ONE WOMAN Strawberries and cream and plenty of em, he calls me when he's got the curtains draw'd up there, and me a-settin on his knee." Alf retreated, burning and baffled. She came to the door drying her arms, and pursued her victim with eyes in which the lightning played with laughter ; as fastidious and dainty in her cruelty as a cat sporting with a mouse. A little way down the street he paused and turned. Then he came back a pace or two stealthily. His face was mottled and he was tilting his chin, mysterious and confidential. " Never hear e'er a word from the Captain ? " he asked, in a hushed voice. Ruth flashed a terrible white and her bosom surged. " I do times," continued the tormentor, and bustled on his way with a malignant chuckle. CHAPTER V THE CREEPING DEATH ONE evening at the club, Mr. Trupp asked the Colonel what had happened to Captain Royal. " He went through the Staff College, and now he's at the War Office, I believe/' the other answered curtly. " Ever hear from him ? " asked Mr. Trupp, warily. " No," said the Colonel. " He's not a friend of mine." And to save himself and an old brother-officer for whom he had neither liking nor respect, he changed the conversation to the theme that haunted him. Mr. Trupp might chaff the Colonel about his idee fixe, but he, too, like most men of his class, had the fear of Germany constantly before his eyes and liked nothing better than to discuss the familiar topic with his friend over a cigar. " Well, how are we getting on ? " he asked encouragingly. " Not so bad," the Colonel answered through the smoke. " Haldane's sent for Haig from India." " Who's Haig ? ' puffed the other. " Haig's a soldier who was at Oxford," the Colonel answered. ''You didn't know there was such a variety, did you ? " " Never mind about Oxford," grunted the great surgeon. " Oxford turns out as many asses as any other institution so far as I can see. Does he know his job ? That's the point." " As well as you can expect a soldier to know it," replied the other, still in the ironic vein. " Sound but slow's his reputation. He and Haldane are the strongest combination there's been at the War Office in my time." He added more seriously "They ought to get a move on between 'em, if anybody can." 52 ONE WOMAN " In time ? " asked Mr. Trupp. The Colonel, in spite of the recurrent waves of despair, which inundated him, was at heart an unrepentant optimist. " I don't see why not/ 1 he said. " Bobs says Germany can't strike till the Kiel Canal's open for battleships. That won't be till 1912 or so." The old doctor moved into the card-room with a cough. " Gives you time to get on with your job, too, Colonel," he said. " I wish you well. Good-night." . . : : The Colonel was retired now ; but his brain was as active as ever, his heart as big, if his body was no longer so sure an instrument as it once had been. And Lord Roberts, when he asked his old comrade in arms to undertake work which he did not hesitate to describe as vital to the Empire, knew that the man to whom he was appealing possessed in excelsis the quality which has always made the British Army the nursery of spirits who put the good of the Service before their own advancement. The little old hero, like all great soldiers, had his favourite regiments, the result of association and experience ; and it was well known that the Hammer-men stood at the top of the list. Fifty years before the date of this story they had sweated with him on the Ridge before Delhi ; under his eyes had stormed the Kashmir Gate ; with him had watched Nicholson die. Twenty years later they had gone up the Kurrum with the young Major-Gen eral, and made with him the famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Another twenty years and they were making the pace for the old Field Marshal in the great trek from Paardeberg to Bloemfontein. He knew most of the officers, some of them intimately. And on hearing that Jocko Lewknor had settled down at Beach- bourne wrote at once and asked him to become Secretary of the local branch of the National Service League, which existed to establish in England universal military training on the lines of Switzerland's Militia. The Colonel made one of his rare trips to London and THE CREEPING DEATH 53 lunched at the Rag with the leader who had been his hero ever since as a lad he had gone up the Peiwar Khotal with the First Hammer-men at the order of Bahadur Bobs. The Field Marshal opened the Colonel's eyes to the danger threatening the Empire. " The one thing in our favour is this/' he said, as they parted at the hall-door. " We've yet time." The Colonel, inspired with new life, returned to Beach- bourne and told his wife. She listened with vivid interest. " You've got your work cut out, my Jocko," she said. " And I shan't be able to help you much." " No," replied the Colonel. " You must stick to the hostel. I'll plough my own furrow." Forthwith he set to work with the quiet tenacity peculiar to him. From the start he made surprising headway, perhaps because he was so unlike the orthodox product of the barrack-square ; and like his leader he eschewed the party politics he had always loathed. When he took up the work of the League he found it one of the many non-party organisations, run solely by the Conservatives quartered in Meads and Old Town, because, to do them justice, nobody else would lend a hand. Liberalism, camped in mid-town about Terminus Road, was sullenly suspicious ; Labour, at the East-end, openly hostile. The opposition of Liberalism, the Colonel soon discovered, centred round the leader of Nonconformity in the town, Mr. Geddes, the powerful Presbyterian minister at St. Andrew's ; the resistance of Labour, inchoate as yet and ineffective as the Labour Party from which it sprang, was far more difficult to tackle as being more vague and imponderable. In those days, always with the same end in view, the Colonel spent much time in the East-end, winding his way into the heart of Industrial Democracy. He sloughed some old prejudices and learnt some new truths, especially the one most difficult for a man of his age and tradition to 54 ONE WOMAN imbibe that he knew almost nothing of modern England. Often on Sundays he would walk across from Meads to Sea-gate and spend his afternoon wandering in the Recre- ation Ground, gathering impressions on the day that Labour tries to become articulate. On one such Sunday afternoon he came on a large old gentleman in gold spectacles, fair linen, and roomy tail- coat, meandering on the edge of a dirty and tattered crowd who were eddying about a platform. The old gentleman seemed strangely out of place and delightfully unconscious of it ; wandering about, large, benevolent and undisturbed, like a moon in a stormy sky. " Well, Mr. Caspar/ 1 said the Colonel quietly. " What do you make of it all ? " The large soft man turned his mild gaze of a cow in calf on the lean tall one at his side. It was clear he had no notion who the speaker was ; or that they had been at Trinity together forty years before. " To me it's extraordinarily inspiring/' he said with an earnestness that was almost ridiculous. " I feel the surge of the spirit beating behind the bars down here as I do nowhere else. ... It fills me with an immense hope." The Colonel, standing by the other like a stick beside a sack, sighed. " They fill me with a fathomless despair/' he said gently. " One wants to help them, but they won't let you." The other shook a slow head. " I don't look at it like that/' he replied. " I go to them for help." The Colonel made a little moue. " D'you get it ? "he asked " I do," Mr. Caspar replied with startling conviction. The Colonel moved sorrowfully upon his way. He was becoming a man of one idea Germany. . . . A few nights later, after supper, he strolled up Beau-nez THE CREEPING DEATH 55 under a harvest-moon spreading silvery wings moth- like over earth and sea. He was full of his own thoughts, and and for once heavy, almost down-hearted, as he took up his familiar post of vigil beside the flagstaff on the Head and looked out over the shining waters. The Liberals were moving at last, it seemed. The great cry for Dreadnoughts, more Dreadnoughts, We want eight! We won't wait! had gone up to the ears of Government from millions of