ERNIE LEAVES THE HOTEL
The winter came and began to go.
In February the celandine peeped in the beech-woods in the coombe, and
the Lords and Ladies began to unfurl their leaves, while in the little
garden in Rectory Walk daffodils made a brave show.
All through the dark months Ernie had only caught an occasional glimpse
of Ruth. Now he lost sight of her entirely.
One afternoon Céleste stopped him on the Third Floor.
She looked at him curiously, with a touch of gauche diffidence he had
never marked in her before.
"Was you very fond of her then, Ernie?" she asked quietly.
"Who?" he inquired, surprised.
"Ruth."
Ernie stared at her.
"What's happened?"
"She's gone."
"When?"
"Some time since. Afore Christmas."
He saw that Céleste, the kindest of creatures, was genuinely moved.
She turned her back, and moved to the window, biting her handkerchief
to restrain her tears.
"Of course she'd no business here at all," she sobbed. "She was an
innocent. She didn't know nothing. If she'd mixed with us girls we
could anyway have learned her enough to keep her out of trouble. But
she was that proud. Kept herself to herself."
Ernie devoured her with dark eyes.
"Where's she gone?" he asked.
"London, I expect," Céleste answered. "They always do."
The flighty little creature dried her eyes and spread her wings in the
sun once more. "Poor old Ern!" she cried. "But there's better fish in
the sea than ever came out of it, as the sayin is.... I'm not aimin at
meself, mind!" she added coquettishly.
Ernie, if he heard her badinage, ignored it. As always, where his
heart was concerned, he struck instantly and without fear.
He walked along the corridor and knocked at Madame's door.
She was, as usual, smoking.
"What is it, Caspar?" she asked kindly.
Ernie came to the point with almost brutal directness.
"Ruth Boam, 'm."
Madame studied her rings.
"She has left--while I was gone away," she said after a pause. "I am
sorry. She was nice gurl."
Madame had only just returned from her annual visit to the sister-hotel
at Brussels.
"Could you tell me where she's gone, 'm?"
Quite suddenly her large fair face wrought. She rose out of the cloud
of her own smoke, and just as Céleste had done a few minutes before,
went to the window and looked out. Her great shoulders heaved.
"I don't know," she said. "She has not gone home to Aldwoldston. I
haf written." Then with an astonishing display of emotion:
"That man!" she cried. "I will never haf that man in my Hotels any
mores."
Ernie retired, seeking and dissatisfied.
The news of his search soon spread.
In the boot-room next day, when the men were at their "Elevens," Don
John met him with a jeer as he entered.
"Don't he know then?" mocked the Austrian.
"Know what?" asked Ernie.
"Where she's gone?"
Ernie put down his bread and cheese.
"Where has she gone, then?"
"Queen Charlotte's, Marylebone."
"What's Queen Charlotte's?" asked Ernie, the simple.
A rumble of cruel laughter went round the room.
"Layin-in hospital," said Don John, "for English gurls the Chairman
Jews have sported with."
Ernie rose. Very deliberately he took off his apron.
"Shut the door, will you?" he said in a curious white calm. "Thank
you, Bill. Now take his knife from him, some of you. You know these
bloody aliens."
A silence had fallen on all.
"What's it all about?" tittered Don John, trying to brave it out.
"Arf a mo," said Ernie, rolling up his sleeves leisurely, "and then
I'll show you. Now chuck him out into the ring. I thank you, Bert."
In the Hotel the feeling between the aliens and the Englishmen ran
high; and the latter obeyed Ernie's injunction with a will all the more
because the fame of Ernie's left-handed punch had reached the Hotel
from Old Town long since.
Don John didn't like it, and he liked it less when Ernie began on him
in all seriousness.
One of the foreigners slipped out.
Two minutes later Salvation Joe, magnificent in his red jersey,
shouldered into the room.
"What's all this then?" he growled in his voice of a drum-major.
"Thought you was a Christian, Caspar?"
Don John was spitting blood over the sink.
Ernie stood in the middle of the floor, his head a little forward,
ignoring the head-porter, his fists still milling the air with a
rhythmic purposefulness that was almost dreadful.
"Yes, I'm a Christian all right," he replied in musing voice. "It is
more blesseder to give than to receive. I've give your friend a
middlin bunt, and there's more where the same come from. He's only got
to arst for it."
Salvation Joe marched away to report to the Manager.
"And went on after I'd spoken," he said. "Saucy with it too."
Christmas was over; Easter some weeks away; things were very slack.
The Manager was a thick young German with wavy black hair parted in the
middle. He now sent for Ernie.
"You can go at the end of your month," he said. "I'm sick of it."
"You ain't the only one," retorted Ernie. "I'll go now."
"Then you'll go without your wages," replied the Manager.
Ernie went upstairs to his dormitory, dressed, gathered his few
belongings, and came downstairs deliberately and with dignity.
He felt exalted.
Salvation Joe met him with a sardonic smile.
"What, reelly goin?" he asked.
Ernie experienced quite suddenly an immeasurable superiority to the
head-porter.
"I am, Mr. Conklin."
"Without your wages?"
"I'll leave them to you, Mr. Conklin," said Ernie quietly. "They're
the wages of sin. This place is a brothel. And your Christ is my
Devil."
Leisurely, with a certain joy in his heart, and his bundle in his hand,
he crossed the road to the Redoubt and climbed the motor-bus for Old
Town.
As he did so the memory of a like journey with a companion at his side
was strong upon him.
Somehow he had a feeling that Ruth would be on the top, awaiting him.
Standing on the steps he peeped warily.
She was not there; and his heart, that had been soaring, crashed to
earth.
Then he climbed up into the bleak unsympathetic sky. All around him
were benches empty, ugly, comfortless. And looking back, he was aware
of Salvation Joe standing with arms folded across his scarlet paunch,
eructating on the steps of the Hotel.
BOOK VI
THE QUEST
CHAPTER XLV
OLD MUS BOAM
Ernie was not adventurous except where his heart was concerned.
He had the homing tendency of the affectionate nature.
When he left the Hohenzollern Hotel in Sea-gate he made straight as a
bird for Old Town. But he did not go to Rectory Walk. He was out of
work now, at the slack season of the year, too. He knew very well what
his brother Alf's attitude towards him would be, and was by no means
certain of his mother's: for she, too, worshipped success and
efficiency in all men but the one dependent on her.
Therefore he went to an old school-fellow of his, married now, and
established in the Moot at the back of the _Star_, and made
arrangements to lodge with him.
His immediate future was secure, for he still had a pound or two in
hand. And long ago he had adopted the outlook on life of the class
which had absorbed him--an outlook natural to them, because inevitable,
and acquired by him--the outlook that sees To-day but shuts its eyes to
save itself from To-morrow.
Old Town is small and has long ears. It was soon known that Ernie
Caspar was "out," and the cause of his dismissal was discussed by all
and hinted at by not a few.
Alf, sitting behind his wheel at Mr. Trupp's door, was one of the first
to note his brother hanging about the street-corner.
He reported the fact to his mother.
"He's back on us," he said briefly.
"Who is?"
"Ernie." He laughed bitterly as he chewed his cigarette. "Lost his
job again and turned corner-boy. Takes his stand opposite the _Star_
so everybody may know he's my brother."
Mrs. Caspar banged the pans upon the range.
"Why's he lost his job?" violently.
Alf lifted his hand to his mouth.
His mother eyed him, and Alf felt criticism in her stare.
"I see Joe Conklin, the head-porter at the Hotel," he said. "They give
him one or two chances. But it was all no good. Never is with that
sort."
Anne Caspar looked at him sharply.
"Are you tellin the tale, Alfred?"
Her son looked up fiercely.
"Why ain't he come home then?--Answer that."
"He did come home Saturday same as usual to take dad a walk."
"That's his cunning--to bluff you he wasn't out," jeered Alf. "He's
lodging in Borough Lane. Has been ten days past. Mrs. Ticehurt told
the Reverend Spink. If he done nothing he ain't ashamed of, why not
come home?"
