was in her blood, mind you--when I

was away in the River Plate driving the Trans-Argentine Railway from

the Atlantic to the Pacific. When I came back--good Lord! Priests to

luncheon, Bishops to dinner, Deaconesses to tea. Missionary meetings

in the drawing-room, altars in the alcove, parasites everywhere. In

her last illness she _would_ have a _religeuse_ to see to her instead

of one of our nurses from the Whitechapel. Of course she died. Serve

her right, too, say I." He paused. "With Ned it was just touch and go

which way it would take him. I thought at one time his mother's

trouble'd got him, but in the end it was..." He jiggled his elbow.

"He's not a bad sort," muttered Mr. Trupp.

Hans Caspar took the other by the lapel of his coat.

"But that's just what makes me so mad, man!" he cried. "If he'd been

vicious I could have kicked his back-side with joy. But you couldn't

kick Ned. You can't kick a pathetic vacuum." He added with a swagger:

"No man can accuse Hans Caspar of being afraid to use the jack-boot.

You don't kick bottoms half enough in England."

"There's plenty of kicking bottoms," answered the other. "The trouble

is that the men who kick bottoms never get their own kicked. If every

man who kicked knew for certain that he would automatically be kicked

in his turn, we might get on a bit."

Hans Caspar chuckled.

"Your idea of Utopia," he said. "Everybody standing round in a circle,

with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, hacking him. I

like it."

"I believe," chanted Mr. Trupp, "in the Big Stick. That's my creed.

But I want it applied by everybody to everybody--not by the strong to

the weak as we do in this country, and you do in yours."

"My firm belief you're this new-fangled creature--a Socialist," said

Hans Caspar.

"What if I am!" grunted the other. In fact, in London he had attended

meetings of the recently born Fabian Society, and had heard William

Morris preach on Sunday evenings in the stables of Kelmscott House.

The young surgeon had found himself in general sympathy with the views

expounded, but like many another man could not tolerate the

personalities of the expounders of the new creed. "Apart from Morris,

they're such prigs," he would say, "and so blatant about it. Always

thrusting their alleged intellectual superiority down your throat. And

after all, they're only advocating what every sensible man must

advocate--the application of the method of Science to the problems of

Government."

Mr. Caspar had gone to the window and was staring out.

"How long'll that boy of mine last the pace he's going?" he asked,

subdued again.

"He might last thirty years yet," the other answered.

Hans Caspar turned round.

"With that woman to run him, you mean?"

"What woman's that?"

"His wife."

It was Mr. Trupp's turn to look away.

"She's the sort for him," he mumbled warily.

The other broke in with vehement enthusiasm.

"The sort for him!--why, if I'd married a woman like that--with a

back-bone like steel, and the jaws of a rat-trap--I'd have been a

Napoleon."

Mr. Trupp's face was still averted. Its naturally shrewd expression

had for the moment a satirical touch.

"You think he's a lucky fellow to get her?" said the other.

Mr. Trupp's silence was eloquent enough.

"Ah," continued Hans Caspar knowingly. "I see. You think _she_ got

him. I dare say. She's the sort of woman who'd get anything she

wanted. And he's the kind of man who'd be got by the first woman who

wanted him. I took the measure of her at first sight. Fact I was just

going to offer her the job of manageress of my canteen at

rail-head--when I found out. She'd make the navvies sit up, I'll

swear."

"Her hands are pretty full as it is," commented Mr. Trupp.

The other nodded.

"I expect so," he said. "Ned alone's one woman's job. And the two

children." He put his hand on the surgeon's arm. "That eldest boy,

Trupp!"

"What about him?"

"He's his grandmother over again. Watch him!"

A bell in the street clanged.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Station-bus," said Mr. Trupp. "The driver strikes the coaching-bell

over the _Star_ as he passes."

"I must catch it."

The big man put on his coat and went out. At the door of the inn a

two-horse bus was drawn up.

Mr. Caspar climbed up beside the driver.

The young surgeon closed the front-door and turned.

His wife stood framed in the garden-window against a background of

green.

"Did he find out?" she asked anxiously.

"My dear," her husband answered, "he did."

The tender creature's face fell.

"Oh, the poor Caspars!" she cried.

CHAPTER VII

HANS CASPAR'S WILL

Sir Audrey Rivers' diagnosis proved correct. Just a year after his

visit to Beachbourne Mr. Caspar died.

His will caused malicious merriment to those who knew "Unser Hans," as

he was called in Society.

He left the bulk of his vast fortune in trust for the Whitechapel

Hospital--with one proviso: that no clergyman was to act as a trustee.

For the rest he bequeathed £300 a year for life, free of Income Tax, to

his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Edward Caspar; and should she pre-decease her

husband, the sum was to be continued to his son.

"Sound fellow that," said Mr. Trupp, when he heard. "Old Man Caspar to

the end."

"It's rather hard on our Mr. Caspar," remarked his wife, who had known

Edward Caspar in London before either had married.

"My dear," replied the surgeon, with the slight sententiousness

peculiar to him, "the only way to help that sort of son is to be hard

on him."

"I hope you'll never help my Joe like that," cried the beautiful woman

warmly.

Mr. Trupp loved to tease his wife.

"If your Joe goes that way I will," he grinned--"and worse. So mind

your eye!"

Another woman who was not amused by Hans Caspar's will was the woman

who benefited by it.

Anne Caspar had the qualities of her kind. If she was hard, she was

passionately loyal and genuinely devoted to her Ned. When she had told

Mr. Trupp that her marriage had been a love-match she had but spoken

the truth as regards her part in it. Therefore on the morning she

opened the letter from the lawyers announcing that she had come by

miracle into what was for the daughter of the Ealing tobacconist a

fortune, she felt a slight had been put upon her husband and was

perturbed accordingly.

With pensive face she went into the study, wearing the long blue

over-all in which Edward Caspar had first seen her.

Her husband stood in his shirt-sleeves, pipe in mouth, a loose,

round-shouldered figure, splashing away with vague enthusiasm at a

canvas in the sunny bow-window.

She realized in a moment that she had caught him in one of his rare

uplifted moods.

"Ned," she said.

"What-ho, my Annie!"

"Your father's left us £300 a year."

He chuckled as he painted, one eye on the gleaming mystery of the Downs.

"Been opening my letters, you burglar?"

"The letter's to me."

This time he turned, saw her face, and steadied.

She offered him the envelope.

He glanced at the address.

"Yes, it's to you all right. Funny they didn't write to me."

"Won't you read it, Ned?" she said gently.

He skimmed the contents and winced.

"That's all right, Anne," he said, handing it back to her, and patting

her hand. "The old man's been as good as his word--and better, by the

amount of Income Tax."

"Such a way to do it and all," said Anne censoriously.

He pinched her arm.

"Perhaps it's for the best," he said. "And anyway, it doesn't much

matter." If Edward Caspar was by no means sure of himself, he was sure

beyond question of the woman life had given him.

She lifted her face to his, and it was beautiful.

"Ned," she said; and he kissed her.

BOOK II

THE TWO BROTHERS

CHAPTER VIII

BEACHBOURNE

The Domesday Book tells us that King Edward the Confessor held the

Manor of Burne, and gave the endowment of the Church of St. Michael to

the Abbey of Fecamp, along with the Lordships of Steyning and Rye and

Winchelsea and other jewels from the crown of Sussex; as all who have

read Mr. Dudgeon's scholarly history of Beachbourne will recall.

Harold cancelled the grant, with the result, so legend has it, that

William the Norman landed at Pevensey just across the way to enforce

restitution. In those days the parish of Burne covered like a blanket

the western promontory of the great Bay. At each of the four corners

of the blanket, holding it down as it were, was a rude hamlet. On the

bourne itself a few hovels clustered round the wooden church upon the

Kneb; in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, carved out of the flank of Beau-nez, was

Holy Well, haunted by pilgrims from the Continent; on the sea-front

there was the Wish, beneath which of old a Roman dock had been; and

further east was Sea-gate with its fishing-station and the earth-work

which guarded the entrance to the Bay whose waters swept inland over

what are now the Levels to Ratton and Horsey and the borders of

Hailsham.

In the reign of Henry II the Norman church, much as we know it to-day,

succeeded the crazy wooden building in which our Saxon forefathers

heard the Word of the Promise first brought to Sussex by Bishop

Wilfrith, who starting from the North, dared the perils of the Forest,

and somehow fought his way through brake and marsh and thicket, among

wild beasts and wilder men, to the ancient Roman settlement at

Chichester; thence to spread the news all along the high bleak

coast-line on which at river-mouths and lagoon-like estuaries the Saxon

adventurers had gained a footing.

Till the nineteenth century the parish that lay scattered thus between

the Downs, the marshes, and the sea, changed but little, experiencing

the ordinary vicissitudes of an English village. Bishops made their

visitations. Rectors lived and died. Outlaws sought sanctuary at the

altar of the church above the Moot, which was still the centre of the

life of the little pastoral community. In the last half of the

fourteenth century the massive tower was added which dominated the

village as it dominates the town to-day; built perhaps as a

thank-offering for the passing of the Black Death, which slew half the

population, reduced the monks at Michelham to five, and, with

indiscriminating zeal, laid a clammy hand on the Abbot of Battle and

Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes; while giving rise to a wave of industrial

unrest which a few years later sent the rebellious men of Sussex

Londonwards behind the ragged banner of Jack Cade.

In 1534 the Proclamation repudiating the Pope was read from the pulpit

of the church upon the Kneb; and ten years later the first outburst of

Puritanism stripped the consecrated building of many shrines, pictures,

ornaments, as our historian has recently reminded us.

The village thrilled to the threat of the Spanish Armada, and, what is

more, prepared to meet it; the inhabitants having--time out of memory

of man, we are told--a reputation, the outcome of experience and

necessity, for dealing with the landings of forraine enemies.

During the Parliamentary troubles the Squire of Beachbourne was of

course a stout-hearted Royalist; and his friend the Rector was brought

up before the authorities on a charge of "malignancy." Found guilty,

he was removed from office; whereupon, as his brass quaintly reminds

us, the gallant gentleman _mori maluit_--preferred to die. And it is

on record that the parish was only saved from the ravages of Civil War

by the abominable condition of the roads of East Sussex. Perhaps the

same factor told against the prosperity of the place. For, by the

middle of the eighteenth century, Beachbourne, as it was now called,

had dwindled in population to a few hundred souls. Later in the same

century, about the time Newhaven was born, it began to blossom out as a

health resort. A celebrity or two discovered its remote charm. A peer

succeeded the Squire at the big house. Behind the Wish a row of

sea-houses sprang into being on the front. But Dr. Russell of Lewes

and the Prince Regent, in turning the fishing-village of Brightelmstone

into fashionable Brighton, ruined for the moment its rival under

Beau-nez. Beachbourne had to wait its turn until the iron horse,

running on an iron road, across country that not long since had been

washed by tides, overcame with astounding ease the difficulties that

teams of snorting oxen up to the hocks in mud had found insuperable.

Then, and only then, the four corners of the parish came together

apace. The old bourne disappeared, the source of it in the Moot under

the church-crowned Kneb now no more than a stagnant pond. And by the

time of our story a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants had risen

where men, still middle-aged, could recall meadows that swept down to

the sea, the voice of the corn-crake harsh everywhere as they sauntered

down Water Lane of evenings after church, and the last fight of the

"gentlemen" and the Revenue Officers that took place on a desolate

strip of shore to the sound of calling sea-birds, on the site of what

is now the Cecil Hotel.

CHAPTER IX

THE TWO BOYS

Next time Mr. Trupp called at 60 Rectory Walk, he marked that the

familiar chocolate notice in the upper window had gone.

He chaffed Mrs. Caspar in his grim way.

"No more rooms to let, I see," he said.

"No," the woman answered. "No more lies to have to tell just at

present."

She was in one of her tartest moods; and when he congratulated her on

being through her troubles, she answered,

"Some of em. Plenty more to follow. There'll be enough money for Ned

and me and the boys. That's one thing."

"And a big thing too," said Mr. Trupp.

"The biggest," admitted the woman surlily. "Speaking worldly-wise, I

don't say nay to that."

After the birth of her second son, Mr. Trupp had told her that she

would have no more children and she was glad: for her hands were going

to be full enough throughout her life; so much the shrewd woman saw

clearly. There was her husband; and there was her eldest son, Ernie,

who was his father over again.

He had his father's face, his father's charm, his father's soft and

generous heart; and, unless she was mistaken, other qualities of his

father that were by no means so desirable. And the curious thing was

that the characteristics which in her husband Anne Caspar secretly

admired, only exasperated her in Ernie.

Alf, the second son, whatever his faults, certainly did not trace them

to his dad. He was as much his mother's child as Ernie was his

father's. And whether for that reason or because for years she had to

wrestle for his miserable little life with the Angel of Death, his

mother loved him with the fierce, protecting passion of an animal.

"Nobody but his mother could have saved him," Mr. Trupp told his wife.

While Mrs. Caspar said to the same lady,

"But for Mr. Trupp he wouldn't be here."

A proud woman, Mrs. Caspar was also a very lonely one. Her genuine

pride in her rather ramshackle husband--his birth, his breeding, his

obvious air of a gentleman--which evinced itself in her almost

passionate determination that he should dress himself "as such,"

prevented her from associating with her own class; and the women of her

husband's class would not associate with her. Mrs. Trupp, the kindest

of souls, was the solitary exception. But the two women were

antipathetic. The doctor's wife, who possessed in full measure the

noble toleration that marks the best of her kind, was forced to admit

to her conscience, that she could not bring herself to like Mrs.

Caspar. The large and beautiful nature of the former, brought to

fruition in the sunshine and shelter of a cultivated home, could not

understand the harsh combativeness of the daughter of the small

tobacconist, who had fought from childhood for the right to live.

"She's like a wolf," Mrs. Trupp told her husband. "Even with her

children."

"My dear," said the wise Doctor, "she's had to snap to survive. You

haven't. Others have done your snapping for you."

"She needn't snap and snarl at that dear, gentle husband of hers,"

retorted Mrs. Trupp.

"If she didn't," replied her husband drily, "she'd be a widow in a

week."

"Anyway she might be kind to that eldest boy," continued Mrs. Trupp,

who at Edward Caspar's request had stood sponsor to Ernie. "He's

beautiful, and such breeding. A true Beauregard."

"What d'you make of the baby?" asked her husband with sudden interest.

"Why, he's like a little rat," answered Mrs. Trupp. "He's the only

baby I've ever seen I didn't want to handle."

"Yet there's something in him," replied the other thoughtfully. "He

wouldn't have lived else. A touch of Old Man Caspar about that child

somewhere. _He'll_ bite all right if he lives to be a man."

And to the Doctor's shrewd and seeing eye it was clear from the start

that Alfred meant to live to be a man. Somewhere in the depths of his

wretched little body there glowed a spark that all the threats and

frosts of a hostile Nature failed to extinguish. On that spark his

mother blew with a tenacity surpassing words; Mr. Trupp blew in his

wise way, working the bellows of Science with the easy skill of the

master-workman; little Ernie, most loving of children, blew too. Even

Edward Caspar leaned over the cot in his quilted dressing gown and said,

"He's coming on."

But even as he leant, the sensitive fellow knew that there was not and

could never be any bond between him and his youngest born. His heart

was with Ernie. And the way his mother rebuffed the elder lad, only

endeared him the more to his father.

The two lads grew: Ernie strong in body, loving in heart, lacking in

will; Alf ardent of spirit, ruthless as a stoat upon the trail, and

rickety as an old doll.

There was a first-rate elementary school in Old Town to which the two

boys went when the time came. The headmaster, Mr. Pigott, was also

manager of the chapel in the Moot which Mrs. Caspar attended regularly.

The hard woman was religious in the common Puritan way, so dear to the

English lower-middle-class of her generation. Her Chapel and her God

were both a great deal to the austere woman, especially the former.

She had a stern and narrow moral code of her own which she mistook for

love of Christ. From that code she never departed herself, and

punished to the utmost of her power all those who did depart from it.

In a chapel of her own denomination she had insisted on being married,

in spite of the fact that she risked by her obstinacy losing the only

man she had ever loved.

Ned Caspar, for his part, took his religion, as most of us do, from his

mother. He was High Church at a time when to be so was far less

fashionable than it is at present. He called himself a Catholic, and

spoke always of the Mass in a way that shocked his fellow-churchmen who

were in those days still content to speak of themselves as Protestants

and the sacramental act as Holy Communion. And after marriage he

maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would

have expected of the soft-willed man. Indeed, it was the one point on

which, aided by his mother's memory, he stood up to his wife for long.

"I'll wear you down yet, my son," Anne told him grimly. "May as well

come off the perch now as later."

In this one matter her taunts served only, so it seemed, to strengthen

her husband's resistance.

He went white, shook, perspired, and continued to attend High Mass at

St. Michael's, in spite of his growing distaste for the man who

administered it--his neighbour, Prebendary Willcocks, across the road.

A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake,

desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his

own way for a time without protest--as the cat permits the mouse a

little liberty.

When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said--and

Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occasion--

"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do

feel it so that we never worship in common."

That was the beginning of the end of his resistance.

He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never

bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and

form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little

community.

And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely.

But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of

the Church of England, often of Sunday afternoons in the spring and

summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the

top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches

close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the

"chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and

fighting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a "chucker-in" himself;

but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at

8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles

of which were darkened that tramp and prostitute might sit there

unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from

the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their

inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occasional visitors

from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour

of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin,

extempore prayer, readings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle,

that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in

days to come should gather thus, without priest or ceremonial, simply

to rejoice together in the blessing of a common life and universal

Father.

CHAPTER X

OLD AND NEW

Edward Caspar went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife.

He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely

modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found

satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediæval formulæ, the

iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his

mother in its grip.

As a student of comparative religion his intellect was still interested

in forms which his seeking mind had long rejected as empty, ludicrous,

or inadequate.

His reading for his book, his experience of life, and most of all an

inner urge, led him in time to look for the spiritual comfort that was

his most vital need outside the walls of the consecrated prison in

which he had been bred.

_Quia fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiscat in

Te_ was the motto that hung above his writing-desk. And his restless

heart found increasingly its peace sometimes in music, sometimes amid

the hum of men and women in the crowded streets of the East End of the

town, and most often in quiet communion with Nature on the Downs or

beside the sea in some gap far from the haunts of men.

He would ramble the lonely hills by the hour, lost in thought, Ernie

skirmishing about him.

Sometimes Mr. Trupp, riding with his little daughter up there between

the sky and sea, would meet the couple.

"Like a bear and a terrier, Bess," he would smile.

Then in some secluded valley, father and son would lie down in the

"loo" of the hill, as Ernie called it.

Resting there with contented spirits amid the gorse, they would watch

the gulls, white-winged and desolately crying over the plough, while

the larks purred above them.

These were the best moments of Ernie's childhood, never to pass from

him in the tumult and battle of later life. A child of the earth, even

his tongue, touched with the soft slur of Sussex caught from

school-mates, betrayed him for a countryman. He loved the feel of the

turf solid beneath him; he loved the sound of the gorse-pods snapping

in the sun; he loved the thump of the sea crashing on the beach far

below; and most of all he loved the larks pouring comfort into the

cistern of his mind until it too seemed to brim with the music of

praise.

"Loving, idn't they?" he would say in his sweet little voice, his hands

behind his head, his eyes on a speck of song thrilling in the blue.

"That's it, Boy-lad," his father's answer would come from beneath the

cavern of his hat; and Edward Caspar forthwith would repeat, in a voice

that seemed to co-ordinate the harmonies of earth and sky and sea,

Wordsworth's _Lines above Tintern Abbey_:

_... That serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,--

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:_

Alf never came on these excursions. The bent of the two brothers was

indeed entirely different. If they left the house together, as often

as not they parted at the garden-gate. Ern turned his face towards the

green hills that blocked the end of the road, Alf turned his back on

them.

"Nothin doin there," he would say with a knowing wink. He hated

walking, and he feared the loneliness of the hills. His heart was in

the East End of the growing town. Down there, beyond the gas-works, at

the edge of the Levels, where the trams clanged continually, where you

heard strange tongues, and saw new types of faces, Alf found himself.

The little urchin, who seemed all eyes in a hideous square head, would

wander by the hour in Sea-gate, among the booths and barrows, drinking

in the life about him, and return home at night tired but contented.

In bed the two boys would compare their experiences.

"What did you see?" Ern would ask.

"Everythink," Alf would answer. "Folks and a fight and all."

"I see something, too," said Ernie, deliberate alike of speech and mind.

"What then?" asked Alf, scornfully.

"I see angels," Ernie answered. "Dad see em too."

But Alf only sniggered.

At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the

Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the

other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing

workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea

to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the

slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the

rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. Beyond it lay

the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing

in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire,

the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth. Old

Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur

of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had

endured for centuries. In its steep streets you might hear the

undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in

vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is

conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the

English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days.

Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new.

Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched

with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he

loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp,

incisive, twanging.

In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to

all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the

Lewes Road. Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in

Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school.

His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door.

"Where you been then?" she asked ferociously.

"With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie. "Dis lambin time. His

boy's run'd away."

The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman.

Alf peeped round his mother's skirts.

"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.

"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.

Alf sneered.

"Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"

Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and

agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his

ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by

his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great

city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending

accent.

When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles

into Anne's unsympathetic ear.

"What a way to talk!" he groaned.

"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "_They_ aren't

going to Harrow and Trinity."

The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not

to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been

given.

"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar

sometimes demonstrated affection.

"And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work."

Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class

held of their rulers and their education.

CHAPTER XI

THE STUDY

Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and

the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of

useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school

in the hollow between the church and Rodmill.

New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd

of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot,

where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from

hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss

affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will.

Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift

to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel.

Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been

little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably.

The boys attended both.

Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in

particular.

As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he

didn't care to use them.

"He's a little gentleman though--like his father," ended the

schoolmaster.

Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us. As an

honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while

money was very little to him. But for the mysterious quality of

breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence

of something finer than ourselves. And on the rare occasions in which

Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new

Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice--"There's

English for you! Don't you wish you could talk like that...?"

Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it

never failed to do.

"That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly.

"But Ern's got to make his own way in the world."

"He'll do," said Mr. Pigott. "He won't be forgotten, you'll see. He's

a good lad, and that's something even in these days."

And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he

excelled. Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike

him in his marked athletic capacity.

True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none

the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was

disliked by everybody and gloried in it. He won all the gilt-edged

prizes, while Ern took the canings.

Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home.

"Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening. "They fairly

sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"

His recollections of the scene were so spicy that--for once--he was

dreadfully affectionate to the brother who had given him such prurient

pleasure.

"Ern in trouble of course!" cried the mother angrily. "You needn't

tell me! A nice credit to his home and all! I'm ashamed to look Mr.

Pigott in the face come Sunday!'

"Now then, mother!" grumbled Mr. Caspar. "Let the boy alone!"

"Yes, you're always for him!" flared Mrs. Caspar, buttering the bread.

"Setting him against his mother! But for you he'd be all right."

Alf sat like a little wizened devil at the end of the table in his high

chair, his eyes twinkling malignantly over his bib, enjoying the fun.

"It's him and Ern against you and me, mum, ayn't it?" he cried,

shuffling on his seat.

Whether it was his son's accent or a sense of the tragic truth

underlying his child's words, that affected him, Mr. Caspar rose and

shuffled out of the kitchen into the study, which was looked on in the

family as dad's sanctuary.

The scene had taken place in the kitchen at tea, which was the one meal

the family shared. Breakfast, dinner, supper, Edward Caspar had by

himself in the little back room looking out on the fig-tree; and Mrs.

Caspar waited on him.

That was by her desire, not his: for from the start of their married

life Anne had determined that, so far as in her lay, her husband should

have everything just as he was accustomed to. Thus from earliest

infancy the children had been taught by their mother to understand that

the two sitting-rooms were sacred to dad, and never to be entered

except by permission. Their place was the kitchen. She herself set

the example by always knocking on the door of either room before

entering.

And the atmosphere of these two rooms was radically different from that

of the rest of the house. Anne knew it and rejoiced. Everywhere else

the tobacconist's daughter reigned obviously supreme. These rooms were

the habitat of a scholar and a gentleman. The little back-room,

indeed, was remarkable for little but the solidity of its few articles

of furniture, and the old silver salver with the crest, reposing on the

mahogany side-board. But the front sitting-room, with the bow-window

looking out on to Beech-hangar and the long spur of the Downs that hid

Beau-nez from view, was known in the family as the study, and looked

what it was called.

