CHAPTER XXVI

THE AVALANCHE MOVES

The placard, seen by the Colonel, announced the opening of a new scene in the Irish tragedy.

The King had summoned a Conference at Buckingham Palace in order if possible to find a solution of the difficulty. When the Conference met the King opened it in person and, speaking as a man weighed down by anxiety, told the members that for weeks he had watched with deep misgivings the trend of events in Ireland. "To-day the cry of Civil War is on the lips of the most responsible of my people," he said; and had added, so Mr. Trupp told the Colonel, in words not reported in the Press, that the European situation was so ominous as imperatively to demand a solution of our domestic differences in order that the nation might present a solid front to the world.

"And I bet he knows," ended the old surgeon, as he said good-bye on the steps of the Manor-house.

"I bet he does," replied the Colonel. "Thank God there's one man in the country who's above party politics." He climbed thoughtfully on to the top of the bus outside the Star, and, as it chanced, found himself sitting beside Ernie, who was deep in his paper and began to talk.

"They ain't got it all their own way, then," he said, grimly. "I see the Irish Guards turned out and lined the rails and cheered Redmond as he came down Birdcage Walk back from the Conference."

"I don't like it," replied the Colonel gloomily. "Rotten discipline. The Army has no politics."

"What about the officers at the Curragh?" asked Ernie almost aggressively. "They begun it. Give the men a chance too."

"Two wrong things don't make a right," retorted the Colonel sharply.

Ernie got down at the station without a word. Was it an accident the Colonel, sensitive as a girl, asked himself? was it a deliberate affront? What was the world coming to? That man an old Hammer-man! One of Bobby Bermondsey yahoos wouldn't treat him so!

Indeed the avalanche was now sliding gradually down the mountain-side, gathering way as it went, to overwhelm the smiling villages sleeping peacefully in the valley.

Next day oppressed by imminent catastrophe, the Colonel, climbing Beau-nez in the afternoon to take up his habitual post of vigil by the flag-staff, found Joe Burt and Mr. Geddes already there.

Both men, he marked, greeted him almost sombrely.

"It looks to me very serious," he said. "Austria means to go for Serbia, that's clear; and if she does Russia isn't going to stand by and see Serbia swallowed up. What d'you think, Mr. Geddes?"

The other answered him on that note of suppressed indignation which characterised increasingly his utterance when he touched on this often discussed subject.

"I think Colonel, what I've thought all along," he answered: "that if we're in the eve of a European eruption the attitude of the officers of the British Army is perfectly inexplicable."

He was firm almost to ferocity.

"Hear! hear!" growed Joe.

"But they don't know, poor beggars!" cried the Colonel, exasperated yet appealing. He felt as he had felt throughout the controversy that he was fighting with his hands tied behind his back. "Do be just, Mr. Geddes. They are merely the playthings of the politicians. O, if you only knew the regimental officer as I know him! He's like that St. Bernard dog over there by the coast-guard station—the most foolish and faithful creature on God's earth. Smith pats him on the head and tells him he's a good dorg, and he'll straightway beg for the privilege of being allowed to die for Smith. What's a poor ignorant devil of a regimental officer quartered at Aldershot or the Curragh or Salisbury Plain likely to know of the European situation?"

The tall minister was not to be appeased.

"Ignorance seems to me a poor justification for insubordination in an Army officer," he said. "And even if one is to accept that excuse for the regimental officers, one can't for a man like the Director of Military Strategics, who is said to have specialised in war with Germany. Yet that is the man who has co-operated, to put it at the mildest, in arming a huge rebel force with guns from the very country he has always affirmed we're bound to fight. It's stabbing the Empire in the back, neither more nor less."

He was pale, almost dogmatic.

Then Joe barged in, surly and brutal.

"The whole truth is," he said, "that the officers of the British Army to-day don't know how to spell the word Duty. Havelock did. Gordon did. And all the world respected them accordingly. These men don't. They've put their party before their coontry as A've always said they would when the pinch came."

The Colonel was trembling slightly.

"If the test comes," he said, "we shall see."

"The test has come," retorted the other savagely, "And we have seen."

The Colonel walked swiftly away. In front of him half a mile from the flag-staff, he marked a man standing waist-deep in a clump of gorse. There was something so forlorn about the figure that the Colonel approached, only to find that it was Ernie, who on his side, seeing the other, quitted the ambush, and came slowly towards him. To the Colonel the action seemed a cry of distress. All his resentment at the incident on the bus melted away in a great compassion.

"She and me used to lay there week-ends when first we married," Ern said dreamily, nodding towards the gorse he had just left.

"And she and you will live there for many happy years, I hope," replied the Colonel warmly, pointing towards the garage in the coombe beneath them.

Ernie regarded him inquiringly.

"What's that, sir?"

"Aren't you coming?"

"Where to?"

"My garage?"

Ernie did not understand and the Colonel explained.

"Didn't Mrs. Caspar tell you?"

"Ne'er a word," the other answered blankly.

The Colonel dropped down to Carlisle Road. There Mr. Trupp picked him up and drove him on to the club for tea. Fresh news from Ulster was just being ticked off on the tape. An hour or two before, a rebel unit, the East Belfast regiment of volunteers, some 5,000 strong, armed with Mausers imported from Germany, and dragging machine-guns warm from Krupp's, had marched through the streets of Belfast. The police had cleared the way for the insurgents; and soldiers of the King, officers and men, had looked on with amusement.

The Colonel turned away.

"Roll up the map of Empire!" he said. "We'd better send a deputation to Lajput Rai and the Indian Home Rulers and beg them to spare us a few baboos to govern us. Its an abdication of Government."

He went into the ante-room.

There was Stanley Bessemere back from Ulster once more. As usual he sat behind a huge cigar, retailing amidst roars of laughter to a sympathetic audience his exploits and those of his caracoling chief. The European situation had not overclouded him.

"There's going to be a Civil War and Smith and I are going to be in it. We shall walk through the Nationalists like so much paper. They've got no arms; and they've got no guts either." He laughed cheerily. "Bad men. Bad men."