middle-class homes ; but the Working Man still slept. Would nothing rouse him to the Terror that stalked by night across those quiet waters ? . . . The Working Man, who would have to bear the brunt of it when the trouble came. . . . The Working Man . . . ? The Head was deserted save for the familiar goat tethered outside the coast-guard station. The moon beamed down benignantly on the silver-sabled land, broad- bosomed about him, and the waters stirring far beneath him with a rustle like wind in corn. Then he heard a movement at his back, and turned to see behind him, shabby, collarless, sheepish, the very Working Man of whom he had been thinking. The Colonel regarded the mystic figure, gigantic in the moonlight, a type rather than an individual, with an interest that was half compassionate and half satirical. Yes. That was the feller ! That was the chap who would take it in the neck ! That man with the silly smile God help him ! " Come to look for it ? " he said to the shadow, half to himself " wiser than your kind ? " " Look for what, sir ? " " The Creeping Death that's stealing across the sea to swallow you and yours." The shadow sidled towards him. " Is that you, sir ? " a voice said. " I thought it were/' 56 ONE WOMAN The Colonel emerged from his dream. " What, Caspar ! " he replied. " What are you doing up here at this time of night ? " " Just come up for a look round before turning in, me and my wife, sir," the other answered. " Ruth/' he called, " it's the Colonel." A young woman with an orange scarf about her hair issued from the shadow of the coast-guard station and came forward slowly. " I've heard a lot about you from Ern, sir," she said in a deep voice that hummed like a top in the silvery silence. " When you commanded his battalion in India and all." The Colonel, standing in the dusk, listened with a deep content as to familiar music, the player unseen ; and was aware that his senses were stirred by a beauty felt rather than seen Then he dropped down the hill to the hostel twinkling solitary in the coombe beneath. " Your friend Caspar's married," he told his wife on joining her in the loggia. The little lady scoffed . " Married ! " she cried. " He's been married nearly a year. They spent their honeymoon on the hill at the back last autumn. I could see them from my room." " Why ever didn't you tell me ? " asked the Colonel. "I'd have run em in for vagrancy." " No, you wouldn't," answered Mrs. Lewknor. " Why not ? " " Because, my Jocko, she's a peasant Madonna. You couldn't stand up against her. No man could." " A powerful great creature from what I could see of her," the Colonel admitted. " A bit of a handful for Master Ernie, I should guess." Mrs. Lewknor's fine face became firm. She thought she scented a challenge in the words and dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in them. " Ernie'll hold her," she said. " He could hold any woman. He's a gentleman like his father before him." THE CREEPING DEATH 57 He reached a long arm across to her as he sat and raised her fingers to his lips. Years ago a bird had flashed across the vision of his wife, coming and going, in and out of the darkness, like the sparrow of the Saxon tale ; but this had been no sparrow, rather a bird of Paradise. The Colonel knew that ; and he knew that the fowler who had loosed the jewel-like bird was that baggy old gentleman who lived across the golf links in the little house that overlooked the Rectory. He knew and understood : for years ago the same bird had flashed with radiant wings across the chamber of his life too, swiftly coming, swiftly going. CHAPTER VI THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET IF the Colonel in his missionary efforts for the National Service League made little impression on the masses in the East-end, he was astonishingly successful with such labour as existed in Old Town ; which in political consciousness lagged fifty years behind its tumultuous neighbour on the edge of the Levels, and retained far into this century much of the atmosphere of a country village. There the Church was still a power politically, and the workers disorganised. The Brewery in the Moot and the Southdown Transport Company were the sole employers of labour in the bulk ; and Mr. Pigott the only stubborn opponent of the pro- gramme of the League. Archdeacon Willcocks backed the Colonel with whole- hearted ferocity, and lent him the services of the Reverend Spink, who, flattered at working with a Colonel D.S.O., showed himself keen and capable, and proposed to run the Old Town branch of the League in conjunction with the Church of England's Men's Society. " I've got a first-rate secretary as a start/' he told the Colonel importantly. "Who's that?" " Caspar." " Ernest Caspar ! " cried the Colonel. " The old Hammer-man ! " " No, his brother. Twice the man. Alfred Mr. Trupp's chauffeur." A few days later, when leaving the curate's lodgings, the Colonel ran up against Ernie in Church Street. 58 THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET 59 " Your brother's joined us," he said. " Are you going to ? " Ernie's charming face became sullen at once. " I would, sir/ 1 he said. " Only for that/' " Only for what ? " " Alf ." " You won't join because your brother has ! " grinned the Colonel. Ernie rolled a sheepish head. " It's my wife, sir," he muttered. " See, he persecutes her somethink shameful." Next afternoon the Colonel was crossing Saffrons Croft on his way to the Manor-house for tea, when a majestic young woman, a baby in her arms, sauntering under the elms watching the cricket, smiled at him suddenly. He stopped, uncertain of her identity. " I'm Mrs. Caspar, sir," she explained. " We met you the other night on the Head Ern and me." " Oh, I know all about you ! " replied the Colonel, glanc- ing at the baby who lifted to the sky a face like a sleeping rose. " My word ! she's a bonny un." " She grows, sir," replied Ruth, cooing and contented. " We gets her all the air we can. So we come here with the children for a blow of the coolth most in general Saraday afternoons. More air than in the Moot." " Where's Caspar ? " asked the Colonel. " Yonder under the ellums, sir, along with a friend. Come about the classes or something I did hear." "The class-war? " asked the Colonel grimly. "No, sir," answered Ruth. "Classes for learning you learning, I allow. Man from the North, I yeard say. Talks funny foreign talk I call it." Just then the Colonel's glance fell on a child, slim as a daisy stalk, and with the healthy pallor of a wood-anemone, hiding behind Ruth's skirt and peeping at the stranger with fearless blue eyes that seemed somehow strangely familiar. 60 ONE WOMAN " And what's your name, little Miss Hide-away ? " he asked, delighted. " Little Alice/ 1 the child replied, bold and delicate as a robin. The fact that the child was obviously some four years old while Ernie had not been married half that time did not occur to the Colonel as strange. He glanced at the young mother, noble in outline, and in her black and red beauty of the South so unlike the child. " She doesn't take after her mother and father/ 1 he said, with the reckless indiscretion of his sex. Then he saw his mistake. Ruth has run up signals of distress. Ernie, who had now joined them, as always at his best in an emergency, came quickly to the rescue. " Favours her grandmother, sir, I say," he remarked. " Like my boy/ 1 commented the Colonel, recovering himself. " I don't think anybody 'd have taken our Jock for his father's son when he joined us at Pindi in 1904 eh, Caspar ? " The two old Hammer-men chatted over days in India. Then the Colonel went on up the hill, the eyes of the child still haunting him. The Manor-house party were having tea on the lawn, under the laburnum, looking over the sunk fence on to Saffrons Croft beyond, when the Colonel joined them. Mrs. Lewknor was already there ; and young Stanley Bessemere, the Conservative candidate for Beachbourne East. He and Bess were watching a little group of people gathered about a man who was standing on a bench in Saffrons Croft haranguing. " Lend me your bird-glasses, Miss Trupp," said her companion eagerly. He stood up, a fine figure of a man, perfectly tailored, " Yes," he said. " I thought so. It's my