The room, flooded with sunshine, was Mrs. Caspar's secret pride. She

knew very well that there was nothing quite like it in Beachbourne, Old

or New, and preserved it jealously. She did not understand it, much

preferring her own kitchen, but she recognized that it stamped her

husband for what he was, admired its atmosphere of distinction, and

loved showing it to her rare visitors. On these occasions she stood

herself in the passage, one arm of steel barring the door, like a

priest showing the sanctuary to one without the pale. And it gave her

malicious pleasure when Canon Willcocks, from the Rectory, opposite,

calling one day, showed surprise, not untinged with jealousy, at what

he was permitted to see. The Canon clearly thought it unseemly that

Lazarus living at the Rectory gate should boast a room like that. And

he was seriously annoyed when Anne, pointing to the Cavalier upon the

wall, referred to the first Lord Ravensrood as "my children's ancestor."

On the evening of the squabble in the kitchen, Ernie joined his father

in the study after tea.

As Alf was fond of remarking, "Ern's welcome there if no one else

ayn't."

Edward Caspar was sitting by the fire as usual, brooding over the

meerschaum he was colouring. His manuscript lay where it usually lay

on the chair at his side, and a critical eye would have noted that it

was little thicker than when Mr. Trupp had first seen it some years

before.

"Ain't you well then, dad?" asked the boy in his beautiful little

treble.

"I'm all right, Boy-lad," the other answered. "Mother didn't touch

you, did she?"

There was something reassuring always about Ernie's manner with his

father, as of a woman dealing with a sick child.

"No," he replied. "She said I was to come to you."

"Why were you caned at school?" asked the father, after a pause.

The boy's eyes were down, and he scraped the floor with one foot.

"Fighting," he said at last reluctantly. "Where it were, Alf sauce

Aaron Huggett in de playground, and Aaron twist Alf's arm. Allowed

he'd had more'n enough of Alf's lip. And he wouldn't leggo. So I

paint his nose for him. And it bled."

Edward Caspar puffed.

"Why don't you let Alfred fight his own battles?"

Steadfast to the tradition of his own class in this matter if in no

other, he revolted against the common abbreviation of his younger son's

name.

"Alf fight!" cried Ernie with rare scorn. "He couldn't fight no-hows.

D'isn't in him. He'd just break."

"Then why does he sauce em?"

Ernie resumed his foot scraping.

"That's what I says to him," he admitted in his slow ca-a-ing speech.

"Only where it seems he ca'an't keep his tongue tidy. Seems he ca'an't

elp issalf like. Then he gets into trouble. Then I avs to fight for

him."

"And if you don't fight for him no one else will?" said his father.

"No," replied Ernie with the delightful reluctance of innocence and

youth. "See no one do'osn't like Alf--only issalf." He added as a

slow after-thought, "And I be his brother like."

Edward Caspar held out a big hand.

Ern saw his father was pleased, he didn't know why; and he was glad.

In Ern's estimation there was no one in the world like dad--the kind,

the comforter.

Once indeed in Sunday-school, some years before, when Mr. Pigott had

been expatiating on the character of our Lord, the silence had been

broken by the voice of a very little lad,

"My dad's like that."

CHAPTER XII

ALF SHOWS HIS COLOURS

In fact, as Ernie said, the two were brothers, and in some sort

complementary.

Ern had to the full the chivalrous qualities of the Beauregards. He

never forgot that he was Alf's elder brother, or that Alf was a poor

little creature with a chest in which Mr. Trupp took an abnormal

interest. He fought many battles, bore many blows for his young

brother. Alf took it all as a matter of course, regarding himself as a

little god whom Ernie was privileged to serve and suffer for. Ern

accepted the other's constant suggestion of superiority without revolt,

and took the second place with the lazy good-nature characteristic of

him.

Ern indeed was nothing of a leader. In all the adventurous

vicissitudes of boy-life the initiative lay with Alf, who planned the

mischief; while Ern, obedient to his brother, for whose brains he had

the profoundest admiration, carried it out and paid the penalty, as a

rule uncomplainingly, at home and abroad.

Old Town was now creeping west along the foot of the Downs towards

Lewes. On its outskirts and in the corn-fields where are to-day rows

of red-brick villas, were still to be found flint cottages, long

blue-roofed barns, and timbered farmsteads among elms. As little by

little the town, with its border of allotment gardens, flooded along

the New Road, sweeping up Rodmill and brimming over towards Ratton and

the Decoy on the edge of the marshes, these buildings that dated from

another age were gradually diverted from their pristine use to be the

habitations of those who no longer drew their living from the earth.

Thus in the house which had once been the huntsman's lodge, beside the

now abandoned kennels, lived Mr. Pigott--one foot in the country, as he

said, one in the town.

Every morning he walked across the foot-path, past Moot Farm, to

school. Mr. Pigott's house stood in a hollow coombe a long way back

from the road. The gorse-clad sides of the Down rose steeply at the

back of it. In front was an orchard in which a walnut-tree lorded it,

conspicuous over the lesser trees.

It was towards the end of their school time, when Ern was nearly

fourteen, that Alf planned a raid upon this tree, famous in the

locality for its beauty and fruitfulness.

The adventure needed careful thinking out.

The approach to the house was along an unscreened path that led across

the arable land. Between the path and the house was the orchard in

which stood the tree with its coveted treasure.

The trouble was that Mrs. Pigott's window overlooked the orchard, and

she was always in that window--so much Alf, in his many reconnaissances

of the position, discovered.

Now it was well known in the school that Mrs. Pigott had but one eye,

and that of glass, which accounted perhaps for its extraordinary powers

of vision. And besides Mrs. Pigott with her one sharp eye, there was

Mrs. Pigott's little dog with his many sharp teeth. There was also in

the background Mr. Pigott, who, outside the chapel, was athletic and

regrettably fierce.

Alf waited long for his opportunity, in terror lest the tree should be

beaten before he had worked his will upon it, but his chance came at

last.

One Saturday afternoon he and Ern were loitering in Church Street,

marching along with the starts and stops, the semi-innocent and

semi-surreptitious manner of boys waiting for Satan to enter into them

and prompt them to definite action, when Alf dug his brother with a

warning elbow.

Mrs. Pigott was staring with her glass eye into the ironmonger's

opposite the church. On her arm was a basket and at her feet her dog.

It was clear that she was doing her week-end shopping.

Alf, swift to seize his opportunity, set off up the hill, hot-foot,

silent, with a bustle of arms and legs, his brow puckered as he

concentrated ruthlessly upon his purpose.

Ern followed the fierce, insistent, little figure more leisurely.

"Steady on!" he called. "Where away then?"

"Walnut-tree," panted Alf. "Now's yer chance."

Ern, who knew from experience that the dirty and dangerous work would

fall to his lot, lagged.

"Mr. Pigott's there," he grumbled.

"Now he ayn't then," cried Alf, spurring the laggard on. "He's gone

over to Lewes for the Conference. Didn't you hear mother at breakfast?"

There had been in truth a split in the chapel. The Established

Methodists were breaking away from the Foundation Methodists, and the

Primitive Methodists were thinking of following suit. The little

community was therefore a tumult of warring tongues.

Alf led up the hill, past the chalk-pit, along the side of the Downs,

and dropped down on his objective from the rear. Coming to the fence

that ran round the orchard, he peeped at the low house lying in the

background under the green flank of the hill.

Ern followed reluctantly, as one drawn to his doom by a fate he cannot

withstand.

He wanted the walnuts; he wanted to be brave; but he liked Mr. Pigott,

and, usually obedient to his brother's suggestions, had qualms in this

case.

"Go on then!" urged Alf. It was a favourite phrase of his. "There

ayn't no one there."

"Come on yourself," answered Ern without enthusiasm.

"Now, I'll stay and watch the path for you against her," piped Alf.

But for once Ern was firm.

"I aren't a-gooin unless you cooms too," he said doggedly.

"What's the good of me, then?" scoffed Alf in his fierce and feverish

way. "Can I climb the tree? Only wish I could. I'd show you. I

suppose you'll be throwin that up at me next! My belief you're afraid."

But Ernie was not to be moved from the position which he had taken up.

Just now and then Alf had remarked that his brother for all his

softness became hard--adamant indeed--in a way that rather frightened

Alf.

"I'll goo up the tree and shake em down to you," Ern said in his slow,

musical voice. "You stand at the foot of her and gather em."

"Fine!" jeered Alf. "And when Mr. Pigott comes out you'll be up the

tree safe as dysies, and I'll be on the floor for him to paste!"

"I thart you said he'd gone to Lewes," retorted Ern, unusually alert.

"So he has," replied Alf sourly. "Only I suppose he won't stay there

for ever, will he?"

Ern, however, was proof against all the other's logic; and finally the

two boys climbed the fence together.

The walnut was a majestic tree, with boughs that dropped almost to the

ground, making a splendid pavilion of green.

Ern swarmed the tree. Alf stood at the foot, sheltered by the drooping

branches. Thus he could watch the house, while nobody in the house

could see anything of him but a pair of meagre black legs.

He was fairly safe and knew it, but even so his heart pattered, he bit

his nails continually, and kept a furtive eye on the line of his

retreat.

"Hurry!" he kept on calling.

Ern, up aloft, went to work like a man. He tossed the branches to and

fro. The ripe walnuts came rattling down. Alf, underneath, gathered

rich harvest. He filled his pockets, his cap, his handkerchief.

Opening his shirt, he stuffed the brown treasure into his bosom and

grew into a portly urchin who rattled when he moved.

"I got nigh a bushel!" he cried keenly. "Throw your coat down, and

I'll fill the pockets!"

The little devil darted to and fro, tumbling spiderlike upon the

falling riches, absorbed in accumulation. His heart and eyes burned.

There was money in this--money. And money was already taking its

appointed place in Alf's philosophy.

He would sell the nuts at so much a pound--some wholesale to a

fruiterer he knew in the remote East End; some retail to his

schoolfellows.

The quality and quantity of the loot so absorbed him that he forgot his

fears. And when he glanced up through the screen of thick branches to

see a pair of grey-stockinged legs, thick and formidable to a degree,

advancing upon the tree with dreadful deliberation, his heart stopped.

The enemy was on them.

Alf emptied handkerchief, pockets, cap: he emptied himself by a swift

ducking motion that sent the treasure heaped against his heart pouring

forth with a rattle about his neck and head and ears.

Then he cast fearful eyes to the rear. It was thirty yards to the

fence and beyond there was but the unscreened path without a scrap of

cover, leading across the plough, past the Moot Farm and abandoned

kennels to the New Road.

Alf saw at a glance that escape was impossible. Mr. Pigott, for all

his forty years, could sprint.

Swift as a cornered rat, Alf made his decision.

He marched out from his shelter towards the approaching legs, a puny

little creature with pale peaked face, and Ern's coat flung over his

arm.

Mr. Pigott was advancing, very grim and grey, across the rough grass,

his hands behind him, dragging something. He seemed in no hurry, and

not in the least surprised to see Alf, whom he ignored.

"Please, sir," said Alf, perking his face up with an air of frankness,

"there's a boy up your tree. Here's his coat."

Mr. Pigott walked slowly on, drawing behind him a sixty-foot hose,

which issued like a white snake from the scullery window.

"I know," he said with suppressed quiet. "And I know who set him on to

it. I can't beat you because you'd break if I touched you. But I'll

take your brother's skin off him though he's twice the man you are, you

dirty little cur!"

He brought the hose to bear on the brigand in the tree, and loosed the

water-spout and the vials of his wrath together.

"Ah, you young scoundrel!" he roared, finding joy in explosive

self-expression. "I'll teach you come monkeying after my nuts!"

Swish went the stream of water through the branches.

Ern hid as best he could on the leeward side of the trunk.

Mr. Pigott brought his artillery mercilessly to bear upon the boy's

clasping hands. Ern, spluttering and sprawling, came down the tree

with a rush and made a bolt for the fence.

Mr. Pigott, roaring jovially, played the stream full on him. It was a

powerful gush, and floored the boy. The avenger knew no mercy and

drenched his victim as he lay.

It was a sodden little figure who crept home disconsolately ten minutes

later.

Alf had been back some time and had already told his tale, gibbering

with excitement and fear.

Ern's mother, in a white fury, was awaiting the boy in the kitchen.

"I'll learn you disgrace me!" she cried. "Robbing your own

chapel-manager's orchard--and then come home like a drownded rat!"

She set about the lad in good earnest.

Alf, perched upon the dresser to be out of the way, watched the fun,

biting his nails.

"You mustn't hit her back then!" he screamed. "Your own mother!"

"I aren't hittin' her back then!" cried Ern, dogged, dazed, and warding

off the blows as best he might. "I'm only defendin of mesalf."

The noise of the scuffle was considerable.

Outside in the passage was the sound of slippered feet. Then some one

tried the door.

"It's only dad!" cried the devil on the dresser, white and with little

black eyes that danced.

"What's up?" called an agitated voice from outside. "Hold on, mother!

Give the boy a chance."

Some one rattled the door.

"Go about your business!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "There's a pair of you!"

Her anger exhausted and shame possessing her, she was going out into

the yard to shelter herself in the little shed against the Workhouse

wall, when Alf's sudden scream stayed her.

"Mum!--down't leave me!--he'll kill me!"

She turned to mark a white flare burning in the face of her elder son.

She had seen it before and had been afraid.

When Ern looked like that he ceased to be Ern: he became

transfigured--yes, and terrible: like, she sometimes thought, the

cavalier in the picture must have been in anger.

"Take them sopping duds off," she said quietly, "and then go up and put

your Sundays on."

Half an hour later Ern, wearing dry clothes, entered the study.

He was sweet, smiling, and a thought abashed.

His father, on the other hand, evinced signs of terrible emotion.

His face was mottled, and he was shaking.

Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood before the fire, trying

pitifully to preserve his dignity, and moving uneasily from leg to leg

like a chained elephant.

"Did she hurt you?" he asked, seeking to steady his voice.

Ern shook his head.

"She laid about me middlin tidy," he admitted. "But she didn't not to

say hurt me. She don't know how--a woman don't. Too much flusteration

along of it."

Edward Caspar collapsed into a chair.

"What happened?" he asked.

Ern recounted the story truthfully, the white glimmer in his face

coming and going between pants as he told.

"Why d'you let him lead you astray?" asked the father irritably, at the

end.

Ern wagged his head slowly and began to scrape once more with his foot.

"Alf's artfuller nor me!" he said at last in a shamefaced way.

CHAPTER XIII

ALF MAKES A REMARK

Both boys turned up at Sunday-school next morning: Alf defiant, Ern

abashed.

Mr. Pigott ignored the former, snubbed him brutally when occasion

offered, and showed himself benignant to the prime sinner.

After chapel Mrs. Caspar spoke to him.

"I don't know what you think of my son, Mr. Pigott," she began.

"Which son?" asked the other in his bluff way.

"Why, Ernie to be sure. He's always bringing shame upon me."

"He's worth twice the other," cried Mr. Pigott, letting off steam.

"Ah, yes, you've got your favourites, Mr. Pigott!" retorted the woman.

"And I'm not the only one!" answered the outraged schoolmaster. "Ern's

a boy. And boys will be boys, as we all know. But he's a little

gentleman, Ern is. He's his father over again."

The comparison of Ernie to his father, however well intentioned, always

touched Mrs. Caspar on the raw. Her eyes sparkled. Every now and then

she reminded you forcibly that her grandmother had lived in a

by-street--off Greyhound Road, Fulham.

"Ah," she muttered vengefully, "I'll cut his little liver out yet,

you'll see."

Mr. Pigott rounded on her, genuinely shocked.

"And you a religious woman!" he cried. "Shame on you!"

"I don't care," answered Mrs. Caspar. "I see it coming. I always

have. And it's just more than I can bear."

Mr. Pigott did not understand the cause of the woman's emotion, but he

recognized that it was genuine and so respected it.

"Well, he's leaving school now," he said more gently. "He'll settle

down once he's got his nose to the grindstone."

Later, at the meeting of the Bowling Green Committee, in the Moot, the

schoolmaster reported Mrs. Caspar's saying to Mr. Trupp.

"She's a hard un," he commented.

"She's need to be," growled the other.

"What's that, Doctor?" asked Mr. Pigott.

"If she let go of him, he'd be dead in a month," mumbled Mr. Trupp.

"Mr. Caspar would?"

The Doctor looked at the grey church-tower bluff against the sky.

"But she won't let go," he added. "She's got her qualities."

"She has," said Mr. Pigott, treading the green. "She's a diamond--as

hard, as keen."

The two always sparred when they met and loved their friendly bouts.

Both were radicals; but they had arrived at their convictions by very

different routes. The schoolmaster had inherited his opinions from

tough, dissenting ancestors, the man of science had acquired them from

Huxley and Darwin. Politics the pair rarely discussed, except at

election time; for on that subject they were in rough agreement. But

the two men wrangled genially over religion, the ethics of sport, even

the two Caspar boys; for Mr. Trupp was the one man in Old Town who

alleged a preference for the younger boy--mainly, his wife declared,

because he must be "contrary."

Mr. Pigott now told the stubborn man almost with glee the story of

Alf's treachery.

"What d'ye think of that now?" he asked defiantly.

"Why," grunted the Doctor, "what I should expect."

"Of course," said the sarcastic Mr. Pigott.

"He's got the faults of his physique," continued the other. "He's

afraid of a thrashing because he knows it'd kill him.

Self-preservation is always the first law of life."

"He's a little cur," said Mr. Pigott. "That's what your young Alf is."

"I've no doubt he is," replied the Doctor. "You would be too if you'd

got that body to live in."

"I'd be ashamed," shouted the other. "I'd commit suicide offhand."

"The wonder is he's alive at all," continued Mr. Trupp, quite unmoved.

"Must have some grit in him somewhere or he'd have died when he was

born."

"That's you and his mother," said the schoolmaster censoriously.

"Saving useless human material that ought to be scrapped. And you call

yourself a Man of Science! In a properly ordered community you'd stand

your trial at Lewes Assizes, the two of you--for adding to the criminal

classes. Now if we were back in the good old days, they'd have exposed

Alf at birth--and quite right, too."

"Quite so," said Mr. Trupp. "Your Christianity has a lot to answer

for, as I've remarked before."

It fell to Mr. Pigott to find a job of work for Ernie when his

favourite left school: for at that date there were no Labour Bureaux,

no Juvenile Advisory Committees, no attempt to make the most of the

country's one solid asset--its Youth. And the rich had not yet made

their grand discovery of the last twenty-five years--that the poor have

bodies; and that these bodies must be saved, even if it cost a little

more than saving their souls, which can always be done upon the cheap.

Mr. Pigott had little difficulty in his self-imposed task, for he did

not mean to remain a schoolmaster all his life, and was already

dabbling in the commercial life of the growing town.

Ernie started as an office-boy in a coal-merchant's office in Cornfield

Road by the Central Station, which formed the junction between the Old

Town and the New.

Before the boy embarked on his career, Mr. Pigott invited him to tea

and lecture.

"It's your own fault if you don't get on," said the schoolmaster

aggressively after the muffins. "Rests with yourself. Office boy to

President--like they do in America. Make a romance of it."

"I shall try, sir," cried Era, with the easy enthusiasm characteristic

of him.

"I'll lay you won't, then!" retorted the other rudely. "I'll lay all

the work I've put into you these ten years past goes down the drain.

Now your grandfather..."

He stopped short, remembering Mrs. Caspar had told him that their

origin had been kept from the two boys....

At his new job Ern did not work very hard. It was not in him to do

that; for he had his father's complete lack of ambition. But he worked

just enough to keep his place, to pay his mother for his keep by the

time he was seventeen, and have some "spending money," as he called it,

over, with which to buy cigarettes, and join the cricket club. In time

he even attained to the dignity of an office stool: for his handwriting

was excellent, his ability undoubted, and his education as good as most.

"Ern don't lick the stamps no more. He writes the letters," was Alf's

report at home.

The younger brother too had now launched out upon the world. But Alf

was very different from Ern. He had his own ideas from the start and

went his own way. Somehow he had ferreted out the facts about his

grandfather's career; and that career it was his deliberate

determination to surpass.

Those were the early days of the motor industry and the petrol engine.

Alf made his mother apprentice him to Hewson and Clarke, an

enterprising young engineering firm in the East End, off Pevensey Road.

"No Old Town for me," he said knowingly. "New Town's the bird!"

And the boy worked with the undeviating energy of an insect. All day

he was busy at the shop, and in the evening came home, grimy and tired,

to have a wash and then settle down in the kitchen to study the theory

of the petrol-engine.

His mother, ambitious as her son, watched him with admiration, guarding

his hours of study jealously from interruption.

"He's his grand-dad over again," she confided to her husband in one of

their rare moments of intimacy.

Edward Caspar shook his head. He was interested in his second son,

although in his heart of hearts he disliked the boy. He disliked

ambitious men--their restlessness, their unhappy egoism, their

incapacity to give themselves to any cause from which they would not

reap personal advantage, offended his spiritual sense; and he followed

with amused benevolence the careers of his contemporaries at Harrow and

Trinity who were reaping now the fruits of Orthodoxy, and just becoming

Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, and the like.

"Alf hasn't got my father's physique," he said.

"You wait," Anne replied. "He'll conquer that too. Last time Mr.

Trupp saw him he said he'd do now--if he took care."

Ern watched his brother's feverish activities with ironical smiles.

"He's like a little engine himself," he said. "No time to look around

and take a little pleasure in life. All the while a-running along the

lines--puff-puff-puff!--with his nose to the ground. Not knowin where

he's goin or why; only set on getting somewhere, he don't know where,

some day, he don't know when."

Himself he preferred the leisurely life, and was known among his

friends as Gentleman Ernie. The office, which prided itself upon its

tone, for in it worked a youth who said he had been at a public school,

had taken the country accent off his tongue. Ern was indeed a bit of a

dandy now, who oiled his hair, and took an interest in his ties; while

Alf never spent a penny on his clothes, was always shabby, and seldom

clean. The dapper young clerk and the grimy little mechanic, on the

rare occasions when they appeared in the streets together, formed a

marked contrast, of which Ernie at least was aware.

"You'd never know em for brothers," the passers-by would remark.

Both had arrived at the age when the young male joins a gang, curious

about women, but inclining to be suspicious of them. Alf, however,

strong in himself, continued on his prickly and independent way. He

was not drawn to others, nor were others drawn to him. Companionable

Ern, on the other hand, who was everybody's friend, was absorbed into a

gang; but he was different from his gang-mates. He used less hair-oil

than they did, and wore more modest ties. Moreover, there was nothing

of the hooligan about him.

"Such a gentlemanly lad," said Mrs. Trupp. "That's his father coming

out in him."

"May the resemblance end there," muttered Mr. Trupp.

The lady speared her husband on the point of her needle.

"Croakie!" she remarked.

Ern could have been a leader among his mates, had he chosen to assume

authority. His quiet, his distinction, his happy manner, and above all

the fact that he was a promising cricketer and had made half a century

on the Frying Pan at Lewes for the Sussex Colts against the Canterbury

Wanderers, marked him out. But Ern would not lead. He spent his

evenings in the main at home rather than in the lighted streets, and

was at his happiest sitting in the study opposite his father. On these

occasions the two rarely spoke, but they enjoyed a silent communion

that was eminently satisfying to them both. Just sometimes the father

would touch the revolving book-case on his right; take out one of the

little blue poetry books Ern knew so well, and read _The Scholar Gypsy_

or _The Happy Warrior_.

Ern loved that, but he was far too indolent to pursue the readings

himself. When his father had finished, he would return the book to its

place and say,

"You should read a bit yourself, Boy-lad," and Ern's invariable reply

would be,

"I will, dad, when I got the time."

But Ern was one of those who never had the time and never would have.

Then the two would relapse into smoke and silence and vague dreams, out

of which Edward Caspar's voice would emerge,

"Where's Alfred?"

To which Ern would answer with a faint smirk,

"Studyin in the kitchen."

Ern's tendency to be a masher, as the phrase of the day went, delighted

Mr. Pigott. He looked on it as the best sign he had yet detected in

the boy.

"Who's the lady, Ern?" he chaffed, meeting the lad.

The boy smiled shyly. At such moments, in spite of his plainness, he

looked beautiful.

"Haven't got one, sir," he said.

It was true, too. His attitude towards girls was unlike that of his

mates. He neither chirped at them in the streets, nor avoided them

aggressively, nor was self-conscious in their presence. He was always

friendly with them, even affectionate; but he went no farther. Some of

the Old Town maidens wished he would. But, in fact, this was not Ern's

weakness.

The Destroyer, who lies in wait to undo us all, if we give him but a

crevice through which to creep into our citadel, was taking the line of

least resistance, as he does in every case.