The Colonel stood, an accusing figure in the door, and eyed the fair-haired giant with cold resentment.

"You know Kuhlmann from the German Embassy is over with your people in Belfast?" he asked.

The other waved an airy cigar.

"You can take it from me, my dear Colonel, that he's not," he answered.

"I'll take nothing of the sort from you," the Colonel answered acridly. "He's there none the less because he's there incognito."

The young man winced; and the Colonel withdrew.

"Jove!" he said. "I'd just like to know how far these beggars have trafficked in treason with Germany."

"Not at all," replied Mr. Trupp. "They've humbugged emselves into believing they're 'running great risks in a great cause,' as they say—or doing the dirty to make a party score, as you and I'd put it. That's all."

The Colonel walked home, oppressed. After supper, as he sat with his wife in the loggia, he told her of Ruth's strange secretiveness in the matter of the garage.

"There she is!" said Mrs. Lewknor quietly nodding over her work. Ruth, indeed, was strolling slowly along the cliff from the direction of the Meads in the gorgeous evening. Opposite the hostel a track runs down to the beach beneath. At that point she paused as though waiting for somebody; and then disappeared from view.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Lewknor spoke again in the same hushed voice.

"Here's the other!"

The Colonel looked up. Joe was coming rapidly along the cliff from the direction of Beau-nez. He too disappeared down the way Ruth had already taken.

The Colonel removed his glasses.

"I shall give em a quarter of an hour to make emselves quite comfortable," he muttered "and then—"

"Spy," said Mrs. Lewknor.

A moment later, Anne, the parlour-maid, showed Mr. Alfred Caspar on to the loggia.

The face of the Manager of Caspar's Syndicate was very long. Alf, cherishing the simple faith that the Colonel because he had been a soldier must be in the secrets certainly of the War Office and possibly of the Government, had come to ask what he thought of the European situation.

The Colonel was not reassuring, but he refused to commit himself. Alf turned away almost sullenly.

"See, it matters to me," he said. "I start Bank Holiday. Don't want no wars interfering with my Syndicate."

"It matters to us all a bit," replied the Colonel.

Alf departed aggrieved, and obviously suggesting that the Colonel was to blame. He walked away with downward eyes. Suddenly the Colonel saw him pause, creep to the cliff-edge, and peep over. Then he came back to the hostel in a stealthy bustle.

"Go and look for yourself then, sir, if you don't believe me!" he cried in the tone of one rebuffing an unjust accusation. "You're a Magistrate. Police ought to stop it I say. Public 'arlotry I call it."

The Colonel's face became cold and very lofty. "No, Caspar. I don't do that sort of thing," he said.

Alf, muttering excuses, departed. The Colonel watched him walk along the dotted coast-guard track and disappear round the shoulder of the coombe. Then he rose and strolled out to meet Ernie who was approaching.

As he did so he heard voices from the beach beneath him and peeped over. Ruth, on her hands and knees amid the chalk boulders at the foot of the cliff, was smoothing the sand and spreading something on it.

A few yards away Joe was standing at the edge of the tide, which was almost high, flinging pebbles idly into the water. Some earth dislodged from the Colonel's feet and made a tiny land-slide. The woman on her hands and knees in the growing dusk beneath looked up and saw the man standing above her. She made no motion, kneeling there; facing him, fighting him, mocking him.

"Having a nice time together?" he asked genially.

"Just going to, thank-you kindly," Ruth replied and resumed her occupation of sweeping with her hands.

The Colonel turned to find Ernie standing beside him and burning his battle-flare.

"Lucky I see you coming, sir," he said, trembling still. "Else I might ha done him a mischief."

"Who?"

"Alf. Insultin her and me. Met him just along back there in Meads by the Ship."

"Go easy, Caspar," said the Colonel quietly. "I remember that left-handed punch of yours of old. It's a good punch too; but keep it for the enemies of your country."

Ernie was hugging a big biscuit-box under his arm.

"What you got there?" asked the other.

Ernie grinned a thought sheepishly.

"It's Joe's birthday," he said. "We are having a bit of a do under the cliff."

He hovered a moment as though about to impart a confidence to the other; and then disappeared down the little track to the beach beneath at the trot, his shoulders back, and heels digging in, carrying a slither of chalk with him.

"'Come into my parlour,' said the spider to the fly," muttered the Colonel as he turned into Undercliff. "Poor fly!"

CHAPTER XXVII

THE GROWING ROAR

The avalanche, once started, was moving fast now. The Irish Nationalists who had lost faith in the power of the Government and the will of the Army to protect them, had decided at last to arm in view of the default of the law that they might resist invasion from the North-East.

On the very day after the parade of insurrectionaries in Belfast a famous Irishman, soldier, sailor, statesman, man of letters, who in his young manhood had served throughout the long-drawn South African War the Empire which had refused liberty to his country alone of all her Colonies, and in the days to come, though now in his graying years, was to be the hero of one of the most desperate ventures of the Great War, ran the little Asgarde, her womb heavy with strange fruit, into Howth Harbour while the Sunday bells peeled across the quiet waters, calling to church.

The arms were landed and marched under Nationalist escort towards Dublin. The police and a company of King's Own Scottish Borderers met the party and blocked the way. After a parley the Nationalists dispersed and the soldiers marched back to Dublin through a hostile demonstration. Mobbed, pelted, provoked to the last degree, at Bachelor's Walk, on the quay, where owing to the threatening attitude of the crowd they had been halted, the men took the law into their own hands and fired without the order of their officer. Three people were killed.

The incident led to the first quarrel that had taken place between Ernie and Joe Burt in a friendship now of some years standing.

"Massacre by the military," said Joe. "That's what it is."

The old soldier in Ernie leapt to the alert.

"Well, what would you have had em do?" he cried hotly. "Lay down and let emselves be kicked to death?"

"If the soldiers want to shoot at all let em shoot the armed rebels," retorted Joe.

"Let em shoot the lot, I says," answered Ernie. "I'm sick of it. Ireland! Ireland! Ireland all the time. No one's no time to think of poor old England. Yet we've our troubles too, I reck'n."