To do her justice, Anne Caspar was convinced against her will; but
subsequent cogitation caused her to accept Alfred's story as true.
She felt that Ernie had deceived her. Why had he not told her that he
was out when he came as usual on Saturday for his dad?
Yet in reality the answer was very simple. It was that Ernie chose to
keep his troubles to himself.
Thereafter mother and son, by tacit consent, avoided each other in the
steep streets of Old Town; and when Ernie called next Saturday he found
the kitchen-door locked against him.
He was not surprised, nor indeed greatly grieved. His heart was high
and very steady as he turned into his father's study. The winter had
tried the old man, who was no longer now able to take the hill as
formerly. Instead the pair dawdled along to Beech-hangar; and there,
sitting among the tree-roots, under the fine web of winter beech-twigs,
Ernie told his father the essential fact about his love.
"I've lost her, dad," he said in his simple way.
The old man's blue eyes, that seemed to brighten as his body dulled,
shone on him mysteriously.
"Feel for her," he said, reaching out his hands like a blind man.
"You'll find her." He added after a pause. "I don't think she's far."
Ernie chewed a grass-blade.
"I shall find her," he said with quiet confidence, "because my heart
ain't fell down--and won't."
The old man was still blind and feeling.
"Spin," he said. "Then pounce."
Ernie nodded.
"That's it, and sooner or later my fly'll fall into the web."
"It must," said the other, "if you keep on spinning till you cover the
uttermost parts of heaven and earth."
His father's words, as always, made a deep impression on Ernie's
suggestible mind.
Ruth was not far: dad had said so; and dad knew.
Next day was Sunday. He determined to walk over the hill to
Aldwoldston to see what he could find.
True, Madame at the Hotel had told him that the girl had not gone home;
but did Madame know?
He started early, passed Moot Farm, where the turkey-cocks, stately and
with spreading tails, played that they were peacocks, and disdained him
for a vulgar fellow in spite of old acquaintance.
It was February, and the beeches in the coombe at the back of Ratton
Hall had not yet begun to warm and colour with the rising sap. The
feel of the turf beneath his feet, the glimpse of shrouded waters
beyond the Seven Sisters, uplifted and inspired him as of old.
He could conquer; he could find.
Descending the long slope into Cuckmere, he crossed the road at the
racing-stables, took the hill again, and marched along, his head in the
sky, and a song on his lips, to greet that of the lark pouring down on
him from the unbroken dimness of the heavens.
It was still early as he dropped down the bare bleak flank of
Wind-hover, scrawled upon with gorse; and came over the cultivated
foot-hills into the valley, bright with brooks and the narrow Ruther
that winds like a silver slug down the green-way towards the sea.
He crossed the stream by a white hand-bridge, passed along an upraised
path under an avenue of willows, across the open field called Parson's
Tye; up the narrow chapel-lane between back-gardens and high walls,
into Aldwoldston High Street, curling narrow as a defile between
crowding houses, yellow-washed, brown-timbered, amber-tiled.
Conspicuous by its air of age and dignity stood out the _Lamb_, swarthy
as the smugglers who once haunted it; a mass of black timber won,
perhaps, from high-beaked galleons in Elizabethan days, with small
projecting upper windows through the leaded panes of which eyes watched
the street of old, while ears strained for the clatter of the hoofs of
tub-laden pack-horses hard-driven from the Haven in the darks. A roof
of Horsham slats bowed it to earth; while a huge red ship's
figure-head, scarred and hideous as an ogre, propped with its dreadful
bulk the corner of the street as it had done for the hundred and fifty
years since the vessel of which it was the guardian and the god had
been lured to destruction against the ghastly wall of the Seven
Sisters. And the carvings, quaint and coloured, on the centre-board
reminded Ernie that his father, when once of old their rambles had
taken them thus far, had told him that the inn had been in days gone by
a sanctuary under the jurisdiction of the Abbot of Battle and the next
house of call after the _Star_ at Beachbourne for pilgrims on their way
from Pevensey to visit the shrine and relics of holy St.
Richard-de-la-Wych at Chichester.
Just beyond the _Lamb_ in the little market-square, filled almost by a
solitary chestnut-tree, stood the Cross.
Around it, their backs against the brick pediment, gathered the village
worthies as they and their fathers had gathered at that hour, under
those skies, amid those hills, on Sabbath mornings for centuries
innumerable. Standing round the four sides of it, men all, in Sunday
negligé and easy attitudes, buttressing the Cross, they smoked and
chewed and spat and ruminated. On the fringe of the centre-piece were
groups of youths and boys, silent as their elders and as absorbed,
whose age and worth did not yet entitle them to a place among the
buttresses. No women or girls joined the sacred circle. These stood
in the doors of their houses round the square, or sat on their
doorsteps, or peeped through the low latticed windows of the
_Smugglers' House_ at their masters expectorating round the Cross.
But for a little white terrier, curled on the pediment at his owner's
back, who bit his flank with furious zeal, Ernie could have believed
that here was a group of rustic statuary set up appropriately to embody
the spirit of the place.
A twinkle lurking in his eyes, he asked the most ancient of the
buttresses the way to Mr. Boam's cottage.
Very slowly the group stirred to life with grunts, groans, and a
shuffling of feet.
Then the ancient one removed his pipe, and, after a preliminary
exercise, spoke.
"Old Mus Boam, t' chapel-maaster," he said. "Down River Lane yarnder.
Frogs' Hall in t' Brooks. I expagt yo'll find he a-settin on his
bricks. Most generally doos o Sunday. For why? Ca'an't get no
furderer dese day, I rack'n. Ate up with rheumatiz, he am. Ca'an't
goo to Chapel. So Chapel has to goo to he!--he!--he!----" A jest
clearly almost as old as the toothless one who made it.
Ernie dropped down River Lane into the valley again. Just behind the
willows at the foot of the lane stood a yellow-washed cottage, with a
high-pitched roof like a truncated spire.
Sheltering the door from the sea-winds was a fine bay-tree, and in
front of the house a little space of bricks on which sat an old man
looking out across the stream towards Wind-hover's bare dun flank, pale
in the wintry sun.
He, too, seemed pale and wintry, sitting there, one big hand on his
ash-stick: a beautiful old fellow, very tall and sparse, his ruffled
beard curling stubbornly up from beneath his chin towards the long
shaven upper lip that added severity to his natural dignity.
There was no question where Ruth got her stature or her bearing from,
if her colouring was all her own.
Ernie felt awkward in the presence of the still old man, but he
introduced himself shyly as one who had been in service with Ruth at
the Hotel.
Mus Boam eyed him keenly, kindly, but with obvious reserve.
"She'll ha left there now, I expagd," he said briefly, and
called--"Mother!"
A woman came to the door. She was big, too, with the warm skin of her
daughter, and the same distinguished foreign air. Her hair was
snow-white, her eye-brows black, her eyes and colouring of the South.
Surely she was descended from some Spanish adventurer who had made of
Ruther Haven a base for raids up the valley into the Weald. But
England, it was clear, and Sussex in particular, had impressed their
staid and ponderous selves upon the riotous foreign blood to the
exclusion of all else. A gypsy queen, the mother of Madonnas, bred
among the Baptists and saturated with their faith, there was about her
the same atmosphere of large and quiet strength that characterized her
man. And Ernie could well understand that the pair had taught chapel,
as Ruth had once told him, for thirty years in the building at the back.
Mrs. Boam stood in the door and looked at the visitor.
He noticed at once about her the same cloud of reserve that he had
remarked in her husband.
She was clearly too well-bred to show hostility, but equally clearly
she was exercising restraint.
"She'll ha gone into service," she said in deep and humming voice, like
an echo of her daughter's, but somewhat dulled and flat with wear.
"In Beachbourne?" asked Ernie.
"Of course we doosn't see her as often as we used when she was at the
Hotel. D'idn't to be expected, surely," said the mother parrying.
"And it bein winter and all," continued the old man, taking up the
tale. "No coaches at this time o year. And dis a tidy traipse over
the hill for a maid." He turned the conversation. "You'll ha walked,
Mr., to judge from yer boots." ...
