CHAPTER XI

THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN

Joe Burt had been born at Rochdale of a mother whose favourite saying was:

"With a rocking-chair and a piece o celery a Lancasheer lass is aw reet."

At eight, she had entered the mill, doffing. Joe had entered the same mill at about the same age, doffing too. He worked bare-footed in the ring-room in the days when overlookers and jobbers carried straps and used them.

When he was fifteen his mother died, and his father married again.

"Thoo can fend for self," his step-mother told him straightway, with the fine directness of the North.

Joe packed his worldly possessions in a chequered handkerchief, especially his greatest treasure—a sixpenny book bought off a second-hand bookstall at infinite cost to the buyer and called The Hundred Best Thoughts. Then he crossed the common at night, falling into a ditch on the way, to find the lodging-house woman who was to be his mother for the next ten years drinking her Friday pint o beer. He was earning six shillings a week at the time in a bicycle-shop. Later he entered a big engineering firm and, picking up knowledge as he went along, was a first-class fitter when he was through his time.

Those were the days when George Barnes was Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and leading the great engineers' strike of the early nineties. Labour was still under the heel of Capital, but squealing freely. Socialism, apart from a few thinkers, was the gospel of noisy and innocuous cranks; and advanced working-men still called themselves Radicals.

Young Joe woke up sooner than most to the fact that he was the slave of an environment that was slowly throttling him because it denied him opportunity to be himself—which is to say to grow. He discarded chapel for ever on finding that his step-mother was a regular worshipper at Little Bethel, and held in high esteem amongst the congregation. He read Robert Blatchford in the Clarion, went to hear Keir Hardie, who with Joey Arch was dodging in and out of Parliament during those years, heralds of the advancing storm, and took some part in founding the local branch of the newly-formed Independent Labour Party. When his meditative spirit tired of the furious ragings of the Labour Movement of those early days, he would retire to the Friends' Meeting-house on the hill and ruminate there over the plain tablet set in the turf which marks appropriately the resting place of the greatest of modern Quakers.

The eyes of the intelligent young fitter were opening fast now; and the death of the head of his firm completed the process and gave him sight.

"Started from nothing. Left £200,000. Bequeathed each of his servants £2 for every year of service; but nothing for us as had made the money."

Joe was now a leading man in the local A.S.E. His Society recognised his work and sent him in the early years of our century to Ruskin College, Oxford. The enemies of that institution are in the habit of saying that it spoils good mechanics to make bad Labour leaders. The original aim of the College was to take men from the pit, the mill, the shop, pour into them light and learning in the rich atmosphere of the most ancient of our Universities, and then return them whence they came to act amongst their fellows as lamps in the darkness and living witnesses of the redeeming power of education. The ideal, noble in itself, appealed to the public; but like many such ideals, it foundered on the invincible rock of human nature. The miners, weavers, and engineers, who were the students, after their year amid the towers and courts of Oxford, showed little desire to return whence they came. Rather they made their newly-acquired power an instrument to enable them to evade the suffocating conditions under which they were born; and who shall blame them? They became officials in Labour Bureaux, Trade Union leaders, Secretaries of Clubs, and sometimes the hangers-on of the wealthy supporters of the Movement.

Burt was a shining exception to the rule. At the end of his academic year he returned to the very bench in the very shop he had left a year before, with enlarged vision, ordered mind, increased conviction; determined from that position to act as Apostle to the Gentiles of the Old Gospel in its new form.

He was the not uncommon type of intellectual artisan of that day who held as the first article of his creed that no working-man ought to marry under the economic conditions that then prevailed; and that if Nature and circumstance forced him to take a wife that he was not morally justified in having children. This attitude involving as it inevitably must a levy on the only capital that is of enduring value to a country—its Youth—was thrust upon thoughtful workers, as Joe was never tired of pointing out, by the patriotic class, who refused their employees the leisure, the security, the material standards of life necessary to modern man for his full development.

Joe practised what he preached, and was himself unmarried. Apart, indeed, from an occasional fugitive physical connection as a youth with some passing girl, he had never fairly encountered a woman; never sought a woman; never, certainly, heard the call that refuses to be denied, spirit calling to spirit, flesh to flesh, was never even aware of his own deep need. Women for him were still a weakness to be avoided. They were the necessaries of the feeble, an encumbrance to the strong. That was his view, the view of the crude boy. And he believed himself lucky to be numbered among the uncalled for he was in fact a sober fanatic, living as selflessly for his creed as ever did those first preachers of unscientific Socialism, the Apostles and Martyrs of the first centuries of our era. Even in the shop he had his little class of students, pouring the milk of the word into their ears as he set their machines, and the missionary spirit drove him always on to fresh enterprise.

The Movement, as he always called it, was well ablaze by the second decade of the century in the Midlands and the North, but in the South it still only smouldered. And when Hewson and Clarke started their aeroplane department at Beachbourne, and began to build machines for the Government, Joe Burt, a first-rate mechanic, leapt at the chance offered him by the firm and crossed the Thames with his books, his brains, his big heart, to carry the Gospel of Redemption by Revolution to the men of Sussex as centuries before, his spiritual ancestor, St. Wilfrid, he too coming from the North, had done. In that strange land with its smooth-bosomed hills, its shining sea, its ca-a-ing speech, he found everything politically as he had expected. And yet it was in the despised South that he discovered the woman who was to rouse in him the fierce hunger of which till then he had been unaware except as an occasional crude physical need.

As on Saturday or Sunday afternoons at the time the revelation was coming to him he roamed alone, moody and unmated, the rogue-man, amid the round-breasted hills he often paused to mark their resemblance to the woman who was rousing in his deeps new and terrible forces of which he had previously been unaware. In her majestic strength, her laughing tranquillity, even in her moods, grave or gay, the spirit mischievously playing hide-and-seek behind the smooth appearance, she was very much the daughter of the hills amid which she had been bred.

Ruth was as yet deliciously unaware of her danger. She was, indeed, unaware of any danger save that which haunts the down-sitting and up-rising of every working woman throughout the world—the abiding spectre of insecurity.