Joe went out surlily without saying good-night. When he was gone, Ruth who had been listening, looked up at Ernie, a faint glow of amusement, interest, surprise, in her eyes.

"First time ever I knaw'd you and Joe get acrarst each other," she said.

Ernie, biting home on his pipe, did not meet her gaze.

"First," he said. "Not the last, may be."

She put down dish-cloth and dish, came to him, and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Let me look at you, Ern!"

His jaw was set, almost formidable: he did not speak.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

For a moment his eyes hovered on her face.

"D'you mean anything?" he asked.

"Not that," she answered and dropped her hand.

"Then to hell with you!" he cried with a kind of desperate savagery and thrust her brutally away. "Sporting with a man!"

He put on his cap and went out.

In a few minutes he was back. Paying no heed to her, he sat down at the kitchen-table and wrote a note, which he put on the mantel-piece.

"You can give this to Alf next time he comes round for the rent," he said.

"What is it?" asked Ruth.

"Notice," Ern answered. "We're going to shift to the Colonel's garage."

Ruth gave battle instantly.

"Who are?" she cried, facing him.

He met her like a hedge of bayonets.

"I am," he answered. "Me and my children."

The volley fired on Bachelor's Walk, as it echoed down the long valleys of the world, seemed to serve the purpose of Joshua's trumpet. Thereafter all the walls of civilisation began to crash down one after another with the roar of ruined firmaments.

Forty-eight hours later Austria declared war.

On Thursday Mr. Asquith, speaking in a crowded and quiet house, proposed the postponement of the Home Rule Bill.

Even the hotheads were sober now.

Stanley Bessemere discarded his uniform of an Ulster Volunteer in haste, and turned up at the club in chastened mood. He was blatant still, a little furtive, notably less truculent. The martial refrain Smith and I had given place to the dulcet coo We must all pull together.

"Is he ashamed?" Mrs. Lewknor asked her husband, hushed herself, and perhaps a little guilty.

"My dear," the Colonel replied. "Shame is not a word known to your politician. He's thoroughly frightened. All the politicians are. There're bluffing for all they're worth."

On the Saturday morning the Colonel went to the club. The junior member for Beachbourne, who was there, and for once uncertain of himself, showed himself childishly anxious to forget and forgive.

"Now look here, Colonel!" he said, charming and bright. "If there's an almighty bust-up now, shall you really blame it all on Ulster? Honest Injun!"

The Colonel met him with cold flippancy.

"Every little helps," he said. "A whisper'll start an avalanche, as any mountaineer could tell you."

He took up the Nation of August 1st and began to read the editor's impassioned appeal to the country to stand out. The Colonel read the article twice over. There could be no question of the white-hot sincerity of the writer, and none that he voiced the sentiments of an immense and honest section of the country.

He put the paper down and walked home.

"If we don't go in," he said calmly to his wife at luncheon, "all I can say is, that I shall turn my back on England for ever and go and hide my head for the rest of my days on the borders of Thibet."

In those last days of peace good men and true agonised in their various ways. Few suffered more than the Colonel; none but his wife knew the agony of his doubt.

Then Mr. Trupp telephoned to say that Germany had sent an ultimatum to Russia, and that France was mobilising. Mr. Cambon had interviewed the King. The Government was still wavering.

The Colonel's course was evident. The little organisation for which he was responsible must express itself, if only in the shrill sharp voice of a mosquito. A meeting of the League must be convened. Tingling with hope, doubt, fear, shame, he set off in the evening to interview Alfred Caspar. Swiftly he crossed the golf-links and turned into Saffrons Croft. There he paused.

It was one of those unforgettable evenings magnificently calm, which marked with triumphant irony the end of the world. The green park with its cluster of elms presented its usual appearance on a Saturday afternoon. The honest thump of the ball upon the bat, so dear to English hearts, resounded on every side: the following cry—Run it out! the groups of youths sprawling about the scorers, the lounging spectators. Not a rumour of the coming storm had touched those serene hearts. Close to him a bevy of women and children were playing a kind of rounders. The batter was a big young woman whom he recognised at once as Ruth.

One of the the fielders was little Alice scudding about the surface of green on thin black legs like a water-beetle on a pond. Then Ernie saw him and came sauntering towards him, a child clinging solemnly to one finger of each hand. There was an air of strain about the old Hammer-man, as of one waiting on the alert for a call, that distinguished him, so the Colonel thought, from the gay throng.

"What about it, sir?" he asked gravely.

"It's coming, Caspar," the Colonel answered. "That's my belief."

"And I shan't be sorry if it does," said Ernie with a quiet vindictiveness.

"Shall you go?" asked the Colonel. He knew the other's time as a reservist was up.

"Sha'n't I?" Ernie answered with something like a snort.

The Colonel was not deceived. It was not the patriot, not the old soldier, who had uttered that cry of distress: it was the human being, bruised and suffering, and anxious to vent his pain in violence on something or somebody, no matter much who.

"Yes, sir, I shall go, if it's only as cook in the Army Service Corps."

The Colonel shook his head.

"If it comes," he said, "every fighting man'll be wanted in his right place. Would you like to rejoin the old battalion at Aldershot, if I can work it for you? Then you'd go out with the Expeditionary Force."

Ernie's eyes gleamed.

"Ah, just wouldn't I?" he said.

Just then there was a shout from the players. Ruth was out and retired. She came towards them, glowing, laughing, her fingers touching her hair to order. She was thirty now, but at that moment she did not look twenty-five. Then she saw the Colonel and deliberately turned away. Susie and Jenny pursued their mother.

The Colonel walked off through the groups of white-clad players towards Alf's garage in the Goffs. A tall man was standing at the gate on to Southfields Road, contemplating the English scene with austere gaze.

It was Royal—the man who would know.

"You think it's going to be all right?" asked the Colonel so keen as to forget his antipathy.

"Heaven only knows with this Government," the other replied. "I've just been on the telephone. Haldane's going back to the War Office, they say."

"Thank God for it!" cried the Colonel.

His companion shrugged.