Ernie trudged home over the greasy hills with certain clear impressions
in his mind.
The old folk were anxious: they did not know where Ruth was: and they
would not talk.
Was she writing?
Was she still in Beachbourne?
CHAPTER XLVI
ERNIE TURNS PHILOSOPHER
Ernie was now steadily ablaze. His heart was set; his purpose
resolved; there was no faltering in his faith. The armour in which his
spirit was cased revealed no fissures under strain. He was amazed at
his own strength, and at the illimitable resources on which he could
draw at will.
People who saw him at this time, swept by the March winds, haggard and
pinched at the _Star_ corner, wondered at the flame of determination
burning in his face.
"He seems always waiting for some one," said Elsie Pigott, who, like
many another woman, was haunted by his wistful eyes at night.
"Perhaps he is," answered Mrs. Trupp.
It was the slackest season of the year--between Christmas and Easter;
and there was no work obtainable. Building was held up by the frosts;
visitors were sporadic; and in the East-end a strike of engineers in
the great railway shops had dislocated trade.
Elsie Pigott pleaded with her husband for her favourite; but for once
she could not tease or taunt the Manager of the Southdown Transport
Company in acquiescence with her wishes.
"No," he said, sturdily, "if he wants my help he must come and ask for
it. Last time I offered him a job he snubbed me brutally. I've got my
self-respect same as others."
That evening she came to his door.
"Please, sir," she said, dropping a curtsey, "Mr. Ernest Caspar!--will
you see him?"
He scowled at her over his _Christian Commonwealth_.
"You've done this," he said.
"No, sir," demurely bobbing. "He came."
"Show him in."
Ernie entered, shining and unshorn, a tatterdemalion with the face of a
saint.
The old schoolmaster thought how like his father he was growing: the
same untidy garden of flesh, the same spirit at work behind the weeds.
"Well," he said, laying down his paper, "I don't see much of you at
chapel these days."
Ernie smiled.
"I'm in chapel all the time, sir," he said. "That's what I come about.
I wanted you to know." He sat down suddenly. "You know what you used
to tell me about prayer when I was a nipper. _Ask, and it shall be
given you_, and that." He leaned forward. "That's true--every word of
it. You can have what you want for the askin--if you'll wait. Now I
want something; and I shall get it in time, because I'll be faithful."
Mr. Pigott looked into the rapt eager eyes of the scare-crow opposite
him.
For some reason he felt humiliated, even afraid; and, man-like, he
concealed his qualms behind an added gruffness.
"Your father's been talking to you," he said.
"Ah," said Ernie. "But I been talking to myself, too. No one else
can't teach you, only yourself." He began to expound his philosophy
with tapping finger in the half-hushed voice of the priest revealing
the mysteries of life and death to the neophyte. "See there's two
minds in Man," he began. "There's the Big Mind and the Little One.
The Big Mind's like a Great Dream--it's beautiful, like clouds, but it
can't do much by itself: the Little Mind's like a tintack, sharp and to
the point. Now Alf's got the one kind of Mind, and me and Dad the
other. This here Little Mind helps you to get on: it thinks it's on
its own, being conceited. But the Big Mind behind does the real work."
His eyes burned. He spoke with a solemnity, a conviction that was
overwhelming.
Mr. Pigott was awed in spite of himself.
"The Little Mind's clever like Alf. And the Big Mind's wise like your
father. That's it, is it?" he said lamely.
Ernie nodded.
"And what about Mr. Trupp?" the other inquired.
"Ah," said Ernie, with enthusiasm, "he's a great man, Mr. Trupp is. He
lives by both Minds--as a full man should. He don't neglect neether.
They're meant to work together. Ye see the Little Mind should be like
a lantern for the Big Mind to work with--like a miner's lamp in the pit
like. It's got no real life of its own--only what the miner chooses to
give it. Most folks neglect one or the other. Dad and me neglect the
Little Mind--so we don't do much; but we aren't afraid of nothin. Alf,
now, he neglects the Big; so he's in fear of his life always, and good
cause why, too. For he lives by the Little Mind. And sooner or later
the Little Mind'll go out snuff. And then where'll Alf be?"
Elsie Pigott, in an apron, stood in the door.
"We're discussing prayer," her husband informed her.
"Indeed," said the lady. "And now you'll discuss a plate of beef. At
least Ernie will."
The starveling rose.
"No, thank you, 'm," he said.
"Aren't you hungry then?" asked the young woman.
"Not as I'm aware of," laughed Ernie.
"Nonsense," the other answered, "you can live by the Spirit, but not on
it." And she took him firmly by the arm and led him into the kitchen.
Her guest established, she returned to her husband.
"Have you found him a job, Samuel Pigott?" she asked.
"I have not, Elsie Pigott. Nor has he asked me for one."
"Mr. Pigott," his wife retorted, "if you were not twenty years my
senior I should call you the beast you undoubtedly are."
All the same, when his wife had gone to bed that night, Mr. Pigott rang
up the Hohenzollern Hotel and asked the Manager why Ernie had been
dismissed.
"Got fighting drunk," replied the Manager. "He'd been warned before."
After that Mr. Pigott set his face like a flint.
"It's now or never," he admitted to Mr. Trupp, and added reluctantly,
"There may be something in your Big Stick sometimes, after all."
CHAPTER XLVII
ALF TRIES TO HELP
Ernie was now in a bad way materially.
He became seedy and slipshod, with hollow eyes, and clothes that hung
loosely upon his diminishing frame.
Alf resented his presence and appearance as a personal injury.
"Does it to spite me, it's my belief," he told his mother furiously.
"Always at the _Star_ corner lookin like a scare-crow and askin for
pity. A fair disgrace on the family. Of course all the folks want to
know why I don't help him. What's the good of helping him? He's the
sort the more you help the less he'll help himself. Help him downhill,
as Reverend Spink says."
The thing became a scandal locally, and Anne Caspar shared something of
the feeling of her younger son.
If Ern must starve, why do it at her door?
Happily her husband was, as always, blind to what was going on beneath
his nose; and so long as he was not disturbed Anne could stifle any
pangs of conscience that might trouble her.
Alf, on the other hand, had no pangs to stifle: for to the hardness of
the egoist he added the mercilessness of the degenerate. His mental
attitude towards the weak was that of the lower animals towards the
wounded of their kind. He wanted them out of the way. Indeed, but for
his ever-present sense of the Man in Blue at the corner of the street
he would have dealt with Ernie, dragging a broken wing, as the maimed
rook is dealt with by its mates.
He eased himself, however, and took characteristic revenge on his
brother for the spiritual wrongs that the needy can inflict upon the
prosperous by direct action.
At a meeting of the Church of England Men's Society in Old Town, he
asked in laboured words and with obvious emotion for the prayers of
those present for "a dear one who had gone astrye"; squeezing his eyes
and contorting his features in a fashion that led certain ladies of the
congregation of St. Michael to whisper among themselves that Mr. Caspar
was a very earnest young man.
Even in the C.E.M.S. Alf had few friends and some enemies; and Ernie
heard from one of these--whom a sense of duty had compelled to
speak--what had passed at the meeting in the Church-room.
Ernie accordingly stopped his brother in the street next day. He
looked white and dangerous. Alf knew that look and halted. His heart,
too, brought up with a jolt, and then began to patter furiously.
"What's all this, then?" began Ernie, breathing heavily through his
nose.
"What's what?"
"At the Men's Society last night. Can't do nothing to help your
brother...."
Alf held up a deprecatory hand.
"You don't know what you're talkin about, Ernest," he said solemnly.
"I'm doin more for you nor what you know."
Ernie came closer. There was in his eyes a surprising flash and
glitter as of steel suddenly unsheathed; and he was kneading his hands.
Ern's "punch" had been famous in certain circles in Old Town long
before he went into the Army.
Now Alf had a spot upon his soul. He, too, possessed a weakness of a
sort that Civilization in its kindest mood covers except in times of
extraordinary and brutal stress.