She liked this big man, surly and self-conscious, and encouraged his visits. Not seldom as she moved amid her cups and saucers in the back-ground of the kitchen, she would turn eye or ear to the powerful stranger with the rough eloquence sucking his pipe by the fire and holding forth to Ernie on his favourite theme. It flattered her that he who notoriously disliked women should care to come and sit in her kitchen, lifting an occasional wary eyelid as he talked to look at her. And when she caught his glance he would scowl like a boy detected playing truant.

"I shan't hurt you then, Mr. Burt," she assured him with the caressing tenderness that is mockery.

His chin sunk on his chest.

"A'm none that sure," he growled.

Ernie winked at Ruth.

"Call him Joe," he suggested. "Then hap he'll be less frit."

"Wilta?" asked Ruth, daintily mimicking the accent of her guest.

"Thoo's mockin a lad," muttered Joe, delighted and relapsing into broader Lancashire.

"Nay, ma lad," retorted Ruth. "A dursena. A'm far ower scared."

CHAPTER XII

RUTH WAKES

Apart from such occasional sallies Ruth paid little attention to her husband's friend or, indeed, to anything outside her home. Now that she had dropped her anchor in the quiet waters of love sheltered by law, and had her recovered self-respect to buttress her against the batterings of a wayward world, she was snug, even perhaps a little selfish with the self-absorption of the woman who is wrapped up in that extension of herself which is her home, her children, and the man who has given them her.

After her stormy flight she had settled down in her nest, and seldom peeped over at the cat prowling beneath or at anybody, indeed, but the cock-bird bringing back a grub for supper; and him she peeped for pretty often. She was busy too with the unending busyness of the woman who is her own cook, housekeeper, parlourmaid, nurse and laundress. And happily for her she had the qualities that life demands of the woman who bears the world's burden—a magnificent physique to endure the wear and tear of it all, the invaluable capacity of getting on well with her neighbours, method in her house, tact with her husband, a way with her children.

And there was no doubt that on the whole she was happy. The reaction from the sturm-und-drang period before her marriage was passing but had not yet wholly passed. Her spirit still slept after the hurricane. Naturally a little indolent, and living freely and fully, if without passion, her nature flowed pleasantly through rich pastures along the channels grooved in earth by the age-long travail of the spirit.

Jenny and little Ned followed Susie, just a year between each child. Ernie loved his children, especially always the last for the time being; but the element of wonder had vanished and with it much of the impetus that had kept him steady for so long.

"How is it now?" asked his mate, on hearing of the birth of the boy.

"O, it's all right," answered Ernie, wagging his head. "Only it ain't quite the same like. You gets used to it, as the sayin is."

"And you'll get use-ter to it afore you're through, you'll see," his friend answered, not without a touch of triumphant bitterness. He liked others to suffer what he had suffered himself.

As little by little the romance of wife and children began to lose its glamour, and the economic pressure steadily increased, the old weakness began at times to re-assert itself in Ernie. He haunted the Star over much. Joe Burt chaffed him.

"Hitch your wagon to a star by all means, Ern," he said. "But not that one."

Mr. Pigott too cautioned him once or twice, alike as friend and employer.

"Family man now, you know, Ernie," he said.

The sinner was always disarming in his obviously sincere penitence.

"I knaw I've unbuttoned a bit of late, sir," he admitted. "I'll brace up. I will and I can."

And at the critical moment the fates, which seemed as fond of Ernie as was everybody else, helped him.

Susie, his first-born, caught pneumonia. The shock stimulated Ernie; as shock always did. The steel that was in him gleamed instantly through the rust.

"Say, we shan't lose her!" he asked Mr. Trupp in staccato voice.

Mr. Trupp knew Ernie, knew his weakness, knew human nature.

"Can't say," he muttered. "Might not."

Ern went to the window and looked out on the square tower of the old church on the Kneb above him. His eyes were bright and his uncollared neck seemed strangely long and thin.

"She's got to live," he muttered defiantly.

The doctor nodded grimly.

The Brute had pounced on Ernie sleeping and was shaking him as a dog shakes a rat. Mr. Trupp, who had no intention of losing Susie, was by no means sorry.

"If it's got to be, it's got to be," said Ruth, busy with poultices. "Only it won't be if I can help it."

She was calm and strong as Ernie was fiercely resentful. That angered Ernie, who was seeking someone to punish in his pain.

When Mr. Trupp had left he turned on Ruth.

"You take it cool enough!" he said with a rare sneer.

She looked at him, surprised.

"Well, where's the sense in wearin yourself into a fret?" answered Ruth. "That doosn't help any as I can see."

"Ah, I knaw!" he said. "You needn't tell me."

She put down the poultice and regarded him with eyes in which there was a thought of challenge.

"What d'you knaw, Ern?"

There was something formidable about her very quiet.

"What I do, then," he said, and turned his back on her. "If it was somebody else, we should soon see."

She came to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and turned him so that she could read his face. He did not look at her.

She turned slowly away, drawing in her breath as one who rouses reluctantly from sleep.

"That's it, is it?" she said wearily. "I thart it'd come to that some day."

Just then little Alice danced in from the street, delicate, pale sprite, with anemone-like health and beauty.

"Daddy-paddy!" she said, smiling up at him, as she twined her fingers into his.

He bent and kissed her with unusual tenderness.

"Pray for our little Sue, Lal," he muttered.

The child looked up at him with fearless eyes of forget-me-not blue.

"I be," she said.

He gave her a hand, and they went out together into Motcombe Garden: for they were the best of friends.

Ruth was left. In her heart she had always known that this would come: he would turn on her some day. And she did not blame him: she was too magnanimous. Men were like that, men were. They couldn't help theirsalves. Any one of them but Ernie would have thrown her past up at her long before. She was more grateful for his past forbearance than resentful at his present vindictiveness. Now that the blow, so long hovering above her in the dimness of sab-consciousness, had fallen she felt the pain of it, dulled indeed by the fact that she was already suffering profoundly on Susie's account. But the impact braced her; and it was better so. There was no life without suffering and struggle. If you faced that fact with your eyes open, never luxuriating in the selfishness of make-believe, compelling your teeth to meet on the granite realities of life, then there would be no dreadful shock as you fell out of your warm bed and rosy dreams into an icy pool.

Ruth went back to her hum-drum toil. She had been dreaming. Now she must awake. It was Ernie who had roused her from that dangerous lethargy with a brutal slash across the face; and she was not ungrateful to him.