friend." " Who's that ? " asked the Colonel. " Our bright particular local star of Socialism," the THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET 61 other answered. " The very latest thing from Ruskin College. I thought he confined himself to the East-end, but I'm glad to find he gives you Old Towners a turn now and then, Miss Trupp. And I hope he won't forget you up at Meads, Colonel." " What's his name ? " asked Bess, amused. " Burt," replied the other. " He comes from the North and he's welcome to go back there to-morrow so far as I'm concerned." " You're from the North yourself, Mr. Bessemere," Mrs. Trupp reminded him. " 1 am," replied the young man," and proud of it. But for political purposes, I prefer the South. That's why I'm a candidate for Beachbourne East." A few minutes later he took his departure. The Colonel watched him go with a sardonic grin. Philosopher though he might be, he was not above certain of the prejudices common to his profession, and possessed in an almost exaggerated degree the Army view of all politicians as the enemies of Man at large and of the Services in particular. Bess was still observing through her glasses the little group about the man on the bench. " There's Ruth I " she cried " and Ernie ! " " Listening to the orator ? " asked the Colonel, joining her. " Not Ruth ! " answered Bess with splendid scorn. " No orators for her, thank you ! She's listening to the baby. Ernie can listen to him." The Colonel took the glasses and saw Ruth and Ernie detach themselves from the knot of people and come slowly up the hill making for Borough Lane. " That really is a magnificent young woman of Caspar's," he said to his host. " She's one in a million," replied the old surgeon. " William's always been in love with her," said his wife. " All the men are/' added Mrs. Lewknor, with a provocative little nod at her husband. 62 ONE WOMAN " Where did he pick up his pearl ? " asked the Colonel. " I love that droning accent of hers. It's like the music of a rookery/' " She can ca-a-a away with the best of them when she likes/' chuckled Bess. " You should hear her over the baby ! " " An Aldwolston girl/' said Mrs. Trupp. " She's Sussex to the core with that Spanish strain so many of them have/' She added with extreme deliberation, " She was at the Hohenzollern for a bit one time o day, as we say in these parts/' Mrs. Lewknor coloured faintly and looked at her feet. Next to her Jocko and his Jock the regiment was the most sacred object in her world. But the harm was done. The secret she had guarded so long even from her husband was out. The word Hohenzollern had, she saw, unlocked the door of the mystery for him. Instantly the Colonel recalled Captain Royal's stay at the hotel on the Crumbles a few years before . . . Ernie Caspar's service there . . . the clash of the two men on the steps of the house where he was now having tea . . . Royal's sudden flight, and the rumours that had reached him of the reasons for it. The eyes which had looked at him a few minutes since in Saffrons Croft from beneath the fair brow of little Alice were the eyes of his old adjutant. Then Mr. Trupp's voice broke in upon his reverie. " Ah," said the old surgeon, " I see you know." " And I'm glad you should," remarked Mrs. Trupp with the almost vindictive emphasis that at times character- ised this so gentle woman. " Everybody does, mother," Bess interjected quietly. . . As the Colonel and his wife walked home across the golf links he turned to her. " Did you know that, Rachel ? " he inquired. She looked straight in front of her as she walked. " I did, my Jocko . . . Mrs. Trupp told me." THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET 63 The Colonel mused. " What a change ! from Royal to Caspar ! " he said. She glanced up at him. " You don't understand, Jocko/ 1 she said quietly. " Ruth was never Royal's mistress. She was a maid on the Third Floor at the Hohenzollern when he was there. He simply raped her and bolted." The Colonel shrugged. " Like the cad/' he said. They walked on awhile. Then the Colonel said more to himself than to his companion, " I wonder if she's satisfied ? " The little lady at his side made a grimace that sug- gested " Is any woman ? " But all she said was, " She's a good woman." " She's come a cropper once," replied the Colonel. " She was tripped," retorted the other almost tartly. " She didn't fall." CHAPTER VII THE MAN FROM THE NORTH A FEW days later, on a Saturday afternoon, the Colonel was sitting in the loggia of the hostel looking out over the sea when he saw two men coming down the shoulder of Beau- nez along the coast-guard path. The tall man in black with flying coat-tails he recog- nised at once. It was Mr. Geddes, the one outstanding minister of the Gospel in Beachbourne : a scholar, yet in touch with his own times, eloquent and broad, with a more than local reputation as a Liberal leader. His companion was a sturdy fellow in a cap, with curly black hair and a merry eye. The Colonel, who never missed a chance, went out to waylay the pair. Mr. Geddes introduced his friend Mr. Burt, who'd come down recently from Mather and Platt's in the North to act as foreman fitter at Hewson and Clarke's in the East-end. The Colonel reached out a bony hand, which the other gripped fiercely. " I know you're both conspirators/' he said with a wary smile. " What troubles are you hatching for me now ? " Mr. Geddes laughed, and the engineer, surly a little from shyness and self-conscious as a school-boy, grinned. " Mr. Burt and I are both keen on education," said the minister. " He's been telling me of Tawney's tutorial class at Rochdale. We're hatching a branch of the W.E.A. down here. That's our only conspiracy." " What's the W.E.A. ? " asked the Colonel, always keen. " It's the Democratic wing of the National Service League," the engineer answered in broad Lancashire " Workers' Education Association." 64 THE MAN FROM THE NORTH 65 The Colonel nodded. " He's getting at me ! " he said. " I'm always being shot at. Will you both come in to tea and talk ? I should like you to meet my wife, Burt. She'll take you on. She's a red-hot Tory and a bonnie fighter." But Mr. Geddes had a committee, and "A must get on with the Revolution," said Burt gravely. " What Revolution's that ? " asked the Colonel. " The Revolution that begun in 1906 and that's been going on ever since ; and will go on till we're through! " He said the last words with a kind of ferocity; and then burst into a sudden jovial roar as he saw the humour of his own ultra-seriousness. Mrs. Lewknor, who had been watching the interview from the loggia, called to her husband as he returned to the house. " Who was that man with Mr. Geddes ? " she asked. " Stanley Bessemere's friend," the Colonel answered. " A red Revolutionary from Lancasheer on the bubble ; and a capital good fellow too, I should say." That evening the Colonel rang up Mr. Geddes to ask about the engineer. " He's the new type of intellectual artizan," the minister informed him. " The russet-coated captain who knows what he's fighting for and loves what he knows. Unless I'm mistaken he's going to play a considerable part in our East-end politics down here." He gave the other the engineer's address, adding with characteristic breadth, " It might be worth your while to follow him up perhaps, Colonel." Joe Burt lodged in the East-end off Pevensey Road in the heart of the new and ever-growing industrial quarter of Seagate, which was gradually transforming a rather suburban little town of villas with a fishing-station attached into a manufacturing city, oppressed with all the thronging problems of our century. There the Colonel visited his 66 ONE WOMAN new friend. Burt was the first man of his type the old soldier, who had done most of his service in India, had met. The engineer himself, and even more the room in which he lived, with its obvious air of culture, was an eye-opener to the Colonel. There was an old sideboard, beautifully kept, and on it a copper kettle and spirit lamp ; a good carpet, decent curtains. On the walls were Millais's Knight Errant, Greiffenhagen's Man with a Scythe, and Clausen's Girl at the Gate. But it was the books on a long deal plank that most amazed the old soldier ; not so much the number of them but the quality. He stood in front of them and read their titles with grunts. Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics lolled up against the Webbs' Industrial Democracy ; Bradley's lectures on the tragedies of Shakespeare hobnobbed with Gilbert Murray's translations from Euripides. Few of the standard books on Economics and Industrial History, English or American, were missing. And the work of the modern creators in imaginative literature, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett were mixed with Alton Locke, Daniel Deronda, Sybil, and the essays of Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter. " You're not married then ? " said the Colonel, throwing a glance round the well-appointed room. " Yes, A am though," the engineer answered, his black-brown eyes twinkling. " A'm married to Democracy. She's ma first loov and like to be ma last." " What you doing down South ? " asked the Colonel, tossing one leg over the other as he sat down to smoke. " Coom to make trouble," replied the other. " Good for you ! " said the Colonel. " Hotting things up for our friend Stan. Well, he wants it. All the politicians do." His first visit to Seagate Lane was by no means his last : THE MAN FROM THE NORTH 67 for the engineer's courage, his integrity, his aggressive tactics, delighted and amused the scholarly old soldier ; but when he came to tackle his man seriously on the busi- ness of the National Service League he found he could not move him an inch from the position he invariably took up : The Army would be used by the Government in the only war that matters the Industrial war ; and therefore the Army must not be strengthened. " If the Army was used for the only purpose it ought to be used for defence A'd be with you. So'd the boolk of the workers. But it's not. They use it to croosh strikes ! " And he brought his fist down on the table with a character- istic thump. " That's to croosh us 1 For the strike's our only weapon, Colonel." The power, the earnestness, even the savagery he dis- played, amazed the other. Here was a reality, an elemental force of which he had scarcely been aware. This was Democracy incarnate. And whatever else he might think he could not but admire the sincerity and strength of it. But he always brought his opponent back to what was for him the only issue. " Germany ! " he said. "That's blooff!" replied the other. " They'll get the machine-guns for use against Germany, and when they've got em they'll use them against us. That's the capitalists' game. Then there's the officers." " What about em ? " said the Colonel cheerfully. " They're harmless enough, poor devils." "Tories to a man. Coom from the capitalist class." " What if they do ? " " The Army does what the capitalist officer tells it. And he knows where his interest lies aw reet." " Well, of course you know the British officer better than I do, Burt," replied the Colonel, nettled for once. His opponent was grimly pleased to have drawn blood. 68 ONE WOMAN " In the next few years if things go as they look like goin we shall see/' was his comment. " Wait till we get a Labour Government in power ! " The Colonel knocked out his pipe. " WeU, Burt, I'll say this," he remarked. " If we could get half the passion into our cause you do into yours, we should do." " We're fighting a reality, Colonel," the other answered. " You're fighting a shadow, that's the difference." " I hope to God it may prove so ! " said the Colonel, as they shook hands. The two men thoroughly enjoyed their spars. And the battle was well matched : for the soldier of the Old Army and the soldier of the New were both scholars, well-read, logical, and fair-minded. On one of his visits the Colonel found Ernie Caspar in the engineer's room standing before the book-shelf, handling the books. Ernie showed himself a little shame-faced in the presence of his old Commanding Officer. " How do they compare to your father's, Caspar ? " asked the Colonel, innocently unaware of the other's mauvaise honte and the cause of it. " Dad's got ne'er a book now, sir," Ernie answered gruffly. " Only just the Bible, and Wordsworth, and Troward's Lectures. Not as he'd ever anythink like this only Carpenter. See, dad's not an economist. More of a philosopher and poet like." " I wish they were mine," said the Colonel, turning over Zimmeni's Greek Commonwealth. " They're aU right if so be you can afford em," answered Ernie shortly, almost sourly. " Books are better'n beer, Ernie," said Joe Burt, a thought maliciously ; and added with the little touch of priggishness that is rarely absent from those who have acquired knowledge comparatively late in life " They're the bread of life and source of power." THE MAN FROM THE NORTH 69 " Maybe/' retorted Ernie with a snort ; " but they aren't the equal of wife and children, I'll lay." He left the room surlily. Burt grinned at the Colonel. " Ern's one o the much-married uns," he said. " D'you know his wife ? " the Colonel asked. Joe shook his bull-head. " Nay," he said. " And don't wish to." " She's a fine woman all the same," replied the Colonel. " Happen so," the other answered. " All the more reason a should avoid her. They canna thole me, the women canna. And A don't blame em." " Why can't they thole you ? " asked the Colonel curiously. " Most Labour leaders rise to power at the expense of their wives," the other explained. " They go on ; but the wives stay where they are at the wash-tub. The women see that ; and they don't like it. And they're right." " What's the remedy ? " " There's nobbut one." Joe now not seldom honoured the Colonel by relapsing into dialect when addressing him. " And that's for the Labour leader to remain un- married. They're the priests of Democracy or should be." " You'll never make a Labour leader out of Caspar," said the Colonel genially. " I've tried to make an N.C.O. of him before now and failed." " A'm none so sure," Joe said, and added with genuine concern : " He's on the wobble. Might go up ; might go down. Anything might happen to yon lad now. He's just the age. But he's one o ma best pupils if he'll nobbut work." " Ah," said the Colonel with interest. " So he's joined your class at St. Andrew's Hall, has he ? " " Yes," replied the other. " Mr. Chislehurst brought him along the new curate in Old Town. D'ye know him ? " 70 ONE WOMAN " He's my cousin/' replied the Colonel. " I got him here. He'd been overworking in Bermondsey in con- nection with the Oxford Bermondsey Mission/ 1 "Oh, he's one of ihem\" cried the other. "That accounts for it. A know them. They were at Oxford when A was at Ruskin. They're jannock, and so yoong with it. They think they're going to convert the Church to Christianity I " He chuckled . " In the course of history," remarked the Colonel, "many Churchmen have thought that. But the end of it's always been the same." " What's that ? " asked the engineer. " That the Church has converted them." CHAPTER VIII THE CHERUB THE advent of Bobby Chislehurst to Old Town made a considerable difference to Bessie Trupp. She was not at all in love with him and he only pleasantly so with her ; but as she told her friend the Colonel, " He's the first curate we've ever had in Old Town you can be like that with." " Like that is good," said the Colonel. " Give me my tables. Meet it is I write it down. It says nothing and expresses everything." Now if the clergy in Old Town with the exception of Bess's pet antipathy, the Reverend Spink, were honest men worthy of respect, as everybody admitted, they were also old-fashioned ; and Bobby Chislehurst was a new and disturbing element in their midst. Shy and unassuming though he was, the views of the Chreub, as the Colonel called his cousin, when they became known, created some- thing of a mild sensation in the citadel which had been held for Conservatism against all comers by the Archdeacon and his lady for nearly forty years. Even Mr. Pigott was shocked. " He's a Socialist 1 " he confided to Mr. Trupp at the Bowling Green Committee. The old Nonconformist had passed the happiest hours of a militant life in battle with the Church as represented by his neighbour, the Archdeacon, but of late it had been borne in upon him with increasing urgency that the time might come when Church and Chapel would have to join forces and present a common front against the hosts of Socialism which he feared more than ever he had done the Tory legions. But if the Church was going Socialist ! . . . And Mr. Chislehurst said it was . . . 