There began to be rumours in Old Town. His father's weakness, known to

all, lent these rumours wing. In Churchy Beachbourne, as the enemy

called the town by reason of the number and variety of its consecrated

buildings, people were swift to believe, eager to hand on their beliefs.

Prebendary Willcocks--which was his proper title--or Canon

Willcocks--as he had taught the locality to call him--who had reasons

of his own for disliking Edward Caspar, heard and shook his

aristocratic head, repeating the rumour to all and sundry in a lowered

voice. The Lady Augusta Willcocks, that indefatigable worker in the

parish for God and the Tory Party, entirely lacking in her husband's

delicate feeling, echoed it resonantly.

Mr. Pigott was honestly aghast.

"Never!" he cried, and added--"God help him if his mother hears!"

He was so genuinely concerned indeed that he went round to 60 Rectory

Walk to find out by indirect examination if Mrs. Caspar had heard.

She had; and was distraught.

"If he takes to that, I'll turn him out of the house!" she cried

savagely. "Straight I will!"

And there was no question that she meant what she said.

"The best way to make trouble is to meet it half-way," muttered the

schoolmaster, cowed for once by the woman's terrible emotion. "Give

the boy a chance--even if he is your own son."

"Alf says he was blind at the match," the other answered doggedly.

"Alf!" scoffed Mr. Pigott, savage in his turn. "I wouldn't care that

what Alf says about his brother. I know your Alf."

"And I don't then," said Mrs. Caspar. "I try to keep it fair between

em--for all what folks may say different."

That evening Mr. Pigott met Alf in Church Street.

The schoolmaster stopped, holding with his eye the youth in the stained

blue overall. Alf approached him delicately, with averted face and a

sly smile.

It was clear that he courted the encounter.

Mr. Pigott came to the point at once.

"How's Ern?" he boomed in a voice of challenge.

Alf dropped his eyes.

"Beg pardon, sir," he said, "our Ern's goin the same way as dad."

Mr. Pigott gazed at him as one stupefied.

Then in a flash he understood ... Mr. Trupp was right. The boy was

abnormal: his spirit dwarfed and stunted by the miserable tenement in

which it was forced to dwell.

This sudden peep into one of the sewers of Nature, this illumination of

what before had been to him obscure, this swift suggestion of Evil

lurking obscenely in the dusk to leap on the unwary, brought him up

abruptly. His anger passed for the moment. Something between fear and

pity laid hold of him.

"I suppose you're glad," he said quietly.

Alf smiled that satyr-like smile of his, sickly and uncertain.

"Ah, you never did like me, Mr. Pigott!" he sneered.

"I don't," answered Mr. Pigott. "I never did. But I'm beginning to

understand you. You're possessed."

He went on down the street and called at the Manor-house.

Mrs. Trupp was, he knew, a staunch friend of Ernie's.

The lady was playing with her children in the garden. But she gave

both her ears to her visitor when she knew his errand. Had she heard

anything?

Mrs. Trupp coloured. She _had_ heard something which greatly perturbed

her pure and beautiful spirit.

Her Joe, home from Rugby, had reported that on the way back from a

match at Lewes Ernie Caspar had taken a drop which had made him funny.

"It was only a little," the lady ended. "Joe said it wasn't enough to

make an ordinary canary queer. But it upset Ernest for the moment."

Mr. Pigott marched on down the hill to the railway station.

It was shutting-up time, and the object of his concern was just leaving

the office.

Mr. Pigott unceremoniously seized the boy by the hand.

"For God's sake take a pull, Ern!" he said, most seriously.

Ernie looked up surprised, read the distress in the other's bearded

face, and burned one of those sudden white flares of his.

"I see!" he said. "Alf's been at it again!" and he broke away.

Swiftly he went home, passed the study door, and entered the kitchen.

His mother was out.

Alf, his elbows on the table, and his chin on his hands, was studying a

model-engine under the gas-light.

He looked up surlily as Ern entered.

"Keep out of it!" he ordered. "You've heard what mother says. The

kitchen's mine at this time. I don't want you."

"But I want you, my lad," answered Ernie, brutal in his bitterness.

He locked the door, and took off his coat.

"Been tellin the tale again!" he trembled, as he rolled up his sleeves.

"I've had more'n enough of it. Put em up! You're for it this journey!"

Alf had risen. He knew that look upon his brother's face, and was

afraid.

"You mustn't touch me!" he screamed, shaking a crooked finger at the

other. "I'm delicit, I am."

It was the ancient ruse which had stood him in good stead many a time

at home and in the playground.

"Else you'll tell mother!" sneered Ern. "Very well. Have it your own

way!"

He seized the model engine on the table, and smashed it down on to the

floor. It lay at his feet, a broken mass, with spinning wheels.

Then Ern unlocked the door and went out.

At supper that evening he was still burning his white flare.

Alf saw it and was cowed; Mrs. Caspar saw it too and held her peace.

Edward Caspar was, as always, away in the clouds and aware of nothing

unusual when he looked in to say good-night.

CHAPTER XIV

EVIL

Alf took no overt steps to avenge himself. Like old Polonius he went

round to work, lying in wait for the chance he knew would come. He had

not to wait long.

On the August Bank Holiday there was a big dance at the Rink in

Cornfield Road. Ern attended. He danced well and was sought after as

a partner.

Alf went too.

Ern was surprised to see his brother there, and pleased: for it was not

in his nature to bear malice long.

"Hullo, Alf!" he chaffed. "Didn't know you was a dancing-man. Let me

find you a partner then."

Alf shook his head, smiling that shifty smile of his.

"I ain't," he said. "I only come to watch."

That was true; but the words carried no sinister meaning to Ern's

innocent ear.

Alf watched.

He sat by himself on one of the faded plush-seats that went round the

hall. Nobody spoke to him, nobody heeded him. The seats on either

side of him were left vacant.

Sour, shabby, ill at ease, yet sure of himself, he watched with furtive

eyes the flow of boys and girls swirling by him in the dance.

One of Ern's friends pointed his brother out to him.

"I know," laughed Ern. "Let him alone. He don't want us. He's above

larking, Alf is."

"Never seen him at a hop before," remarked the friend. "And now he

don't look happy."

The evening was hot, the dancers thirsty, the drinks good. Alf

observed his brother go to the bar once, twice, and again. Then he

rose to go home, nodding to himself.

Ern passed him in the dance and stopped.

"What, Alf! You're off early!"

"I got a bit of reading to do," answered Alf.

"So long, then," said Ernie. "Shan't be long first myself." And he

joined the current again, with flushed face and loquacious tongue.

It was just ten when Alf entered the kitchen.

His father had already retired to bed; his mother was sitting up.

"You're late," she remarked sharply. "Where's Ern?"

"Heard em say he was at the Rink," Alf answered sheepishly.

Mrs. Caspar's face darkened. The Puritan in her rose in arms.

"Dancing?" she asked.

Alf feigned uneasiness.

"I'll stay and let him in," he said. "He mayn't be back yet a bit."

Mrs. Caspar took her candle.

Regular as a machine, she rose always at six, and expected to be in bed

by ten.

Anything that disturbed her routine she resented, surly as an animal.

"Let me know when he comes in," she said. "I'll speak to him. Keepin

us up to all hours and disturbin dad's rest while he carries on. Might

be a disorderly house."

She left the room.

Alf turned out the gas, and sat in the darkness, watching the dying

fire, and waiting for his mouse.

A crisis in his life had come.

He was about to take the first big step along the road that was going

to lead him to success or ruin.

He was aware of it, and calm as a practised gambler.

Once he rose and locked the front door to make sure his brother could

not enter without his knowledge.

It was eleven o'clock when he heard feet outside.

Those feet told their own tale.

Alf turned up the light in the passage and opened the door.

His brother lolled against the side-wall like a mortally wounded man.

"Take my arm, old chap," said Alf, and supported his brother into the

kitchen.

Ern sat down suddenly at the table. Alf lit the gas.

The light fell on his brother's foolish face and clearly irritated him.

He put up his hand to brush it away.

"Arf a mo'," said Alf soothingly, skipped light-footed upstairs, and

knocked at his mother's door.

She was half-undressed, brushing her hair, her neck and shoulders bare

in the moonlight.

Alf glanced at them and even in that moment of excitement thought how

beautiful they were.

Mrs. Caspar raised a finger.

Her husband was in bed and apparently asleep, Lady Blanche upon the

mantelpiece staring vacantly at the form of her recumbent son.

"Ern!" whispered Alf, and jerked his head significantly. "You'd best

come."

Anne Caspar slipped on a wrap. Candle in hand she descended the stairs

and entered the kitchen.

Alf followed stealthily. Like a gnome he stood in the shadow at the

foot of the stairs, biting his nails uneasily, as he watched with lewd,

malignant eyes.

Ern sat at the table with the dreadful blind face of the living dead.

He saw his mother enter and paid no heed to her. He was too much

occupied. A troubled look crossed his face, and clouded it. Then he

was very sick.

That amused Alf.

His mother shut the kitchen-door.

But Alf was not to be defrauded of his spectacle.

He opened the door quietly.

His mother, busy on her knees, with a slop pail and cloth, looked up.

"It's only me, mum," muttered Alf.

Her face frightened him: so did her breathing: so did her quiet.

"Come in then," she said. "And shut the door."

Ern still sat at the table.

"You little og!" said Alf fiercely, and shook his brother.

His mother, still on her hands and knees, restrained him.

"Let him be," she said. "It's past that. It's past all."

The door opened slowly.

Mr. Caspar stood in it in the faded quilted dressing-gown that had once

graced historic rooms at Trinity.

He stood there, dishevelled from sleep, a tall, round-shouldered ruin

of a man, every sign of distress upon his face.

"What is it?" he asked nervously.

"Im!" said Alf.

Mr. Caspar saw Ern, and marked his wife busy on her knees. Then he

understood.

The distress on his face deepened.

Anne Caspar rose sharply from her knees, the filthy rag still in her

hands.

"Two of you!" she cried thickly. "It's too much!" and shoved him out

of the room.

The father's slippered feet shuffled along the passage.

"Take your brother up to bed," ordered Mrs. Caspar.

Alf, too discreet to argue, obeyed.

Anne Caspar locked the door, and sat down at the table.

CHAPTER XV

MR. TRUPP INTRODUCES THE LASH

There was no doubt that Anne Caspar was a woman of character.

"Too much character," said Mr. Trupp.

His wife was somewhat shocked.

"Can you have too much character?" she asked.

Her husband was in one of his philosophical moods.

"Character's only will," he growled. "It's the repression or direction

of energy. You may misdirect your energies. Most so-called strong men

do. Look at this fellow Chamberlain. Willed us into this war. If it

hadn't been for his superfluous character we should never have heard of

South Africa."

"And your investments would never have gone down," said Mrs. Trupp

delicately.

The Doctor may have been unjust to the Colonial Secretary, but he was

right about Anne Caspar, whom he knew rather better.

That dour woman had, indeed, just two friends in Beachbourne. One was

Mr. Trupp, and the other was Mr. Trupp's wife. Neither had ever failed

her; and she knew quite well that neither ever would.

The day after the calamity she went round to see the Doctor.

"He's got to go," she said, tight-lipped and trembling. "That's flat.

You know what I been through with his father, Mr. Trupp. You're the

only one as does. I'm not going through it again with him. Ned's my

man, and I'm going to see him through. But Ern must go his own way.

Stew in his own juice, as Alf says. They say I've been hard with the

boy. So I have. Because I've seen it a-comin ever since he was so

high. And I've fought it and been beaten."

The gruff man was wonderfully tender with her. He saw the woman's

distress and understood its cause as no other could have done.

"Don't do anything in a hurry," he said soothingly. "Think it over for

a week and then come and see me again."

That evening he reported the interview to his wife.

"She'll never turn him out!" cried the kind woman.

"She will though," said Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp, pink and white with indignation, dropped her eyes to her

work to hide the flash in them.

"I'll never forgive her if she does," she said.

"Yes, you will," retorted Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp answered nothing for a time.

"I shall go round to see her," she said at last with determination.

"You won't move her," the Doctor answered, grimly cheerful.

"No," said Mrs. Trupp. "She hasn't got a heart. As Mr. Pigott says,

she's hard as the nether millstone in a frost."

Mr. Trupp put down his coffee-cup and licked his lips like a cat.

"My dear," he said, "you haven't been through her mill."

"Perhaps not," the other answered warmly. "But I am a mother."

The sympathetic creature, all love and pity, was as good as her word.

Mrs. Trupp was always full of indignation against Mrs. Caspar when away

from her, and in her presence touched by the tragedy of the woman's

loneliness.

She found things at Rectory Walk as she had expected or worse.

Ern had lost his job. His escapade at the Rink had reached his

employers' ears. None too satisfied with the quality of the lad's

work, they had seized the excuse to dismiss him.

"There he is!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "Just turn eighteen and back on my

hands. Nobody won't have him, and I don't blame em neether."

"Where is he?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

The interview between the two women was taking place in the back

sitting-room, where Mrs. Caspar always saw her rare visitors.

Anne nodded in the direction of the study.

"Settin along o dad," she said briefly. "Nothing but trouble along of

it all. I took his cigarettes away. _If he don't earn neether shan't

he smoke_, as Alf says. And now dad won't smoke because Ern can't.

_Sympathetic strike_, Alf calls it. And it's dad's one pleasure. I

allow him a shilling bacca-money a week. It's just all I do allow him."

"We all make mistakes--especially when we're young," said Mrs. Trupp

gently.

The other was adamant.

"There's slips and slips," she retorted. "If he'd gone with a girl I'd

have said nothing. But _this_!"

Mrs. Trupp was steadfast in her tranquil way, as her opponent was

dogged.

"I know if my Joe made a mistake what I should do," she said.

"What then?" sharply.

"Forgive him," replied the other.

Mrs. Caspar flared up.

"You wouldn't, not if your Joe's father----"

She pulled up short.

Loyalty to her husband was the soul of Anne Caspar.

On her way home the Doctor's wife met Mr. Pigott.

The sanguine little man stopped short.

"You've heard?" said Mrs. Trupp.

The other nodded, surly as a baited bear.

"Ern was round at my place first thing Sunday to tell me. He kept

nothing back." Mr. Pigott dropped his voice like a stage-conspirator.

"That young Alf's at the bottom of this, I'll lay."

Mrs. Trupp was shocked.

"Did Ernie say so?"

"No," fiercely. "He wouldn't give his brother away--not he. But I

know." He came closer. "I tell you the Devil's in that boy. I can

see him leering at me from behind the mask of Alf's face. There is no

Alf Caspar. He's only a blind. But there is a Devil!"

"O, Mr. Pigott!" murmured the lady.

"Yes, you may O Mr. Pigott me!" cried the wrathful man. "But I've

watched. I know. He's the cuckoo kind, Alf is. He wants the place to

himself. It's me and mum all the time. His father don't count; and

Ern's to be jostled out of the nest. Then there'll be room for him to

grow. I curse the day Mr. Trupp saved his miserable little life."

"Hush! hush! hush!" said the lady.

"Yes, I know Alf's one of Mr. Trupp's darlings," continued the other.

"And I know why. You know my old bicycle they all laugh at. I bought

it for ten shillings from a pedlar and patched it up myself. It's the

worst bike in Old Town, but I saved it from the scrap-heap, so I think

the world of it. Same with Mr. Trupp and young Alf."

Mrs. Trupp reported to her husband that Mr. Pigott had become almost

blasphemous over Alf.

"I know," grunted the Doctor. "He's not fair to the boy. Alf's

stunted; of course he's stunted. He's grown up all wrong. The wonder

is he's grown up at all. He's a standing witness to the power of

Nature to make the most of a bad job."

It was next day that Mrs. Caspar came round, as appointed, to see the

Doctor, who was much more to her than a physician.

Mr. Trupp had now come to a decision as to the best course to be taken.

"You must send him right away," he said. "That's his best chance."

"Dad won't hear of the Colonies," the other replied. "Says it's so far

and he'll never see the boy again once he gets out there. Stood up and

fought me fairly!" And it was clear from the way she said it that the

resistance encountered from her husband had been as rare as it was

astonishing.

"I didn't mean the Colonies," the other replied.

"What then?"

"The Army."

Mrs. Caspar's face fell. She was momentarily shocked: for she belonged

to a sect that had for generations been despitefully used by the powers

that be. And the weapon of the powers that be is always in the last

resort the Army.

"Discipline is what the boy wants," said Mr. Trupp. "It's what we all

want."

Anne Caspar nodded dubiously.

"If it's the right sort," she said.

"It may save him," continued her mentor. "It can't do him any harm.

And anyway, it's worth trying. You send Ernie round to me. I'll have

a talk with him, and I'll drop in to-morrow and have a chat with his

father."

Ernie, when approached, made no difficulty.

He was young; his enthusiasms were easily stirred; and the most famous

of South Country regiments, the Forest Rangers, known in history as the

Hammer-men, had been more than living up to its reputation in South

Africa.

"You'll travel," Mr. Trupp told him. "Go to India as like as not and

see a bit of the world. Our Joe's going to Sandhurst next year.

Nothing'll do but he must be a Hammer-man--like his grandfather before

him. I dare say he'll join you out there."

But if Ern was too young to fight his own battles, there was one

doughty warrior who meant to fight them for him.

Mr. Pigott came round to see the Doctor in roaring wrath.

The South African War was in full swing. The frenzy of lusty paganism,

called Imperialism, which was sweeping the country, had revolted the

schoolmaster and many more. In the estimation of these, the horrors

enacted at home in the name of God and Empire surpassed the obscenities

of the war itself. Mr. Pigott saw Militarism as a raddled prostitute

dancing on the souls and bodies of men.

He burst like a tempest into Mr. Trupp's consulting room.

"The Army!" he cried. "You're going to send that boy into the Army!

Take him a first-class ticket to Hell at once! Where's your Militarism

led us? The war's costing us half a million a week! Over a thousand

casualties at Paardeberg alone! Rowntree stoned in York; Leonard

Courtney boycotted in London; Lloyd George escaping for his life over

the house-tops for daring to preach Christ! And you call yourself a

Radical, Mr. Trupp!--Shame on you!"

Mr. Trupp listened, amused and patient.

"It's discipline he wants," he said at last. "He's soft and slack.

He'll never do any good without it. The artist type like his father."

The other began to blaze again.

"Discipline!" he cried. "You talk like a Prussian drill-sergeant. I

tell you that lad's got a soul. You _discipline_ beasts of the

field--with a Big Stick; but you _grow_ souls."

Mr. Trupp shook his head.

"We're only just emerging from the mud," he said. "The Brute still

lurks in all of us. Watch him or he'll catch you out. And remember

the only thing the Brute understands is the Big Stick. Without it

he'll either go to sleep--like Ernie; or pounce on some one who has

gone to sleep--like Alf."

Mr. Pigott drew himself up. There was about him the dignity of

conviction.

"Mr. Trupp," he said. "Fear never made a man yet. Faith's the thing."

The Doctor lifted his shrewd kind face, and eyed the other through his

pince-nez.

"Fear plays its part too," he said. "We none of us can do without the

Lash as yet."

CHAPTER XVI

FATHER, MOTHER AND SON

There was no difficulty with Edward Caspar.

He had made an immense effort and fought about the Colonies. Easily

spent, he would not fight again. Moreover, Ernie committed to the Army

was committed for a few years only, and not for life; and some of his

service might very well be passed in England. In Edward Caspar too,

pacifist though he personally inclined to be, there was no inherited

prejudice to overcome: for the Beauregards had been soldiers for

generations.

Mr. Trupp came to talk things over; and that evening, as father and son

sat together in the study, Edward Caspar said out of the silence, very

quietly,

"Boy-lad, it's best you should go."

"I shall go all right, dad," the boy answered, feigning a cheerfulness

he by no means felt. "Don't you worry."

"Mother wants it," the other continued.

"She's all right, mother is," said the lad.

It was settled that the boy should go over to Lewes and enlist in the

Hammer-men at the depot there, on Saturday.

The decision made, his mother relaxed somewhat. While she still kept

Ernie without money, she allowed him cigarettes.

Father and son sat together and smoked in the evenings, watching the

trees swaying against the blue in the Rectory Garden across the road.

Alf reported surreptitiously to his mother that Ern was smoking with

dad.

"What's it to do with you if he is?" answered the other tartly.

The catastrophe which had severed the frayed string that joined the

mother and her eldest son had reacted unfavourably on her relations

with Alf.

The few days before Ern's departure went with accustomed speed.

On the last evening, as he and his father sat together, studying their

toes in the twilight, a small fire flickering in the grate, Edward

Caspar spoke out of the dark which he had been waiting to cover him.

"Boy-lad, I can't do by you as I should wish," he said tremulously.

"But here's a bit of something to show you I mean well."

In the half light he thrust an envelope towards his son.

Ern opened it and saw that it contained a five-pound note.

The great waters surged up into his throat and filled his eyes.

"Here! I can't keep this, dad," he said chokily. "I'm all right.

I've got..."

The old man--for such he was to his son, though not yet fifty--waved

his hand irritably.

"Put it away," he said, "put it away. Let's hear no more of it."

Ernie sat dumb, moved and wondering.

Where had dad got the money from?

He knew very well that his mother jealously controlled the family

purse, doling out rare sixpences or shillings to his father; and he

knew why.

The boy's brain moved swiftly.

"What's the time, dad?" he asked, and lit the gas.

The clock on the mantel-piece never went: for it was Edward Caspar's

solitary household task to wind it up.

The father, by no means a match for his artful son, produced from a

baggy pocket a five-shilling Waterbury watch in place of the old gold

hunter that had come to him from Lady Blanche's father, the twelfth

Earl Ravensrood.

His ruse successful, Ernie delivered a direct attack.

"Where's the ticket, dad?" he asked casually.

"What ticket?"

"The pawn-ticket."

"I don't know," irritably. "Don't worry me. Turn out the light. I

want to get a nap."

Ernie obeyed.

Soon Edward Caspar's breathing told its own tale.

Ernie rose, and, knowing his father's habits well as he knew his own,

put his hand into the Jacobean tankard that stood on the book-shelf.

There he found what he sought.

Quietly he went out into the passage.

On the ticket was the name he expected: Goldmann, the Jew pawn-broker

in the East-end off the Pevensey Road.

For a moment he paused, fingering the brown cardboard ticket under the

gas light.

It would not take him an hour to get down to Goldmann's and back; for

the tram almost passed the door; but he hadn't got the redemption

money. He hadn't got a penny in the world. Alf had seen to that.

With the impetuous gallantry peculiar to him he made up his mind and

opened the kitchen-door. Where Ernie loved he would risk anything,

face anybody--even his mother.

She sat in her Windsor chair by the fire, a Puritan, still beautiful,

reading her Bible as she always did at this hour; and her silvering

hair added to her distinction.

All their married life the pair had sat thus of evenings, Edward in the

study, Anne Caspar in the kitchen.

The strange couple rarely met indeed except at night. And the

arrangement was not of Edward Caspar's making, but of his wife's. It

may be that in part the woman preferred the kitchen as the environment

to which she was most used: it was still more that she had determined

from the outset of their union never to intrude upon her husband's

spiritual life, or attempt to encroach upon a mind she could not

understand. Her duty was as clear to her from the first as were her

limitations. She could and would cherish, support, protect, and even

chasten her husband where it was necessary for his good. For the rest

she was resolved to be no hindrance or inconvenience to him. He should

gain by his marriage and not lose by it. Therefore from the start she

had slammed the door without mercy or remorse on her own relatives.

When Ern entered, she looked up at him not unkindly through her

spectacles.

"What is it, Ernie?" she asked.

He rushed out his request.

"Please, mum," he panted, "could you let me have a shilling?"

He was determined not to give his father away.

To his relief his mother rose without a word, went to a drawer,

unlocked it, took out half a sovereign and gave it to him.

Ernie ran out without his hat, took the old horse-bus at Billing's

Corner, and riding on the top under a night splendid with stars that

hung in the elms of Saffrons Croft, he went down the hill, through the

Chestnuts, past the railway station, and along the gay main-street.

Just before Cornfield Road reaches the sea he exchanged the horse-bus

for the electric tram that swung him down Pevensey Road through the

thronged and always thickening East-end.

At the _Barbary Corsair_ in Sea-gate he descended, turned down a

side-street, and entered a door over which hung the three golden balls

taken from the coat-of-arms of the banker Medici.