When he returned an hour later with little Alice she was unusually tender to him, though her eyes were rainwashed. He on his side was clearly ashamed and stiff accordingly. He said nothing; instead he was surly in self-defence.

To make amends he sat up with the child that night and the next.

"Shall you save her, sir?" asked the scare-crow on the third morning.

"I shan't," replied the doctor. "Her mother may."

Next day when Mr. Trupp came he grunted the grunt, so familiar to his patients, that meant all was well.

When the corner was turned Ern did not apologise to Ruth, though he longed to do so; nor did she ask it of him. To save himself without undergoing the humiliation of penance, and to satisfy that most easily appeased of human faculties, his conscience, he resorted to a trick ancient as Man: he went to chapel.

Mr. Pigott who had stood in that door at that hour in that frock-coat for forty years past, to greet alike the sinner and the saved, welcomed the lost sheep, who had not entered the fold for months.

"I know what this means," he said, shaking hands. "You needn't tell me. I congratulate you. Go in and give thanks."

Ern bustled in.

"I shall come regular now, sir," he said. "I've had my lesson. You can count on me."

"Ah," said Mr. Pigott, and said no more.

Next Sunday indeed he waited grimly and in vain for the prodigal.

"Soon eased off," he muttered, as he closed the door at last. "One with a very sandy soil."

The Manager of the Southdown Transport Company went home that evening to the little house on the Lewes Road in unaccomodating mood.

"His trousers are coming down all right," he told his wife. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Once you let go o God——"

"God lets go o you," interposed Mrs. Pigott. "Tit for tat."

CHAPTER XIII

NIGHTMARE

A few days later on his way back to the Manor-house from visiting his little patient in the Moot, the old surgeon met Mr. Pigott, who stopped to make enquiries.

"She'll do now," said Mr. Trupp.

"And that fellow?"

"Who?"

"Her father."

Mr. Trupp looked at the windy sky, torn to shreds and tatters by the Sou-west wind above the tower of the parish-church.

"He wanted the Big Stick and he got it," he said. "If it came down on his shoulders once a week regularly for a year he'd be a man. Steady pressure is what a fellow like that needs. And steady pressure is just what you don't get in a disorganised society such as ours."

The old Nonconformist held up a protesting hand.

"You'd better go to Germany straight off!" he cried. "That's the only place you'd be happy in."

Mr. Trupp grinned.

"No need," he said, "Germany's coming here. Ask the Colonel!"

"Ah!" scolded the other. "You and your Colonels! You go and hear Norman Angell on the Great Illusion at the Town Hall on Friday. You go and hear a sensible man talk sense. That'll do you a bit of good. Mr. Geddes is going to take the chair."

The old surgeon turned on his way, grinning still.

"The Colonel's squared Mr. Geddes," he said. "He's all right now."

What Mr. Trupp told Mr. Pigott, more it is true in chaff than in earnest, was partially true at least. Liberalism was giving way beneath the Colonel's calculated assault. After Lord Roberts's visit to Beachbourne the enemy dropped into the lines of the besiegers sometimes in single spies and sometimes in battalions. Only Mr. Pigott held out stubbornly, and that less perhaps from conviction than from a sense of personal grievance against the Colonel. For three solid years the pugnacious old Nonconformist had been trying to fix a quarrel on the man he wished to make his enemy; but his adversary had eluded battle with grace and agility. That in itself happily afforded a good and unforgiveable cause of offence.

"They won't fight, these soldiers!" he grumbled to his wife.

"They leave that to you pacifists," replied the lady, brightly.

"Pack o poltroons!" scolded the old warrior. "One can respect the Archdeacon at least because he has the courage of his opinions. But this chap!"

Yet if Liberalism as a whole was finding grace at last, Labour in the East-end remained obdurate, as only a mollusc can; and Labour was gaining power for all men to see.

In the general elections of 1910, indeed, the two Conservative candidates, Stanley Bessemere, East, and Mr. Glynde, West, romped home. The Colonel was neither surprised nor deceived by the results of the elections. He knew now that in modern England in the towns at all events, among the rising generation, there were few Conservative working men—though there were millions who might and in fact did vote for Conservative candidates; and not many Radicals—apart from a leaven of sturdy middle-aged survivors of the Gladstonian age. The workers as a whole, it was clear, as they grew in class-consciousness, were swinging slow as a huge tide, and almost as unconscious, towards the left. But they were not articulate; they were not consistent; they changed their labels as they changed their clothes, and as yet they steadfastly refused to call themselves Socialists. Indeed, in spite of the local Conservative victory, the outstanding political feature of the moment, apart from the always growing insurgency of Woman, was the advance of Labour, as the Colonel and many other thoughtful observers noted. He began, moreover, to see that behind the froth, the foam, and arrant nonsense of the extreme section of the movement, there was gathering a solid body of political philosophy. The masses were becoming organised—an army, no longer a rabble; with staff, regimental officers, plan of campaign, and an always growing discipline. And, whether you agreed with it or not, there was no denying that the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission was a political portent.

When Joe Burt came up to Undercliff, as he sometimes did, to smoke and chat with the Colonel, Mrs. Lewknor, a whole-hearted Tory, would attack him on the tyranny of Trade Unions with magnificent fury.

She made no impression on the engineer, stubborn as herself.

"War is war; and discipline is discipline. And in war it's the best disciplined Army that wins. A should have thought a soldier'd have realised that much. And this isna one o your little wars, mind ye! This is the Greatest War that ever was or will be. And we workers are fighting for our lives."

"Discipline is one thing and tyranny is quite another!" cried Mrs. Lewknor, with flashing eyes.

The Colonel, who delighted in these pitched battles, sat and sucked his pipe on the fringe of the hub-bub; only now and then turning the cooling hose of his irony on the combatants.

"It is," he said in his detached way. "Discipline is pressure you exert on somebody else. And tyranny is pressure exerted by somebody else upon you."

And it was well he was present to introduce the leaven of humour into the dough of controversy, for Mrs. Lewknor found the engineer a maddening opponent. He was so cool, so logical, and above all so dam provocative, as the little lady remarked with a snap of her still perfect teeth. He gave no quarter and asked none.

"I don't like him," she said with immense firmness to the Colonel after one of these encounters, standing in characteristic attitude, her skirt a little lifted, and one foot daintily poised on the fender-rail. "I don't trust him one inch."