"Henry Wilson's in touch with Maxse and the Conservative press," he said. "He's getting at the Opposition. There's to be a meeting at Lansdowne House to-night. H.W.'s going to ginger em."

The Colonel looked away.

"And what are you doing down here?" he asked.

"They sent me down to Newhaven last night—embarkation. I'm off in two minutes." He jerked his head towards a racing car standing outside the garage, white with dust. "Got to catch the 7 o'clock at Lewes, and be back at the War Office at 9 p.m. An all-night sitting, I expect." That austere gaze of his returned to the playing-fields. "Little they know what they're in for," he said, as though to himself.

For the first time the Colonel found something admirable, almost comforting, in the hardness of his old adjutant. He followed the other's gaze and then said quietly, almost tenderly, as one breathing a secret in the ear of a dying man.

"That's the child, Royal—that one in the white frock and black legs running over by the elms. And that's her mother in the brown dress—the one waving. And there's her husband under the trees—that shabby feller."

Royal arched his fine eyebrows in faint surprise.

"Is she married?" he asked coolly.

"Yes," replied the Colonel. "The feller who seduced her wouldn't do the straight thing by her."

Again the eyebrows spoke, this time with an added touch of sarcasm, almost of insolence.

"How d'you know?"

The Colonel was roused.

"Well, did you?" he asked, with rare brutality.

Royal shrugged. Then he turned slow and sombre eyes on the other. There was no anger in them, no hostility.

"Perhaps I shall make it up to them now, Colonel," he said....

The Colonel crossed the road to the garage. There was a stir of busyness about two of the new motor char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate. Alf was moving amid it all in his shirt-sleeves, without collar or tie, his hands filthy. His moustache still waxed, and his hair parted down the middle and plastered, made an almost comic contrast to the rest of his appearance. But there was nothing comic about his expression. He looked like a dog sickening for rabies; ominous, surly, on the snarl. He did not seem to see the Colonel, who tackled him at once, however, about the need for summoning a meeting of the League.

"Summon it yourself then," said Alf. "I got something better to do than that. Such an idea! Coming botherin me just now. Start on Monday. Ruin starin me in the face. Who wants war? Might ha done it on purpose to do me down."

The Colonel climbed the hill to the Manor-house to sup with the Trupps.

Two hours later, as he left the house, Ernie Caspar turned the corner of Borough Lane, and came towards him, lost in dreams. The Colonel waited for him. There was about the old Hammer-man that quality of forlornness which the Colonel had noted in him so often of late. He took his place by the other's side. They walked down the hill together silently until they were clear of the houses, and Saffrons Croft lay broad-spread and fragrant upon their right.

In the growing dusk the spirits of the two men drew together. Then Ernie spoke.

"It's not Joe, sir," he said. "He's all right, Joe is."

The Colonel did not fence.

"Are you sure?" he asked with quiet emphasis.

"Certain sure," the other answered with astonishing vehemence. "It's Ruth. She won't give me ne'er a chance."

The Colonel touched him in the dusk.

"Bad luck," he muttered. "She'll come round."

It was an hour later and quite dark when he rounded the shoulder of Beau-nez and turned into the great coombe, lit only by the windows of his own house shining out against Beau-nez.

Walking briskly along the cliff, turning over eternally the question whether England would be true to herself, he was aware of somebody stumbling towards him, talking to himself, probably drunk. The Colonel drew aside off the chalk-blazed path to let the other pass.

"A don't know justly what to make on't," came a broad familiar accent.

"Why, it's fight or run away," replied the Colonel, briskly. "No two twos about it."

A sturdy figure loomed up alongside him.

"Then it's best run away, A reckon," answered the other, "afore worse comes on't. What d'you say, Colonel?"

The darkness drew the two men together with invisible bonds just as an hour before it had drawn the Colonel and Ernie.

"What is it, Burt?" asked the Colonel, gently.

He felt profoundly the need of this other human being standing over against him in the darkness, lonely, suffering, riven with conflicting desires.

Joe drew closer. He was sighing, a sigh that was almost a sob. Then he spoke in the hushed and urgent mutter of a schoolboy making a confession.

"It's this, Colonel—man to man. Hast ever been in love with a woman as you oughtn't to be?"

Not for the first time in these last months there was strong upon the Colonel the sense that here before him was an honest man struggling in the toils prepared for him by Nature—the Lion with no mouse to gnaw him free. Yet he was aware more strongly than ever before of that deep barrier of class which in this fundamental matter of sex makes itself more acutely felt than in any other. A man of quite unusual breadth of view, imagination, and sympathy, this was the one topic that some inner spirit of delicacy had always forbidden him to discuss except with his own kind. He was torn in two; and grateful to the kindly darkness that covered him. On the one hand were all the inhibitions imposed upon him by both natural delicacy and artificial yet real class-restraint; on the other there was his desire to help a man he genuinely liked. Should he take the line of least resistance, the line of the snob and the coward? Was it really the fact that because this man was not a gentleman he could not lay bare before him an experience that might save him?

"Yes," he said at last with the emphasis of the man who is forcing himself.

There was a lengthy silence.

"Were you married?"

"No," abruptly. "Of course not."

"Was she?"

"Yes."

"What happened?"

"She wired me to come—in India—years ago."

"Did you go?"

"No—thank God." The honest man in him added: "I never got the wire."

Again there was a pause.

"Are you glad?"

"Yes."

"Had she children."

"No."

The engineer breathed deep.

"Ah," he said. "I'd ha gone."

"Then you'd have done wrong."

"Happen so," stubbornly. "I'd ha gone though—knowing what I know now."

"What's that?"

"What loov is."

The Colonel paused.

"She'd never have forgiven you," he said at last.

"What for?"

"For taking advantage of her hot fit."

The arrow shot in the dark had clearly gone home. The Colonel followed up his advantage.

"Is she in love with you?"

"She's never said so."

"But you think so?"

"Nay, A don't think so," the other answered with all the old violence. "A know it. A've nobbut to reach out ma hand to pluck the flower."

His egotism annoyed the Colonel.

"Seems to me," he said, "we shall all of us soon have something better to do than running round after each other's wives. Seen the evening paper?"