"I know _just_ what you're doing for me, Alf," said Ernie quietly.
"Let's have no more of it, see, or I'll bloody well bash you!"
There was no question that Ernie meant what he said. Easy-going though
he was, all his life he had been subject to these sudden eruptions
which flooded the sunny and somnolent landscape with white-hot lava; as
his brother knew to his cost of old.
Alf put his hand up as though he had been already bashed.
"Ow!" he gasped, "Ow!" and passed on swiftly.
That evening he went, as was very proper, to see and consult his
spiritual director.
The origin of the Reverend Spink was known to few. He was in reality
the son of a Nonconformist grocer in the North, and had been educated
with a view to the ministry. His mother had been a governess, a fact
of which her son at the outset of his career was perhaps unduly proud;
though later in life, when referring to it, he would say with quite
unnecessary ferocity, "And I'm not ashamed of it, eether."
After his father's death the superior attraction of what his mother
truly called "the church of the gentry" seduced him from his old-time
allegiance. With the aid of the local Bishop he was sent to a
Theological College, and shortly received what he was fond of naming in
militarist moments, "a commission" in the Established Church.
He did not like his brother-curates to have been public-schoolmen, and,
when asked, would say that he himself had been educated privately. The
Archdeacon, who was not jealous of him, spoke of him to those of his
staff he considered on his own social level as "dear brother Spink."
On the rare occasions when the Lady Augusta Willcocks asked him to
supper, he oiled his hair before the great event and prayed fervently
for guidance at his bed-side.
He was a small man, plump and rather puffy, who wore pince-nez, was
spruce in his person, and walked about in a brisk, rather bustling way,
as though he could not afford to lose a minute if all the souls waiting
for him to save them were to be gathered in.
He and Alf were of much the same class if of somewhat different
calibre. It was, indeed, from a close observation and imitation of the
facial activities of the Reverend Spink at devotion that Alf had been
enabled to win the benedictions of the virgins of St. Michael's.
Alf now called on his friend and pitched his tale.
"Past ope," he said lugubriously. "I'm sorry to say it of any man, let
alone me own blood brother. But it's my true belief all the same."
"To man, my dear friend," said the Reverend Spink, rising heavenward on
his toes with a splendid smile, "much is impossible. Not so to Go-urd."
Alf looked into the fire very religiously. Then he nodded his head and
said after an impressive pause,
"I believe you, sir." He lifted his face with a frankness the curate
thought beautiful. "Of course I ain't told you all I know about our
Ern," he said. "After all, he _is_ me own brother. And, as I often
says, blood is thickerer nor what water is."
It was some months later that Alf swaggered into his mother's kitchen
late one night.
The knowing look upon his face was mingled with one of obvious relief.
He sat down before the fire and smiled secretively. Once he sighed,
and then chuckled till his mother's attention was attracted.
"What is it?" she asked.
Alf nodded his great head.
"Ah," he said. "He'll be easier now, you'll see. That's all. _She's_
left."
His mother, who was stirring something in a saucepan, looked up.
"Who's left?"
"Her Ern got into trouble with."
Anne Caspar ceased to stir.
"What's that?" she asked sharply.
Alf smirked as he stared into the fire.
"One of the flash-girls from the Hotel. I see her off to-day for Mr.
Trupp."
Anne Caspar was breathing deep.
"Was Mr. Trupp seeing to her?"
"That's it," said Alf. "Sea View. You know."
Yes, Anne Caspar knew all about Sea View.
"Was that why Ernie left the Hotel?" she asked at last, white as a
sword.
"Ah," said Alf, significantly. "It was one why, I reck'n."
Anne Caspar was not critical nor logical nor even just.
Next Saturday, when Ern called to take his father out, his mother met
him with terrible hostility.
"She won't come on you now," she said with a white sneer. "You needn't
worry no more."
Ernie was taken aback.
"Who won't come on me?" he asked.
"That girl you got into trouble."
Ern turned ghastly. His mother's eyes held his face with cruel
tenacity, although she was trembling.
"She's gone away to London," Anne continued,--"with her child."
Ernie threw back his head with a little hoary smile.
"Ah," he said, "Alf," and went out slowly.
His mother's voice pursued him, dreadful in its caressing cruelty.
"I shan't tell dad," she said.
It was not often Ernie drew his sword. Now he knew no mercy.
"You can," he retorted. "He won't believe you."
CHAPTER XLVIII
TWO MEETINGS
After thirty years of following the wagon, Colonel Lewknor and his wife
had returned home from India on a pittance of a pension.
There was a grandson now, and that grandson had to be sent to Eton like
his father and his grandfather before him. Mrs. Lewknor was determined
upon that. But the grandson's father was only a Captain in the Indian
Army; ways and means had to be found; and openings are not many in
modern life for a retired couple on the wrong side of fifty.
Then the Colonel's health became uncertain, and he was sent down to
Trupp of Beachbourne.
While there Mrs. Lewknor caught influenza, and Mr. Trupp attended both.
A delightful intimacy sprang up between the three. The Colonel's
sardonic humour and detached outlook upon life appealed to the great
surgeon almost as much as did Mrs. Lewknor's experience and width of
view to his wife.
Mr. Trupp attended his patients once a day for a fortnight.
When he paid his last visit, Mrs. Lewknor thanked him and asked him for
his account.
"I'll see," answered Mr. Trupp. "What are you going to do when you
leave here?"
"Go back to London and look out for a job, I suppose."
Mr. Trupp shook his head.
"The Colonel mustn't go back to London," he said. "Why not stay here
and find your job here?"
He expounded his pet plan, cherished faithfully for years, of an
Open-Air Hostel for his tuberculous patients.
"There's a site available in Coombe-in-the-Cliff," he said, "just at
the back. Build a Home. I'll fill it for you. You'll make a lot of
money."
Mrs. Lewknor was thrilled at the project. It was at least a great
adventure; and, coming of the lion-hearted race that conquered Canaan,
she had no fears.
The Colonel, it is true, was more tempered in his enthusiasm, but then,
as he was fond of saying,
"I haven't the courage of a louse. No man has."
And he was content to stand aside, as often before, and watch his
wife's audacities with admiration not untinged with irony.
She took a tiny house in Holywell for herself and her husband, set out
to raise money with which to buy the site in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, and
sat down in earnest to work out the scheme in co-operation with the
inspirer of it.
Her visits to Old Town to consult Mr. Trupp were almost daily. In fine
weather she would walk across the Golf Links; and when the turf was
like a soaped sponge she would go round by the road through
Beech-hangar.
Here one bitter April afternoon she marked a tall bowed old man walking
dreamily under the beech-trees, the light falling through the fine
net-work of twigs on his uplifted face. His hands were behind him, and
he wore an old-fashioned roomy tail-coat.
Mrs. Lewknor's swift feminine eyes took him in at a glance.
He was a gentleman; he lived out of the world; and there was somebody
at home who cared for him: for it was clear that he was not the kind of
man who would care for himself.
As she drew near, she glanced away, and yet confirmed her impression
with that trick of the well-bred woman who somehow sees without looking.
Then, as she passed him, a wave of recognition overwhelmed her, and she
stopped suddenly.
"Mr. Edward Caspar!" she cried.
He, too, had half turned.
"I was wondering if you'd remember me," he rumbled, beaming kindly down
on the little lady through gold-rimmed spectacles. "You still walk as
if you were dancing."
"Who am I?" she asked.
"I don't know," he answered. "Thirty years ago you were Rachel
Solomons."
The profound spiritual affinity which had made itself felt in that
unforgettable moment under the palms in Grosvenor Square long ago
manifested itself instantly.
Time was not. Only two spirits were, who recognized the familiar beat
of each other's wings in the dark spaces of Eternity.
She regarded him affectionately.
"How's it gone?" she asked.
"Not so bad, I suppose," he mused. "Better than I expected, if worse
than I hoped. I'm dreaming still instead of doing."
"Any big things in your life?"
"One."