"He is a bit mad-doggy," the other said, entwining his long legs. "But he is genuine."

Then two significant incidents cast the shadow of coming events on the screen of Time.

In July, 1911, Germany sent the Panther to Agadir. There ensued a sudden first-class political crisis; and a panic on every Stock Exchange in Europe.

Even Ernie was moved. This man who, in spite of Joe Burt's teaching, took as yet little more account of political happenings than does the field-mouse of the manoeuvres of the reaping machine that will shortly destroy its home, crossed the golf links one evening and walked through Meads to find out what the Colonel thought.

"What's it going to be, sir?" he asked.

The other refused to commit himself.

"Might be anything," he said. "Looks a bit funny."

"Think the reservists will be called up?"

The old soldier evinced a curious restrained keenness as of a restive horse desiring to charge a fence and yet uncertain of what it will find on the far side. The Colonel, appraising him with the shrewd eyes of the man used to judging men, was satisfied.

"I shouldn't be surprised," was all he would say.

The old Hammer-man walked away along the cliff in the direction of Meads, and dropped down on to the golf links to go home by the ha-ha outside the Duke's Lodge. Then he swung away under the elms of Compton Place Road and turned into Saffrons Croft, where Ruth and the children were to have met him. He looked about for them in vain. The cricketers were there as always, the idlers strolling from group to group, but no Ruth. Ernie who had been looking forward to a quiet half-hour's play with little Alice and Susie on the turf in the shade of the elms before bed-time felt himself thwarted and resentful. Ruth as a rule was reliable; but of late, ever since his unkindness to her at the time of Susie's illness, three weeks since, he had marked a change in her, subtle perhaps but real. True she denied him nothing; but unlike herself, she gave without generosity, coldly and as a duty.

Nursing his grievance, he dropped down the steep hill under the Manor-house wall, past the Greys, into Church Street.

At the Star a little group was gossiping, heads together. As he crossed the road they turned and looked at him with curiosity and in silence. Then a mate of his in the Transport Company called across,

"Sorry to hear this, Ern."

Ernie, thinking the man referred to the probabilities that he would be called back to the Army, and proud of his momentary fortuitous importance, shouted back with an air of appropriate nonchalance,

"That's all right, Guy. I wouldn't mind a spell with the old regiment again—that I wouldn't."

At the foot of Borough Lane he met Alf bustling along. His brother did not pause, but gave Ernie a searching look as he passed and said, "Watch it, Ern!"

Ern experienced a strange qualm as he approached his home. The door was open; nobody was about; there was not a sound in the house—neither the accustomed chirp of the children, nor the voice and movements of their mother.

The nightmare terrors that are wont to seize the sensitive at such times, especially if their conscience is haunted, laid hold of him. The emptiness, the silence appalled him. Death, so it seemed to his imaginative mind, reigned where the life and warmth and pleasant human busyness the woman and her children create had formerly been. Ever since that dark moment when he had let loose those foul and treacherous words, he had been uneasy in his mind; and yet, though usually the humblest of men, some stubborn imp of pride had possessed him and refused to allow him to express the contrition he genuinely felt. Perhaps the very magnitude of his offence had prevented him from making just amends.

Ruth on her side had said nothing; but she had felt profoundly the wound he had inflicted on her heart. So much her silence and unusual reserve had told him. Had he gone too far? Had her resentment been deeper than he had divined? Had he by his stupid brutality in a moment of animal panic and animal pain snapped the light chain that bound him to this woman he loved so dearly and knew so little? And none was more conscious than he how fragile was that chain. Ruth had never been immersed in love for him: she had never pretended to be. He knew that. She had been an affectionate and most loyal friend; and that was all.

On the threshold of his home he paused and stared down with the frightened snort of a horse suddenly aware of an abyss gaping at his feet.

For the first time in his married life the instant sense of his insecurity, always present in his subconsciousness, leapt into the light of day.

He gathered himself and marched upstairs as a man marches up the steps of the scaffold to pay the merited punishment for his crimes.

Then he heard a little noise. The door of the back room where the children, all but the baby, slept, was open. He peeped in. Susie was there, and Jenny with her. Hope returned to him. They were sitting up in bed still in outdoor clothes. Then he noticed that the baby's cot which stood of wont in the front room beside the big bed was here too. His sudden relief changed to anguish. He saw it all: his children, the three of them, packed away together like fledgelings in a nest—for him to mother; and the mother-bird herself and her child flown!

And he had brought his punishment on to his own head!

Susie waved a rag-doll at him and giggled.

"Neddy seeps with Susie!" she cried. "Susie nurse him! Mummy's gone with man!"

Brutally Ernie burst into the bedroom.

Two people stood beside the bed—his wife and a man; one on either side of it.

The man was Joe Burt; the woman Ruth.

On the bed between them lay little Alice, wan as a lily, her eyes closed apparently in death.

As he entered Joe raised a hushing finger.

"It's all right, Ern. She isna dead," said the engineer, comfortably.

Ruth, who was the colour of the child on the bed, had turned to him and now wreathed her arms about him.

"O Ern!" she cried in choking voice. "I am that glad you've come."

For a moment she hung on him, dependent as he had never known her.

Then the child stirred, opened her eyes, saw Ernie at the foot of the bed, and smiled.

"Daddy," came her sweet little voice.

Her eyes fell on Joe; her lovely brow crumpled and she wailed,

"Don't want man."

"That's me," said Joe gently, and stole towards the door on tip-toe. Ern followed him out.

Mr. Trupp met them on the stairs.

At the outer door Joe gave a whispered account of what had happened. He had been crossing Saffrons Croft on the way up to see Ernie, when he had noticed Ruth and the children under the elms. Little Alice had seen him and come rushing through the players towards her friend. A cricket-ball had struck her on the forehead; and he had carried her home like a dead thing. Outside the cottage they had met Alf, and Ruth had asked him to go for Mr. Trupp.

Ernie ran back upstairs.

The old surgeon, bending over the child, gave him a reassuring glance.

"The child's all right," he said. "See to the mother!" and nodded to Ruth, who was holding on to the mantel-piece.

She was swaying. Ern gathered her to him. The whole of her weight seemed on him. His eyes hung on her face, pale beneath its dark crown as once, and only once, he had seen it before—that time she lay on the bed in Royal's dressing-room on the dawn of her undoing.