71 72 ONE WOMAN The new curate and Bess Trupp had much in common, especially Boy Scouts, their youth and the outstanding characteristic of their generation a passionate interest and sympathy for their poorer neighbours. Both spent laborious and happy hours in the Moot, listening a great deal, learning much, even helping a little. Bess, who had known most of the dwellers in the hollow under the Kneb all her life, had of course her favourites whom she commended to the special care of Bobby on his arrival ; and first of these were the young Caspars. She told him of Edward Caspar, her mother's old friend, scholar, dreamer, gentleman, with the blood of the Beau- regards in his veins, who had married the daughter of an Ealing tobacconist, and lived in Rectory Walk ; of Anne Caspar, the harsh and devoted tyrant ; of the two sons of this inharmonious couple, and the antagonism between them from childhood ; of Alf 's victory and Ernie's enlistment in the Army ; his sojourn in India and return to Old Town some years since ; and she gave him a brief outline of Ruth's history, not mentioning Royal's name but referring once or twice through set teeth to " that little beast." " Who's that ? " asked the Cherub. " Ernie's brother," she answered. " Alfred, who drives for dad." " Not the sidesman ?" " Yes." Bobby looked surprised. " Mr. Spink," Bess explained darkly. " He got him there." Apart from Bess's recommendation, Mr. Chislehurst's contact with Ruth was soon established through little Alice, who attended Sunday School. Ruth, moreover, called her- self a church-woman, and was sedately proud of it, though the Church had no apparent influence upon her life, and though she never attended services. On the latter point, the Cherub, when he had rooted himself firmly in her regard, remonstrated. THE CHERUB 73 " See, I ca-a-n't, sir/' said Ruth simply. " Why not ? " asked Bobby. " He's always there/' Ruth answered enigmatically. Bobby was puzzled and she saw it. " Alf," she explained. "See, he wanted me same as Ernie. Only not to marry me. Just for his fun like and then throw you over. That's Alf, that is. There's the difference atween the two brothers." She regarded the young man before her with the lovely solicitude of the mother initiating a sensitive son into the cruelties of a world of which she has already had tragic experience. " Men are like that, sir some men." She added with tender deli- cacy. " Only you wouldn't know it, not yet." The Cherub might be innocent, but no man has lived and worked in the back-streets of Bermondsey without learning some strange and ugly truths about life and human nature. " He's not worrying you now ? " he asked anxiously. "Nothing to talk on," answered Ruth. "He wants me still, I allow. Only he won't get me not yet a bit anyways." She seemed quite casual about the danger that threatened her, Bobby noticed; even, he thought, quietly enjoying it. That evening, when the Cherub touched on the point to his colleague, Mr. Spink turned in his india-rubber lips. " It's an honour to be abused by a woman like that," he said. " She's a bad character bad." " She's not that, I swear ! " cried Bobby warmly. " She may have exaggerated, or made a mistake, but bad she's not." " I believe I've been in the parish longer than you have, Chislehurst," retorted the other crisply. " And presumably I know something about the people in it." " You've not been in as long as Miss Trupp," retorted Bobby. " She's been here all her life." Mr. Spink puffed at his cigar with uplifted chin and smiled. 74 ONE WOMAN " How's it getting on ? " he asked. " Pah ! " muttered Bobby" Cad ! " and went out, rather white. That was not the end of the matter, however. A few days later Joe Burt and Bobby had paused for a word at the Star corner when Mr. Spink and Alf Caspar came down Church Street together. " Birds of a feather/ 1 said Alf loudly, nudging his companion, just as they passed the standing couple. "That's not very courteous, Caspar," called Bobby quietly after him. Mr. Spink walked on with a smirk ; but Alf came back with hardly dissimulated truculence. " Sorry you've been spreading this about me, Mr. Chislehurst," he said, his sour eyes blinking. " What ? " asked the Cherub, astonished. " Dirt," Alf retorted. " And I know where you got it from too." " I haven't," cried Bobby with boyish indignation. " What d'you mean ? " " I know you have though," retorted Alf. " So it's no good denying it." He was about to move on with a sneer when Joe Burt struck in. " That's a foonny way to talk," he said. " Foonny it may be," mocked Alf. " One thing I'll lay : it's not so foonny as your lingo." The engineer shouldered a pace nearer. " Throw a sneer, do you ? " " Ah," said Alf, secure in the presence of the clergyman. " I know all about you." "Coomto that," retorted the Northerner, "I know a little about you. One o Stan's pups, aren't you ? " Bobby moved on and Alf at once followed suit. " You keep down in the East-end, my lad ! " he called over his shoulder. " We don't want none of it in Old Town. Nor we won't have it, neether." THE CHERUB 75 Joe stood four-square at the cross-roads, bristling like a dog. " Called yourself a Socialist when yo were down, didn't you ? " he shouted. " And then turned Church and State when yo began to make. I know your sort ! " He dropped down Borough Lane, hackles still up, on the way to meet Ernie by appointment in the Moot. At the corner he waited, one eye on Em's cottage, which he did not approach. Then Ruth's face peeped round her door, amused and malicious, to catch his dark head bobbing back into covert as he saw her. The two played / spy thus most evenings to the amusement of one of them at least. " He's there," she told Ernie in the kitchen" Waitin at the corner. Keeps a safe distance, don't he ? What's he feared on ? " " You," answered Ernie, and rose. Ruth snorted. The reluctance to meet her of this man with the growing reputation as a fighter amused and pro- voked her. Sometimes she chaffed with Ernie about it ; bijt a ripple of resentment ran always across her laughter. Ern now excused his friend. " He's all for his politics," he said. " No time for women." " Hap, he'll learn yet," answered Ruth with a fierce little nod of her head. CHAPTER IX THE SHADOW OF ROYAL THAT evening Alf called at Bobby's lodgings and apolo- gised frankly. " I know I said what I shouldn't, sir," he admitted. " But it fairly tortured me to see you along of a chap like that Burt." " He's all right," said Bobby coldly. Alf smiled that sickly smile of his. " Ah, you're innocent, Mr. Chislehurst," he said. " Only wish I knew as little as you do." Alf in fact was moving on and up again in his career ; walking warily in consequence, and determined to do nothing that should endanger his position with the powers that be. This was the motive that inspired his apology to Mr. Chislehurst and caused him likewise to make approaches to his old schoolmaster, Mr. Pigott. The old Nonconformist met the advances of his erst- while pupil with genial brutality. " What's up now, Alf ? " he asked. " Spreading the treacle to catch the flies. Mind ye don't catch an hornet instead then ! " The remark may have been made in innocence, but Alf looked sharply at the speaker and retired in some disorder. His new stir of secret busyness was in fact bringing him into contact with unusual company, as Mrs. Trupp discovered by accident. One evening she had occasion to telephone on behalf of her husband to the garage. A voice that seemed familiar replied. " Who's that ? " she asked. The answer came back, sharp as an echo, THE SHADOW OF ROYAL 77 " Who's that f " " I'm Mrs. Trupp. I want to speak to Alfred Caspar/' Then the voice muttered and Alfred took the receiver. Later Mrs. Trupp told her husband of the incident. "I'm certain it was Captain Royal/' she said with emphasis. The old surgeon expressed no surprise. " I daresay/' he said. " Alf's raising money for some business scheme. He told me so." Now if Alf's attempts on Ruth in the days between the birth of the