"Nay, nor the morning for that matter."

"And you a politician!"

"A'm two men—same as most: politician and lover. Now one's a-top; now t'other. It's a see-saw."

"And the lover's on top now?" said the Colonel.

"Yes," said the engineer, "and like to stay there too—blast him!" And he was gone in the darkness.

CHAPTER XXVIII

OLD TOWN

Next day was Sunday.

The Colonel waited on the cliff for his paper, which brought the expected news. The die was cast. Germany had proclaimed martial law: she was already at war with Russia; France had mobilised.

"She's in it by now," he said to himself, as he walked across the golf-links towards Old Town.

The threat of danger was arousing in every individual a passionate need for communication, for re-assurance, for the warmth and comfort of the crowd. The herd, about to be attacked, was drawing together. Its out-posts were coming back at the trot, heads high, ears alert, snorting the alarm. Even the rogue and outcast were seeking re-admission and finding it amid acclamation. The main body were packing in a square, heads to the danger, nostrils quivering, antlers ready. An enemy was a-foot just beyond the sky-line. He has not declared himself as yet. But the wind betrayed his presence; and the secret stir of the disturbed and fearful wilderness was evidence enough that the Flesh-eater was abroad.

The turf sprang deliciously beneath the Colonel's feet. His youth seemed to have returned to him. He felt curiously braced and high of heart. Once he paused to look about him. Beyond the huge smooth bowl of the links with its neat greens and the little boxes of sand, its pleasant club-house, its evidence of a smooth and leisurely civilisation, Paradise rippled at the touch of a light-foot breeze. The Downs shimmered radiantly, their blemishes hidden in the mists of morning. On his right, beyond the ha-ha, the Duke's Lodge stood back in quiet dignity amid its beeches, typical of the England that was about to fade away like a cinema picture at a touch.

A lark sang. The Colonel lifted his face to the speck poised and thrilling in the blue.

What a day to go to war on! was his thought.

At the deserted club-house he dropped down into Lovers' Lane and climbed up towards Old Town between high flint walls, ivy-covered.

As he emerged into Rectory Walk the Archdeacon was coming out of his gate. He was in his glory. His faded eyes glittered like those of an old duellist about to engage, and confident of his victim.

"I've been waiting this day for forty-five yeahs," he announced.

The Colonel was aware of the legend that in 1870 the Archdeacon, then a lad at Cambridge, had only been restrained from fighting for his hero, the Emperor of the French, by a brutal father.

"It certainly looks as if you might get back a bit of your own," he said wearily. The other's dreadful exaltation served only to depress him. "Russia going at em one side and France the other."

"And England!" cried the Archdeacon.

"You think we shall go in?"

To the Colonel's horror, the Archdeacon took him by the arm.

"Can you doubt it?" he cried, rolling his eyes to see the impression he was making on the grocer in the door of the little corner-shop. "Are we rotten to the heart?"

They were walking down Church Street now, arm-in-arm, in the middle of the road.

"The pity of it is," he cried in his staccato voice, "we've no Emperah to lead us to-day. Ah! there was a man!" He made a dramatic halt in mid-street. "Thank Gahd for Carson—what!" he whispered.

"And Smith," said the Colonel meekly. "Let us give thanks for Smith too—

Great in counsel, great in war,
Foremost Captain of our time,
Rich in saving common sense,
And, as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime."

They had reached the door of the parish-church.

The Archdeacon entered; and the Colonel turned with relief to greet Bobby Chislehurst. The lad's open face was unusually grave.

"There are sure to be pacifist demonstrations in London to-morrow," he began, blurting out his confidences like a a school-boy. "It's my day off. I shall go."

"Don't," said the Colonel.

"I must," the other replied. "It's all I can do."

"Bobby," said the Colonel grimly. "This is my advice. If you go up to London at all wire to Billy to come and meet you. He may be able to get an hour off, though I expect they're pretty busy at Aldershot." Billy was Bobby's twin-brother and in the Service.

Bobby winced.

"Yes," he said, "if Billy goes, Billy won't come back. I know Billy."

A few yards down the street the Colonel met Alf Caspar in the stream of ascending church-goers.

The little sidesman was dapper as usual: he wore a fawn coloured waist-coat, his moustache was waxed, his hair well-oiled; but his face was almost comically a-wry. He looked like the villain in a picture play about to burst into tears. Directly he saw the Colonel he roused to new and hectic life, crossing to him, entirely forgetful of their meeting on the previous evening.

"Is it war, sir?" he asked feverishly and with flickering eyes.

"If we are ever to hold up our heads and look the world in the face again," the Colonel answered.

"But what's it got to do with us?" Alf almost screamed. "Let em fight it out among themselves if they want to, I says. Stand aside—that's our part. That's the manly part. And then when it's all over slip in—"

"And collar the loot," suggested the Colonel.

"And arbitrate atween em. If we don't there'll be nobody to do it, only us. I don't say it'll be easy to make the sacrifice o standing aside when you want to help your friends, of course you do. But I say we ought to do it, and let em say what they like—if it's right and it is right. Take up the cross and face the shame—that's what I says. Where's the good o being Christians else, if you're going to throw it all overboard first time you're put to the test? We won't be the first, I says. What about the martyrs and them? Didn't they go through it? Not to talk o the expense! Can we afford it? Course we can't. Who could? Income tax at a shilling in the pound, and my petrol costing me another six-pence the can. And then ask us to sit down to a great war!"

He poured out his arguments as a volcano in eruption pours out lava.

The Colonel listened.

"You'd better give your views to your Rector, I think," he remarked.

Alf's face turned ugly.

"One thing," he said, with an ominously vicious nod, "if there is war I resign my position in the League—that's straight."

"O dear!" said the Colonel, and he turned into the Manor-house.

Bess opened to him herself.

"Joe come?" he asked, knowing she was expecting her brother for the week-end.

"No. A post-card instead. We don't quite know where he is."

The Colonel nodded.

"Leave stopped. Sure to be."