Mr. Goldmann was a short, fair Jew, without a neck, immensely thick

throughout, though still under thirty. When he walked he carried his

arms away from his side as though to aid him to inflate; and winter or

summer he could be found behind his counter, perspiring freely. His

trousers were always too short, and his little legs protruded from them

like pillars. He spoke Cockney without a trace of Yiddish. His manner

was hearty; but he was honest of his kind. The police had nothing

against him, while his innumerable clients complained less of him than

of his rivals.

Ern in the past had dealt with him.

"How much?" he asked, presenting the ticket.

"Only two-pence," said Goldmann, and took the watch out of the case.

He handled it with care, almost covetously, burnishing it on his sleeve.

"What arms is them?" he asked, displaying the back.

Ernie didn't know.

"If it had been any man but your father left it, I'd have communicated

with the police," said the pawn-broker cheerfully.

"Will you do it up in a piece of paper, please?" Ern requested.

The Jew obeyed.

"Lend me your stylo alf a mo," said Ernie, and wrote on the paper

covering the word _Dad_.

Then he raced home and re-entered the kitchen.

It was after ten, but his mother was still up, and apparently

unconscious of the lateness of the hour.

Ern, panting from the speed at which he had travelled, paid nine

shillings and four pence into his mother's lap.

Tram and bus had cost him sixpence, and the redemption money the rest.

"Eightpence all told," he gasped, "what I wanted. Only a little

something for dad. I'll send you the odd money when I draw me first

pay." He put the little packet on the mantel-piece. "Will you give

that to dad, please, when I'm gone, mum?"

His mother looked at him, a rare sweetness in her eyes.

"You may keep the change, Ern," she said gently.

Collecting the money from her lap, she handed it back to him.

A moment he demurred, taken aback; then slipped the cash into his

trouser pocket, mumbling and deeply moved.

"Thank you kindly, mum," he muttered.

Her eyes were still on his face, and he could not meet them.

"You're a good lad, Ern," she said quietly.

The words, and the way of saying them, moved the lad more than all her

rebuffs and brutalities in the past had done. His chest began to

heave. She stood before him stiff as a blade of steel, as slight and

straight.

For a second she laid her hand, fine still for all its toil, upon his

arm.

"Go up to bed now," she said in the same very quiet way.

He went hurriedly.

There were few things which happened in that house of which Anne Caspar

was not aware. That morning on rising she had missed her husband's

watch on the dressing-table--and had said nothing. Later she had found

the pawn-ticket in the tankard--and again had held her peace.

A wife before all things, yet to some extent a mother, she had known,

had understood, had perhaps sympathized.

CHAPTER XVII

ERNIE GOES FOR A SOLDIER

Next day, after dinner, when she heard Ern's feet slowly descending the

stairs, and knew he was coming to say good-bye, Anne Caspar shoved Alf

roughly out of the kitchen.

"You wait your brother outside," she said. "Take his bag now, and

carry it to the bus for him. Be a brother for once!"

"Well, I was going to," answered Alf, aggrieved.

Since the catastrophe he had kept discreetly in the background.

Ern entered the kitchen, uncertain of himself, uncertain of his

reception; but, true to the best that was in him, trying to carry a

pale feather of gallantry.

"I guess it's about time to be off, mum," he remarked huskily.

His mother shut the door behind him gently, and drew him to her.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

The boy gasped and obeyed.

"Now go and say good-bye to dad," continued his mother, quiet, firm,

authoritative.

As he went into the passage, he heard the kitchen-door close behind him.

Ern was his father's son, and nothing was to be allowed to intrude in

the parting between the two.

Edward Caspar stood before the fire in quilted dressing-gown, somewhat

faded now.

In its appointed place on the chair beside his chair lay the familiar

manuscript, much as Ern had known it since his childhood, save that the

titles on the covering page were typewritten now--_The Philosophy of

Mysticism, Part I, The Basis of Animism_.

His father's colourless hair was greying fast and becoming sparse;

while his always ungainly figure was losing any shape it had ever

possessed.

At fifty Edward Caspar was already old. But age had enhanced the

wistfulness which had marked him, even in youth. His was the face of a

man who has failed, and is conscious of his failure; but it was the

face of a Christian, gentle and very sad. Here clearly was a man of

immense parts, scholar, thinker, artist, who, somehow baffled by the

wiles of Nature, had failed to make good.

Yet in spite of his failure there were few who could more surely rely

upon the limitless resources of the Spirit in the hour of his need than

Edward Caspar.

And now in this great moment of his life, when he was parting from his

dearest, he summoned to his aid all the powers that, massed unseen in

the silence, await our call.

There was a wonderful dignity and restraint about him.

Ern, the most intuitive of lads, felt it and drew from his father's

strength.

Simply and beautifully father and son kissed.

A moment the eyes of each rested in the other's.

Then it was over.

No one of us is entirely inhuman.

Something of the spirit of the scene enacted in the study had conveyed

itself even to Alf awaiting in the road outside, Ern's bag at his feet.

He was blinking when his brother, blowing his nose, joined him.

Ern glanced at the green rampart of the Downs rising like a wall at the

end of the road, and huge Shadow Coombe where the lambs were folded in

March and where once he had passed a night in the shepherd's hut.

Ern waved to them and Beech-hangar beyond.

"Good-bye, old Downs!" he called. "You and me been good old pals!"

Then they set off for the bus at Billing's Corner, neither speaking,

neither wishing to, Alf carrying his brother's bag. Both youths were

slight and colt-like, yet with loose unshackled limbs; Ern rather

smart, Alf distinctly shabby.

The Rector, tall and titupping, emerged from his gate as they passed,

but refrained from seeing them. He did not approve of the two Caspar

boys--in the main because they were the sons of their father.

Canon Willcocks aped--successfully enough--the walk and deportment of a

thoroughbred weed. His face--which was aquiline--inspired his pose,

which was aristocratic and satirical. His solitary hero was Louis

Napoleon, whom he had worshipped from childhood. And he bore himself

habitually as one who is too fine for the coarse world in which he

dwells perforce. The two brothers nudged each other as he stalked by.

Then they climbed to the box-seat of the old bus and established

themselves beside the driver.

"Where away then?" he asked, seeing the bag.

"Off to see the world, Mr. Huggett," answered Ern, already cheering up.

"Goin for the week-end to the North Pole, me and Alf!"

The bus jolted down the street, past the long-backed church with its

mighty tower looking down upon the Moot as it had done for five

centuries, and stopped opposite the _Star_. Ern for the last time

touched the old coaching bell with the driver's whip. As it clanged

sonorously, a window in the Manor-house opened.

Ern looked up to see Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, a fair flapper now,

waving at him with eyes that smiled and shone.

"Good-bye!" they called. "Good luck!"

Saffrons Croft was white with cricketers as they passed. The honest

thump of the ball upon the bat, the recumbent groups under the elms,

even the imperious voice of Mr. Pigott umpiring on Lower Pitch, moved

Ern strangely.

Alf's presence somehow helped him to be hard.

At the Central Station the boys got down.

They paced the platform, waiting for the train.

Alf babbled at large, his brother paying little heed.

"Be the making of you!" Alf was saying in his rather patronizing way.

"See the world!--knock about!--come home a full-blown Hammer-man with a

fat pension and a V.C. on your chest and a Colonel's commission! And

we'll all meet you at the stytion with a brass band playing _See the

Conquering Hero Comes!_ and be proud of you. I'd come along meself for

company, only I'm too small."

Ern roused from his dreams.

"What will you do then?" he asked, faintly ironical.

"Me?" cried Alf, starting off on his favourite topic. "I ain't a-goin

to stop in Beachbourne all me life, you lay. When I'm through me

apprentice they may send me to the River Plate. Got a big branch

there. England's used up. There's chances in a new country for a chap

that means to get on."

Ern installed himself in a smoking carriage.

"O, reservoir," said Alf, facetious to the end.

"See ye again some day," answered Ern, puffing away and exhibiting a

man-of-the-world-like stoicism he did not feel.

He took off his Trilby hat, unbuttoned the overcoat with the velvet

collar, and opened his orange-coloured _Answers_.

The train moved on. The brothers waved. Alf stood on the platform, a

mean little figure with a dishonest smile; his clothes rather shabby,

his trousers too short and creased behind the knees.

Then he turned to the bookstall and asked if _Motor Mems_, the paper on

the new industry, had arrived yet.

Ern leaned back in his corner; and his eyes sought, between hoardings

and roofs of crowded railway-shops, the familiar outline of the Downs

which would accompany him to Lewes--and far beyond.

BOOK III

THE SOLDIER

CHAPTER XVIII

ERNIE GOES EAST

The Army did for Ernie neither what Mr. Trupp hoped nor what Mr. Pigott

feared.

Ernie was in truth very much the modern man, and had absorbed

unconsciously the spirit of industrial democracy. He was open-minded,

intelligent and sincere. The false idealism that is at the back of all

Militarism, the bully-cum-bluff principle that has been the creed of

the barrack-square at all times all over the world, from Sparta to

Potsdam, made no appeal to him. In the British Army, it is true, there

was even at that date little of the spirit of orthodox Militarism, but

the shadow of the Continental System and the heritage of a false

tradition still hung over it.

He found himself plucked out of the world of to-day with its quick flow

of ideas, its give and take, its elasticity, its vivid unconscious

spirituality, and plunged back into the darkness of medievalism: forced

labour, forced worship, forced obsequiousness, a feudal lord against

whom there was no appeal, with corrupt retainers who squeezed the serf

without mercy.

When his first drill-instructor in a moment of patronizing confidence

informed the squad of which Ernie was a member that "It's swank as

makes the soldier," others were amused; but Ernie, who giggled

dutifully with the rest, thought how silly and how disgusting.

Ernie always remembered that drill-sergeant's illuminating remark, and

placed it alongside that of a veteran Colonel, dating from Crimean

days, who said in Ernie's hearing with the offensive truculence that a

certain type of officer still thinks he owes it to himself and to his

position to cultivate,

"That man's no good to me." He was speaking of a Company

Sergeant-Major who had the manners of a gentleman. "Take him away and

shoot him. I want a man who'll chuck his chest, and beat his leg, and

own the barrack square."

Ernie saw very soon that the Army system was based on the old two-class

conception with an insuperable barrier between the two classes, and the

underclass deprived of the right to appeal, the right to combine, the

right to strike. And he saw equally clearly, and with far more

surprise, that in spite of its obvious limitations, and openness to

brutality and abuse, the system worked astonishingly well, given good

officers--and his own were unusually good upon the whole.

Ernie did not know that the barrack was in fact the heir of the old

monastic habit and tradition with its herding together of males, its

little caste of priests who alone possessed the direct access to God

denied to common men, its sacrosanct dogmas, its insuperable

prejudices, its life of unquestioning obedience to authority with the

consequent thwarting of intellectual and spiritual development that is

the outcome of free communion between man and man; and on the other

hand its genuine religious fervour, its abnegation, its devotion to

duty, and disinterested service of the Commonwealth.

Ern, it is true, who realized some of these things and was dimly

conscious of others, was different from most of his mates and superior

to them: rather more intelligent and much more refined. The bulk of

them were the conscripts of Necessity; some, like himself, had made

mistakes; a few, nearly always themselves the sons of old soldiers,

were genuine volunteers.

And yet Ern was by no means unhappy. If he was something of a critic,

he was not in the least a rebel. At first the pressure of discipline

served to brace the boy, as Mr. Trupp had anticipated. Moreover, if he

vaguely apprehended what was vicious in the military system, there was

much he could not fail to enjoy, because he was young, virile and

healthy; and not a little he could honestly admire. He loved the

drill: the rhythmical marching _en masse_, the movements of great

bodies of men swinging this way and that like one, actuated by a single

purpose, directed by a single mind, worshipping a single God enthroned

at the saluting-point, satisfied his religious spirit, exalted and

transfigured him as did nothing he was to know in later days. The

outdoor existence, the hard athleticism, the good fellowship, and above

all the communal life, appealed to all that was best in him. Indeed in

this organization, abused by advanced thinkers in Press and Parliament

alike, he was to find a fullness of corporate life, an absorption of

the individual in the mass, a bee-like enthusiasm for the hive, such as

he was never to discover outside the Army in after years.

Moreover there was a goal held before his eyes, as it is held before

the eyes of all young English soldiers.

That goal was India.

The Shiny was the Private Soldier's Paradise, the old hands would tell

the young in the canteens at night.

"Things are different there, my boy. In the Shiny a swoddy's a

gentleman. Punkah-wallahs to pull the cords in the hot weather, a

tiger curled at your feet to keep the snakes at bay, bearer to clean

your boots, shooting parties, bubbly by the barrel, I don't know what

all."

Because of this jewel that was for ever dangled before his eyes, Ernie

bore a good deal without complaining.

A youth who had enlisted with him, and for much the same reason,

induced his people to buy him out after six months.

Ernie made no such attempt.

"I'm going through with it now," he said. "Want to see a bit before

I'm done and take em home a tale or two."

After a spell of service in Ireland, at the close of the South African

War, when Ernie was turned twenty, the expected call came.

A draft was going out to join the First Battalion of the Hammer-men at

Jubbulpore, and Ernie went with it.

The cheering transport dropped down the Thames one misty November

afternoon, passing hay-laden barges, timber ships from the Baltic, and

rusty tramps from all over the world.

The smell of the sea, so familiar and so good, thrilled Ernie's

susceptible heart. It spoke to him of home, of the unforgotten things

of childhood, of his passing youth, of much that was intimate and dear.

He spent most of that first evening on deck, long after dark, in spite

of the drizzle, watching the coast lights.

Once they passed quite close to a light-ship, swinging desolately on

the tide.

"What's that?" he asked a sailor.

"Sovereign Light," the man told him.

Ernie leapt to the name familiar to him from childhood.

How often had he not climbed the hill behind his home of winter

evenings, and waited in the chalk-pit above the larch spinney for that

far-off spark to leap out of the darkness and warm his expectant heart.

He swung about and stared keenly through the gloom at a light winking

at them from the land.

"Then that's the light-house under Beau-nez!" he said, pointing.

"That's it," the man answered. "And Beachbourne underneath. All them

lights strung out like a necklace along the coast,--Bexhill, Hastings,

Beachbourne. It's growing into a great place. D'you know it?"

Ernie's heart and eyes were full.

"My home's there," he said. "And my old dad."

He stayed on deck peering through the darkness, till the last light had

disappeared and they had swung round Beau-nez into the Channel and he

could see the Seven Sisters, the gap that marks the mouth of the

Ruther, and the cliffs between Newhaven and Rotting-dean. Then he went

below and turned in.

Thereafter, his home behind him, he began to taste the new life, the

life of adventure.

He felt the surge of the Atlantic, saw whales spouting in the Bay,

marked off the coast of Portugal a lateen sail which first whispered of

the East; gazed up at the Rock of Gibraltar, noted there caparisoned

Barbs, their head-stalls studded with turquoises to keep the Evil One

away, welcomed the Mediterranean sun, and gazed at the snow-capped

hills of Crete.

In Port Said he landed and saw his first mosque. He examined it with

interest.

_Very bleak-like_, he wrote home to Mr. Pigott. _More like a chapel

than a church. And more like the Quaker Meeting-house in the Moot than

either. No stained glass or crucifixes or nothing. I was more at home

there than the Catholics_.

In the Canal he marked the black hair-tents of the travelling Bedouins,

and saw a British Camel Corps trekking slowly across the desert against

the hills beyond. He sweated in the Red Sea and gazed with awe at the

sultry rocks of Aden, and followed with delight the flying-fish

skimming across the Indian Ocean.

Then one dawn the engines stopped; the ship lay at rest; and in his

nostrils, blown from the land, there was the smell of incense.

"Makes you think of the Queen of Sheba," said Ernie. "Spices and Tyre

and Sidon and all the rest," and he closed his eyes and saw Mr. Pigott

standing with the pointer before the black-board, addressing his class.

"Not alf," said his unimaginative friend. "Give me the Pevensey Road o

Sadaday nights. Fried fish and chips."

They went on deck to find themselves lying in the lovely

island-sprinkled harbour of Bombay; boats with curved bamboo yards and

brown-skinned crews of pirates under the ship's side; and Parsee

money-lenders in shining hats on deck offering to change the money of

those who had any.

Ernie looked across to the land, lifting blue in the wondrous dawn--the

land that was to be his home for the next six years.

CHAPTER XIX

THE REGIMENT

Ernie joined his Battalion in the Central Provinces. The Forest

Rangers, as famous in the South Country as the Black Watch in the

Highlands, and of far longer pedigree, was first raised from the

iron-ore workers by the Hammer Ponds on the Forest Ridge in the heart

of the then Black Country of England to meet the imminent onslaught of

the Spanish Armada. In those days the Hammer-men, as they were called

familiarly from the start, watched the coast from the mouth of the Adur

to Rye and Winchelsea; and in the succeeding centuries they left their

bloody mark upon the pages of history, the memories of their

fellow-countrymen, and the bodies of the King's enemies.

The most ancient of English regiments, it carries on its colours more

honours than any but the 60th. For more than three tumultuous

centuries it has been distinguished even in that British Infantry which

has never yet encountered in war its match or its master. The splendid

foot-soldiers of Spain broke in Flanders before its thundering

hammer-strokes; in Flanders and elsewhere in later times the legions of

Imperial France surged in vain against its bayonets; and in our own day

the Prussian Guard, as insolent and vain-glorious as the veterans of

Napoleon, has recoiled before the invincible stubbornness of the

peasants of Sussex.

The officers were drawn almost exclusively from two or three of the

oldest public-schools. Ernie found they were keen soldiers, and

efficient, immensely proud of their regiment, athletic, and

better-mannered than most. But as a whole they were singularly stupid

men, deliberately blind to the wonders of the country in which they

lived, proud of their blindness, and cultivating their insularity.

There was one shining exception.

When the new draft paraded for inspection, a scarecrow Major wearing

the South African ribands walked slowly up and down the ranks with a

word for each man. He was very tall, and so lean as to be almost

spectral. His voice was charming and leisured, reminding Ernie of his

father. He was friendly too, almost genial. It was obvious that he

based his authority on his own spiritual qualities and not on the

accident of his position. There was no rattling of the sabre, no

fire-eating, no attempt to put the fear of God into the hearts of the

recruits.

When he came to Ernie, he asked,

"What name?"

"Caspar, Sir."

The Major looked at the lad from beneath his sun-helmet with sudden

curiosity.

"Are you ..." he began, and pulled himself up short. "I hope you'll be

happy as a Hammer-man," he said, and passed on.

Later he addressed the draft in a gentle little speech of the kind that

annoyed his brother-officers almost past bearing.

"You have all heard of Death and Glory," he began. "Well, in this

country there's a certain amount of Death going about, if you care to

look out for it, but very little Glory. You have also heard no doubt

from your mothers and the missionaries that the black man is your

brother. It may be so. But in this country there are no black men and

therefore no brothers. There are brown men who are your remote

cousins; and they aren't bad fellows if you keep them in their place,

and remember your own. On Sundays there is church for those who like

it; and the same for those who don't. For the rest, whether you are

happy or the reverse depends in the main upon your health, and your

health depends in the main on yourselves. Be careful what you drink,

and don't suck every stick of sugar-cane a native offers you. Remember

you are Hammer-men and not monkeys. Most of you are men of Sussex, as

are most of your officers; and we all know that the Sussex man wunt be

druv. But discipline is discipline and must be maintained. We don't

hammer each other more than we can help, nor do we hammer the natives

more than is good for them. We exist to hammer the King's enemies.

And now I wish you all well and hope you'll find the Regiment a real

home."

Major Lewknor's long spidery legs carried him back to the bungalow

where his wife awaited him.

She was a little woman, clearly Semitic, fine as she was strong, with

eyes like jewels and the nose of an Arab.

"My dear," said the Major, "in your young days did you ever hear of one

Hans Caspar?"

"My Jock, did I ever hear of one Napoleon Buonaparte?" mocked his mate.

"What about him?"

"I was at Trinity with his son," replied the Colonel.

"We used to call him Hathri. A charming fellow, and a brilliant

scholar, but----"

"What about him?" said Mrs. Lewknor, who seemed suddenly on the

defensive.

"His son has just joined us," answered the Major. "In the ranks."

The lady handled the sugar-tongs thoughtfully. Her memory travelled

back more than twenty years to a great ball in Grosvenor Square, and

the timid son of the house, a gawky, awkward fellow with a reputation

for shyness and brilliance. He could not dance, but under the palms in

the conservatory, tête-à-tête, he could talk--as Rachel Solomons had

never heard a man talk yet--of things she had never heard talked about:

of a place called Toynbee Hall somewhere in the East End; of a little

parson named Samuel Barnett; of the group of young University

men--Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Nettleship--he and his wife

were gathering about them there with the aim of bridging the gulf

between Disraeli's Two Nations; of the hopes of a redeemed England and

a new world that were rising in the hearts of many. That young man saw

visions and had made her see them too. She had cut two dances to

listen to that talk, and when at last an outraged partner had torn her

away and Edward had said in his sensitive stuttering way, his face

shining mysteriously,

"Shall we ever meet again?"

She had answered with astonishing emphasis,

"We must."

But they never did. Fate swung his scythe; her father died and she had

to abandon her London season. Edward Caspar went abroad to study at

Leipzig. And next winter she met her Hammer-man and launched her boat

on the great waters.

But she had never forgotten that mysterious half-hour in which the

trembling young man had knocked at her door, entered her sanctuary; and

she, Rachel the reserved, had permitted him to stay.

At that moment Reality had entered her life--unforgettable and

unforgotten.

India from the first tantalized Ernie. It was for him a mysterious and

beautiful book, its pages for ever open inviting him to read, yet

keeping its secret inviolate from him; for he could not read himself

and there was no one to read to him. His officers, capable at their

work, and good fellows enough in the main, Ernie soon discovered to be

illiterate to an almost laughable degree. They not only knew nothing

outside the limited military field, but they took a marked professional

pride in their ignorance.

Ernie, used to his father's large philosophical outlook on any subject,

his scholarly talk, his learning, was amazed at the intellectual apathy

and crustacean self-complacency, sometimes ludicrous, more often naïf,

occasionally offensive, of those set in authority over him.

Major Lewknor was the solitary exception. He was the one University

man in the Regiment, and, whether as the result of a more catholic

education or a more original temperament, he always stood slightly

apart from his brother-officers. When he was a young man they had

mocked at him quietly; now that he was a field officer they stood

somewhat in awe of his ironical spirit. Some of his more dubious

sayings were handed on religiously from last-joined subaltern to

last-joined subaltern. The worst of them--his famous--_Patriotism is

the last refuge of every scoundrel_--was happily attributed by the Army

at large to a chap called Johnston who, thank God! was not a Hammer-man

at all, but a Gunner or a Sapper or something like that. A Sapper

probably. It was just the sort of thing you would expect a Sapper to

say: for Sappers wore flannel shirts and never washed.

But if the Major was undoubtedly critical of what was obsolete and

theatrical in the Service that he loved, few possessed a deeper

reverence or more intimate understanding of the much that was noble in

it.

"After the really grand ritual of a big ceremonial parade," he would

say, "when you actually do transcend yourself and become one with the

Larger Life, for grown men in an age like ours, to be herded at the

point of the bayonet into a tin-pot temple to hear a gramophone in a

surplice droning out an unintelligible rigmarole every Sunday in the

name of religion--why it is not only redundant, it's a blasphemous

farce that every decent man _must_ kick against."

In spite of his caustic humour the Major's passion for the Regiment, to

which he had given his life, steadfastly refusing all those

staff-appointments for which he was so admirably fitted, was genuine as

it was profound. Because of it, his much-tried brother officers, who

loved him deeply if they feared him not a little, forgave him all. And

if he was sadly unorthodox in many respects, as for instance that he

was not a hard and fast Conservative, he was jealously orthodox in

others as in that contempt for politicians which is almost an obsession

amongst the men of his profession, perhaps because to them it falls to

pay the price of the mistakes of their masters at Westminster.

The Major and his wife were in brief distinguished from their kind by

the fact that they were mentally alive, sympathetic, keen, and

knowledgeable. They had passed most of their lives in the East, and

were of the few of their fellow-countrymen who had made the most of the

opportunities vouchsafed to them. Indeed it was said in the Regiment

that what the pair didn't know about India was not worth knowing.

Once at a halt on a route-march Ernie saw the Major, standing gaunt and

helmeted in the shade of a banyan tree, take a pace out into the road.

A native, carrying two sealed pitchers slung from the ends of a bamboo,

was padding down the road in the dust between the ranks of the soldiers

who had fallen out.

The Major spoke to him, then turned to Ernie who was standing by.

"See that man, Caspar," he said quietly. "He's a pilgrim. He's

tramped all the way from Hardwar, the source of the Ganges, to get holy

water--seven hundred miles. What about that for faith?"