child and her marriage to Ernie were known to Mrs. Trupp, the connection of the little motor-engineer and Royal was only suspected by her. A chance word of Ruth's had put her on guard ; and that was all. Now with the swift natural intuition for the ways of evil-doers, which the innocent woman, once roused, so often reveals as by miracle, she flashed to a conclusion. " Alf's blackmailing him ! " she said positively. " I shouldn't be surprised," her husband answered calmly. His wife put her hand upon his shoulder. " How can you employ a man like that, William ? " she said, grave and grieved. It was an old point of dispute between them. Now he took her hand and stroked it. " My dear," he said, " when a bacteriologist has had a unique specimen under the microscope for years he's not going to abandon it for a scruple." A few days later Mrs. Trupp was walking down Borough Lane past the Star when she saw Alf and Ruth cross each other on the pavement fifty yards in front. Neither stopped, but Alf shot a sidelong word in the woman's ear as he slid by serpent-wise. Ruth marched on with a toss of her head, and Mrs. Trupp noted the furtive look in the eyes of her husband's chaffeur as he met her glance and passed, touching his cap. 78 ONE WOMAN Mindful of her conversation with her husband, she followed Ruth home and boarded her instantly. " Ruth," she asked, " I want to know something. You must tell me for your own good. Alfred's got no hold over you ? " Ruth drew in her breath with the sound, almost a hiss, of a sword snatched from its scabbard. Then slowly she relaxed. " He's not got the sway over me not now," she said in a still voice, with lowered eyes. " Only thing he's the only one outside who knaws Captain Royal's the father of little Alice." Mrs. Trupp eyed her under level brows. " Oh, he does know that ? " she said. Ruth was pale. " Yes, 'M," she said. " See Alf used to drive him that summer at the Hohenzolleni." Mrs. Trupp was not entirely satisfied. " I don't see how Alfred can hold his knowledge over you," she remarked. "Not over me," answered Ruth, raising her eyes. "Over him." " Over who ? " " Captain Royal," said Ruth ; and added slowly " And I'd be sorry for anyone Alf got into his clutches let alone her father." Her dark eyes smouldered ; her colour returned to her, swarthy and glowing ; a gleam of teeth revealed itself between faintly parted lips. Mrs. Trupp not for the first time was aware of a secret love of battle and danger in this young Englishwoman whose staid veins carried the wild blood of some remote ancestress who had danced in the orange groves of Seville, watched the Mediterranean blue flecked with the sails of Barbary corsairs, and followed with passionate eyes the darings and devilries of her matador in the ring among the bulls of Andalusia. Mrs. Trupp returned home, unquiet at heart, and with a sense that somehow she had been baffled. She knew THE SHADOW OF ROYAL 79 Ruth well enough now to understand how that young woman had fallen a prey to Royal. It was not the element of class that had been her undoing, certainly not the factor of money : it was the soldier in the man who had seized the girl's imagination. And Mrs. Trupp, daughter herself of a line of famous soldiers, recognised that Royal with all his faults, was a soldier, fine as a steel-blade, keen, thorough, searching. It was the hardness and sparkle and frost-like quality of this man with a soul like a sword which had set dancing the girl's hot Spanish blood. Royal was a warrior ; and to that fact Ruth owned her downfall. Was Ernie a warrior too ? Not for the first time she asked herself the question as she turned out of the Moot into Borough Lane. And at the moment the man of whom she was thinking emerged from the yard of the Transport Company, dusty, draggled, negligent as always, and smiling at her with kind eyes too kind, she sometimes thought. As she crossed the road to the Manor-house Joe Burt passed her and gave his cap a surly hitch by way of salute. Mrs. Trupp responded pleasantly. Her husband, she knew, respected the engineer. She herself had once heard him speak and had admired the fire and fearlessness in him. Moreover, genuine aristocrat that she was, she followed with sympathy his lonely battle against the hosts of Toryism in the East-end, none the less because she was herself a Con- servative by tradition and temperament. That man was a warrior to be sure. . . . That evening the old surgeon dropped his paper and looked over his pince-nez at his wife and daughter. " My dears," he said, " I've some good news for you/ 1 " I know/' replied Bess, scornfully. " Your Lloyd George is coming down in January to speak on his iniqui- tous Budget. I knew that, thank you ! " " Better even than that," her father answered. " Alfred Caspar's leaving me of his own accord." 8o ONE WOMAN The girl tossed her skein of coloured silk to the ceiling with a splendid gesture. " Chuck-her-up I " she cried. " Do you hear, mother ? " " I do/' answered Mrs. Trupp severely. " Better late than never." "And I'm losing the best chauffeur in East Sussex/ 1 Mr. Trupp continued. Alf , indeed, who had paddled his little canoe for so long and so successfully on the Beachbourne mill-pond, was now about to launch a larger vessel on the ocean of the world in obedience to the urge of that ambition which, apart from a solitary lapse, had been the consuming passion of his life. Unlike most men, however, who, as they become increasingly absorbed in their own affairs, tend to drop outside interests, he persisted loyally in old-time activities. Whether it was that his insatiable desire for power forbade him to abandon any position, however modest, which afforded him scope ; or that he felt it more necessary than ever now, in the interests of his expanding career, to maintain and if possible improve his relations with the Church and State which exercised so potent a control in the sphere in which he proposed to operate ; or that the genuinely honest workman in him refused to abandon a job to which he had once put his hand, it is the fact that he continued diligent in his office at St. Michael's, and manifested even increased zeal in his labours for the National Service League. Alf, indeed, so distinguished himself by his services to the League that at the annual meeting at the Town Hall, he received public commendation both from the Archdeacon and the Colonel, who announced that "the admirable and indefatigable secretary of our Old Town branch, Mr. Alfred Caspar, has agreed to become District Convener/' That meeting was a red-letter day in the history of the Beachbourne National Service League, for at it the Colonel disclosed that Lord Roberts was coming down to speak. CHAPTER X BOBS THE old Field-Marshal, wise and anxious as a great doctor, was sitting now at the bedside of the patient that was his country. His finger was on her pulse, his eye on the hour- glass, the sands of which were running out ; and he was listening always for the padding feet of that Visitor whose knock on the door he expected momentarily. After South Africa he had sheathed at last the sword which had not rested in its scabbard for fifty years ; and from that moment his eyes were everywhere, watching, guiding, cherishing the movement to which he had given birth. He followed the activities and successes of Colonel Lewknor on the South Coast with a close attention of which the old Hammer-man knew nothing ; and to show his appreciation of the Colonel's labours, he volunteered to come down to Beachbourne and address a meeting. The offer was greedily accepted. Mrs. Lewknor, who, now that the hostel was in full swing, was more free to interest herself in her husband's concerns, flung herself into the project with enthusiasm. And the Colonel went to work with tact and resolution. On one point he was determined : this should not be a Con- servative demonstration, run by the Tories of Old Town and Meads. Mr. Glynde, a local squire, the member for Beach- bourne West, might be trusted to behave himself. But young Stanley Bessemere, who, as the Colonel truly said, was for thrusting his toe into the crack of every door, would need watching he and his cohorts of lady-workers. 