Then Mrs. Trupp came down the stairs. About her was the purged and hallowed air of one who faces death without fear and yet without self-deception as to the price that must be paid. The Colonel felt he was standing upon holy ground.

Mrs. Trupp handed him a post-card. The postmark was Dover. It ran:

All well. Very busy.

"I think it'll be all right, don't you?" said Mrs. Trupp, raising wistful eyes to his. The mother in her longed for him to say No: the patriot Yes.

"It must be," replied Bess, ferociously. "If it isn't Joe will chuck the Service. They all will. The pacifists can defend their own rotten country!"

The Colonel moved into the consulting-room, where Mr. Trupp was burrowing short-sightedly into his Sunday paper.

The old surgeon at least had no doubts.

"We shall fight all right," he said comfortably. "We must. And Must's the only man who matters in real life."

The Colonel felt immensely comforted.

"But what a position my poor old party'd have been in now if our leaders hadn't queered the pitch!" he remarked. "We told you so! We told you so! How we could have rubbed it in."

"Thank God you can't," replied the other grimly. "No party's got the chuckle over another. So there's some hope that we may act as a country for once."

Outside the Manor-house the Colonel met Mr. Pigott in his frock-coat on the way to chapel. The two men had never spoken for years past except to spar. Now in the presence of the common fear they stopped, and then shook hands.

Mr. Pigott was a brave man, but there was no doubt he was shaken to the roots.

"My God, Colonel!" he muttered. "It's awful."

"It don't look too pleasant," the old soldier admitted.

"But we can't go in!" cried the old Nonconformist. "It's no affair of ours. Who are the Serbs?"

"It's go in or go under, I'm afraid," the other answered. "That's the alternative."

He dropped down Borough Lane past the Star.

On the hill Edward Caspar ambling rapidly along with flying coat-tails caught him up.

"Well, Mr. Caspar, what do you think about it?" asked the Colonel.

The old man emerged from his brown study and looked up with scared eyes through his gold spectacles. He did not recognise the questioner: he never did—but he answered eagerly, and with wonderful firmness.

"It's Love. It can't be anything else."

"I don't know. War seems to me a funny sort of Love," the Colonel muttered.

"What's that?" asked the other.

"War," replied the Colonel. "There's a great European war on."

The old man, blind, puzzled, seeking, stopped dead.

"War?" he said. "What war's that?"

The Colonel explained.

"Austria's gone to war with Serbia. Russia's chimed in. Germany's having a go at Russia. And France is rushing to the rescue of her ally. Europe's ablaze from the Bay of Biscay to the Caucasus."

Edward Caspar blinked at the road as he absorbed the news. Then he gathered himself and went droning down the hill at increased speed with the erratic purposefulness of a great bumble-bee. There was something lofty, almost majestic about his bearing. In a moment he had increased in spiritual stature; and he was trying to straighten his rounded shoulders.

"It must work itself out," he said emphatically. "It's only an incident on the march. We mustn't lose our sense of proportion. We shall get there all the quicker in the end because of it."

"We shall if we go this pace," muttered the Colonel, pretending to pant as they turned into the Moot.

The Quaker meeting-house lay just in front of them, a group of staid figures at the door. On their left was a row of cottages at the foot of the Church-crowned Kneb. The door of one of them was open, and in it stood Ernie in his shirt-sleeves, towel in hand, scrubbing his head. A word passed between father and son; then the old man shuffled on his way.

Ernie turned in a flash to the Colonel, who saw at once that here the miracle of sudden conversion had been at work. This man who for months past had been growing always graver and more pre-occupied was suddenly gay. A spring had been released; and a spirit had been tossed into the air. He seemed on the bubble, like an eager horse tugging at its bridle.

Now he held up a warning finger and moved down the road till he was out of ear-shot of his own cottage.

"Have you worked it, sir?" he asked. His question had reference to his conversation with the Colonel in Saffrons Croft the evening before, and in his keenness he was oblivious of the fact that nothing could have been achieved in the few brief hours that had elapsed since their last meeting.

"I've written," replied the Colonel. "You'll be wanted. Every man who can stand on his hind-legs will. That's what I came about: If you have to join up it'll punish your feet much less if you've done a bit of regular route-marching first. Now I'm game to come along every evening and march with you. Begin to-night. Five to ten miles steady'd soon tell. What about it?"

"I'm at it, sir!" cried Ernie. "Thank you kindly all the same. Started last night after we'd read the news. There's a little bunch of us in Old Town—old sweats. Marched to Friston, we did. One hour's marching; ten minutes halt. Auston to-night. We'll soon work into it."

"That's the style," said the Colonel. "Are the other men keen?"

Ernie grinned.

"Oh, they're for it, if it's got to be," he said.

"And Burt?—seen him?"

"No sir, not yet. But he's all right at heart, Joe is. I'm expectin him round every minute."

At the moment a thick-set man came swishing round the corner of Borough Lane on a bicycle. His shoulders were hunched, and he was pedalling furiously. The sweat shone on his face, which was red and set. It was clear that he had come far and fast. Seeing the two men in the road he flung off his bicycle and drew up beside them at a little pattering run.

Out here under the beat of the sun the Colonel hardly recognised in this solid fellow, dark with purpose, the wavering lover of the cliff last night. Was the change wrought in this man as by magic typical of a like change in the heart of the country? The thought flashed into the Colonel's mind and brought him relief.

The engineer, who was heaving, came straight to his point without a word, without a greeting.

"Philip Blackburn's coomin down on the rush to address a great Stop-the-war meeting at the Salvation Army Citadel this afternoon," he panted. "We must counter it. A'm racin round to warn the boys to roll up. You must be there, Colonel, and you, Ern, and all of you. It's all out this time, and no mistake."

The door behind the Colonel opened. He turned to find Ruth standing in the door, drying her hands.

Joe paid no heed, already sprawling over his bicycle as he pushed it off.

"What time?" she called after him.

"Two-thirty," he answered back, and was gone round the corner.

"Right," she yodled. "I'll be there."