"Ruth," he called quietly.

Slowly she returned to life, opening her eyes, and drawing her hand across them.

"Is that you, Ern?" she sighed. "O, that's right. I come all over funny like. Silly! I'm all right now."

Ernie lowered her into a chair.

She sat a moment, gathering herself. Then she looked up at him—and remembered. She had been caught. Fear came over her, and she began to tremble.

He bent and kissed her.

"I'm sorry I said that, Ruth," he whispered in her ear.

A lovely light welled up into her eyes. At that moment she was nearer loving him than she had ever been. Regardless of Mr. Trupp's presence, she put a hand on either of his shoulders, and regarded him steadfastly, a baffling look on her face.

"Dear Ern!" she said. "Only I'd liefer you didn't say it again. See, it do hurt from you."

CHAPTER XIV

SHADOWS

Ern was not called up after all.

The trap-door through which men had peered aghast into the fires of hell, closed suddenly as it had opened. Only the clang of the stokers working in the darkness under the earth could still be heard day and night at their infernal busyness by any who paused and laid ear to the ground.

England and the world breathed again.

"Touch and go," said Mr. Trupp, who felt like a man coming to the surface after a deep plunge.

"Dress rehearsal," said the Colonel.

"It'll never be so near again!" Mr. Pigott announced pontifically to his wife. "Never!"

"Thank you," replied that lady. "May we take it from you?"

When it was over the Colonel found that the walls of Jericho had fallen: the Liberal Citadel had been stormed. Mr. Geddes took the chair at a meeting at St. Andrew's Hall to discuss the programme of the League.

"It looks as if you were right after all," the tall minister said to the Colonel gravely.

"Pray heaven I'm not," the other answered in like tones.

The second significant incident of this time, which occurred during a lull before the final flare-up of the long-drawn Agadir crisis, had less happy results from the point of view of the old soldier.

In August, suddenly and without warning, the railway-men came out. The Colonel had been up to London for the night on the business of the League, and next morning had walked into Victoria Street Station to find it in possession of the soldiers: men in khaki in full marching order, rifle, bayonet, and bandolier; sentries everywhere; and on the platform a Union official in a blue badge urging the guard to come out.

The guard, a heavy-shouldered middle-aged fellow, was stubbornly lumping along the platform on flat feet, swinging his lantern.

"I've got a heart," he kept on reiterating. "I've got a wife and children to think of."

"So've I," replied the official, dogging him. "It's because I am thinking of them that I'm out."

"Silly 'aound!" said a bystander

"No, he ain't then!" retorted a second.

"Yes, he is!" chipped in a third. "Makin trouble for isself and everybody else all round. Calls isself the workers' friend!—Hadgitator, I call him!"

All the way down to Beachbourne in the train the Colonel marked pickets guarding bridges; a cavalry patrol with lances flashing from the green covert of a country lane; a battery on the march; armies on the move.

Joe Burt's right, he reflected, it's war.

"I never thought to see the like of that in England," said a fellow-traveller, eyes glued to the window.

"Makes you think," the Colonel admitted.

Arrived home he found there was a call for special constables. That evening he went to the police station to sign on, and found many of the leading citizens of Beachbourne there on like errand. Bobby Chislehurst, his open young face clouded for once, and disturbed, was pressing the point of view of the railway-men on Stanley Bessemere, who was listening with the amused indifference of the man who knows.

"I'm afraid there is no doubt about it," the politician was saying, shaking the sagacious head of the embryo statesmen. "They're taking advantage of the international situation to try to better themselves."

"But they say it's the Government and the directors who are taking advantage of it to try and put them off—as they've been doing for years!" cried Bobby, finely indignant.

"I believe I know what I am talking about," replied the other, unmoved from the rock of his superiority. "I don't mind telling you that the European situation is still most precarious. The men know that, and they're trying to squeeze the Government. I should like to think it wasn't so."

Then the Archdeacon's voice loudly uplifted overwhelmed all others.

"O, for an hour of the Kaiser!—He'd deal with em. The one man left in Europe—now my poor Emperah's gone. Lloyd George ... Bowing the knee to Baal ... Traitors to their country ... Want a lesson ... What can you expect?" He mouthed away grandiloquently in detached sentences to the air in general; and nobody paid any attention to him.

Near by, Mr. Pigott, red and ruffled, was asking what the Army had to do with it?—who wanted the soldiers?—why not leave it to the civilians?—with a provocative glance at the Colonel.

Then there was a noise of marching in the street, and a body of working-men drew up outside the door.

"Who are those fellows?" asked the Archdeacon loudly.

"Workers from the East-end, old cock," shouted one of them as offensively through the door. "Come to sign on as Specials! And just as good a right here as you have...."

The leader of the men in the street broke away from them and shouldered into the yard, battle in his eye.

It was Joe Burt, who, as the Colonel had once remarked, was sometimes a wise statesman, and sometimes a foaming demagogue. To-day he was the latter at his worst.

"What did I tell yo?" he said to the Colonel roughly. "Bringin oop the Army against us. Royal Engineers driving trains and all! It's a disgrace."

The Colonel reasoned with him.

"But, my dear fellow, you can't have one section of the community holding up the country."

"Can't have it!" surly and savage. "Yo've had five hundred dud plutocrats in the House of Lords holding up the people for years past. Did ye shout then? If they use direct action in their own interests why make a rout when 500,000 railway men come out for a living wage?—And then you coom to the workers and ask them to strengthen the Army the Government'll use against them!—A wonder yo've the face!" He turned away, shaking.

Just then happily there was a diversion. The yard-door, which a policeman had shut, burst open; and a baggy old gentleman lumbered through it with the scared look of a bear lost in a busy thoroughfare and much the motions of one.

Holding on to his coat-tails like a keeper came Ruth. She was panting, and a little dishevelled; in her arms was her baby, and her hat was a-wry.

"He would come!" she said, almost in tears. "There was no stoppin him. So I had just to come along too."

Joe, aware that he had gone too far, and glad of the interruption, stepped up to Ruth and took the baby from her arms. The distressed woman gave him a look of gratitude and began to pat and preen her hair.

At this moment Ernie burst into the yard. He was more alert than usual, and threw a swift, almost hostile, glance about him. Then he saw Ruth busy tidying herself, and relaxed.