81 82 ONE WOMAN The Committee took the Town Hall for the occasion, and arranged for the meeting to be at eight in the evening so that Labour might attend if it would. The Colonel journeyed down to the East-end to ask Joe Burt to take an official part in the reception ; but the engineer refused, to the Colonel's chagrin. " A shall coom though/' said Joe. "And bring your mates along," urged the Colonel. "The old gentleman's worth seeing at all events. Mr. Geddes is coming." " I was going to soop with Ernie Caspar and his missus," replied the engineer, looking a little foolish. " And we were coomin along together afterwards." "Ah," laughed the Colonel, as he went out. "She's beat you ! I knew she would. Back the woman ! " Joe grinned in the door. " Yes," he said. " Best get it over. That's my notion of it." Bobs was still the most popular of Englishmen, if no longer the figure of romance he had been in the eyes of the British public for a few minutes during the South African war. His name drew; and the Town Hall was pleasantly full without being packed. Many came to see the old hero who cared little for his subject. Amongst these was Ruth Caspar who at Ernie's request for once had left her babes to the care of a friend. She stood at the back of the hall with her husband amongst her kind. Mrs. Trupp, passing, invited her to come forward ; but Ruth had spied Alf at the platform end, a steward with a pink rosette, very smart, and deep in secret counsel with the Reverend Spink. Joe Burt, with critical bright eye everywhere, supported the wall next to her. The Colonel, hurrying by, threw a friendly glance at him. " Ah," he said, " so you've found each other." BOBS 83 " Yes, sir," replied Ruth mischievously. " He's faced me at last, Mr. Burt has." " And none the worse for it, I hope/' said the Colonel. " That's not for me to say, sir/' answered Ruth, who was in gay mood. Joe changed the subject awkwardly. " A see young Bessemere's takin a prominent part in the proceedings," he said, nodding towards the platform. " He's two oughts above nothing, that young mon." " Yes, young ass," replied the Colonel cheerfully. " Now if you'd come on the Committee as I asked you, you'd be there to keep him in his place. You play into the hands of your enemy ! " Then Bobby Chislehurst stopped for a word with Ruth and Ernie and their friend. " Coom, Mr. Chislehurst ! " chaffed the engineer. " A'm surprised to see you here. A thought you was a Pacifist." " So I am," replied the other cheerily. " That's why I've come. I want to hear both sides." Joe shook his bullet-head gravely. " There's nobbut two sides in life," he said. " Right and Wrong. Which side is the Church on ? " Then the little Field-Marshal came on to the platform with the swift and resolute walk of the old Horse-gunner. He was nearly eighty now, but his figure was that of a youth, neat, slight, alert. Ruth remarked with interest that the hero was bow-legged, which she did not intend her children to be. For the rest, his kindly face of a Roman-nosed thoroughbred in training, his deep wrinkles, and close- cropped white hair, delighted her. The great soldier proved no orator ; but his earnestness more than compensated for his lack of eloquence. After the meeting he came down into the body of the hall and held an informal reception. The Colonel intro- duced Mr. Geddes, and left the two together while he edged his way down to Joe Burt. 84 ONE WOMAN " WeU, what d'you think of him ? " he asked. The engineer, his hands glued to the wall behind him, rocked to and fro. " A like him better than his opinions/' he grinned. " You come along and have a word with him/' urged the Colonel. Joe shook a wary head. " He's busy with Church and State," he said, nodding down the hall. " He don't need Labour." Then Ruth chimed in almost shrilly for once. " There's young Alf shook hands with him ! " " Always shovin of issalf ! " muttered Ernie sourly. " He and Reverend Spink." The old Field-Marshal was now coming slowly down the hall with a word here and a handshake there. Church and State, as Joe had truly said, were pressing him. Mrs. Trupp, indeed, and Mrs. Lewknor were fighting a heavy rearguard action against the Archdeacon and Stanley Bessemere and his cohorts, to cover the old soldier's retire- ment. As the column drifted past Ernie and Ruth the Colonel stopped. " An old Hammer-man, sir," he said. " And the mother of future Hammer-men." Lord Roberts shook hands with Ruth, and turned to Ernie. " What battalion ? " he asked in his high-pitched voice. " First, sir," answered Ernie, rigid at attention, in a voice Ruth had never heard before. " Ah," said the old Field-Marshal. " They were with me in the march to Kandahar. Never shall I forget them ! " He ran his eye shrewdly over the other. " Are you keeping fit?" " Pretty fair, considering, sir," answered Ernie, relaxing suddenly as he had braced. BOBS 85 " Well, you'll be wanted soon/' said Bobs, and passed on. " How these men run to seed, directly they leave the service, Lewknor ! " he remarked to the Colonel on the stairs. " Now I daresay that fellow was a smart upstanding man when he was with you." Ernie, thrilled at his adventure, went out into the cool night with Ruth, quietly amused at his excitement, beside him. " Didn't 'alf look, All didn't, when he talked to you I " chuckled Ruth. That was the main impression she had derived from the meeting, that and LordRoberts's ears and the way they were stuck on to his head ; but Ernie's mind was still in tumult. " Where's Joe then ? " he cried suddenly, and turned to see his pal still standing somewhat forlorn on the steps of the Town Hall. He whistled and beckoned furiously. " Come on, Joe ! " he called. "Just down to the Wish and have a look at the sea." But the engineer shook his head and turned slowly away down Grove Road. " Nay, A know when A'm not wanted," he called. " Yoong lovers like to be alone." " Sauce ! " said Ruth, marching on with a little smile. Ernie rejoined her. " What d'you think of him ? " he asked keenly. " O, I liked him," said Ruth, cool and a trifle mischievous. " He's like a little bird so alife like. And that tag of white beard to his chin like a billy-goat ! I did just want to pluck it ! " She tittered and then recollected herself. " I didn't mean Lord Roberts, fat-ead," retorted Ernie. " I meant Joe." " O, that chap ! " answered Ruth casually. " I didn't pay much heed to him. There's a lot o nature to him, 86 ONE WOMAN I should reckon. Most in general there is them black chaps, bull-built, wi curly tops to em." She drifted back to Lord Roberts and the meeting. " Only all that about war ! I don't like that. Don't seem right, not to my mind. There's a plenty enough troubles seems to me without them a-shoving great wars on top o you all for love." Ernie felt that the occasion demanded a lecture and that he was pointed out as the man to give it. The chance, moreover, might not recur ; and he must therefore make the most of it. He had this feeling less often perhaps than most men, and for that reason when he had it he had it strong. At the moment he was profoundly aware of the immense superiority of his sex ; the political sagacity of Man ; his power of taking statesmanlike views denied apparently to Woman. " And what if Germany attacks us ! " he asked cen- soriously. " Take it laying down, I suppose ! Spread your- self on the beach and let em tread on you as they land, so they don't wet their feet ! " " Germany won't interfere with you if you don't inter- fere with her, I reckon," Ruth answered calmly. " It's just the same as .neighbours in the street. You're friends or un- friends, accordin as you like." " What about Mrs. Ticehurst ? " cried Ernie, feeling victory was his for once. " You didn't interfere with her, did you ? Yet she tip the dust bin a-top o little Alice over the back-wall to show she loved you, I suppose." Ruth tilted a knowing chin. " She aren't a neighbour, Mrs. Ticehurst aren't not prarperly." They were relapsing into broad Sussex as they always would when chaffing. " What are she then ? " "She's a cat, sure-ly." The night air, the thronged and brilliant sky, the rare BOBS 87 change, the little bit of holiday, inspired and stimulated her. The Martha of much busyness had given place to the girl again. Immersed in the splendid darkness, she was in a delicious