"A woman?" fearlessly.
"No. My son. And he was taken from me--for ever, I thought at the
time. And after that I made the Discovery."
The little lady nodded.
"It's worth making," she said.
"Yes," replied the old man with the sudden leaping enthusiasm she
remembered so well of old, and the same spreading flush, "and you don't
make it till you've lost everything. That's the condition."
He had turned and was rambling along at her side, as if he had belonged
to her for the thirty years in which they had not met.
They walked together thus down the New Road, along Rectory Walk, and
turned into Church Street.
Anne Caspar from the bedroom-window saw them pass and wondered.
They were not talking: Anne was glad of that. Her Ned was ambling
along, apparently unaware of the little lady, strong as she was fine,
walking at his side.
The pair turned down the hill at Billing's Corner.
It was afternoon, and the street was almost empty save for a shabby man
walking up the hill towards them from the _Star_.
They did not see him, absorbed more in themselves than in each other;
but he saw them and stepped into the porch of the parish-church as
though to avoid them.
Just opposite the porch Edward Caspar came to himself and said good-bye
with grunts.
Mrs. Lewknor looked after his heavy figure toiling laboriously up the
hill.
Then her eyes caught the eyes peeping at her from the porch--eyes that
possessed the same wistful quality as those of the man who had just
left her side: eyes somehow familiar that were smiling at her.
"Why, Caspar!" she cried, and crossed the road.
The man left the beam against which he was leaning, and came towards
her suddenly. There was a curious wan smile upon his face. He
lurched, held out his hand like a child for help, and fell his length
in the road.
A man from the iron-monger's shop opposite came out.
"He's out of work," he said. "He's half-starved. There's a lot the
same. Funny world."
Mrs. Lewknor was horrified.
"Take him into the porch," she cried, "out of the road. He'll be run
over here."
"No, not into the church!" came an authoritative voice. "I know the
man. The church is a sacred edifice."
It was the Archdeacon. He bent his somewhat dandiacal figure
elaborately, put his nose close to Ernie's lips, and sniffed
deliberately.
"No, sir, it's not that," said the iron-monger shortly. "It's food he
wants."
"Ah," said the Archdeacon, rising in gaitered majesty, his painful duty
done. "I'm glad to heah it."
Mrs. Lewknor was trembling with fury.
Ernie, on his back in the mud, stirred and opened his eyes.
He saw wavering faces all about him.
"Guess I'm all right now," he said.
"Give him air!" ordered the Archdeacon magnificently. "Ayah, I say!"
and he made a sweeping gesture with his arm to brush away the crowd who
were not there.
"He's had plenty of air," retorted Mrs. Lewknor with the curt brutality
that distinguished her on rare occasions. "What he wants is something
more solid than he gets from the pulpit."
The Archdeacon eyed her _de-haut-en-bas_. From his undergraduate days
he had believed implicitly in the power of his eye to master and
demoralize his enemies and those of his Church, and the Lady Augusta
Willcocks had loyally fostered his belief.
Now, however, his antagonist refused to be demoralized.
He saw that she was a lady, suspected that she might be "somebody," and
with that fine flair for the things of this world which characterize
the successful of his profession, he retired on gaitered legs with a
somewhat theatrical dignity.
Ernie was helped to his feet.
A car, coming slowly down the hill, ground to a halt.
Mr. Trupp leaned out and took in the scene.
"Ernie, get up alongside your brother, will you?" he said. "Mrs.
Lewknor!"
The car rolled on its way with its two new occupants.
"He don't want me," muttered Mr. Trupp in his companion's ear. "He
wants my cook."
Mrs. Lewknor, still seething, recorded the incident.
"The Church is the limit," she snapped. "I could have pushed that man
over in the mud."
"Yes," said Mr. Trupp soothingly. "But you mustn't take the Church too
seriously. The right way to look on it is as rather a bad joke."
That evening, after his coffee, Mr. Trupp laid down his evening paper
and stared long into the fire as his manner was.
His wife and daughter waited for the word that was slowly brewing.
It came in time.
"Men grow when they've got to," he announced at last with humorous
sententiousness.
"They can't grow much without food," said Bess with warmth. The
incident of the afternoon had stirred her generous young soul to the
deeps. "It's monstrous!"
"It is," her father agreed. "And it's all because Civilization has
thrown up a class that's above the Discipline it imposes upon others."
Mrs. Trupp eyed her husband sternly.
"William Trupp!" she said, "I believe you're a Socialist."
"My dear," he answered, "I've been told that before."
"Bess and I don't want to hear your viewy views," continued the lady.
"We want to talk about flesh-and-blood Ernie and how to help him."
"Hear! hear!" said Bess.
"My dears," replied the annoying man, "it's just Ernie I'm talking
about. He's growing again. My old friend Necessity's at work on him
once more."
CHAPTER XLIX
ALF MARKS TIME
The scene outside the parish-church in Old Town, when Mrs. Lewknor
challenged the Archdeacon, marked the turn in Ernie's material fortunes.
The Reverend Spink handed on his version of the affair to Mr. Pigott at
the Relief Committee that evening.
"He was laying on his face in the road _dead_ drunk opposite the
church-door when his brother picked him up," he reported, round-eyed
and spectacled. "His poor, _poor_ people!"
"Ah," said Mr. Pigott, "was he?--I know where you got that story from."
The curate tried to be rude in his turn, but he was not so good at it
as the more experienced man.
"Such a place to choose!" he continued, turning to Colonel Lewknor.
"Opposite the church-door! Just like him!"
"Such a place, indeed!" echoed the Colonel, quiet and courteous.
"What's the good of lying down to die of starvation at the door of the
_Church_ of all places? Will she open to you?"
Mr. Pigott disliked the Reverend Spink almost as much as he disliked
the curate's protégé. Next day the contrary man sent for Ernie and
offered him a job as lorry-man in the Transport Company.
"I know you and you know me," he said in his most aggressive manner.
"So it's no good telling a pack o lies to each other that I can see.
Start at twenty-three a week, with chances of a rise if you keep at it
steady. Begin Monday.... And it's your last chance, mind!"
Ernie ignored the insults and leapt at the offer.
The Southdown Transport Company ran motor-lorries between Newhaven and
Beachbourne, carrying seaborne coal and other merchandise from the
harbour on the Ouse to the town under Beau-nez.
Ernie liked the work.
It kept him out of doors, under the sky, and in touch with the
old-world elemental things he loved. The breath and bustle of the
harbour at Newhaven; the long ride on the motor-lorry through the
hill-country at all seasons of the year; even the pleasant acrid smell
of the coal and coke in the lorry and on his overalls was pleasant and
satisfying to him.
He worked steadily, paid his debts, and for the first time in his life
began gradually to save money.
That autumn his father asked him if he wouldn't return home to live.
"Alfred's left us," said the old man.
"Has he?" asked Ernie surprised. "Where's he gone then?"
"He's gone to live above his garage," replied the other. "Something's
happening to Alfred," he added. "I don't know what."
Alf, in fact, was changing; and Mr. Trupp was watching the evolution of
his chauffeur with a detached scientific interest that his wife defined
as inhuman.
And that evolution was proceeding apace. Alf was living alone above
his garage; he had introduced a girl into his office; and he was no
longer getting on.
Mr. Trupp noted the last as far the most significant symptom of the
three.
Alf had climbed in his career to a certain point, and there he stuck
fast. His business neither went ahead nor back. He was still doing
well and saving money. The wonder was that he was not doing better.
But the reason was clear enough to the penetrating eye of the old
surgeon, to whom his chauffeur was an absorbing study in mental
pathology: Alf was no more a man of one idea; his energies were no
longer concentrated solely on getting on to the exclusion of all else.
The emotional side of him, battered down from infancy, was revenging
itself at last. Desperately it was seeking an outlet, no matter how
perverted: certainly it would find one.
"He's suffering from life-long repression," the Doctor told his wife.
"Now he's got to find a safety-valve."
In his own mind Mr. Trupp had no doubt as to the form the safety-valve
would take.