"Caught him playing truant, didn't you, in Saffrons Croft?" he said. "The park-keeper tell me."

Ruth was recovering rapidly.

"Yes," she laughed. "I told him it was nothing to do with him—strikes and riots and bloodshed!—Such an idea!"

A baby began to wail; and Ernie turned to see Joe with little Ned in his arms.

"Hallo! Joe!" he chaffed. "My baby, I think."

He took his own child amid laughter, Joe surrendering it reluctantly.

Just then Edward Caspar appeared in the door of the office. He looked at them over his spectacles and said quietly, as if to himself.

"It's Law as well. We must never forget that."

The Colonel turned to Ernie.

"What's he mean?" he asked low.—"Law as well."

Ernie, dandling the baby, drew away into a corner where he would be out of earshot of the Archdeacon.

"It's a line of poetry, sir," he explained in hushed voice—

"O, Love that art remorseless Law,
So beautiful, so terrible."

"Go on!" said the Colonel, keenly. "Go on!—I like that."

But Ernie only wagged a sheepish head.

"That's all," he said reluctantly. "It never got beyond them two lines." He added with a shy twinkle—"That's dad, that is."

A chocolate-bodied car stopped in the street opposite.

Out of it stepped Mr. Trupp.

In it the Colonel saw a lean woman with eyes the blue of steel, fierce black brows, and snow-white hair.

She was peering hungrily out.

"It's mother come after dad," Ernie explained. "In Mr. Trupp's car. That's my brother driving."

The old surgeon, crossing the yard, now met the run-agate emerging from the office and took him kindly by the arm.

"No, no, Mr. Caspar," he scolded soothingly. "They don't want old fellows like you and me to do the bludgeon business. Our sons'll do all that's necessary in that line."

He packed the elderly truant away in the car.

Mr. Caspar sat beside his wife, his hands folded on the handle of his umbrella, looking as determined as he knew how.

Mrs. Caspar tucked a rug about his knees.

Ernie, who had followed his father out to the car, and exchanged a word with his brother sitting stiff as an idol, behind his wheel, now returned to the yard, grinning.

"Well!" said Joe.

Ernie rolled his head.

"Asked Alf if he was goin to sign on?" he grinned.

"Is he?" asked the Colonel ingenuously.

Ernie laughed harshly.

"Not Alf!" he said. "He's a true Christian, Alf is, when there's scrapping on the tape..."

At the club a few days later, when the trouble had blown over, the Colonel asked Mr. Trupp if Ernie was ill.

"He seemed so slack," he said, with a genuine concern.

"So he is," growled the old surgeon. "He wants the Lash—that's all."

"Different from his brother," mused the Colonel—"that chauffeur feller of yours. He's keen enough from what I can see."

Mr. Trupp puffed at his cigar.

"Alf's ambitious," he said. "That's his spur. Starting in a big way on his own now. Sussex is going to blossom out into Caspar's Garages, he tells me. I'm going to put money in the company. Some men draw money. Alf's one."

CHAPTER XV

THE LANDLORD

Alf's great scheme indeed was prospering.

Thwarted by the Woman, and driven back upon himself, he had taken up the career of action at the point where he had left it to pursue an adventure that had brought him no profit and incredible bitterness.

Fortune had favoured him.

Just at the moment Ruth had baffled him, another enemy of his, the Red Cross Garage Syndicate, which in the early days of his career had throttled him, came to grief.

Alf saw his chance, and flung himself into the new project with such characteristic energy as to drown the bitterness of sex-defeat. He had no difficulty in raising the necessary capital for the little Syndicate he proposed to start. Some he possessed himself; his bank was quite prepared to give him accommodation up to a point; and there was a third source he tapped with glee. That source was Captain Royal. Alf was in a position to squeeze the Captain; and he was not the man to forego an advantage, however acquired.

Royal put a fifth of his patrimony into the venture, and was by no means displeased to do so. Thereby he became the principal shareholder in the concern, with a predominant voice in its affairs. That gave him the leverage against Alf, which, with the instinct of a commander, he had seen to be necessary for the security of his future directly that young man showed a blackmailing tendency. Moreover Royal was not blind to the consideration that the new Syndicate, under able management, bid fair to be a singularly profitable investment.

Backed then by Royal and his bank, Alf bought up certain of the garages of the defaulting company at knockout prices. Thereafter, if he still coveted Ruth, he was far too occupied to worry her; while she on her side, purged by the busyness and natural intercourse of married life of all the disabling morbidities that had their roots in a sense of outlawry and the forced restraint put upon a roused and powerful temperament, had completely lost her fear of him.

Ruth, surely, was changing rapidly now. At times in family life she assumed the reins not because she wished to, but because she must; and on occasion she even took the whip from the socket.

Ernie had, indeed, climbed a mountain peak and with unbelievable effort and tenacity won to the summit, which was herself. But then, instead of marching on to the assault of the peak which always lies beyond, he had sat down, stupidly content; with the inevitable consequence that he tended to slither down the mountain-side and lose all he had gained in growth and character by his hard achievement.

The pair had been married four years now; and Ruth knew that her house was built on sand. That comfortable sense of security which had accompanied the first years of her married life, affording her incalculable relief after the hazards which had preceded them, had long passed. Dangers, less desperate perhaps in the appearance than in the days of her darkness, but none the less real, were careering up from the horizon over a murky sea like breakers, roaring and with wrathful manes, to overwhelm her. In particular the threat that haunts through life the working-woman of all lands and every race beset her increasingly. Her man was always skirting now the bottomless pit of unemployment. One slip and he might be over the edge, hurtling heavily down into nothingness, and dragging with him her and the unconscious babes.

The home, always poor, began to manifest the characteristics of its tenants, as homes will. When the young man came for the rent on Monday mornings, Ruth would open just a crack so that he might not see inside, herself peeping out of her door, wary as a woodland creature. Apart from Joe Burt, whom she did not count, there was indeed only one visitor whom Ruth now received gladly; and that was Mr. Edward Caspar, whose blindness she could depend upon.

There had grown up almost from the first a curious intimacy between the dreamy old gentleman, fastidious, scholarly, refined, and the young peasant woman whom destiny had made the mother of his grandchildren. Nothing stood between them, not even the barrier of class. They understood each other as do the children of Truth, even though the language they speak is not the same.