"Fine, sir," said Ernie, with quiet enthusiasm.

"In the days of Chaucer we used to do the same kind of thing in

England," continued the Major. "Ever read the 'Canterbury Tales'?"

"Dad's read em to me, sir--in bits like."

The Major moved away.

Close by a group of officers, whose faces clearly showed how profoundly

they disapproved of this conversation, were sprawling in the shade.

_That was the way to lose caste with the men_. Amongst them was a

last-joined lad, chubby still; the other was Mr. Royal of Ernie's

company.

"What did the Major say he was?" asked the Boy keenly.

"I don't know what the Major said he was," answered Mr. Royal coolly.

"And between ourselves I don't greatly care. _I_ know what he was.

And if you'll ask me prettily I might impart my information."

"What was he?" asked the Boy.

"He was a coolie," said Mr. Royal. "India's full of them. In fact

they're the dominant class."

"I thought he looked something a bit out of the ordinary," said the

snubbed Boy.

"Did you?" retorted Mr. Royal. "I thought myself he looked as if he

wanted kicking. And as I've got five years' service to your three

months it may be presumed that I'm right."

CHAPTER XX

ERNIE IN INDIA

The Regiment was wonderfully well run for the men on its social side,

for the Colonel was a bachelor, and much was trusted to Mrs. Lewknor.

She was at Ernie's bedside the day after he had his first attack of

fever.

The little lady, so delicate, yet so strong, stood above the lad whose

mother she might have been with a curious thrill.

He was so like his father, yet so unlike; and he was not only sick of

fever, but dreadfully homesick too.

Mrs. Lewknor knew all about that, and the cure for it.

"Tell me about your people, Caspar," she said, after the ice had been

broken.

The lad unloosed the flood-gates with immense relief.

He talked of Beachbourne, of Rectory Walk with the virginia-creeper on

the wall and the fig-tree at the back; of his mother, of Mr. Pigott,

even of Alf, and all the time of dad and the Downs.

On rising to go, Mrs. Lewknor said that when she came next day she

would read to him.

"What shall I read?" she asked.

"Would you read me Matthew Arnold's _Scholar-Gypsy_?" said the boy.

Mrs. Lewknor looked down at the lad with brilliant eyes.

"Is that your father's favourite?" she asked.

"One of them, 'm. Wordsworth's the one."

There was only one man in the Regiment who possessed a Matthew Arnold,

but that man happily was Mrs. Lewknor's husband.

Next day, as the little lady read the familiar lines, Ernie lay with

eyes shut, the tears pouring down his face.

"Takes me right back," he said at last as she finished. "I'm not here

at all. I'm laying just above the Rabbit-walk over Beech-hangar, with

the gorse-pods snapping in the sun, and the beech-leaves stirring

beneath me, and old dad with his hat over his eyes and his hands behind

his head reciting."

That afternoon Mrs. Lewknor told Mr. Royal, who had dropped in to tea,

that she had been reading Matthew Arnold to a man in his company.

Mr. Royal looked blank.

He had cold, speedwell blue eyes, that seemed all the brighter for his

curly dark hair, a fine skin, rather pale, and an always growing

reputation for hard efficiency.

"Matthew Arnold!" he said. "And who might Mr. Matthew Arnold be?"

He said it a thought aggressively. It was clear that not only had he

never heard of Matthew Arnold, but that he would have considered it bad

form to have done so.

"I believe he was a poet who seldom went to church," said the Major in

the chi-chi voice which he could imitate to the life.

"Indeed," said Mr. Royal. "A poet!--Ah, I'm too busy for that sort of

thing myself." He said it with a crushing air of finality.

When he had gone, Mrs. Lewknor looked at her husband with deprecatory

eyes.

"My Jock," she said with a little sigh, "tell me!--Is it the

system?--is it the man?--What is it?"

The Major sat upright on a little hard chair.

His eyes twinkled maliciously in his somewhat bony head. He looked

like a gaunt satyr.

"My dear," he said, "in the British Army you must do as the British

Army does. And there is one thing which the British Army _Will Not_

tolerate, and that is--a cultivated mind."

"I don't think that's peculiar to the Army," replied Mrs. Lewknor.

"The attitude's characteristic of our race."

Mr. Royal was not in fact popular among his brother officers. His

superiors complained that his manner was slightly insolent, his juniors

that it was so damn superior. The men liked him for his efficiency,

and some women admired him--too much it was whispered.

Mrs. Lewknor followed Ernie's military career with quiet interest. Not

that there was very much to follow: for Ernie, apart from the

cricket-field, had no career.

He did not seek promotion, and was not in fact offered it. As Mr.

Royal very truly said,--"He can't come it enough to make an N.C.O."

The habit of authority indeed sat ill on his shoulders; but he was

liked by officers and men; and his cricket gave him a place in the

regimental team.

But there was little in Army life to do for Ernie the one thing

essential self demands--encourage growth; and not a little to repress

it.

When the first newness had worn off, Ernie was spiritually unsatisfied

and solitary.

The grosser vices of the men never appealed to him, and the men

themselves were not his sort. To get away from them he sometimes

wandered far a-field, poking and prying into the temples of the various

sects, and not seldom found himself in the crowded streets of the

native city, a lonely khaki figure in a sun-helmet, regarding the

many-coloured crowd, and asking himself, in the philosophical way he

inherited from his father,

"What's the meaning of it all?"

It was on one of these rambles that the solitary incident of his career

in India occurred to him.

He was standing at the foot of the hill in the native city of Lahore,

watching the traffic in the narrow streets, when he saw a mem-sahib

driving a tum-tum slowly through the heavy ox-traffic.

The syce for some reason had descended, and the lady was alone.

Just then a huge elephant with painted sides came swinging down the

steep street, at the head of a religious procession, singing and

clashing cymbals.

The lady's pony, a dun country-bred, took fright and bolted.

Ernie saw her face, quite calm beneath her solar topee, as she rushed

past him, pulling at the run-away. It was Mrs. Lewknor.

A few yards down the street the wheels of the tum-tum cannoned into a

sack borne by a small donkey. The donkey, already tottering beneath

his load, collapsed and lay in the dust unable to rise.

The driver of the donkey, an unsavoury giant, pock-marked, abused the

mem-sahib. A crowd gathered. The religious procession was held up,

the elephant swinging his trunk discontentedly and spouting showers of

dust over his flanks.

Ernie didn't like the look of things, for it was common talk in the

lines that the native city was mutinous.

He came up quickly. The presence of the man in khaki steadied the

crowd and stopped the chatter.

"Best get out of this, 'm," he suggested. "They look a bit funny."

He took the pony's head and turned him.

"You get up alongside me then," said Mrs. Lewknor.

He obeyed.

The crowd made way. The pock-marked man began again to beat his

donkey. The procession resumed its march.

"One up for the Hammer-men!" the little lady laughed, as they emerged

from the gate of the native city.

"Yes, 'm," said Ernie. "Only one thing. The native city's out of

bounds for me."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled.

"I'm not one of the Military Police," she said....

That evening she put to her husband a question that had often puzzled

her.

"Why doesn't Caspar get on?" she asked. "He's got twice the

intelligence of men who go over his head."

"My dear," replied the Major with the sententiousness that grew on him

with the greying years, "intelligence is the last thing we want in the

ranks of the Army. Intelligence always leads to indiscipline. The

Army wants in the lower ranks only one thing--what is called

'character.' And by character it means the quality of the bull who

rammed his head against a brick-wall till he was unconscious and went

at it again when he came round saying--_My head is bloody but unbowed_."

During Ernie's years of service the Battalion moved slowly North,

exchanging the plains of the Central Provinces for the frosty nights

and red sand-hills of the Punjauh.

Major Lewknor became Colonel; and Mr. Royal adjutant.

Ern and the new Colonel were curiously sympathetic; Ern and the

adjutant the reverse.

It may be that the Colonel, unusual himself, and lonely because of it,

recognized a kindred spirit in the man; it may be that he never forgot

that Ern was the son of his old contemporary Hathri Caspar of Trinity;

or perhaps Mrs. Lewknor played an unconscious part in the matter. It

is certain that on the one occasion Ern was brought before him in the

Orderly Room for a momentary lapse into his old weakness, the Colonel

merely "admonished" the offender.

Captain Royal, a ruthless disciplinarian, was aggrieved.

"He's such a rotten slack soldier, sir," he complained, after the

culprit, congratulating himself upon his escape, had disappeared.

"Isn't he?" said the Colonel, enjoying to the full the irritation of

his subordinate. "That man'd be no earthly good except on service."

Even at the wicket indeed Ernie was only at his best when he had to

try. A first-rate natural bat, he would have been left out of the

regimental team for slackness but that, as the Sergeant-Major said,

"Caspar's always there when you want him most."

In fact, Ernie ended his career in the Army with something of a

flourish.

The Regiment was playing the Rifle Brigade at Rawlpindi in the last

round for the Holkar Cup. Half-way through the second day, when the

Hammer-men were batting, a rot set in. There were still two hours to

play when the last man went in.

"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, keen as a knife.

"Your friend, Caspar, Mrs. Lewknor," answered the senior subaltern, one

Conky Joe, with the beak of a penguin, the eyes of an angel, and the

heart of a laughter-loving boy. "They're sending him in last for his

sins in the field--which were many and grievous."

"He won't live long against their fast bowler," commented the Boy

gloomily. "I know Caspar."

"I never like to differ from my superiors," said the Colonel. "But I'm

not so sure."

"Nor am I," said Mrs. Lewknor defiantly.

The Colonel and his wife proved right. Ernie batted with astonishing

confidence from the first. At the end of twenty minutes it was

anybody's game. Royal, well into his second century, was flogging the

ball all over the ground. And Ernie's clear voice--"Yes, sir! No,

sir! Stay where you are!" gave new heart to the watching Hammer-men.

In the end the two men played out time with consummate ease, and were

carried together off the ground.

"It was like bowling at two rocks," said one of the defeated side.

"Spiteful rocks too!" replied the other. "Stood up and slashed at you!"

The Colonel went up and shook hands with the victorious batsmen, and

Mrs. Lewknor waved her parasol.

"Well done, Caspar!" she cried. "Stuck it out!"

A few days later, his time being up, Ernie was detailed for a draft for

home.

The Colonel, on signing his papers, said that he was sorry to be

parting, and meant it.

"Charming fellow!" he said to the Adjutant, when Ern had left the room.

"Yes," answered Captain Royal in his lofty way. "Too charming. He'll

never be any good to himself or us either."

"I'm not so sure," replied the Colonel. "He's the sort that never does

well except when he's got to."

That evening Ern went up to the Colonel's bungalow to say good-bye to

Mrs. Lewknor.

"Where are you going?" asked the little lady.

"Back home, 'm," Ernie answered. "Old Town, Beachbourne. There's no

place in the world to touch it."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled at his enthusiasm.

"I know it," she said. "The Colonel comes from those

parts--Hailsham-way. Perhaps we shall follow you when we retire."

"Beachbourne!" mused the Colonel, after Ernie had departed. "Famous

for two things: Mr. Trupp, the surgeon, who by a brilliant operation

saved the other day the life of the man the world could have done best

without, and the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"What's the Hohenzollern Hotel?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.

"My dear," said the Colonel, "Captain Royal will enlighten you in his

more intimate moments."

CHAPTER XXI

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

That first return to England after his long absence in the East always

remained one of the land-marks in Ernie's life. It was a revelation to

him, never completely to pass away.

The time was late April; the weather perfect. The song of mating birds

rose from dew-drenched brake and bush on every hand; the spring lay

like a dream of gossamer on the hedges and woodlands; the lambs and

quiet cattle filled him with an immense content. His heart rose up in

joy and thankfulness and humble love.

And his mates, it was clear to him, were experiencing the same

transfiguring emotion. He was sure of it from the silence that grew on

them as they travelled through the radiant country-side from the port

at which they had landed, their noses glued to the windows of the

troop-train. Gradually the vision possessed their souls like lovely

music. The rowdiness, the silly songs, the bad jokes faded away. An

awe stole over them as of men admitted into the Sanctuary and beholding

there for the first time the beauty of the Holy One unveiled before

them.

Now and then a quiet voice spoke out of the silence.

"Blime! There's a rabbit!"

"There's an English serving-maid!"

"Ain't it all solid-like?"

That solidity was one of Ernie's abiding impressions too--the massive

character of this Western Civilization to which he was returning. And

it stood, he was convinced, for something real: for it was based on a

foundation that only the blind and gross could call materialism.

The big-boned porters trundling tinkling milk-cans along the platforms

at a wayside station, the English faces, the square brick buildings,

the substantial coin, confirmed the thought.

"Solid!" he echoed in his father's vein. "That's the word. Give me

the West. Back there it's all a little bit o gilded gimcrack."

Once the train stopped in an embankment lined with primroses and

crowned with woods, a sweet undercurrent of song streaming quietly up

to heaven, like the murmur of innumerable fairy-bees.

Ernie removed his cap; and the unuttered words in his heart, as in

those of his companions, were, "Let us pray!"

A few weeks later he stood on the platform of Victoria, discharged.

Deliberately he chose, to take him home, a train that stopped and

browsed at all the stations with the familiar English names as it made

its fussy way across the Weald through the very heart of Saxondom.

He sat in the corner, the window wide, the breeze upon his face,

without a paper, reading instead the countryside as a man reads in age

a poem beloved in his youth.

One by one he picked up the old land-marks--the spire of Cowfold

Monastery, slender against the West, Ditchling Beacon, Black Cap, and

the Devil's Dyke.

At Ardingly, where the train had stopped, it seemed, for lunch, he got

out.

The Downs were drawing closer now, the blue rampart of them seeming to

gather all this beauty as in a giant basin.

In the woods hard by a woodpecker was tapping. He saw a cock pheasant

streaming in glorious flight over a broad-backed hedge. And across the

hollow of the Weald cuckoos everywhere were calling, and flying as they

called. He closed his eyes and listened. The Weald seemed to him an

immense bowl of nectar, brimming and beaded. He was floating in it;

and the tiny bubbles all about him were popping off with a soft

delicious sound--_Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!_

Then he came to earth to see the train bundling out of the station with

a callous grin.

It was significant of Ernie's weakness and his strength that he didn't

mind. Indeed he was glad.

He left the station and plunged like a swimmer into the sea of sound

and colour, opening his chest and breathing it in. The wealth of green

amazed him. It filled and fulfilled his heart. He caught it up in

both hands, as it were, and poured it over his thirsting flesh.

Abundant, yet light as froth, it overflowed all things, hedges, woods

and pastures; splashing with brightest emerald the walls and roofs of

the cottages, russet-timbered and Sussex-tiled.

Here and there in an old garden, set in the green, was a laburnum like

a fountain of gold, a splash of lilac in lovely mourning against the

yews, a chestnut lighted with a myriad spray of bloom. The pink May

had succeeded the white; and clematis garlanded the hedges. There was

a wonderful stillness everywhere, and the atmosphere was bright and

hard. After a dry month the grass was very forward. The oak-trees

stood up to their knees in hay that was yellow with buttercups, the

wind rustling through it like a tide. The foliage of the oaks was

still faintly bronzed. Steadfast, old, and very grim in all this

faerie, they bore themselves as lords of the Forest by right of

conquest and long inheritance. Ernie nodded greeting at them. Their

uncompromising air amused him. They were not his tree: for he was a

hill-man; and the oaks belonged to the Weald, which in its turn clearly

belonged to them. He did not love them; but he admired and respected

them for their sturdy independence of character, if he laughed a little

at their English self-righteousness and dogmatic air. They were of

England too in their determination not to show emotion: for they

appeared not to be moving; yet he could see a wind was flowing through

them, while in the shadow of them mares-in-foal were flicking their

tails.

Ernie recognized with joy that he was returning to the country he had

left.

The gang of men he came on at the end of a lane, asphalting a

main-road, the rare car dashing along with a swirling tail of dust

between green hedges, disturbed but little his peace of mind.

He was home again--in Old England--the heart of whose heart was Sussex.

In the train again he sank back in a kind of pleasant trance. Two

country-men in his carriage were talking in the old ca-a-ing

speech--_So cardingly I saays to herrr_.... Their undulating voices

rocked him to sleep. He woke to find himself in Lewes, and his eyes

resting on the massif of Mount Caburn.

The train wandered eastwards under the Downs, past Furrel Beacon,

athwart the opening of the Ruther Valley. The Long Man of Wilmington

stared bleakly at him from the flanks of hills that seemed sometimes

scarred and old and worn, at others rich with the mystery of youth.

The train ran through Polefax, where the line to Romney Marsh turns

off. Then with a belated effort at sprightliness it hurried through

the sprawling outposts of Beachbourne.

The town had grown greatly, overspreading the foothills towards Ratton

and the woods of the Decoy and skirmishing across the marshes beyond

the gasworks, which, when he left, had marked the uttermost bounds of

civilization.

CHAPTER XXII

OLD TOWN

When Ern got out of the train on to the very platform where Alf, six

years before, had prophesied his return in glory, nothing much happened.

True, the conditions were not quite as Alf had foretold. Rather the

reverse. Whereas it was a dapper young clerk who had left Beachbourne,

it was a solid working-man who returned to it; one who by his clothes,

boots, hands, hair, and even walk, testified that he was of those who

bear on their shoulders the burden of our industrial civilization. And

that perhaps was why the promised brass-band was conspicuous by its

absence, and there were present no fathers of the city expanding ample

paunches preparatory to delivering an address of welcome to the

returning soldier. Instead there was upon the platform one unkempt

porter, who took his ticket very casually, and when asked by Ern

whether he recognized him, replied with more honesty than tact that he

didn't know but thought not.

"See, I sees so many," he remarked apologetically.

"I'm Ernie Caspar," said Ernie, noting with critical military eye that

the other did not seem to have had his hair cut since last they met.

"I was at the Moot School along o you. Aaron Huggett, aren't it?"

The porter's face betrayed a flicker of sardonic interest.

"I expagt you'll be Alf Caspar's brother," he said.

"That's it," Ernie answered, a thought sourly.

Back in Beachbourne he was not himself; he was just his younger

brother's brother, it seemed.

Things were not quite as he had expected. Everywhere was a subtle

change of atmosphere. Beside the book-stall now stood a sentry-box

with glass doors. In it a man with something to his ear was talking to

himself.

Ernie felt somehow disconsolate.

Outside the station, in Cornfield Road, he paused and took in the scene.

There was more traffic than of old, and it was swifter. In the country

from which he came the ox was still the principal motive-power upon the

roads: here clearly horses were becoming out of date.

He asked a policeman when the bus for Old Town ran.

"There she is," said the man, pointing. "On the bounce!"

Just across the street, under the particular plane-tree the starlings

haunted of evenings, where in the past old Huggett in his bottle-green

coat would wait indefinitely with his mouldy pair of browns, there

stood a gaudy motor-bus, decked on top. A spruce conductor was pulling

the bell sharply; and a board on which were printed the starting-times

hung from a neighbouring lamp. It was all very precise, powerful, and

efficient. Ernie was not sure whether he liked it or not.

But he had little time to think. This mechanical monster was not the

old gentlemanly horse-bus with its easy tolerance. It gave no law and

knew no mercy. It was swift and terrible; and its heart was of the

same stuff as its engines.

He crossed the road and leapt on to the great lurching thing.

Carelessly it bore him along the Old Road to Lewes and then swung away

under the Chestnuts into Water Lane.

Here at least nothing had changed but the vehicle that carried him. On

his left was Saffrons Croft, just as of old, with its group of splendid

elms and the Downs seen through the screen of them; in front on the

hill, above the roofs of Old Town, the church-tower with its squat

spire, bluff against a background of green.

Two ladies were walking down the hill, a middle-aged and gracious

mother, escorted by a tall daughter.

Ernie's neighbour nudged him confidentially.

"Mrs. Trupp," he said.

Ernie leaned over. Except for the silver in her hair, his god-mother

had altered little; but he would hardly have recognized in the stately

young woman who walked at her side the flapper who had waved him

good-bye from the nursery-window years before.

His neighbour was conveying to him information about the great surgeon.

"He's our greatest man by far. Mr. Trupp _of Beachbourne_. They come

from all parts to him. He saved the Tsar of Dobrudja--when all the

rest had taken to their prayers."

"Ah," said Ernie, "I think I ave eard of im."

The bus, for all its rushing manners of a parvenu, stopped opposite the

_Star_; but the old beam across the road was gone.

Ernie felt himself aggrieved, and complained to the conductor as he got

down.

"Well, you didn't want your head took off every time, did you?" said

that unsympathetic worthy.

Ernie strolled up Church Street, living his past over again. Here at

least he found the rich, slow atmosphere he had expected. There was

the long-backed church standing massive and noble as of old on its

eminence above the Moot; beneath it in the hollow the brown roof of the

Quaker Meeting-house; and on his left the little ironmonger's shop

outside which Alf had seen Mrs. Pigott and her dog Sharkie on the fatal

day they sacked the walnut-tree.

At Billing's Corner he was reassured to find the high flint-wall that

ran at the back of Rectory Walk making its old sharp corner and the

fig-tree peeping over it. The Rectory, too, still stood in pharisaic

aloofness amid gloomy evergreens. And out of it was coming the Rector,

walking mincingly just as of yore.

That finikin old man had not changed much at all events, and yet ...

and yet ... as he came closer, Ernie was aware of some subtle spiritual

difference here too. At first he thought the Rector had grown. Then

he recognized that the change was in the top-hat and those tall

attenuated legs. They were clothed in gaiters now, and gave the wearer

just that air of old-world distinction it was his passion to assume.

In fact pseudo-Canon Willcocks had in Ernie's absence become

Archdeacon, to his own ineffable satisfaction and that of his lady.

Now he marched down the middle of the road with his hands behind his

back, in the meditative pose he always hoped passers-by would mistake

for prayer.

Ernie touched his hat; and the Archdeacon with an air of royal

indifference imitated to the life from his hero, the late Emperor of

the French, acknowledged the salute with an "Ah! my friend!" and

titupped delicately upon his way.

Ernie, grinning, turned the corner and stopped short.

He had little notion as to what was before him.

During his absence his mother's letters, it is true, had been very

regular and most curt. It was indeed astonishing how little she had

contrived to tell him. His father, on the other hand, had written

seldom but at length, yet never mentioning home-news; while Alf, of

course, had not written at all.

Ernie was therefore in the dark as to the welcome awaiting him.

The Downs at the end of the Walk greeted him; but a row of red-brick

villas on the far side the New Road imposed a barrier between him and

them. True, they nodded at him friendly over the intruding roofs; but

he was shut out from the great Coombe which of old had gathered the

shadows in the evening and echoed in the spring to the melancholy

insistent cry of lambs.

All around the builder had been busy.

When he left, the windows of Rectory Walk had looked across over rough

fields to the Golf Links and Beech-hangar beyond. Now detached houses

on the westward side of the road blocked the view.

His own home at least had changed not at all. The virginia-creeper was

brilliant as ever on its walls; the arabis humming with bees beneath

the study-window.

As he passed through the gate, his mother, who must have been waiting,

opened to him quietly, and held up a warning finger.

She was beautiful still, but showing wear, as must a woman of fifty,

who has never spared herself. Her hair was now snow-white; her

complexion, as seen in the passage, fine as ever; her eyes the same

startling blue under fierce brows, but the lines about them had an

added kindness.

She led past the study-door into the kitchen, walking a little stiffly,

her bones more apparent than of old.

Ern followed her with a smile, his hand scraping the familiar varnished

paper, his eye catching that of the converted drain-pipe.

She was still clearly a woman of one idea--dad.

Cautiously his mother closed the door of the kitchen behind him. Then

she turned and put her hands upon his shoulders.

There was something yearning in her gesture as of a puzzled child

asking an explanation. Ern's quick intuitions told him that since he

had last seen her his mother had lost something and was missing it.

This he noticed and her hands--how worn they were. Fondly he kissed

them, realizing a little wistfully that his mother now was an old woman.

She smiled at him.

"Let me see you," she said, and her eyes dwelt upon his face. For the

first time in his life he felt that his mother was depending on him,

and was moved accordingly.

"You're changed," she said at last. "You're a man now. But your eyes

are the same."

"How's dad?" he asked.

She withdrew from his arms and turned away.

"He's an old man now, Ernie," she said.... "He's not what he was....

I don't rightly know what to make of him.... He goes to Meeting now."

She was puzzled and pathetic.

"Has he turned Quaker?" asked Ernie.

"He says not."

Just then quiet music sounded from the study.

"Is that dad?" asked Ernie, amazed.