About that time Mrs. Trupp, meeting Mr. Pigott in the Moot, asked him
how his new hand was getting on.
"Working steady as Old Time," replied the other with satisfaction.
"I like the look upon his face," Mrs. Trupp remarked. "He's always
expecting."
"Yes," replied the old school-master, "expecting angels--like his
father."
"Perhaps he'll find them," smiled Mrs. Trupp.
That evening, as it chanced, she met her godson under the elms in
Saffrons Croft, and stopped him.
It was May now. The hope illuminating air and sky and every living
thing was reflected in Ernie's face. Indeed the young man looked
inspired.
The two regarded each other affectionately.
"Ernie," said the lady, colouring faintly.
"Yes, 'm."
"Are you still thinking of that girl you told me about?"
The other's face glowed like the moon.
"I never hardly think of nothing else, 'm."
"I knew you were," answered Mrs. Trupp. She added with a sudden lovely
smile: "You'll find her--if you're faithful."
"That's what dad keeps on, 'm," Ernie answered. "And I know I shall
too. See, I keep all the while a-drawin her to me." He made the
motion of one hauling on a line. "She can't escape me--not nohows."
He turned on her the earnest eyes of the evangelist, and began to wag
an impressive finger in the way she loved.
"See, you can draw down what you want--_only you must want it with all
your heart_. 'Taint no good without that. Alf, now, he draws down
money. For why?--that's what he wants. Now I want something else."
The lady regarded him with wise shrewd interest.
This New Thought, as the foolish called it, how old it was, how
universal, how deeply embedded in the primitive consciousness of the
common man! Ernie, to be sure, did not read Edward Carpenter nor the
works of any of that school; but instinct and experience had led him to
knock at the same door.
"And if Alf wanted something different, too?" she asked.
Ernie shook a sceptical head.
"He wouldn't--not really. That ain't Alf. Money's what Alf wants and
what he gets by consequence. He's only for himself, Alf is. If he
went out a'ter anything else he'd only go half-hearted like, therefore
he wouldn't get it. He'd be a house divided against hissalf. So he'd
fall."
The two brothers now rarely met and never spoke.
Just sometimes Ernie in his grimy overall, sitting with arms crossed
and sooty face upon a load of coal in the jolting lorry, would be
passed by Alf at the wheel of his thirty horse-power car, stealing by
without an effort or a sound, swift as the wind, silent as the tide.
On these occasions Ernie, perched aloft on his load, would detect the
smirk on his brother's face, and knew that Alf was feeling his own
superiority and hoping that Ernie felt it too.
In those days Ernie learned to know the corner of England in the
triangle between Lewes, the Seven Sisters, and Beau-nez as he had never
known it before. And the closer grew his intimacy the greater became
his love.
The quiet, the strength, the noble rounded comeliness of the hills
reminded him of the woman he sought. True, she disturbed him, present
or absent; while they, in act or retrospect, comforted. But their full
round breasts, rising clean and clear before him, stubble-crowned,
green, purple, or golden against the blue, gave him a sense of earth
rooted in the immensity of spirit and washed by the winds of heaven as
did nothing else he knew but the woman he had lost.
"Wish I were a poet," he sometimes said to his father. "To put it all
down what I feel, so others could see it too."
"Perhaps you are," his father replied.
And certainly if to be a poet is to love the familiar objects of the
road, a poet Ernie was: for he loved them all--Lewes with its narrow
streets, its steep hill to which you cling like a fly on a pane and
look across to Mount Caburn for help; the old _Pelham Arms_, its
walnut-tree at the back, the _Fox_, the _Barley Mow_, the _Newmarket_
on the Brighton road; the hills running down in glorious nakedness to
the highway, the tanned harvesters sitting among their sheaves; peeps
of the blue Weald islanded with woods; and always accompanying him the
long wall of the Downs, gloomy or gleaming, here smooth as the flanks
of a race-horse, there scarred, grim, weather-worn and pocked, in
winter dazzling white beneath the blue, ruddy in autumn sunsets,
emerald in April days; and all the year gathering the shadows at
evening in the Northward coombes to spill them over the expectant Weald
like purple wine when the door of night had closed upon the sun.
The lorries to and from Newhaven always took their way through the
valley of the Ruther. Once or twice in that winter, as they bumped
down High'nd Over from Sea-foord into Aldwoldston at evening, Ernie was
surprised to find the chocolate-bodied car lying apparently derelict in
the roadway at the steep entrance to the village; and wondered if the
surviving Miss Caryll who still lived in the Dowerhouse at the foot of
the hill was ill.
And again one evening in the spring, as he jolted through the
village-street, past the great chestnut lit with a thousand tapers in
the market-square, he was aware of a man on a motor-bicycle pelting
past him up the hill. The man wore motor-goggles; but there was no
mistaking Alf, bowed over his handles, flashing past the _Lamb_, down
the hill, and out of sight.
What was Alf doing at that hour of the evening on the road to Sea-foord?
BOOK VII
THE OUTCAST
CHAPTER L
THE CRUMBLES
Nature's punishments of her erring children are slow as they are sure.
If the inexorable Dame cannot forget, neither can she hurry.
Therefore the shock of realization that the wages of sin are death--as
our fathers used to put it; or that weakness brings its own reward--as
we should more prosaically say; because it comes gradually to the human
consciousness, is mercifully numbed.
It was some time before Ruth faced the fact that she was in the toils,
and that there was no escaping. When at length the dreadful dream had
become a reality, and she was forced to acknowledge to herself the life
she bore within her, it seemed to her for a moment that the worst was
passed.
On the morrow of the night on which the hidden voice refused longer to
be hushed, she went away by herself on to the Crumbles: that
bird-haunted waste of stagnant pools and tussocky shingles which
stretches along the edge of the Bay to Pevensey. There at least she
would be sure of being alone save for a rare creature of the
Wilderness, snipe or wild duck, hare or slow-winged heron. Half a mile
from the great Hotel, rising sepulchre-wise from the surrounding
desolation, her back to the town, and her face to the sea, she sat down
on the lonely beach and girdled her knees with her arms.
It was a dull November afternoon.
The remorseless sea crawled like a serpent out of the gloom, curled an
ugly lip at her as it reared to stare, then softly falling to the
ground, scudded towards her with a hideous little hiss, to suck her
down, the victim of its lust.
The dumb sky offered her no help. There was neither song nor sun. And
back in the West, amassed under significant gloom, lay the great camp
of men, hostile now to her and hers, to which she must yet return.
Sitting thus by the scolding sea, her chin on her knees, she looked the
situation in the sombre eyes.
It was terrible enough.
She had to pay the price every mothering woman must pay--disfigurement,
pain, dependency, long-drawn physical disease, and, at the end of all,
torment and possibly death: and in her case, added to the price Nature
asks of those women who obey her laws, there was the penalty Man
demands of those who violate his.
For her, and such as her, there is in Society, as at present organized,
but one sure way of escape: and that way Ruth was too near to Nature,
too healthy in mind and body, to contemplate save for a passing moment.
Her eyes travelled down her young figure, shapely yet.
"All right, my darling," she cooed. "You shan't suffer--not if it were
ever so."
Her face was to the future. At whatever cost, she would be true to the
trust imposed on her unsought.
Indeed, so sane was she and strong, that but for the old couple in the
little yellow-washed cottage in the valley of the Ruther, who had
taught Bible-class there for thirty years, she believed her fear would
have been blotted out by the hope her baby, pushing through the crust
of her terror like a crocus through the chill wintry earth into
February sunshine, brought her.
For she recognized with a sob of bitterness that these brooding months,
when her child, thrusting with tiny hands and inarticulate cries, was
opening for her the Door of Escape into the Open Country that lies for
each one of us outside the Prison that is Self, would have been the
most beautiful in her life, if Humanity had blessed her for the
sufferings she was enduring on its behalf, if Society had supported and
pitied her when she had fallen into the trap that it had laid.