The old man was particularly devoted to little Alice.

"She's like a water-sprite," he said,—"so fine and delicate."

"She's different from Ernie's," answered Ruth simply. "I reck'n it was the suffering when I was carrying her."

"She's a Botticelli," mused the old man. "The others are Michael Angelos."

Ruth had no notion what he meant—that often happened; but she knew he meant something kind.

"I'd ha said Sue was more the bottled cherry kind, myself," she answered gently.

Her visitor came regularly every Tuesday morning on the way to the Quaker meeting-house, shuffling down Borough Lane past the Star, his coat-tails floating behind him, his gold spectacles on his nose, with something of the absorbed and humming laziness of a great bee. Ruth would hear the familiar knock at the door and open. The old man would sit in the kitchen for an hour by the latest baby's cot, saying nothing, the child playing with his little finger or listening to the ticking of the gold watch held to its ear.

After he was gone Ruth would always find a new shilling on the dresser. When she first told Ernie about the shilling, he was surly and ashamed.

"It's his tobacco money," he said gruffly. "You mustn't keep it."

Next Tuesday she dutifully handed the coin back to the giver,

"I don't like to take it, sir," she said.

The old man was the grandfather of her children, but she gave him always, and quite naturally, the title of respect.

He took it from her and laid it back on the dresser with the other he had brought. Then he put his hand on her arm, and looked at her affectionately through dim spectacles.

"You go to the other extreme," he said. "You're too kind."

After that she kept the money and she was glad of it too, for she was falling behind with her rent now.

Then one Monday morning, the rent-collector making his weekly call, little brown book in hand, gave her a shock.

He was a sprightly youth, cocky and curly, known among his intimates as Chirpy; and with a jealously cherished reputation for a way with the ladies.

"Say, this is my last visit," he announced sentimentally, as he made his entry in the book, and poised his pencil behind his ear. "We can't part like this, can we?—you and me, after all these years. Too cold like." He drew the back of his hand significantly across his mouth.

Ruth brushed his impertinence aside with the friendly insouciance which endeared her to young men.

"Got the sack for sauce, then?" she asked.

Chirpy shook his head ruefully.

"Mr. Goldmann's sold the house."

"Over our heads!" cried Ruth, aghast.

She hated change, for change spelt the unknown, which in its turn meant danger.

"Seems so," the youth replied. "No fault o mine, I do assure you." He returned to his point. "Anythink for Albert?"

Ruth was thoroughly alarmed. Even in those days cottages in Old Town were hard to come by.

"Who's our new landlord?" she asked.

"Mr. Caspar, I heard say in the office."

Ruth felt instant relief.

"Mr. Edward Caspar?—O, that's all right."

"No; Alf—of the Garridges. Him they call All-for-isself Alfie!"

Ruth caught her breath.

"Thank you," she said, and closed the door swiftly.

The youth was left titupping on the door-step, his nose against the panel like a seeking spaniel.

Within, Ruth put her hand to her heart to stay its tumult. She was thankful Ernie was not there to witness her emotion, for she felt like a rabbit in the burrow, the stoat hard on its heels. All her old terrors revived....

The new landlord soon paid his first visit, and Ruth was ready for him.

"You want to see round?" she asked, with the almost aggressive briskness of the woman who feels herself threatened.

"Yes, as your landlord I got the right of entry." He made the announcement portentously like an emperor dictating terms to a conquered people.

Ruth showed him dutifully round. He paid no attention to his property: his eyes were all for her; she did not look at him.

Then they went upstairs where it was dark.

There was a closed door on the left. Alf thrust it open without asking leave; but Ruth barred his passage with an arm across the door.

"What's that?" he asked, prying.

"Our room. You can't go in there. That's where my children was born."

Alf tilted his chin at her knowingly.

"All but little Alice," he reminded her. His eyes glittered in the dark. "Does he stand you anything for her?" he continued confidentially. "Should do—a gentleman. Now if you could get an affiliation order against him that'd be worth five or six bob a week to you. And that's money to a woman in your position—pay me my rent and all too. Only pity is," he ended, thoughtfully, "can't be done. You and me know that if Ern don't."

Ruth broke fiercely away.

Leisurely he followed her down the stairs with loud feet. He was greatly at his ease. His hat, which he had never taken off, was on the back of his big head. He was sucking a dirty pencil, and studying his rent-book, as he entered the kitchen.

"You're a bit behind, I see," casually.

"Only two weeks," as coldly.

"As yet."

He swaggered to the door with a peculiar roll of his shoulders.

"If you was to wish to wipe it off at any time you've only got to say the word. I might oblige."

He stood with his back to her, looking out of the door, and humming.

She was over against the range.

"What's that?" she panted.

Standing on the threshold he turned and leered back at her out of half-closed eyes.

She sneered magnificently.

"Ah, I knaw you," she said.

"What's it all about?" he answered, cleaning his nails. "Only a little bit of accommodation. No thin out o the way."

"Thank you. I knaw your accommodation," she answered deeply.

"Well," he retorted, picking his teeth. "There's no harm in it. What's the fuss about?"

"I'll tell Mr. Trupp," Ruth answered. "That's all."

Alf turned full face to her, jeering.

"What's old Trupp to me, then?" he cried. "I done with him. I done with em all. I'm me own master, I am—Alfred Caspar, Hesquire, of Caspar's Garridges, Company promoter. Handlin me thousands as you handle coppers."

He folded his arms, thrust out a leg, and looked the part majestically without a snigger. It was clear he was extraordinarily impressive to himself.

Ruth relaxed slowly, deliciously, like an ice-pack touched by the laughing kiss of spring.

She eyed her enemy with the amused indifference of some big-boned thoroughbred mare courted by an amorous pony.

"You're mad," she said. "That's the only why I don't slosh the sauce-pan over you. But I shall tell Ern all the same. And he'll tell em all."

"And who's goin to believe Ern?" jeered her tormentor. "'Old Town Toper,' they call him. Fairly sodden."

"Not to say Archdeacon Willcocks and Mr. Chislehurst," continued Ruth, calmly.

Alf shot his finger at her like a crook in a melodrama, looking along it as it might have been a pistol and loving his pose.