CHAPTER XXIX

FOLLOW YOUR LEADER

Philip Blackburn's meeting had not been advertised, for it was only in the small hours of the morning that a motor-bicyclist scaring the hares and herons in the marshes, had brought the news from Labour Headquarters that P.B. was bearing the Fiery Cross to Beachbourne in the course of a whirlwind pilgrimage of the Southern Counties. But the hall was crammed.

Philip Blackburn was a sure draw at any time. A Labour M.P. and stalwart of the Independent Labour Party, it was often said that he was destined to be the Robespierre of the new movement. Certainly he was an incorruptible. A cripple from his youth, and a fanatic, with the face of a Savonarola, in the House and on the platform he asked no quarter and gave none.

Half an hour later the dusty Ford car which bore the fighting pacifist was signalled panting down Stone Cross hill over the Levels: a half-hour the audience passed singing God save the People and The Red Flag.

A few minutes later he came limping on to the platform: a little man, of the black-coated proletariat obviously, with the face of a steel blade, keen and fine, and far-removed from the burly labour agitator, hoarse of voice, and raw of face, of a previous generation. His reception was impressively quiet. The man's personality, his courage, his errand, the occasion, awed even the most boisterous.

He looked dead-beat, admitted as much, and apologised for being late.

"You know where I come from (cheers) and where I'm bound for to-night. And you know what I've come about—Is it Peace or War?"

And he launched straightway into that famous Follow-your-leader speech, the ghost of which in one form or another was to haunt the country, as the murdered albatross haunted the blood-guilty mariner, all through the war, and will haunt England for generations still after we are gone:—

The danger long-preached was on them at last. It must be faced and fought. They must take a leaf out of Carson's book. The Conservatives had shown the way: they must follow their leaders of the ruling class. They must dish the Government if it proposed to betray the country just as the Unionists had done—by persuading the Army not to fight. They must undermine the morale of the private soldiers—just as the Tories had undermined that of the officers. They must have their agents in every barrack-room, their girls at every barrack-gate—just as the Tories had done. The men must apply the sternest "disciplinary pressure" to scabs—just as the officers had done. They must stop recruiting—as Garvin and the Yellow Press had advocated. The famous doctrine of "optional obedience," newly introduced into the Army by Tory casuists, must be carried to its logical conclusion. And if the worst came to the worst they must follow their leaders of the ruling class, arm, and "fight the fighters. Follow your leaders—that is the word."

He spoke with cold and bitter passion in almost a complete hush—a white-hot flame of a man burning straight and still on the altar of a packed cathedral. Then he sank back into his chair, spent, his eyes closed, his face livid, his fine fingers twitching. He had achieved that rarest triumph of the orator: beaten his audience into silence.

The Colonel stood up against the wall at the back. Peering over intervening heads he saw Joe Burt sitting in front.

Then a voice at his ear, subdued and deep and vibrating, floated out on the hush as it were on silver wings.

"Now, Joe!" it said, like a courser urging on a greyhound.

There was a faint stir in the stillness: the eyes of the orator on the platform opened. A chair scraped; the woman beside the Colonel sighed. There was some sporadic cheering, and an undercurrent of groans.

Joe Burt rose to his feet slowly and with something of the solemn dignity of one rising from the dead. Everybody present knew him; nobody challenged his right to speak. A worker and a warrior, who had lived in the East-end for some years now, he had his following, and he had his enemies. The moderate men were for him, the extremists had long marked him down as suspect—in with the capitalists—too fond of the classy class. But they would hear him; for above all things he was that which the Englishman loves best in friend or enemy—a fighter.

Standing there, thick-set and formidable as a bull, he began the speech of his life.

"Two wrongs don't make a right. Because the officers have sold the pass, are the men to do the same?"

"Never!" came a shout from the back. It was Ernie's voice. The Colonel recognised it and thrilled.

"We all know," continued the speaker, "that the gentry have put their coontry after their party. It's for the People to show them the true road, and put Democracy before even their coontry."

"Hear! hear!" from Philip Blackburn.

The speaker was growing to his task, growing as it grew.

"This is a great spiritual issue. Are we to save our lives to lose them? or lose them to save them? The People are in the Valley of Decision. God and the Devil are standing on a mountain-top on either side the way crying—Who is on my side?" His great voice went billowing through the hall, borne, it seemed, on some huge wind of the spirit. He was holding the audience, carrying them. The Colonel felt it: the man with the closed eyelids in the chair on the platform felt it too.

"Jaures, the beloved leader of our cause in France, has already made his choice—the first man to fall for Democracy. Shall he lie alone?"

It was a dramatic touch, and told.

"A have chosen ma part," the speaker went on more quietly. "A loov ma coontry; but there's something greater even than the fate of the coontry hanging in the balance now. Democracy's at stake!"

A roar of applause greeted the remark.

"It's the Emperors agin the People!"

This time the roar was pierced by a shrill scream,

"What about Russia?"

The booming voice over-rode the interruption as a hurricane over-rides a blade of grass that stands in its track.

"Look at little Serbia!—a handful of peasants standing up against a great militarist Empire. Look at Belgium!—the most peaceful nation on God's earth about to be over-run by the Kaiser's hordes. Look at France, the mother of Revolution, and the home of Democracy!—Could we forsake them now?"

"Never!" in a growing thunder.

"If so we forsook our own ideals, betrayed our past, turned our back on our future. Yea. The People must fight or perish."

"He's got em," sobbed Ruth, her handkerchief tight in her mouth. The Colonel could feel her trembling.

"The question to ma mind," continued the speaker, "is not whether we should fight, but whether the officers of the Army—who have failed us once, mind!—will fight."

The blow went home and hammered a few dissentients into silence.

"If not then we must find our own officers—roosset-coated captains who know what they're fighting for, and love what they know."

The words were lost in a hurricane of cheering.

"And ma last word to you," ended the speaker, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth, "is much that of the Great Apostle—Stand and Fight!" He flung the words at his audience with a power and a conviction that were overwhelming.

A great bell was tolling in the Colonel's mind.

"That's a great man," he found himself murmuring.

"Aye, that's Joe," came the deep voice beside him.