As things were, she was an outlaw, who would be stoned alike by men and
women when it was discovered that an innocent indiscretion, prompted by
a noble natural impulse, had flung her into the miry pit.
She turned and looked across the flats at her back to the great camp of
men, crouching for their prey.
The Downs behind seemed to circle it as with a wall of dulled steel,
making escape impossible; while over in the West was a murky glow as of
damped-down furnaces, waiting to open their doors and pour down molten
gloom on the City of the Plain.
Ruth rose up swiftly and returned to the Hotel.
Better even its unsympathetic walls than the naked desolation of the
waste.
There, however, was no one to whom she could turn. Ernie was out of
the question, while Madame had retired, as always at this season of the
year, to the sister-hotel at Brussels.
Indeed in all Beachbourne with its hundred thousand inhabitants, its
temples and tabernacles at every street corner, its innumerable
white-collared priests and ministers, its sacrament-taking women, and
reform-talking men, was there one soul to whom she could look in her
distress?
Ruth prayed as she had never prayed before. Alone in the darkness on
her knees, redeeming herself and mankind by her tears, she asked that
the punishment for the mother's sin might not fall upon the child.
"On my head, O Lord, not hers," was the cry of her anguished heart.
Light came to her darkness.
There was one man in Beachbourne in whom she had detected, so she
believed, the spirit of Love.
That man was Mr. Trupp, who had attended her Miss Caryll till she died.
Taking her courage in her hands one dark January evening, when she
realized that her time at the Hotel was short, she stood on the steps
of the Manor-house and rang.
"Why, you're quite a stranger, Ruth!" said the smiling maid.
"Could I see Mr. Trupp?" asked the girl.
"That I'm sure you can."
She was shown into the long consulting-room, and sat down, trembling,
her eyes upon her knees.
She was staking her all upon a throw.
Mr. Trupp came in.
The young woman dressed in black, simply as a lady, rose.
"Who is it?" asked the surgeon, peering over his pince-nez.
"Ruth Boam, sir," the other answered. "Miss Caryll."
Mr. Trupp glanced at her. Then he put his hand upon her shoulder, and
she knew that she was safe.
"Sit down," he said gently.
This large young creature, who had something of his own Bess about her,
went straight to his heart in her trouble.
"Ruth," he said gravely. "May I send Mrs. Trupp to you?"
Ruth sobbed and nodded.
Very slowly Mr. Trupp climbed the stairs to his wife's room.
It was some time before Mrs. Trupp joined the girl.
The room was dark, save for one shaded lamp.
The lady came in quietly, dressed for the evening in a damson-coloured
tea-gown that showed off her gracious beauty and silver hair. Her face
was wan and wistful, her bearing noble and full of tender dignity.
The black figure on the chair did not move.
The elder woman took her seat beside the younger and laid her hand upon
the girl's.
"Ruth," she said at last, in a still voice with a quiver running
through it. "I know more than you think. You loved him, didn't you?"
The broken girl nodded; then shook her head.
"It's not that," she said. "It's not him. It's my baby. I couldn't
abear she should be born in the Workhouse along of them."
To Mrs. Trupp the Workhouse system had been a nightmare ever since, as
a young girl, she had first realized its existence and become dimly
aware of the part it played in our imperial scheme. She believed that
the institution which had its local seat in the old Cavalry Barracks at
the back of Rectory Walk was no worse than others of its kind up and
down the country. Sometimes she visited its wards and nurseries with
her old friend, Edward Caspar, and came away sick at heart and
oppressed of spirit. More often, sitting in her garden, she listened
to his quietly told stories of what he always called "our Cess-pool."
Mrs. Trupp stroked Ruth's hand.
"It shan't," she said, with the fierceness that sometimes surprised her
friends. "You must trust us. Mr. Trupp'll see you through. But you
must leave the Hotel at once. I'm going to send you to a house of mine
in Sea-gate--now. I shall telephone for the car."
And half an hour later Ruth was sitting in the chocolate-bodied car
that once before had carried her into the perilous Unknown.
CHAPTER LI
EVELYN TRUPP
Evelyn Moray had been brought up in the Church; and, like most
Englishwomen of her class and generation, she had as a girl looked to
the Church to enable her to realize her ideals.
In her young days she and her neighbour of later life, Edward Caspar,
had been of the little group of West-end people who had been drawn East
by the couple who were making St. Jude's, Whitechapel, the home of real
religion for more than the dwellers in the East-end. She would
sometimes give a violin solo at the famous Worship Hour in the church
off Commercial Street; while Edward Caspar would on rare occasions read
Browning or Wordsworth there. The memory of those early days of
dawning hopes served as a never-present bond between the pair when in
later years chance caused them to pass their lives side by side in the
little town on the hill under Beau-nez. And the religious development
of each had followed much the same lines.
They had watched the fingers of love light a candle in the darkness of
the late seventies and the early eighties, and ...
"The candle went out," Edward Caspar would say. "Candles always do in
the Church of England."
"Yet the light grows," his companion would answer.
"Assuredly," Edward would agree. "Everywhere but in the Churches."
Evelyn Moray's disillusionment had begun even before her marriage. For
all her innocence she brought a singularly shrewd judgment to bear on
the affairs of men. And if as she came to understand the truth, she
suffered at first the pangs of betrayed love, she was too brave a
spirit not to face the situation in its entirety. The noble words of
the Order of Baptism--_manfully to fight under His banner against sin,
the world, and the Devil_--applied, she found, to a Church the
outstanding characteristic of which was that it never fought at all.
When she was bogged in a quagmire of doubt and despair, fearful of the
new, more than dissatisfied by the old, Mr. Trupp had come into her
life. His sane judgment, his wide experience, and broad philosophy,
landed her once more on _terra firma_. In a time before the great
Exodus from the Temples of Orthodoxy had assumed the proportions that
we know to-day, she had left their gloomy portals to seek elsewhere
that simple and direct service of mankind her spirit needed for its
fulfilment.
Her father's death left her something of an heiress.
Forthwith she started a maternity home in a quiet street in Sea-gate
for young women of the middle-class who had fallen victims of a Society
which failed to protect them, to give them opportunity, to supply their
honest needs.
The conditions of entry to the home were strict; and Mrs. Trupp never
wilfully departed from them. Sometimes, it is true, she was taken in;
often she was disappointed; but she persevered with the tenacity that
is the inevitable outcome of continuous prayer.
She ran her home very quietly; and Mr. Trupp was, of course, her
medical officer. But the Church, jealous of all trespassing within
what it believed to be its own demesne, heard and objected.
"Making sin easy," said Lady Augusta Willcocks, who wore short hair and
cultivated the downright manner which she believed to be characteristic
of the English aristocracy.
She cherished a secret antipathy for "the doctor's wife," as in her
more bitter moments she would describe her neighbour.
Lady Augusta was indeed of the world of Victoria and Disraeli, opulent,
pushing, loud; Mrs. Trupp of an older, finer, more deliberate age.
There was between the temper and tradition of the two ladies a gulf no
convention could bridge. Lady Augusta felt and resented the fact.
Archdeacon Willcocks, on the other hand, reacted to the same stimulus
in a different way. For him the fact that Mrs. Trupp was a Moray of
Pole was paramount. And so--when Mr. Trupp had become famous--he
hushed up his wife and schemed to run Mrs. Trupp's home in connection
with the Diocesan Magdalen League.
But Mrs. Trupp was not to be cajoled. She had her own way of doing
things, and meant to stick to it.
"I think perhaps we'd better go on working for the same end in our
rather different ways," she told the Archdeacon with that disarming
courtesy of hers.
"Am I to understand that our way is not the Christian way?" asked the
Archdeacon, smiling and satirical according to his wont, as he swayed
his long thin body to and fro, serpent-wise.
"It may be," replied the lady, faintly ironical in her turn. "It's not
quite mine."
"Pity," said the Archdeacon, mounting his favourite high horse with the
little toss of his head, carefully cultivated, which so impressed the
shop-keepers of Old Town. "I had hoped that you remained of the Faith,
even if you have seen good to desert your Church."