"And would they believe you against me? Do you attend mass? Are you a sidesman?"

"I was confirmed Church afore ever you was," retorted Ruth with spirit. "I've as good a right to the sacraments, as you have then. And I'll take to em again if I'm druv to it—that I will!"

Something about this declaration tickled Alf. The emperor was forgotten in the naughty urchin.

"So long, then!" he tittered. "Appy au-revoir! Thank-ye for a pleasant chat. This day week you can look forward to. I'll collect me rent meself because I know you'd like me to."

He turned, and as he was going out ran into a man who was entering.

"Now then!" said a surly voice. "Who are you? O, it's you, is it?—I know all about you."

"What you know o me?" asked Alf, aggressively.

"Why, what a beauty you are."

The two men eyed each other truculently. Then Joe barged through the door. The entrance cleared, Alf went out, but as he passed on the pavement outside he beat a rat-tan on the window with insolent knuckles.

Joe leaped back to the door and scowled down the road at the back of the little chauffeur retreating at the trot. Alf excelled physically in only one activity: he could run.

The engineer returned to the kitchen, savage and smouldering. Ruth, amused at the encounter, met him with kind eyes. There was in this man the quality of the ferocious male she loved. He marched up to her, his head low between his shoulders like a bull about to charge.

"Is yon lil snot after you?" he growled, almost menacing.

She regarded him with astonishment, amused and yet defensive.

"You're not my husband, Mr. Burt," she cried. "You've no grievance whoever has."

The engineer retreated heavily.

"Hapen not," he answered, surly and with averted eyes. "A coom next though."

She looked up, saw his face, and trembled faintly.

He prowled to the door without a word, without a look.

"Won't you stop for Ern?" she asked.

"Nay," he said, and went out.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GRANDMOTHER

Ruth and her mother-in-law frequently met in the steep and curling streets of Old Town as they went about their business. They knew and tacitly ignored each other. But Ernie's children were not to be ignored. They knocked eternally at their granny's heart. When of summer evenings their mother took her little brood to Saffrons Croft and sat with them beneath the elms, her latest baby in her arms, the others clouding her feet like giant daisies, Anne Caspar, limping by on flat feet with her string bag, would be wrung to the soul.

She hungered for her grand-children, longed to feel their limbs, and see their bodies, to hold them in her lap, to bathe them, win their smiles, and hear their prattle.

Pride, which she mistook for principle, stood between her and happiness.

Ruth knew all that was passing in the elder woman's heart, and felt for the other a profound and disturbing sympathy. She had the best of it; and she knew that Anne Caspar, for all her pharisaic air of superiority, knew it too. Ruth had learnt from Mrs. Trupp something of the elder woman's story. Anne Caspar too, it seemed, had loved out of her sphere; but she, unlike Ruth, had achieved her man. Had she been happy? That depended on whether she had brought happiness to her husband—Ruth never doubted that. And Ruth knew that she had not; and knew that Anne Caspar knew that she had not.

Moreover, all that Ernie told her about his mother interested her curiously: the elder woman's pride, her loneliness, her passion for her old man.

"Alf's mother over again," Ern told Ruth, "with all her qualities only one—but it's the one that matters. He's a worker same as she is. He means to get on, same as she done. There's just this difference atween em: Alf can't love; Mother can—though it's only one." ...

A week after his first visit Alf appeared again on Ruth's door-step.

Ruth opened to him with so bright a smile that he was for once taken completely by surprise. He had expected resistance and come armed to meet it.

"Come in, won't you?" she said.

Then he understood. She had thought better of her foolishness.

"That's it, is it?" he said, licking his lips. "That's a good gurl."

"Yes," said Ruth. "Very pleased to see you, I'm sure." She was smarter than usual too, he noticed—to grace the occasion no doubt. And the plain brown dress, the hue of autumn leaves, with the tiny white frill at the collar, revealed the noble lines of her still youthful figure.

The conqueror, breathing hard, entered the kitchen, to be greeted by a cultivated voice from the corner.

"Well, Alfred," it said.

Alf, whose eyes had been on the floor, glanced up with a start.

His father was sitting beside the cradle, beaming mildly on him through gold spectacles.

"Hullo, dad," said Alf, surlily. This large ineffectual father of his had from childhood awed him. There was a mystery about even his mildness, his inefficiency, which Alf had never understood and therefore feared. "I didn't expect to find you here."

It seemed to Alf that the bottle-imp was twinkling in the old man's eyes. Alf remembered well the advent of that imp to the blue haunts he had never quitted since. That was during the years of Ern's absence in India. Now it struck him suddenly that his father, so seeming-innocent, so remote from the world, was in the joke against him.

A glance at Ruth, malicious and amused, confirmed his suspicion.

"I'm glad you come and visit your sister sometimes, Alfred," said the old man gently.

"Yes," purred Ruth, "he comes reg'lar, Alf do now—once a week. And all in the way of friendship as the savin is. See, he's our landlord now."

"That's nice," continued the old man with the dewy innocence of a babe. "Then he can let you off your rent if you get behind."

"So he could," commented Ruth, "if only he was to think of it. Do you hear your dad, Alf?"

She paid the week's rent into his hand, coin by coin, before his father's eyes. Then he turned and slouched out.

"Good-night, Alf," Ruth said, almost affectionately. "It 'as been nice seein you and all."

Determined to enjoy her triumph to the full, she followed him to the door. In the street he turned to meet her mocking glance, in which the cruelty gleamed like a half-sheathed sword. His own eyes were impudent and familiar as they engaged hers.

"Say, Ruth, what's he after?" he asked, cautiously, in lowered voice.

"Who?"

"That feller I caught you with the other night—when Ern wasn't there. Black-ugly. What's he after?"

"Same as you, hap."

He sniggered feebly.

"What's that?"

"Me."

She stood before him; a peak armoured through the ages in eternal ice and challenging splendidly in the sun.

He hoiked and spat and turned away.

"Brassy is it?" he said. "One thing, my lass, you been in trouble once, mind. I saved you then. But I mightn't be able to a second time."

Behind Ruth's shoulder a dim face, bearded and spectacled, peered at him with the mild remorselessness of the moon.

"Alfred," said a voice, dreadful in its gentle austerity.

When the old man said good-bye to Ruth ten minutes later he kissed her for the first time.