His mother nodded.

"One of them new-fangled machines. Pianolas, don't they call em? I

give him one for his birthday."

Ernie listened in awed silence.

"That's Beethoven," he said. "I'd know it anywhere.... In old days we

used to have to go out for that, me and dad did."

The music ceased.

"Now," said his mother, and opened the kitchen-door.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE CHANGED MAN

Ernie went to the study-door and knocked.

"Come in," said a voice that surprised him by its firmness.

He entered.

His father stood before the fireplace almost as he had left him, save

that he had discarded his dressing-gown for a loose long-tailed

morning-coat of the kind worn by country gentlemen in the eighties.

Physically he had changed very little, spiritually it was clear at the

first glance that he was another man. The dignity which had

distinguished him at the moment of parting had become his permanent

possession. Some shining wind of the spirit blowing through his

stagnant streets had purged him thoroughly. His colour was fresh as a

child's, his eyes steady and hopeful, and there was a note of quiet

exaltation about him, of expectation.

"Boy-lad," he said in deeper tones than of old, as they shook hands.

Ernie looked round like one lost.

The room, too, was as greatly changed as its inmate. But for a bowl of

crimson roses on the book-shelf it might have been called austere. The

Persian rug had gone, the writing-table was bare of the familiar

manuscript. The book-shelves had disappeared to make way for a piano.

The walls were still brown, and from them Lely's Cavalier looked down

with faintly ironical eyes upon his descendants. It was the only

picture on the walls.

"Where are the books then, dad?" Ernie asked.

"I sent them down to Fowler's," the other answered. "I've done with

books--all except those."

He pointed to a single row, perhaps a dozen in all, among which Ernie

recognized the blue backs of the Golden Treasury Series, the old

edition of Wordsworth, homely as the poet himself, and a little

brown-paper bound new Testament.

Ernie sat down. Now he understood that pathetic look in his mother's

eyes. His father was no longer dependent on her; and she was missing

that dependency as only a woman who has given her life to propping an

invalid can miss it.

"Have you joined the Friends, dad?" he asked earnestly.

The old man shook his head.

"I shall never join another sect. They're nearest the Truth, it seems

to me--a long way nearest. But they aren't there yet. None of us are."

Ernie considered his father, sitting opposite him as of old, and yet

how changed! In those familiar blue eyes he detected now a dry

twinkle, as of an imp dancing amid autumn leaves.

Suddenly the imp leapt out and tickled him.

Ernie flung back in his chair and laughed.

The old man opposite nodded sympathetically.

Then the door in the hall opened.

Somebody had entered the passage, and was stumbling over the bag Ernie

had left there.

Ernie ceased to laugh; and the imp to twinkle.

"That's your brother," said the old man almost harshly.

Ernie made no move. In the passage outside Alf was shifting the

bag--with curses.

"Does he live here still?" asked Ernie, low.

"Yes," said his father. "He's got a garage of his own now. He's

getting on."

"Shall I go and see him?" asked Ernie.

"There's nothing to see," his father answered in that new dry note of

his. "But you'd better go and see it perhaps," he added.

Ernie rose reluctantly and went into the passage. Alf's voice came

from the kitchen, dogmatic and domineering.

"Him or me. That's flat," he was saying. "House won't hold us both."

Ernie swaggered into the kitchen.

Alf was standing before the fire, very smart and well-groomed. He wore

a double-breasted waistcoat, festooned by a watch-chain, from which

hung a bronze cross. A little man still, with an immense head, his

shoulders appeared broad in their padded coat; but the creases in his

waistcoat betrayed his hollow chest and defective physique, and his

legs were small and almost shrunken in their last year's Sunday

trousers.

Ernie advanced on his brother.

"All right, Alf, old son," he said. "No need to get yer shirt out.

I'm not a-goin to force myself on no one."

"Al-_fred_, if you please," answered Alf, planted before the fire and

caressing a little waxed moustache, which had come into being during

Ernie's absence.

"Oh, you are igh," laughed Ernie.

"I am Al-_fred_ to me own folk and Mr. Caspar to the rest," answered

Alf, dogged and unbending.

"Come, Alf, shake hands with your brother!" scolded his mother.

Alf, his eyes still averted, extended a surly hand mechanically from

the shoulder.

Ern, white and flashing, took the hand.

"There's for my brother!" he said. "And there's for Alf!" and tossed

it from him.

Then he went out.

His bag was still in the hall. He was about to take it up when his

father called him from the study.

"You're going to stop here?" he asked; and Ernie detected a touch of

the old anxiety in his voice, a suggestion of the old tremulousness in

his face and figure.

In all the tuzzles between the two brothers, Alf had over Ern the

incalculable material advantage of the man who is not a gentleman over

the man who is.

"I just got to go down and see Mr. Pigott after a job, dad," Ern

answered soothingly. "I'll be round again later."

He went out of the house, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Anne Caspar heard it go, and looking out into the passage saw that the

bag had vanished too.

"He's gone," she said.

"Army manners," muttered Alf.

"You've drove him out," continued his mother.

"Ave I?" said Alf, cleaning his nails with a penknife. "I got my way

to make. I don't want no angers-on to me.... Comin back on us a

common soldier--not so much as a stripe to his arm, let alone a full

sergeant. A fair disgrace on the family, I call it."

"All for yourself always," said his mother censoriously.

"Who else'd I be for then?" asked Alf, genuinely indignant.

"You might be for the church," answered Anne grimly.

CHAPTER XXIV

ALF

If Ernie was now the working-man, Alf on his side was very much the

gentleman.

He dressed the part to the best of his ability; and--when he

remembered--even tried to talk it.

But he had not arrived at his present position without a struggle.

When he was through his apprenticeship, he left Hewson & Clarke, and

inducing his mother to lend him a little capital, started a car and

garage of his own in the Chestnuts between Old Town and the station.

At first he did not prosper. The horse-industry, with a tradition of

tens of thousands of years behind it, would not yield its pride of

place without a struggle. Competitors were many and fierce. And just

when he believed that he was finding his feet at last, a big London

Syndicate started the Red Cross Garages throughout Kent and Sussex.

Alf for the first time felt the full weight of capitalism--the

Juggernaut with Mammon at the wheel that crushes beneath its rollers

the bodies and souls of the weak and impotent.

His sense of helplessness embittered him.

His garage was empty; his car in little request; he had few repairs.

Old Town at one end of Beachbourne and Holywell on the foot-hills under

Beau-nez at the other were the quarters of the resident aristocracy

amongst whom it was the convention to avoid "the front" as bad form.

These clung to their sleek pairs and cockaded coachmen just as they

clung to the Church and Joseph Chamberlain and the belief, so often

re-affirmed by Archdeacon Willcocks, that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was

the one man living who knew how to rule the masses. _The firm hand,

sir!_

The doctors, on the other hand, were beginning to possess little cars

of their own which they drove themselves or had driven for them; while

the progressive Town Council started motor buses and deprived Alf of

some station-work. Mr. Pigott, now a radical alderman, was responsible

for this last injustice.

Alf knew it, and in revenge, ceased to attend chapel.

Mr. Pigott, with an unerring eye for the defaulters of his flock,

marked his absence and tackled the lost sheep on the subject.

"You've given up God then!" he said, fierce and frowning.

"There ain't none," answered Alf, as brief and brutal. "Where there's

no justice, there can't be no God." His little eyes sparkled

dreadfully. "Look at young Albert Hewson. He went through the shops

with me. Is he as good an engineer as me?--Can he strip an engine same

as me?--Can he turn to the thousandth part of an inch?--Ask the chaps

in the yard. Yet because he's got all the money, been to Rugby and

Oxford, they make him deputy-chairman of the Red Cross Syndicate at

£1,000 a year straight from the shop, and Managing Director of

Ball-Bearings, Limited, and I don't know what all."

He became a violent Socialist; spent his Sundays attending Labour

demonstrations in the East-end; read Robert Blatchford in the

_Clarion_; and sulked with his mother.

For a moment he even contemplated the abandonment of his ambitions.

When Mr. Pigott, after his second marriage, finally gave up

schoolmastering and became Manager of the Southdown Transport Company,

Alf applied for the position of working foreman.

The application was discussed at a meeting of the Directors.

"He's the chap that made the wage-slave speech to the Engineers at the

Salvation Army Citadel on Labour Day," said one.

"What d'_you_ think, Pigott?" asked another.

"I won't have Alf Caspar in my yard," replied the Manager with

characteristic emphasis. "I know Alf."

"Then that settles it," said the chairman.

Alf rightly attributed his defeat to his old schoolmaster.

"So you've turned me down, Mr. Pigott," he said, stopping the other in

Church Street a few days later.

Mr. Pigott, like most professing pacifists, was always ready for a

fight.

"I thought you wanted to be a master-man!" he cried. "And here you're

applying for a job as a wage-slave--to use your own term."

Alf was white, trembling, and sour-faced.

"All I want is a fair chance," he said doggedly. "And if I don't get

it there'll be trouble." He came a step closer. His eyes were down,

and he looked dangerous. "See here, Mr. Pigott--if you turn on

full-steam same time you seal up the safety-valve, something'll burst.

That's science, that is."

Mr. Pigott was not at all dismayed.

"Now look here!" he said. "You take a pull, young man. You're going

altogether too far and too fast. And I'm speaking not as a magistrate

but as your old school-master."

At the Bowling Green Committee that evening, while the minutes were

being read, he retailed the incident to Mr. Trupp.

"That little ewe-lamb o yours is turning tiger because he can't have it

all his own way," he said. "Going to upset Society because he's not

King."

Mr. Trupp was amused.

"Arrested development," he said. "He's an interesting study in

pathology."

"Criminal pathology," muttered Mr. Pigott.

Whether in the interests of Science, or of expediency, next day Mr.

Trupp rolled into Alf's garage, with a blue long-dog, a descendant of

the original _She_, wearing the studded collar of her ancestress, at

his heels.

No man had made a stiffer fight against the new and aggressive

locomotive than the great surgeon.

Pests of the road, he called them, and refused to recognize his friends

when driving them. He affirmed that they upset his horses and his

patients; made the place stink; and whirled through the country-side

disseminating disease in clouds of dust. But he was no fool, and

increasingly busy. A machine that could whisk him over to Lewes in

little more than thirty minutes, and land him at the Metropole in

Brighton in the hour, was not to be scoffed at.

Alf was cleaning his car when Mr. Trupp, greatly muffled in spite of

the heat, strolled into his yard.

"Look here, Alf," growled the great man. "I'm never going to own one

of those things. But I've got to use one to get about. If you like to

do my driving we'll arrange something."

Alf's attitude to life changed in the twinkling of an eye.

He bustled home that evening, a new man.

"All O.K.," he called to his mother. "I got me first contract."

"What?" she asked sullenly.

"Driving for Mr. Trupp."

She took a saucepan off the fire.

"Then you're a made man," she said; and she did not exaggerate.

The job, or as Alf preferred to call it, the contract, meant honour; it

meant money; it meant--above all--a start. Mr. Trupp had been for long

the first surgeon in Sussex: since the operation, as daring as

discreet, by which he had preserved the life of a Balkan Tsar to

disgrace a throne, his fame had become world-wide.

That evening, uplifted on a wave of humility and thankfulness, Alf

walked to Mr. Pigott's house and apologized to him.

"I said a lot of silly things, I know," he said. "There is a God and a

good God too."

Mr. Pigott was sitting with his new wife, who was as much his junior as

the first had been his senior.

She was a young woman, with a mischievous face and bright hair.

"He'll be glad to have you on His side again," she remarked demurely.

"He was missing you."

Mr. Pigott scowled melodramatically at the offender.

She refused to catch his eye, busy with her work.

"Five pound a week isn't a bad God as times go," she went on.

Alf smirked.

"It's seven pound ten," he said, and withdrew.

"Elsie Pigott!" roared her husband, when the outside door had shut.

"Sir!" answered his bride, and added--"Mr. Trupp's taken him on....

Mrs. Trupp's furious...."

Alf, in spite of his access of faith, never returned to chapel.

As he remarked to his mother,

"I got me principles. And I must stick to em."

"That's it," said his mother. "Stick to em--until you want to change

em."

Anne Caspar cherished now no illusions about her second son.

She no longer cared for Alf--for he was no longer dependent on her; nor

did she respect him. But his naïveté, the outrageous sincerity of his

egotism, appealed to a certain grim sense of humour she possessed.

CHAPTER XXV

THE CHURCHMAN

Alf, with all his faults, had at least the supreme virtue of the animal

living in a fiercely competitive world: he never missed a chance.

A year after he began to drive for Mr. Trupp, he had a second car, a

man driving for him, and another on repairing work.

Success sugared his political outlook, just as defeat had soured it.

Like most really hard men, he saved himself in his own eyes by becoming

a thorough-going sentimentalist. In the course of a year or two, King

and Country had become the objects of his ferocious admiration; while

the masses of his countrymen were to be dealt with as ruthlessly as

expediency and the Vote would allow.

"Traitors, I call em," he confided to his new friend, the Reverend

Spink. "All for their fat selves all the time. Never think of you and

me. They fair give me the hiccoughs."

At the General Election of 1906 he came out fearlessly for God and the

Conservative Party.

The two candidates for West Beachbourne were, as all decent men

admitted, the worst who ever stood for a constituency. The sitting

member had just received that which he entered Parliament to obtain--a

Baronetcy; and his solitary ambition now was to be defeated.

Unfortunately an aspiring wife had other views to which her spouse had

to give way.

His opponent, on the other hand, had, according to the enemy, recently

emerged "from a home of rest" in order to contest the constituency.

At the preceding Khaki Election the Conservative candidate, who was an

undoubtedly fine whip, had secured the "Triumph of Right," as

Archdeacon Willcocks finely called it, by the simple process of driving

a well-appointed team through the constituency.

"I'll vote for them 'orses," had been the general verdict.

The victor now repeated his tactics.

On polling day, as a reward for his strenuous labours in the good

cause, Alf was given a ride on the top of the coach among the very pick

of England's aristocracy. In that fair company he meandered from

public-house to public-house all a winter's afternoon, singing with his

hosts hymns and spirituous songs.

In Cornfield Road, opposite the _White Hart_, Mr. Pigott, red and dusty

from the battle, saw him ensconced on that bad eminence among the

crimson faces and flowery hats of the enemy.

"You've changed your coat to some purpose," he bawled.

Alf leaned down.

"Yes, sir," he said quietly. "I've learned a bit, and I'm not ashamed

to admit it."

The beery riders raised an aggressive cheer. And the son and heir of

the candidate, snatching the horn from the hand of a footman, blew a

strident blast in the ear of the outraged schoolmaster.

Alf's candidate was returned, to his no small chagrin--one of the few

Tories to survive the democratic deluge of that year.

"Just a remnant of us," as Alf remarked pathetically to the Archdeacon,

"that 'as not bowed the knee to Bile."

Thus earlier in life even than most of us, Alf joined the Big

Battalions of those who, secure themselves, mean to make capital out of

the insecurity of others.

"I'm a high old Tory," he would tell Lady Augusta Willcocks

truculently. "And I don't care who knows it."

And finding quickly the necessity for, and advantage of, a religious

sanction for a position that was morally untenable, he threw himself

upon the bosom of the Church; and in that comfortable and accommodating

community which opens wide its gates to all who prefer the Path of

Compromise to the Road that leads up Calvary, he found the sustenance

of which he stood in need.

Alf effected the change of religious community with considerable tact.

He began quite simply by touching his hat to the junior curate of the

parish church, when he met him in the street.

The Reverend Spink, who was a man of much the same class as Alf, was

highly gratified and uplifted.

Then Alf took to saying very shyly,

"Good morning, sir," hurrying past in order not to impede by his

unworthy presence the great man's view.

Next he took to dropping in to the Reverend Spink's addresses for "men

only."

Here he made himself conspicuous by his thoughtfulness and the

corrugations in his brow as he imbibed the teachings of his master.

One day he asked, with some confusion and stumblings of speech, a

question so easy that even the curate could answer it.

Alf nodded, well satisfied.

The curate swelled in the spirit. This catechumen at the least knew

what was what.

Next day Alf, greatly daring, stopped the evangelist in the street.

"Beg pardon, sir," he began diffidently. "About what you was saying

last night about them Proper Prefaces..."

The curate amplified his explanation.

Alf drank in the milk of the Word, nodding his head.

"Ah, I never thought of that!" he said.

"Look here!" said the curate with sudden warmth. "If you're interested

in those sort of things..."

The naughty devil who possessed Alf bobbed out and almost undid him.

"What!--Proper Prefaces!" he said, and added hastily--"and the things

appertaining to em!--religion and that."

"That's what I mean," said the curate. "Come round to my rooms on

Friday. Some of us meet there once a week. Jolly fellows. Come and

smoke a pipe and chat!"

The Reverend Spink was deeply tainted with the hearty bon-camarade

method which the Bishop of Fulham had recently introduced into the

Church to enable it to float on the flowing democratic tide.

After that Alf went often.

The curate, who had made inquiries, found that Alf had once been,

according to report, "a roaring, raving Socialist and atheist!"

"Shockin the things he used to say!" his informant told him. The

curate, who was all out for sensation, was thrilled. Here was a catch

indeed!--If he could but bring it off!--What wouldn't the dear Bishop

of Fulham say?

His prayers were answered more swiftly than he had anticipated.

In a month the Reverend Spink had led his penitent to the baptismal

font.

Alf, asked if he would like any of his people to be present at the

ceremony, had shaken his head.

"See where it is, sir, Mother's chapel. She'll never forgive me--not

but what I'll put up with that if it's right. And dad's I don't know

what. I don't know that he knows himself."

The only people Alf invited to attend were Mrs. Trupp and her daughter.

They refused politely.

As Bess said to her mother with the firmness of youth, "We are on

Ernie's side. Dad may forget, but we don't."

A few weeks later the Reverend Spink went to call on Alf's father.

After he had left, Mrs. Caspar heard strange sounds in the study. She

went to the door and listened.

Then she opened and peeped in.

Edward Caspar was laughing as she had never seen him laugh in twenty

odd years of married life. The tears were streaming down his face, his

head was thrown back and his body convulsed.

His wife regarded him with dour sympathy.

"What is it?" she asked hardly.

Her husband wiped his eyes shamefacedly.

"Nothing," he said. "Only the curate's been converting me."

That evening, as he went to bed, he peered over the banisters, and said

in his grave way to Alf in the kitchen,

"I hope your friend Mr. Spink'll come again."

Alf reported the incident next day to the curate, adding,

"I will say this for dad. He is broad."

Mr. Trupp heard of his chauffeur's conversion.

"You're church then now, Alf," he said.

"Yes, sir," replied the other with the curious naïveté of blunted

susceptibilities. "More classier. See, I'm getting on now."

And Alf did not stop at baptism.

He was thorough in religious as in secular affairs.

Next spring, after a careful preparation by the Reverend Spink, he was

confirmed by the Bishop and afterwards admitted a member of the C.E.M.S.

After the ceremony, the Bishop inquired of the Rector, in the vestry,

who the young man with the immense head might be.

Archdeacon Willcocks always wore a little white imperial in reverent

imitation of his master, Louis Napoleon. His cult of the Third Emperor

was perhaps the most genuine thing about him, and had endured for fifty

years. But for a stern no-nonsense father he would have deserted

Cambridge in '70 to fight for a cause already lost. And he had never

forgiven the scholar at his gate who had told him that his favourite

had painted his face before Sedan.

"What if he did?" he had asked sourly.

"Nothing," Edward Caspar had answered. "Only it's interesting."

"I don't believe he did."

"Did you never read Zola's _Débâcle_?" asked the other gently.

"Nevah!" cried the Archdeacon, on firm church-ground now. "I don't

read Zolah!"

"Ah," said Edward. "Pity..."

The Archdeacon looked like a gentleman, and, to do him justice, tried

hard to live up to his looks. With this end in view he had married--to

his no small gratification, and that of his mother--the daughter of a

Victorian Earl. In the days before he became an Archdeacon he

habitually wore a top-hat, slightly battered to signify that the

wearer, while an aristocrat, was not a new one. A sedulous attendant

on the rich of the parish, he visited the poor by proxy; and yet by the

simple process of taking off his hat with a sweep to every

cottage-woman in the Moot who vouchsafed him a good-morning on his rare

passages through that district, he maintained an easy reputation among

the more conservative of the working-class as a Christian and a

gentleman.

Archdeacon Willcocks was in fact a snob, but he was not a cad; whereas

his junior curate was both. When, therefore, the Bishop made inquiries

as to Alf, the Archdeacon gave the glory to his subordinate.

"Spink got hold of him," he said. "He was a dangerous Socialist, I

believe."

The Bishop regarded with approval the chubby young man with the pursed

mouth, wondering whether he should transfer him to the industrial

East-end or the slums of Portslade.

A thorough-going man of the world, like most of his type, he was quite

astute enough to see that the real enemy of the Institution he

represented was the Labour Party; and that the danger from this quarter

was growing, and would continue to grow.

When Alf returned home from the ceremony in the parish-church, his

mother was taking off her bonnet in the kitchen.

She eyed him with sardonic mirth as he entered.

"Feel a change?" she asked.

"What's that?"

"Since he done it."

"Was you there then?" asked Alf.

"I was."

Alf was entirely unabashed.

"I must go with me conscience," he said, "if it was ever so."

"And we all know which way your conscience goes, Alf," his mother

answered.

"Which way's that then?"

"The way the money goes."

Alf was not in the least offended. Indeed he was rather pleased. He

stood in his favourite position in the window with his back to his

mother and cleaned his nails with a pen-knife.

"Crucified for conscience' sake," he muttered. "I dare say I'm not the

first, nor I won't be the last neether."

Alf was confirmed into the church, and persecuted for it by his mother,

a few weeks before his brother's return home.

CHAPTER XXVI

MR. PIGOTT

Ernie, bag in hand, and sore of heart, sauntered along to the end of

Rectory Walk.

There Beech-hangar, swirling in the wind under the shoulder of the

Downs that shut off Beau-nez, called to his wounded spirit.

He walked slowly along the New Road, away from the houses, across the

Golf Links towards this favourite retreat of his boyhood where of old,

when in trouble with his mother, he would retire.

There on the slope amid the beech-trees, the Links billowing away

before him to the woods that ambushed the Duke's Lodge, he lay down.

The smooth stems rose about him like columns in the choir of a church.

The wind strayed amid a sea of sun-lit leaves. The cool, the comfort,

the bright graciousness of these comrades of his youth soothed and

satisfied him. He studied them with kind eyes. The harsh male quality

of the oak was not theirs. They could not stand the buffeting of Time

as did the fierce old warriors of the Weald; but they could sustain the

spirit in the hour of need. They were for him the women among trees.

Ernie lay with his eyes shut, and his hands behind his head, listening

to the wind flowing through the tree-tops. The murmur of flies, the

under-song of birds, the moving stillness, the secret stir of life,

filled him to overflowing.

Alf had made him feel an isolated atom, the sport of incredibly cruel

devils. Now he knew that he was part of an immense and harmonious

whole. The sense of dislocation, exile and disease passed away. His

mind was an open cistern into which a myriad healing streams were

pouring from an unknown source.

Who was Alf to disturb his peace of mind? Alf, the puny, the

pretentious, who was not really alive at all. There was something

greater in the world than Alf, and that something was on his side. He

was sure of it.

He sat up and laughed.

Then above the murmur of insects and birds the louder hum of Man and

his machinery, setting the world to rights, stole in upon his mind.

Two groundmen were mowing the green just under the Hangar.

It was time to be moving.

He sauntered back along the New Road, eyeing the spruce villas on the

northern side, where of old allotment gardens had been.

At the corner of Church Street he asked a policeman where Mr. Pigott

lived now.

The man pointed down the Lewes Road, now fringed with houses.

The old schoolmaster had, it seemed, left Huntsman's Lodge at the foot

of the Downs, and moved in nearer to his work when he became Manager of

the South Downs Transport Co.

Ernie rambled down the dusty hill, the Downs upon his left, picking up

familiar objects as he went--the Moot Farm standing up like an elm-girt

island from the sea of arable, the long low backs of the Duke's

piggeries, the path that wound across the plough and led over the hill

to far Aldwoldston in the Ruther Valley.

A young woman with provocative eyes and brightly burnished hair came to

the door at his knock and scanned him friendly.

"Is Mr. Pigott in?" Ernie asked.

"He's at his office."

"Could I see Mrs. Pigott then?"

She eyed him merrily.

"You are seeing her," she said; and added, enjoying his embarrassment,

"I'm number two. My predecessor sleeps at the back." She tossed her

bright head in the direction of the cemetery on Rodmill seen through

the open back-door.