The heat, the crush, the tumult of sound, his own intense emotion proved almost too much for the Colonel. He leaned against the wall with closed eyes, but there was joy in his heart.

"Done it," he muttered. "That was England speaking." Then somebody led him out into the fresh air.

"They're all right, sir," said a voice comfortably in his ear. "Joe done the trick. Grand he was."

Some of the Labour extremists recognised him as he lolled against the wall, hat over his eyes, recalled his work for the National Service League, and gathered round for the worry.

"That's him.—Militarist!—Brought the trouble on us! He won't pay.—Leaves that for us to do!—Drunk as a lord!—On the blood of the workers."

The Colonel heard the words, but paid no heed. They fell on his mind like rain-drops on a sea which absorbs them unconsciously as it sways and drifts listlessly to and fro.

Then another voice, familiar this time, and strangely fierce, clashed with those of his would-be persecutors.

"None of it now! Want one for yourself, do you? Stand back there! Give him a chance to breathe! Ought to be ashamed, some of you."

The Colonel opened his eyes to find Ernie standing over him.

"Ah, Caspar," he said faintly.

Then Ruth came swiftly out of the dissipating crowd towards them. She was flashing, glorious, with tumultuous bosom. Swept by her emotion she forgot for the moment the undeclared war that was raging between this lean old man and herself: she did not even notice his distress.

"He's such a battler, Joe is!" she cried.

All that was combative in the Colonel rose desperately to grip and fight the same qualities in her.

"He's not the only one," he said feebly, and musing with a vacuous smile on the strange medley of vast world-tragedy and tiny domestic drama sank slowly into unconsciousness, Ernie's arm about him, Ernie's kind face anxious above him. "Watch it, Caspar!" he whispered. "Danger!"

He came round slowly to hear voices wrangling above him.

"I had to come to the meeting. I promised Joe," the woman was saying.

"What about the children?"

There was silence: then the man went on with a cold sneer.

"Little Alice, I suppose. Little Alice got to do it all these days."

"Little Alice is mine," the woman retorted. "If you're not satisfied with the way your—"

The Colonel sat up.

"For God's sake!" he cried.

CHAPTER XXX

THE END OF THE WORLD

The next day was Bank Holiday; and such a holiday as no living man had known or would ever know again. Half the world had already tumbled into hell; and the other half was poised breathless on the brink, awaiting the finger-push that should send it too roaring down to death.

On that brilliant summer day nations crouched in the stubble like coveys of partridges beneath the shadow of some great hawk hovering far away in the blue.

A silence like a cloud enveloped England.

The tocsin was about to sound that was to call millions of rosy lads from their mothers, splendid youths from their girls, sober middle-aged men away from their accustomed place in church and chapel, from the office stool, from the warm companionable bed and the lovely music of children's voices, to strange destinies in unknown seas, on remote deserts, beside alien rivers; calling them in a voice that was not to be denied to lay their bones far from the village church-yard and the graves of innumerable ancestors, in rotting swamps, on sun-bleached mountains, with none to attend their obsequies save the nosing jackal and raw-necked vulture.

Early in the morning the Colonel walked across to Old Town to see Bobby Chislehurst, and put the curb on him if possible; for the Daily Citizen had come out with a full-page appeal to lovers of peace to attend an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar-square.

On his way the Colonel gleaned straws of news; and the gleaning was not hard. The most reserved were expansive; the most exclusive sociable. For the moment all barriers of class were down. By the time he had reached the Star he was au courant with all the happenings, local and general.

The Archdeacon who, when he put his snuff-box aside, and took the gloves off, could be really moving, had from his hill thundered a magnificent call to arms—"purely pagan, of course." Mr. Trupp, whom he met, told the Colonel, "but fine for all that." Mr. Geddes in the plain had answered back in an appeal which had moved many to tears on behalf of Him, Whose sad face on the Cross looks down on This after the passion of a thousand years.

The Fleet had gone to war-stations; the Territorials had been mobilised. Haldane had returned to the War Office.

As the Colonel dropped down the steep pitch to Church-street, under the chesnuts of the Manor-house garden, he met a couple of toddlers climbing the hill shepherded by an efficient little maiden of seven or eight, who smiled at him with familiar eyes.

"Hullo, little Alice," he said. "Where you off to so busily with your little flock?"

"Saffrons Croft for the day—me and my little ones," she answered, not without a touch of self-importance. "I got the dinner here. Dad and Mother's taking baby a drive on the bus to see Granny at Auston."

She turned and waved to her mother, who was standing at the top of Borough Lane with Ernie, amongst a little group opposite the Star, where was one of the char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate picking up passengers from the Moot.

The Colonel walked down the hill towards them. Ruth, seeing him approach, climbed to her place on the char-a-banc. Ernie handed little Ned to her, and then turned to meet the Colonel.

"Givin Alf the benefit," he said, with a grin. "Backin the family and baptizin the bus. Goin the long drive over the hill to Friston and Seaford; then up the valley to Auston. Dinner there. And home by Hailsham and Langney in the evening.—I wanted her to ask Joe. But she wouldn't. Fickle I call her."

The Colonel glanced up; but Ruth steadfastly refused to meet his eye.

"I suppose one wants the family to one-salf some-times, even a workin-woman doos," she muttered.

And the Colonel saw that Ern had made his remark to show that the tension between him and his wife, so marked yesterday, had eased.

"My wife's right," he thought. "Caspar is a gentleman. Blood does tell."

Just then Alf came down the steps of the Manor-house opposite, looking smug and surly. He crossed the road to the char-a-banc and said a word to the driver.

Ruth leaned over, glad of the diversion.

"Ain't you comin along then, Alf?" she asked quietly.

"Caspar's my name," the Managing Director answered, never lifting his eyes to his tormentor.

The young woman bent down roguishly, disregarding Ern's warning glances.

"Not to your own sister, Alfie," she answered, demure and intimate.

They were mostly Old Town folk on the char-a-banc, many from the Moot; and they all tittered, even the driver.

Alf stood back in the road and said deliberately, searching with his eye the top of the bus.

"Where is he, then?"

Ern flashed round on him.