The lady looked at him with eyes that were a little wistful, a little
whimsical.
"I'm afraid we're mutually disappointed," she answered quietly.
CHAPTER LII
THE RETURN OF THE OUTCAST
It was in Mrs. Trupp's home, in a back-water of the East-end, that
Ruth's child was born.
The babe was beautiful, but over the mother a shadow lay.
"It's her people," Mr. Trupp told his wife. "She hasn't broken it to
them yet."
"I know," Mrs. Trupp answered. "I must talk to her about it."
Ruth, curled in her bed, giving satisfaction to the babe in the hollow
of her arm, showed every sign of distress when the other broached the
topic.
"Will you trust me to tell them?" asked the lady gently. Ruth raised
her fine eyes, brimming with gratitude to the elder woman's face.
Mrs. Trupp went.
Before she started on her pilgrimage of love she passed an hour in the
parish-church, which was her favourite resort in all the crises of her
life.
There the Archdeacon came on her, to his surprise.
"I'm glad to see you here, Mrs. Trupp," he said with slight inevitable
patronage.
"I'm often here," she answered, smiling.
"Ah," said the Archdeacon. "I've missed you."
She could not tell him that this was because she avoided the church
when he and his fellow-priests were ministering there.
"I love the atmosphere," she said.
"Thank-you. It is nice, I think," he answered with a little bow;
taking to himself, with childish ingenuousness, the credit for the
conditions that six centuries of prayer and worship had created.
An hour later Mrs. Trupp was face to face with Ruth's mother in the
kitchen of Frogs' Hall.
Hard by, the church-bell tolled for evening service. Through the open
window came the noise of homing rooks drifting up the valley from the
Haven; and under the hedge on the far side the Brooks a cow bellowed.
It was Mrs. Boam who began.
"I allow you've come to tell me about our Ruth," she said at last.
"Have you heard anything?" asked Mrs. Trupp.
The other shook her head.
"We'd be the last to hear," she said. "That's sure. But I knaw
there's been something. It's seven month since she's been anigh us.
That's not our maid--our Ruth: so good and kind and considerate for her
dad and me as she's always been."
"There has been something," answered Mrs. Trupp, and told her tale....
The mother listened in silence, the tears streaming down her face, her
hands upon her lap.
When the story was finished, she rose.
"Thank you kindly, 'm," she said. "If you'll excuse me I'll tell dad.
He's in the back."
She went out, a big unwieldy woman, walking with the unconscious
majesty of grief, and was absent some time.
Mrs. Trupp sat in the kitchen with a somnolent rust-coloured cat, and
listened to the willows rustling by the stream and the voices of
children playing by the bridge.
Once she went to the window and looked across the cattle-dotted Brooks
to the long low foothill that raises a back like a bow, green now with
young corn, against the bleak shaven flanks of old Wind-hover.
Then Reuben Boam entered, erect as a soldier, and with the face of a
puritan and prophet.
Mrs. Trupp wondered, as she often had of late years, why the men of her
own class never attained the dignity of the great amongst the simple
poor.
She rose humiliated, conscious of her own spiritual inferiority; and
took his rough paw between her two delicate hands.
"Won't you sit down, Boam?" she suggested, quite modern enough to
realize what a topsy-turvy world it was in which she should have to
make such a request to an old man in his own home.
His long bare upper lip trembled and nibbled as he spoke.
"She's a good maid," he said huskily--"our Ruth. The Mistus says it
were a gentleman. It's hard for a working girl to stand up agen a
gentleman that's set on despoilin her. But in my day gentlemen were
gentlemen and kept emselves accardin. They tell me it's different now.
Accounts for the bit o bitterness, hap." The great hand lying in hers
twitched. "She must come back home soon so ever she can move. There's
not much. But we'll make out somehow. Rebecca must goo to her.
She'll need her mother now. They was always very close--mother and
daughter."
The old woman entered, tying her bonnet-strings beneath her chin.
"Yes, I'll take carrier's cart to Ratton. Then I can walk to the Decoy
and take train to the East-end."
"Won't you come with me?" said Mrs. Trupp. "I've got the car in the
Tye." ...
She dropped her companion at the door of the house in Sea-gate, and
herself took a tram home. When Mrs. Boam emerged from the house an
hour later a car was still at the door.
The old lady looked about her, a little bustled.
"Could you tell me the way to the tram?" she asked the chauffeur.
He touched his hat and smiled.
If Alf had a soft spot in his heart, it was for old women.
"This is your tram, ma," he said, and helped her in.
A fortnight later the same car stood at the same door, when Ruth
emerged, her baby in her arms.
It was dusk, and she did not see the chauffeur, who leaned out towards
her.
"Would you come up in front alongside me?" he said. "I put your box
inside."
Ruth obeyed.
They drove through the gathering shadows in the sweet-scented June
evening, past Ratton and Polefax, all along the foot of the Downs, the
Wilmington Giant with his great staff gleaming wan and ogre-like on the
hillside, and at the Turn-pike, just where the spire of B'rick church
is seen pricking out of trees, turned for the gap and ran down the
valley towards the Haven.
A sea-wind with a sparkle in it blowing up the Brooks seemed to meet
the softer breezes of the Weald and penetrate them. A young moon hung
over the sharp crest of Wind-hover.
Ruth, her baby in her arms, picked up familiar objects as they swung
by: the long-backed barn on the left, the little red pillar-box on the
wall, and occasionally the glimmer of a light in one of the homesteads
among trees across the stream. On her right, unhedged cornlands swept
away in a rustling sea towards the foot of the Downs which made a
bulwark of darkness against the firmament; while on the near rise a row
of stacks, like immense bee-hives, stood sentinel under the stars.
The car slid down a hill and up again. The valley lay naked alongside
them now, cattle moving darkly in the moonlight and the tower of the
church upon the hill black against the night in front.
The chauffeur took out his clutch. The car was running so noiselessly
that Ruth could hear the ghostly stir and murmur of the willows that
line the river-bank and cover the feet of the village with a green
girdle.
"You don't remember me then?" said the man beside her.
They were the first words he had spoken.
Ruth glanced at the face beside her own, smooth and smiling in the
moon, and clutched her baby to her so fiercely that it gave a little
cry.
"Ah," said Alf, "I thought you would then."
The impression he had made seemed to please and satisfy him. He put
his engine into gear, and was soon running through the village-street.
At the foot of the hill, where a group of mighty elms on a high bank
guard the seaward entrance to the village, he turned sharply to the
left under a row of pollarded poplars, and bumped over Parson's Tye
quiet in the moonlight, the church four-square among its trees upon the
mound on the right.
Then he drew up by the stile leading into the Brooks.
Ruth descended swiftly, and her babe lying like a snowdrift in her
arms, disappeared in the darkness through the stile.
Alf waited beside his car, watching the river like a snake crawling and
curling away in gleams of sudden silver under stark trees into the
night.
A few minutes later the bulk of a big woman in a white apron appeared
at the stile.
"Could you take the box in?" said a gentle voice. "Dad's crippled."
Alf swaggered.
"Very well. This once. To oblige."
The job accomplished, he looked round the little plain kitchen with a
proprietary air.
"Nice little place," he said.
"Would you take a cup of tea?" asked Mrs. Boam.
Ruth had disappeared.
"No'w, thank you," said Alf in his cockiest manner. "I dare say you'll
see me round here again next time I'm this way."
CHAPTER LIII
THE FIND
It was rather more than a year later.
Ernie, in grimy overall strapped over his waistcoat, and grey shirt
without a tie, was climbing the lower slopes of High-'nd-Over from
Sea-foord in an empty lorry.
Beneath him lay the Haven, buttressed by a gleam of white cliff, the
Old River blue-winding to the sea at Exeat, and the New laid like a
sword-blade across the curves of the Old.
The lorry bumped over the crest of the hill, austere and bare even in
the sunshine, the sea broad-shining at its back, and dropped down out
of the brilliant bleakness into the best wooded of the river-valleys
that pierce the South Downs.
It was Saturday evening early in July.