Ernie blushed and fumbled.

"I'm Ernie Caspar, Miss--I would say Ma'am."

The young woman regarded him with swift and sympathetic interest.

"Oh, I know _you_," she said. "You used to write from India.... So

Mr. Pigott never mentioned _me_! I'll just speak to him when he comes

in."

She saw the bag in his hand, and her mouth became firm.

"Been to see your people?"

"Just looked in on dad, 'm."

She eyed him sharply.

"And your brother?"

Ern said nothing.

"Well then, you leave your bag here, and step across the Moot to the

office. _Southdown Transport Co._, back of the _Star_ by the Quaker

Meeting-house. You'll sleep the night here."

Ernie crossed the brickfields, passed his old school where the children

were singing the evening hymn, under the church upon the Kneb, through

what the old inhabitants still called Ox-steddle Bottom, where once his

father had pointed out to him the remains of Roman byres.

The office was in Borough Lane.

Mrs. Pigott had warned her husband by telephone.

Ernie therefore was shown into the inner sanctum at once.

Mr. Pigott, grizzled now, but with the old almost aggressive air of

integrity, summed his erstwhile pupil up with the eyes of the

appraising schoolmaster.

"It's the old Ernie. I see that," he grunted. "So Alf's been playing

it up already. You needn't tell me. He's a masterpiece, that young

man. Even _she_ admits that." He paused and began again, confidential

and communicative like one naughty boy whispering to another. "What

d'ye think of her? She's church--more shame to her. But I forgive

her. I forgive her a lot. You have to when you're married to em--as

you'll find some day. And what I don't forgive I pass by. For

why?--If I didn't she'd sauce me." He suddenly became aware that he

was being indiscreet, even undignified, and broke off gruffly--"Well,

what did they teach you in the Army?"

Ernie laughed.

"It's not so bad as they make out, sir. I like the old Regiment well

enough."

"They tell me," said Mr. Pigott solemnly, "that in South Africa none of

the unpopular officers came home--_and they weren't shot by the Boers_!"

"It depends on the Regiment, I expect," replied Ernie. "There's not

much of that in the Hammer-men. Our officers were mostly all right.

More gentlemen than most, from what I could see of it. They were

sports, and they tried to be just. Of course there wasn't none of em

like dad--only the Colonel. Hadn't the education. But some of these

snotty little jumped-ups like what they had in the Welsh Liverpools

that lay alongside us in Pindi ... Why I wouldn't salute em if I met em

in the lines."

Mr. Pigott listened to this audacious statement with the hostile

interest of the radical.

"A rotten system," he said. "Built on make-believe and lies."

"It fairly rots some of em," Ernie admitted. "Gives em more power nor

what they can carry. But in the hands of the right men it don't work

so bad. All depends on that."

Then Mr. Pigott asked him what he proposed to do.

"That's what I come to you about, sir."

"Of course your brother won't help!"

"No, sir; nor I wouldn't ask him," flashed Ernie.

"And I don't blame you," answered Mr. Pigott. "Alf's too busy taking

the Mass and walking in processions to help his brother.... Now I'll

tell you what to do. You go up and see Mr. Trupp. He can do anything

he likes now he's disembowelled Royalty. And if he can't help you, I

must; though I haven't got a vacant job in the yard just now. You're

to sleep at my place, _she_ says."

He followed Ernie to the door.

"What d'you make of your father?" he asked mysteriously.

"I don't rightly understand him, sir," Ernie answered.

"Don't you?" said Mr. Pigott. "I do." He dropped his voice. "He's

waiting the Second Coming, I'm sure of it."

When Ernie presented himself at the Manor, Mr. Trupp was out. Ernie

thought Mrs. Trupp would see him. The smart maid thought not. Ernie,

however, proved right.

Mrs. Trupp was sitting in the long drawing-room, with her daughter, and

greeted him with pleasure.

"Ernie!" cried Mrs. Trupp. "This is a sight for sair e'en. What a man

you've become!"

"Was Alfred decent to you?" blurted Bess.

Mrs. Trupp shot a warning glance at her impetuous daughter.

"And have you seen the new Mrs. Pigott?" she asked.

"She's top-hole," cried Bess. "He never stops talking about her.

Really after that other old thing always sitting on his head----"

Then Mr. Trupp entered, smiling, and cocking his face to sum up his

visitor through his pince-nez.

"You needn't introduce yourself, Ernie," he growled. "You've taken no

harm, I see."

Later the two men retired to the consulting-room to talk business.

"Would you care for a temporary job at the Hohenzollern?" asked Mr.

Trupp; "the German Hotel on the Crumbles. It was building in your

time. They want a lift-man, I know."

"Anything, sir," answered Ernie with easy enthusiasm.

Mr. Trupp rang up the Hotel and arranged the matter there and then.

"It will do as a stop-gap, anyway," he said, "until we can fix you up

in a permanent job. You don't want to be knocking about at home,

twiddling your thumbs."

"That I don't, sir!" laughed Ernie a thought ironically, and returned

to Deep-dene to tell his luck.

Mr. Pigott glanced at his wife.

"The Hohenzollern," he said gruffly. "Well, give it a try."

Next day Mr. Pigott met the Doctor in the street.

"Well," he said, "what d'you think of your soldier?"

"Done him no harm anyway," replied Mr. Trupp, quite impenitent.

"I don't know," retorted the other. "He left here a gentleman: he

comes back a labourer--fit to work a lift."

"None the worse for that," said Mr. Trupp. "Mr. Wyndham's been telling

us we want fewer clerks and more working-men. There's no satisfying

you radicals."

"Better than a jumped-up jackanapes in black leggings and a pilot coat,

I will admit," answered the other. "Yes, you've got a lot to answer

for, Mr. Trupp. First you send him off to the army; and directly

that's finished you pack him off to the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"Might be worse places," muttered Mr. Trupp.

Mr. Pigott held up a hand in horror.

"Doctor!" he cried, "I tell you what it is. Ever since you saved that

Tsar you've been a changed man."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Trupp. "I only know that Tsars

forget to pay their Doctor's bills."

"I'm glad to hear it," answered Mr. Pigott. "_Very_ glad," with

emphasis. "A lesson to you to leave the insides of Royalty to emselves

in future."

BOOK IV

RUTH BOAM

CHAPTER XXVII

THE HOHENZOLLERN HOTEL

The Hohenzollern Hotel was both physically and spiritually remote from

all the other hotels in Beachbourne.

The respectable Grand, facing the Wish, the ponderous Talbot opposite

the band-stand, the perky Hydropathic perched on the rise of the hill,

the Dudley by the pier, the Cecil, the Bentinck, and all the other

hotels with aristocratic names and a middle-class clientele, were at

the West-end of the town, interspersed among boarding-houses the whole

length of the sea-front from the pier to Beau-nez.

The Hohenzollern stood aloof at the East-end on the edge of the

Crumbles, as the Levels here were called.

An immense, modern caravanserai of pretentious neogothic style, it had

been dumped down on the shore beyond the long-deserted Redoubt of

Napoleonic times.

In front of it was the sea. On its flank, beyond the Fishing Station,

stretched the marshes. Behind it, at a respectful distance, crouching

in the dust, the mass of mean houses and crowded streets that

constituted the East-end.

On these the Hohenzollern, aloof and lordly in its railed-off pleasure

grounds, turned an unheeding back. It was unaware of their presence;

or rather recognized them only to patronize.

It was a drab area, unfrequented by the fashionable and redolent of the

atmosphere of cheap lodging-houses.

The parade ceased at the Redoubt, and ended for promenaders at the pier.

Beyond Splash Point nobody who was anybody ever thought it decent to

penetrate. The band-stand, the winter gardens, the brick walls were at

the West-end, reaching out towards Beau-nez.

And the Hohenzollern was not only inaccessible, it was self-contained

and meant to be.

It possessed its own fine band, its own smooth lawns, its own strip of

fore-shore with bathing rafts moored off it and bathing tents on the

beach, its own tiny jetty for pleasure boats.

The hotel was German-owned and German-inspired; but it was not the

centre of an extensive spy-system as certain of the patriots of East

Sussex maintained.

The men and women who launched it as a business proposition were not

mad. They were just cosmopolitan financiers who knew a good deal about

the human heart on its shady side, and proposed to make money out of

their knowledge.

In Beachbourne it was always spoken of as the German Hotel, and its

character was well known and probably exaggerated.

The town, called by spiteful rivals on the South Coast Churchy

Beachbourne, by reason of the number and variety of its sacred

edifices, was shocked and delighted.

Started in the late nineties, the original title of the Hotel was of

course the Empire; and its first chairman, Baron Blumenthal, a

prominent member of the Primrose League. Then came the slump in

British Imperialism after the Boer War. With the advent of a Radical

Government it became correct for desperate patriots to affirm with

immense emphasis in private, and with less emphasis on public platforms

that they would sooner see the country governed by the German Emperor,

who was at least a gentleman, than by Lloyd George--that little Welsh

attorney.

At the height of this patriotic rally the German Emperor came himself

to England; and Beachbourne was thrilled to hear the great and good man

was to stop at the Empire Hotel to be under Mr. Trupp.

The Hotel incontinently changed its name to commemorate an event which

in fact never took place. Shortly afterwards, however, a Balkan

Tsar--also a Hohenzollern--happily did come, and was subjected by Mr.

Trupp to the operation prepared for the head of his family.

But if the Hotel changed its name, its reputation remained the same and

even grew. In Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Buda-Pesth, men talked of it;

and even in India native princes whispered _risqué_ stories about it to

their Prime Ministers at the Council Table.

Wherever men spoke of it, they mentioned with smiles its two

characteristic traits--the Third Floor and the Head Porter.

The Hohenzollern Hotel, indeed, had two sides, like many a better

institution, and deliberately cultivated both.

The Third Floor represented one; and Salvation Joe the other.

There were respectable men and women who stayed regularly at the Hotel

on the Crumbles, and denied quite honestly and not without heat all

knowledge of the Third Floor and what it stood for. It was a

convention at the Hohenzollern that nobody stopping there ever

recognized anybody else. You went down to Beachbourne from town with

the man who always occupied the chair next you at the club; you sat by

his side in the station-bus that bore you to the portals of the Hotel;

and then--you parted till Monday morning when you met once more on the

platform at the station. Therefore the most staid and admirable of

citizens often retired there to be undisturbed. Ministers and their

secretaries during a busy Session, homely young couples on their

honeymoons, even Bishops and clergymen in retreat. And for these the

Hotel had its undoubted advantages. Eastwards the Levels stretched

away for miles haunted by none but birds. The fore-shore was private,

the sea itself secluded. There were no trippers, and, what mattered

more, none of the usual Society week-enders. The former spread

themselves between the Redoubt and the pier, the latter from the pier

to Beau-nez.

It was for those who sought for quiet at the Hotel that the Head Porter

existed. He was known far and wide as Salvation Joe, and always wore

the red jersey of his kind by request of the Management; though unkind

rumour affirmed that he had forfeited the right to his distinguishing

habit.

On Sundays, after lunch, the second dining-room was cleared, and

Salvation Joe, all glorious in scarlet apparel, held a meeting for the

staff. Visitors would be welcomed, a notice in the hall announced,

though as Joe often said with the splendid smile he was alleged to have

copied from a recent Archbishop,

"It's only just among ourselves, sir. We call it our 'appy 'our. We

just like to meet together the once a week--them and me and the Master."

That pleased the Bishops, who went back to the Athenæum and talked

about it over their coffee; it delighted the occupants of the Third

Floor, especially on wet Sundays; and, to judge from the attendance, it

appeared to be very popular with the staff, who, warmed by the rays

from Joe's benevolent eye, sang with enthusiasm _Tell me the old, old

story_ and the like.

Moreover it was noticed by the curious that when the men were asked by

sceptical visitors whether they _really_ enjoyed it, the invariable

answer given in the same sort of voice with the same sort of smile was,

"We calls it our 'appy 'our, miss."

Salvation Joe was not perhaps more of a humbug than most of us: that is

to say, he humbugged himself just as much as he humbugged others. At

one time he had quite certainly found religion; and if with the advent

of middle age he lost it, it is by no means sure that he was aware of

his loss.

Certainly he was invaluable to the Management as a counterpoise; and

they paid him accordingly. Salvation Joe never took tips. That

impressed every one, especially the Third Floor. Through this

idiosyncrasy Joe indeed acquired a European reputation. On Monday

mornings he stood in the great marbled hall, under a tall palm, among

bustling porters and stacks of luggage, a majestic presence, refusing

with a martyr's smile the coin that corrupts. His real name was Joseph

Collett; and in the boot-room in the basement he was known irreverently

as J.C.

The staff attended the service because it paid; and they had to live.

There was only one man who never went; and that man was Ernie.

Joe met him in the passage one day, after he had been at the Hotel a

month or more, and stopped him.

"I suppose you haven't got a soul to save then, Caspar?" he began, his

great chest rising and falling beneath the flaming jersey.

Ernie grinned sheepishly.

"Well, Mr. Collett, as to that, I guess I've got the same as most."

"But you're too proud to save it," continued the other in a voice like

battalions on the march. He laid a frank and friendly hand on Ernie's

shoulder. "Come and confess your Redeemer, my lad!" he called. "Come

to the foot of the Cross! Throw the burden of your sins on Him! He'll

carry em--next Sunday--two o'clock--second dining-room--sharp."

Ernie never went.

It was not that he wished to stand or fall by a principle: Ernie had no

hankerings for a martyr's crown. It may have been that he inherited

from his father a fine reserve in matters spiritual and that somewhere

in the deeps of him there was an invincible repugnance to the methods

of the seducer, or merely that he was one of the simple of earth--far

too honest to see the path of expediency and follow it.

The other men saw and winked. They did not admire Ernie for refusing

to bow the knee, nor was there anything to admire.

"Bloody mug," was all their comment.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE THIRD FLOOR

But if Ernie was simple, he was not blind. When he was not on the

lift, he acted as Boots for the Third Floor; and no man could work

there without seeing what he saw.

Mr. Pigott, once meeting his old pupil in Church Street, asked him how

he liked his job.

"Not so bad, sir," Ernie answered without enthusiasm. "Some I likes;

and some I dislikes; and most I don't mind."

The work indeed, in the slack seasons at all events, was by no means

hard, the wages moderate; the tips many, and sometimes extravagant.

Ernie was the only man on the staff who frequented the Third Floor. No

waiters ever came there. All the waiting that was done--and there was

plenty--was done by the maids.

Most of these were foreign; and the few who were not had adopted

foreign names. They were pretty and pert; and they called

Ernie--"Ernie Boots." It was the common gossip that the Manageress

chose them herself--"with care," the knowing added with a wink.

Madame, as she was familiarly known, was in fact a Bavarian, who must

have been beautiful in her day, with an immense bust that concealed a

most kind heart, and piles of fair hair, obviously her own, that she

amassed in pyramids on the top of her head. There was generally a

cigarette between her lips, and she used a lorgnette lavishly. She was

in fact an efficient woman of the world, saved from the dreadful vices

of the efficient by a genuinely benignant nature. And she avowed

openly that it was her mission in life to give people what they

wanted--propriety to the proper, and pleasure to the pleasure-seeking.

Ernie had been at the hotel nearly a year when there came to the Third

Floor a maid who seemed strangely out of her element.

He noted her advent at once with surprise and a sense of shame. Amid

her saucy colleagues she seemed a lily of the valley blowing stately

amid artificial flowers. A big young woman and beautiful, she held

herself apart, moving among the others, apparently unconscious of them,

and ignorant of the meretricious atmosphere, as a Madonna walking

through the ballet of a music-hall revue.

Her presence filled him with acute personal discomfort. He did not

like the tone of the Third Floor, but he accepted it as he accepted

everything with the easy tolerance that was his weakness. This

majestic young woman with her aloof and noble air, her accusing

innocence, her damning purity, filled him with shame and pity--shame

for himself and his weak-kneed benevolence, pity for those others whom

she with her unconscious dignity made appear so small and vulgar.

Her name was Ruth, so much Ernie knew, and she was English too, though

she scarcely looked it: for she was very dark, her hair black as a

horse's mane, with a skin that had a peculiar ruddy warmth, and the

large brown eyes full of splendid darkness and mellow lights, that are

so rare and therefore so noticeable when found among the

working-classes that fringe the North Sea. Her brows, black as her

hair and broadly splashed, almost met; but there was nothing of

ferocity about her.

Her natural habit, Ernie saw, was that of a great and mysteriously

growing tree, its roots deep in the red earth; its massive foliage

drinking of the goodness of sunshine and wind and rain; but now there

was about her a note of restraint, even of stress. The easy flow of

her nature was being dammed. She seemed out of place and dumbly aware

of it, like a creature of the wilderness in a strange environment. The

profound and quiet joyousness of woman, maturing to ripe perfection,

which should have been hers to an unusual degree, was not.

Ernie was desperately shy of her.

He would peep at her as she passed him on her swift way; she never

looked at him.

He seldom saw her speak to the other maids. Yet it was clear to him

that this isolation was unnatural to her, and that she was made for

quiet intercourse and noble mirth. Unlike the other maids she was

always busy. She never romped, gossiped, or flirted.

One evening Ernie saw a fat-necked Jew in a sleeping suit, his mouth

stuffed with a cigar, his eyes hot and bibulous, standing in the door

of his bedroom.

The dark beauty came by.

The Jew chirped at her.

"Pretty tartie!" he called in his luscious voice. "Come inside then.

I've got something to show you."

The girl passed on, unheeding.

The Jew followed her with moist eyes that glistened.

A fair chamber-maid emerging from another room winked at Ernie.

"She's white," she said, and jerked her head in the direction of the

disappearing girl.

The chamber-maid was a little cockney from Clapham who had taken to

herself the name of Céleste.

"None the worse for that, I dare say," said Ernie with unusual acrimony.

Céleste flirted on her way.

"Tra-la-la!--ta-ta-ta!" she taunted with a little mocking flutter of

her fingers. "I suppose you're white too, Ernie Boots."

"No," grinned Ernie. "I'm grey."

"Baa-baa, black sheep!" mocked the naughty one. "I'd be one or the

other. Grey's a silly sort of tint."

Then the Jew's sodden voice came wheezing down the corridor.

"Here, kid!--You'll do. You're not a bloody iceberg, are you?"

Céleste shook her carefully-coiffed head.

"I'm engaged, Soly. So sorry!--Go back to bed, there's a dear old

thing!"

Ernie woke that night in the belief that Ruth was bending over him.

"Ruth!" he answered quietly. "Is that you?" But there was no reply.

Next morning he took the plunge.

"Good morning, Miss," he said as she passed him.

The other's curiously impassive face flashed into life.

"Good morning, Mr. Boots," she answered in a deep and humming voice

like the sound of wings.

She said the words quite simply, and he saw she was not chaffing. She

honestly believed Boots to be his name.

Céleste, dusting in an adjoining room, looked through an open door.

"She's an innocent," she said discontentedly. "She knows nothing.

Ought to go back to her mother. Madame's got no business to put her

here."

Ernie went on his way, that deep voice still thrilling in his ears.

Thereafter he sought and found chances of serving the girl.

One day he came on her tugging a heavy basket of washing along the

passage. It was clear that she had been too proud to ask another maid

for help, preferring to trust her own magnificent physique to

accomplish the task alone.

"Let me, Miss," he said.

"You take yon end," she answered. "I'll take this. Then atween us

like."

"Ah," said Ernie, gathering courage. "I see what it is. You think

you're the only strong one." Deliberately and without an effort he

swung the basket on to his shoulder and bore it jauntily to its

destination.

Then he slid it down and faced the girl.

"Now then!" he cried.

She dropped her eyelids, and he saw the length and curl of her lashes.

"You are strong," she said, with a dainty irony he found as delightful

as it was surprising. "I allow you'll be purty nigh half as strong as

I be."

He pointed an accusing finger at her.

"You're Sussex!" he cried, falling into the old broad speech in his

turn. "I'd knaw ye anywheres."

Her whole face gladdened slowly as she heard the familiar accent.

"Never!" she said, still faintly ironical, and added more sedately. "I

was bred and born in Sussex, and never been outside it."

"And never mean to be," chaffed Ernie. "That's your style. I knaw ye."

"I was borrn in the Brooks at Aldwoldston," she continued, pronouncing

the word Auston. "Along under the church by the White Bridge across

Parson's Tye. Dad was Squire Caryll's keeper till he was ate up with

the rheumatism." Her speech broadened even as she spoke, deliberately,

he thought, to meet his own.

He followed suit.

The pair began to ca-a-a away at each other like a couple of old rooks

in an elm in May.

"What might be your name then?"

"Ruth Boam, I believe."

Ernie nodded sagaciously.

"'Twould be surely. Boam or Burgess or Ticehurst or Woolgar.

Something with a bit o Saxon in it, as dad says." He added hopefully:

"I'm Sussex too. I was dragged up in Old Town agin the Rectory there,"

jerking his head. "Cerdainly I was."

She regarded him mischievously.

"I knew you was no'hun of a foreigner then," she told him.

Ernie feigned surprise.

"How did you knaw that then?"

She chuckled like a cuckoo.

"Hap I aren't the only one," she answered.

Then she was gone; and it struck him suddenly that this grave and

stately damsel had been chaffing him.

Ernie stood a moment amazed. Then he nodded his head.

Suddenly he seemed to have crossed a border-line into a new country.

Behind him was the stale old past, with its failures, its

purposelessness, its dreary hag-tracks; before him was adventure, the

New world--and what?

He wasn't sure. But there it was beckoning him and he should follow,

true child of Romance that he was.

And it was time he moved on.

He had been a year now at the Hotel and was, as always, tending to grow

slack.

Salvation Joe was watching him, waiting his chance, and Ernie knew it.

Now a change stole over him. A nucleus, small at first, but always

growing, round which the dissipated forces of his spirit could rally,

had been forming in his heart, unknown to him, ever since Ruth's advent

to the Third Floor. He was becoming firm of purpose, gathering

himself, making good. His eyes, his face, his gait, testified to the

change.

Mr. Trupp, the observant, remarked on it to Mr. Pigott.

"He's growing," he said.

"The right way, let's hope," answered the other. "That place you sent

him to is a queer kind of forcing house."

"He wants forcing," said Mr. Trupp. "We all do."

"Bah!" growled Mr. Pigott. "You and your Lash."

CHAPTER XXIX

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS

Once a week Ernie had a half-day off, which he invariably spent in the

same way.

He took the bus from the Redoubt up to Old Town, went home, and coaxed

his father out for a walk to Beech-hangar or the Downs above the

chalk-pit. Then back to tea, and a long and quiet smoke in the study.

In this matter he always had a faint resistance to overcome, part real,

part simulated: his father's excuse for not going being the curious one

that he was too busy.

"You forget that I'm a man of action now," he would say, the imp

dancing remotely in his blue eyes. "I've an official position."

It was true too in a sense. Edward Caspar, during Ernie's absence in

India, had been appointed a visitor to the workhouse at the back of

Rectory Walk. And there in that cess-pool of our civilization, into

which filtered drop by drop the sewage of all our defective social

processes, amid the derelicts of the vast ocean of Empire, prostitutes

sickening to death, the idiot offspring of incestuous intercourse, the

half-witted mother who had fallen a prey to the prowling male, the

decent girl who had succumbed to her own affections, the young man

broken in the industrial arena, the middle-aged who were not wanted,

the old for whom there was no place beside the fire at home, amid all

those of every age and class whom Society was too cruel to kill, and

not capable as yet of stimulating to life, Edward Caspar wandered

vaguely like a cloud, full of sunshine, blessing alike and blessed.

In his old-fashioned roomy tail-coat of a country gentleman, always

fresh, his beautiful linen, that showed Anne Caspar's care, his blue

tie of an artist running loosely through a gold ring, he became a

familiar figure in the wards of the Bastille, with his beard, his

spectacles, his morning air, radiating a mild warmth of love and pity.

Almost daily he might be seen, sitting at the bedside of some broken

boy picked up off the roads to be patched up and flung again under the

wheels of the Juggernaut car of modern Industrialism that had crushed

him, or listening to the tale of some ancient in corduroys--not seldom

according to his own account the scion of an illustrious but ruined

house--who had laboured on the land for sixty years, to be cast alive

into the cess-pool when he had been broken in the service of his

country.

All the inmates of the Bastille, from the unwanted babies in the

nursery, to the grannies and daddies propped up like dreadful dolls in

bed in the wards of the Infirmary, liked the visits of this shambling

man who said so little and looked so much.

The Lady Augusta Willcocks, a fierce and efficient Guardian, tramping

the wards in short skirts, broad-toed boots, and cropped woolly white

hair, cross-questioned the Master as to what Mr. Caspar said to the

inmates.

The Master, a kind man, something of a mystic himself, answered:

"He don't seem to say much. Mostly he listens."

"Oh, that's all right," said the lady with relief. "Only we don't want

a lot of nonsense talked in here."

"Seems to soothe em," continued the Master. "Afore now when I've had

them violent in the casuals' cells I've sent for him. They call him

the Prophet."

The Master smiled to himself as the masterful lady tramped on her way.

He had noticed that Edward Caspar invariably left the ward when the

Reverend Spink entered to hold Divine Service; and that if the

Archdeacon marched through the wards like a conqueror amid the dreadful

human debris of a battle-field the visitor, sitting quietly at the

bedside of some cast-away, never seemed to see him.

In spite of the pressure of affairs, Ernie rarely failed to lure his

father out into the sunshine on the hill.

Once, as they sat together by the roadside in Beech-hangar, Ernie

propounded a solemn question.

"Dad."

"Well."

"Didn't you once say there was a Spanish strain in the real old Sussex

peasant stock?"

The father eyed his son obliquely.

"So they say," he answered. "A Spanish galleon in the days of the

Armada wrecked in Ruther Haven. That's the story. And I'm inclined to

think there's something in it. Any way there's more foreign blood in

the genuine peasantry of Sussex and Kent than in all the rest of

England. Propinquity to the Continent, you see. All the refugees came

here first--Dutchmen in the days of Alva; Huguenots after the

Revocation; Royalists during the Terror; and smugglers of all sorts all

the time from the days of Cæsar."

That evening, as Anne Caspar brushed her hair in the bedroom before

going to bed, she heard her husband in the little dressing-room talking

to himself as his manner was.

She stayed the sweeping motion of her hand and listened.

"I met Mr. Pigott in Church Street this evening," she called. "He

stopped me and said, 'What's come to Ernie?'"

There was a silence; then the voice from next door answered,

"She's dark. That's all I know."

CHAPTER XXX

REALITY

A few days after his conversation with his father, Ernie took a

telegram up to the Third Floor in the afternoon, and was about to

descend when he heard a bedroom bell ring violently for the maid on

duty.

There was no maid visible.

He went along the corridor. At the end of it was a passage-landing

with a window looking over the sea.

On the window-sill Ruth was sitting in the sun, perched as a woman

riding, her work beside her.

She did not see him, and for a moment he watched her fascinated: the

lines of her figure, almost majestic for so young a woman; the dignity

of her face; the lovely curve of her neck and shoulders; the warmth of

her colouring. Her thimbled finger flashed to and fro; and the sun

caught her hair, simply massed beneath her cap, and revealing in its

blackness just a note of tan.

Every now and then, as the sea thumped and hissed and poured on the

fore-shore, she looked up.

There was for once a wonderful content upon her face, the look that

Ernie had often sought and never found there before. The strain had

vanished. This girl possessed her soul in love and peace for the

moment at least.

Ernie was reluctant to disturb her, for she gave him the impression of

one who prays.

"The bell's going, Ruth," he said at last gently.

She put down her work and dismounted from the sill in that swift

business-like way of hers. There was a rhythm about her every movement

that satisfied the deepest need of Ernie's soul.

"What number?" she asked.

"Seventy-seven."

Her face clouded.

It was the sodden Jew, clamant once more.

"I'll go," said Ernie.

It was no job of his, but go he did. And he was glad he had, for Soly

surpassed himself.

"You!" stertorously. "What good are you to me? Send that Spanish

gypsy here! She's the one I want. I like 'em brown."

Just outside the door Ernie met Céleste.

"He wants you, Miss," he said, and admired the readiness of his lie.

Then he walked thoughtfully back to Ruth, who had resumed her work.

"It's all right," he said shyly.

She lifted her face to him slowly, almost stealthily.

Then there flashed a lovely light into her eyes.

"Thank-you, Mr. Boots," she said.

He advanced a step on her.

"That ain't my name."

She hid again in her work.

"What is then?" she asked.

"Ernie," he said. "Call me that."

He was curiously peremptory, almost imperious.

She did not answer him--threading her needle deliberately against the

light.

Suddenly doors flung wide, and his whole being leapt forth as from a

furnace, caught her up, and rapt her in a living flame of love.

She seemed to feel it beating about her, devouring her, and stirred as

a tired bird stirs in its nest at night after a long flight.

Ernie was trembling till it seemed to him that his heels rat-a-tatting

on the floor must betray him.

Then he went on his way.

The transfiguring experience that comes perhaps once in a life-time to

the pure in heart had come to him in full flood. A new life was his,

sweeping away old land-marks, and bearing him he knew not whither. He

drifted with that mighty tide, content to be borne along. He had been

alive for twenty-five years, yet dead. Now he rose from the tomb, at

this his astounding Ascension-tide. In a second he had been rapt up

from the earth, had suffered miraculous conversion, and would never

again see life as he had once seen it.

It was curious, wonderful, and above all it revolutionized old values.

The men and women he met in the passage looked different, especially

the women.

They were coarse, commonplace.

Céleste passed him with a quip.

What she said he didn't know, but he thought how opaque and material

she was in such a spiritual world; and what a pity it was; and how

sorry he was for her.

Madame stopped him and gave him orders. He heard and carried them out.

But all the while this new spirit was at work on its own business in

the deeps of him. His intellect, a mere cockle-shell afloat on an

Ocean of Mind, dealt with the superficial mechanism of life.

_He_ was elsewhere. For the first time Ernie became aware of a Double

Life going on within him, of Two Minds, related, yet apart, each

pursuing its own ends.

He entered the room in the basement where the men cleaned the knives,

blacked the boots and ate their hurried meals. It was cool, almost

cavernous. He was amazed that he had never before seen beauty in this

bleak room, the beauty of the woods for which he longed.

He sat down and was glad.

About him were men of all nationalities, some in aprons, some in their

shirt-sleeves, some snatching a desultory snack, chattering or silent.

Ernie, aware of them, yet deep in himself, was conscious of two

impressions: These men were monkeys--and knew it; and they were Sons of

God--and as yet unconscious of it.

One of the men, a sallow Austrian with a stringy moustache, who went by

the name of Don John among his mates, put down the _Arbeiter Zeitung_

which he had been reading, watched Ernie awhile sardonically, and then

made a jeering remark to a neighbour, who replied.

Ernie caught the words "Third Floor."

Instantly he emerged from his deeps, his intellect alert, paramount,

and defensive.

Don John continued caressingly, his cheek bulging with cheese, and a

clasp-knife in his hand.

"Pluddy mug!" he jeered. "Thinks they're for him. They're for de

toffs on de top--not for _you_! You're unter-tog. Nozzing for

unter-tog in this world only de crumbs that _don't_ fall from de rich

man's table. De girls are for de Chairman Jews. They can buy em. Can

you?--Nice English girls are cheap."

CHAPTER XXXI

THE RIDE ON THE BUS

The Thursday following his great experience, Ernie went as usual to the

Redoubt which was the terminus of the bus that ran to Billing's Corner.

He was early; and there was as yet only one passenger on the roof, a

young woman simply dressed in black, her bare throat girt about with

yellow amber, and wearing a felt hat of terra-cotta colour.

She was sitting on the front seat.

The large and graceful indolence of her pose gave him pause.

He stayed on the last step, regarding her.

Then she turned her face sea-wards and he saw her profile.

Another moment and he stood above her.

"Ruth," he said.

She looked up at him.

"O, it's you, Ernie!" she answered quite simply, and without a thought

of coquetry.

His heart moved within him.

"That's a little better!" he muttered, and proceeded to sit down beside

her.

She made room for him, friendly and entirely unconscious.

They began to talk, and once she glanced at him from under her hat with

tranquil eyes that seemed to pour their soft light into his.

He held them with his own.

The two streams met and mingled in mysterious communion that thrilled

him till he trembled faintly.

He was the first to turn away.

"You look just all right," he said.

She was a changed girl. The restraint had left her. A new life danced

within her. She was quivering with it, almost communicative.

"I feel it," she answered joyously. "I'm off till ten. I'm going away

back home to Dad and Mother. I most in general doos o Sadadays if I

gets off."

She was broadening her speech again, as though to throw off the

corrupting town, and draw near once more to the country which had bred

her.

He heard her with delight; and answered her easily and in kind.

"Auston, aren't it?" he asked.

She eyed him slyly, taking his humour, and nodded.

"You got it," she said. "I just take bus to Billing's Corner; and then

'Lewes coach drops me at Turnpike short o B'rick. Then 'dis but little

better'n a mile to traipse down the valley. I was borrun in the River

House in the Brooks along o the White Bridge under the church. And

where I was borrun there my folks do still live. Pretty well beknown

in them paarts my folks be, I rack'n." She was almost chattering now.

And as her tongue resumed with joy the habit of babyhood a ripple of

deep mirth swam over her face, and spoke of profound inward content.

She became shy and confidential. "Just under the eaves outside the

room where I was borrun there's a martin's nest. And in the dark o

summer nights they wake and gurgle to emselves. That'll be the little

uns snugglin agin their mother's breast and thinkin how cosy. I do

just adore to listen to em. Kind o company like." She gurgled in her

turn, and then looked away abashed and blushing at the flow of her

confidences.

"That's where you was borrun, was it?" mocked Ernie. "No, it warn't

then. You was borrun in de corrun one morrun all forlorrun. How do I

know it? Cos you're same as I be. You're a country chap."

It was clear that she enjoyed his chaff.

"That's a sure thing, you may depend," she answered in that humming

voice of hers that seemed to resound long after she had finished

speaking. "It's bred in my blood. See dad's dad and his dad afoor him

dey were ox-herds in the home-farm in Ruther Valley. Dad went along o

the long-horns on the hill too when he was a lad. There's few teams

left now except only Mr. Gorringe's at Exeat. When dad's dad was a lad

it was pretty near ox-teams allwheres in Sussex--on the hill and on the

Levels. Then it come horrses; and prazendly it'll be machines. The

world moves faster nor it used to did one time o day, I expagd. Ya-as.

Cerdainly it doos."

The bus ran along the Esplanade to the pier, the sea shining on their

left. Then it swung down Cornfield Road, stopped at the Station, and

took the Old Road for Lewes. As it lurched under the Chestnuts into

Water Lane, the Downs were seen across Saffrons Croft through a screen

of elms.

"There they be!" cried Ernie, hailing them. "What d'you think of them

now?"

"Eh, but they're like mother and father to you, if you've been bred to

em," answered Ruth. "I just couldn't a-bear to be parted from them

nohows. They're Sussex--them and the sea. Sussex by the sea, my Miss

Caryll used to call it."

They travelled up the hill; and the girl feasted her eyes on the green

of Saffrons Croft.

"I allow the brown-birds holloa in them old ellums, dawn and dusk," she

murmured, talking more to herself than to her companion. "That's what

I misses by the sea more'n all--the song o birds. There's no loo like

for em--only the anonymous bushes. Reck'n that's where it is. They

like the loo'th, doos birds. But times I see a old jack-yearn flappin

along over the Levels like he'd all the time before him. And the

wheat-ears come from acrarst the sea and show the white of their tails

that carmical about Cuckoo-fair. Hap it'll be their first

landing-place. They must be tired. But there's not nigh the numbers

there was one time o day. When dad was a lad there was I dunna many

all along the Downs from Rottingdean to Friston."

The bus stopped, as always, at the _Star_.

Ernie, who felt the spirit of the show-man strong within him, pointed

out the Manor-house with a certain proprietary air.

"That's where Mr. Trupp lives," he explained. "They come from all over

the world to see him. He's our doctor. Has been this thirty year.

Dad was one of the first in Old Town to have him. Give him his start,

as you might say."

"He's a nice gentleman surely," said Ruth.

"Do you know him then?" asked Ernie, a thought jealously.

"I've knaw'd him all my life," answered the other. "He attends the

Squire and family. He looked after my Miss Caryll till she died; and

then me when I took bad after her death. Eh, but he was a kind

gentleman."

"He brought me into the world," said Ernie with an air of finality, the

desire to swagger still strong upon him. "He took the inside out of

the Tsar of Dobrudja and he brought me into the world. That's what Mr.

Trupp done."

She turned a deep brown eye on him.

"He done well," she said quietly.

Then they both laughed.

At Billing's Corner he helped her off the bus and on to the four-horse

char-a-banc waiting outside the _Billing Arms_.

"Last char-a-banc home," said Ernie authoritatively. "Half after nine

or so. I'll look out."

He stood beneath her in the dust.

With her jet-black hair, her colouring of a ripe peach, and those soft

swarthy eyes that streamed down upon him, she perched above him,

stately, mocking, mysterious.

He could not make her out. She was at once so simple and so elusive in

her royal way. She teased, startled, and exalted him; she calmed and

maddened him.

"Thank you, Mr. Caspar," came the quiet voice from on high.

"Call me, Ernie," he ordered, this strange passion to domineer still

overmastering him.

She gazed at him with those quiet ironical eyes of hers.

Then the char-a-banc moved on.

CHAPTER XXXII

ON THE HILL

That afternoon Ernie and his father sauntered up to the chalk-pit, and

lay on the green hill-side above it in the sun.

Ernie plucked the bents and chewed them.

"Dad," he began at last.

"Yes."

"What is love?"

Once years ago at a dance in Grosvenor Square, Edward Caspar had

himself for a moment floated out on to the ocean of an immense and

wonderful new life. Thereafter he had been captured, as such

easy-going dreamy creatures are, by one of the fiercer sex. He

respected his wife, admired her beauty, owed her much, and was aware of

it; but for all her strength of character Anne had found herself from

the start of her married relations with her husband in that position of

secret moral inferiority which is even to-day, perhaps as the result of

an age-long inheritance of tradition, the accustomed doom of the woman

who has taken the initiative in matters of sex. Moreover as the years

went by the doom grew always more oppressive, and her husband more

remote....

Edward answered his son,

"A door opens," he said slowly. "And you see."

"What d'you see?" persisted the young man.

His father made a curious undulating motion with his hand.

"_The Infinite that lends

A Yonder to all ends,_"

he said after a pause, and gestured across the Weald stretched beneath

them.

"I can see it," he mused, "and hear it. So can you. It's a Tide--like

the wind in willow leaves. It's silvery and it rustles. It's

there--and here--and everywhere. The scientists call it ether. So it

is--from their point of view. If you approach it from the other

side--our side--it's what you said. It goes like so--like a billow."

With fine long-fingered hand he resumed that curious rhythmic motion of

his. "I once heard somebody compare Humanity to an Undulating Wave.

So it is, because it's the highest expression of _That_. It made us,

and is us. All that about the Everlasting Arms which Mr. Pigott, and

the Archdeacon, and your Salvation Joe talk about, it's all

true--literally true. Only they put it crudely; and for most of them

it's an opinion and not a fact of experience--that a man can prove for

himself at any moment." He paused. "Love is Recognition--often

instantaneous. It is the I-within recognizes the Me-without."

He was sitting up now, bare-headed. A lovely colour flushed his frail

complexion. To Ernie, watching his scant hair, he seemed wonderfully

innocent and pure: a child talking with the wisdom of an old man.

Then his father spoke again with an emphasis that was almost startling.

"It's the profound simplicity of life that baffles us," he said. "It's

too simple for us to understand. Our brains aren't big enough--as

yet." He was becoming strangely excited. Ernie thought he understood

now the source of that exalted look of his father's. "But we shall

some day. Already there has been One Man who did. Think of it! We

crucified Him for it of course. We had to. He was climbing too far

a-head: so we plucked him back to earth. You mustn't go too far ahead

of the Herd. They won't stand it. But He knew: He trusted It: He

could float in It--like that kittiwake, ascending into heaven,

descending into hell, at will."

He lay back on the turf, exhausted, his hat over his eyes, his hands on

the turf beside him.

"Ernie."

"Yes, dad."

"Have you felt the Tide?"

"I think so."

The old man put his hand upon his son's.

"Let it come, Boy-lad," he said. "Trust it to do the work. All our

mistakes are due to the same thing."

"What's that?" asked Ernie.

"Trying to interfere," answered the other. "Follow!--that's our human

part."

That evening, after supper, before he left, Ernie asked his mother

shyly for some roses. She took him out into the front-garden, tiny as

it was trim, and gave him of her best.

Afterwards, as he walked away, she stood at the little gate and watched

him, a beautiful look in her eyes. Then she wiped her shoes very

carefully, and turned into the house.

The study-door was open, and she peeped in.

Her husband was sitting as always in the bow, looking out towards the

trees stirring in the Rectory garden.

Anne stared at him.

"Has he said anything to you?" she asked at last in the voice that grew

always more grumbling and ungracious with the years.

"Not yet," her husband answered.

"Well, it's about time," Anne grumbled. "Only I wish I'd had the

choosing of her."

"Ernie'll choose all right," Edward answered in the peculiar crisp way

he sometimes now adopted. "You needn't worry about him."

Whether there was a faint emphasis on the pronoun or not, Anne answered

with asperity,

"And you needn't worry about Alf for that matter. He's far too set on

himself to find room for a wife."

Ernie was at Billing's Corner half an hour before the Lewes char-a-banc

was due, hanging about at the top of the rise, looking along the white

road that runs past Moot Farm under the long swell of the escorting

hills.

It was a perfect evening of late May. The sun had already sunk in

darkened majesty against the West when the familiar cloud of dust

betokened the approach of the four-horse team.

Ruth was sitting on the box beside the driver. Ernie recognized her

from afar by the splotch of colour made by her hat, and was filled with

an almost overpowering content.

The horses sprang the rise at a canter, the conductor blowing a

flourish on his horn. The girl's hand was to her hat, and her head

bowed to the wind. The char-a-banc drew up with a swagger in the open

space before the _Billing Arms_.

She was smiling down at him.

Ernie lifted his cap: it was a trick he had from his father. No one

had ever paid the girl that common courtesy before, and she beamed upon

him.

The other passengers were descending by the steps.

Ernie advanced lordly.

"This way!" he ordered, and laid his roses on the driver's foot-board.

"Don't wait for them! Put your foot on the wheel! Give over your

hand! Now your left foot here!"

For the first time in his life he felt masterful. Powers in him, of

which he had possessed no previous knowledge, were thrusting through

the ice of the customary.

Ruth obeyed.

She slipped her foot into his hand. It was slight, not small, yet

beautifully compact.

"It's dusty," she warned him.

"No, it ain't," he answered, still in his high mood.

He gripped it firmly. Her cool hand was in his.

Then she trusted her whole weight to him.

He felt his strength tried and answering to the test; and rejoiced in

it. So did she.

For a moment he balanced her, lifted her even, let her feel the power

of his manhood. Then he lowered her swiftly.

It was well, even gracefully done.

Neither spoke; Ernie took his roses from the feet of the driver, who

looked down with approval.

"Go on!" he said sturdily. "That's the way!"

The motor-bus that was to take them back to the hotel was turning in

the open space before the public-house.

Without a word they climbed on to the top.

The bus dropped down Church Street, past the long-backed church with

its square tower standing on the grave-strewn mound solemn in the

growing dusk.

Ernie placed his roses in Ruth's lap.

Her eyes were shining, her voice soft.

"For me?" she asked in her deep thrilling voice.

For a second he laid his hand on hers.

"Oh, they are beauties!" She buried her face in them. "My Miss Caryll

learned me the names of a tidy few o them when we was in the

Dower-house afoor she come to Beachbourne," she said.

A motor-car stood at Mr. Trupp's door as the bus reached the _Star_.

The two talked quietly of the famous surgeon, their heads together.

The chauffeur got down from the Doctor's car and crossed slowly towards

the bus.

He was small and wore black gaiters that glittered in the lamp-light

like a wet slug.

He stood beneath them in the road, and then gave a low whistle.

Ernie looked down.

Alf was leering up at him.

CHAPTER XXXIII

UNDER THE STARS

The bus rolled on, past Saffrons Croft, the stars now twittering in the

branches of the elms.

"Who was that?" asked Ruth.

"My brother," answered Ernie, a thought surlily.

"He doesn't favour you," said Ruth after a pause.

"No," answered Ernie. "He's a master-man now, Alf is. Got his own

garage and men working for him and all. He drives for Mr. Trupp."

At the pier, at Ernie's suggestion, they got down. It was dark now;

the sea moon-silvered and still.

They walked along, rubbing elbows. Ernie broke the silence, to ask a

question that had long haunted him.

"Ruth," he said, "however did you come into service at the

Hohenzollern?"

Both of them had unconsciously resumed the accent of the town as they

returned to the town.

Ruth told him simply and without reserve.

She had been maid to Squire Caryll's sister at the Dowerhouse in

Aldwoldston. Her mistress had been taken ill, and Mr. Trupp had

ordered her to Beachbourne.

"We was going to the Grand," Ruth told him. "But it was full. So

cardingly we went to the Hohenzollern till the Grand could have us.

And once there we stayed there two years--till she died. See Mr. Trupp

likes the Hotel for his patients. There's the lawns straight onto the

sea; and the Invalids' Corner by the anonymous hedge he got Madame to

build."

Madame had throughout been kind, so kind--first to her mistress and

then to her; for after Miss Caryll's death Ruth had broken down from

over-strain. The Manageress and Mr. Trupp had pulled her through.

Then when she came round, Madame, who was clearly fond of the girl, had

kept her on as personal maid, "cosseting me," said Ruth with a little

laugh, "like a bottle-lamb." At Easter, when the crush came, and Ruth

was quite recovered, Madame had asked her to go to the Third Floor to

help, saying she would take her back if the girl didn't like it.

"I went tempory to oblige Madame," Ruth explained. "I'd do a lot for

her. She's been that kind."

Ruth had been there some weeks now, too lazy or too shy to take the

step that would involve another change.

"I don't ardly like to see you there, Ruth," said Ernie gently. "I

don't really."

She lifted her face to him in the darkness.

"Where?"

"The Third Floor."

Ruth turned her face to him. Her wall was down. She was talking

intimately almost as a woman to a woman she trusts.

"I don't hardly myself," she said in the musing voice of the disturbed.

"The gentlemen are that funny. Seem scarcely respectable, some of em.

And the couples too. Might not be married the way they go on. London,

I suppose."

He glanced at her covertly.

She met his eyes--so frank, so fearless.

What a man of the world Ernie felt beside this white ewe-lamb straying

far from the fold in the hollow of its native coombe!

They were skirting now the fosse of the Redoubt.

Before them on the shore rose the great Hotel, like a brilliantly

lighted mausoleum, blocking out a square patch of stars.

They made towards it.

"Ruth," said Ernie quietly, "if I was you I'd get Madame to change you.

Second Floor's more your sort. More steadified. There's a Bishop

there now and his wife and three-four daughters or so. Go to bed at

ten, and get up at seven. I can hear em all a-snorin in chorus like so

many hoggets in a stye when I take the lift down last turn at night."

"Hap I will," said Ruth thoughtfully. "Madame'd take me back herself,

only she's got a German maid now, and I wouldn't do anything to put

Madame out for worlds."

A struggle was taking place in Ernie's heart. If Ruth left the Third

Floor for the Second he would still see her sometimes. If she left the

Hotel altogether he might lose her.

"Ruth," he said at last. "I sometimes wonder why you stay on there at

all."

She glanced at him mischievously.

"Shall I tell you?" she asked, her voice deeper than ever.

"Yes."

"It's the bathin. I just do adore the swimmin. Madame arranges it

nice for the maids. And the season's coming on. We start next week if

this weather holds. When the season's over I shall cut my stick--if so

be Madame wasn't to want me for her own maid again."

She chuckled at her own cunning.

They came to the servants' gate.

Ernie stopped.

"Good-bye, Ruth," he said. "I'll say good-night."

She looked up at him surprised.

"Aren't you comin then?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "But I'm just a-goin to finish my fag first."

She gave him a delicious look.

Innocent as she was, she understood his consideration and thanked him

for it mutely.

She gave him her hand. He took it, shook it, and held it awhile, as

though weighing it. It was firm and very capable.

Swiftly he lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

She made no protest, looking at him with kind eyes that knew no thought

of coquetry.

Then she vanished with her flowers.

He gave her five minutes, and then followed her.

Ruth had been detained in the basement, and was vanishing up the

back-stairs as he entered, her roses in her hand.

Don John, the Austrian, with his dingy face and greasy moustache,

winked at Ernie as he passed.

"Peach," he whispered. "Don't you wish you ad the pickin of her?"

BOOK V

CAPTAIN ROYAL