mood, cool, provocative, ironical ; as Ernie had known her in that brief April of her life before Captain Royal had thrown a shadow across her path. He threaded his arm through hers. Together they climbed the little Wish hill on the sea-front. From the top, by the old martello tower, they looked across the sea, white beneath the moon. Ernie's mood of high statesmanship had passed already. " I don't see this Creeping Death they talk on," he said discontentedly. "Ah," Ruth answered, sagacious in her turn. "Hap it's there though." Ernie turned on her. " I thart you just said . . ." %< No, I didn't then," she answered with magnificent unconcern. " All I say is War and that, what's it got to do wi' we ? " As they came off the hill they met Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor crossing Madeira Walk on their way home. " Where's your friend ? " asked the Colonel. " Gone back to his books and learning, sir, I reckon," replied Ruth. " He don't want us." " Ah, you scared him, Mrs. Caspar," chaffed the Colonel. " Scared him back to his revolution," commented Mrs. Lewknor. Ruth laughed that deep silvery bell-like laughter of hers that seemed to make the night vibrate. " He'd take some scaring, I reckon, that chap would," she said. 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. THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN 89 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 atmo- sphere 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 redeem- ing 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 go ONE WOMAN 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 sup- porters 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 con- ditions that then prevailed ; and that if Nature and cir- cumstance 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 thought- ful 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 THE RUSSET COATED-CAPTAIN 91 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 92 ONE WOMAN 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 eye- lid 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/ 1 he suggested. " Then hap he'll be less frit." " Wilta ? " asked Ruth, daintly 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 atten- tion 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 93 94 ONE WOMAN 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. " 0, 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." RUTH WAKES 95 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. 96 ONE WOMAN " 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, Lai," 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 Mot combe 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 their- salves. 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 vindictive- ness. 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. RUTH WAKES 97 " 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. 11 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 98 NIGHTMARE 99 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 unfor- giveable 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 Con- servative 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 I00 ONE WOMAN themselves Socialists. Indeed, in spite of the local Con- servative 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 NIGHTMARE ,';.: ; : ; ; * . joi; 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/ 1 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 Hurt'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 - Z '*': ONE WOMAN 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 hi 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, NIGHTMARE 103 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 io 4 ONE WOMAN 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 : Us 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 Hurt ; 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 NIGHTMARE 105 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. Regard- less 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 Hot," 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 106 SHADOWS 107 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 Beach- bourne 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." io8 ONE WOMAN " 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 over- whelmed 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. "Gome 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. SHADOWS 109 " 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 no ONE WOMAN 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 " 0, 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 SHADOWS in 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. " WeU ! " 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. THE LANDLORD 113 Backed then by Royal and his bank, Alf bought up certain of the garages of the defaulting company at knock- out 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 bottom- less 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. n 4 ONE WOMAN The home, always poor, began to manifest the charac- teristics 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. THE LANDLORD 115 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 n6 ONE WOMAN 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." THE LANDLORD 117 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. Nothin out o the way." " Thank you. I knaw your accommodation," she answered deeply. u8 ONE WOMAN " Well," he retorted, picking his teeth. " There's no harm in it. What's the fuss about ? " " TU 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 THE LANDLORD 119 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 ? 0, 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 husbandRuth 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 THE GRANDMOTHER 121 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. 122 ONE WOMAN 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." THE GRANDMOTHER 123 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. She smiled up at him gallantly. " It's all right, dad," she said, consolingly. " I'm not afraid o Mm whatever else." It was the first time she had called him dad, and even now she did it unconsciously. Edward Caspar ambled home. He did not attempt to conceal from his wife where he went on Tuesday mornings. Indeed, as he soared on mysterious wings, he seemed to have lost all fear of the woman who had tyrannised over him for his own good so long. Time, the unfailing arbitrator, had adjusted the balance between the two. And sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Trupp, observing quietly as she had done for thirty years, that in the continuous unconscious struggle that per- sists inevitably between every pair from the first mating till death, the victory in this case would b$ to the man intangible as air. That morning, as Edward entered the house, his wife was standing in the kitchen before the range. Anne Caspar was white-haired now. Her limbs had lost much of their comeliness, her motions their grace. She was sharp-boned and gaunt of body as she had always been of mind not unlike a rusty sword. As the front-door opened, and the well- trained man sedulously wiped his boots upon the mat, she looked up over her spectacles, dropping her chin, grim and sardonic. " I know where you been, dad," she taunted. He stayed at the study-door, like a great pawing bear. Then he answered suddenly and with a smile. " I've been in heaven." 124 ONE WOMAN She slammed the door of the range ; smiling, cruel, the school-girl who teases. " I know where your tobacco money goes, old dad," she continued. His mind was far too big and vague and mooning often to be able to encounter successfully the darts his wife occasionally shot into his large carcase. " He's a beautiful boy/' was all he now made answer, as he disappeared. Whether the wound he dealt was deliberately given in self-defence, or unconsciously because he had the power over her, his words stung Anne Caspar to the quick. She turned white, and sat down in the lonely kitchen her wrung old hands twisted in her lap, hugging her wound. Then she recovered enough to take reprisals. " Alf's their landlord, now/' she cried after him, the snakes in her eyes darting dreadful laughter. Edward Caspar turned in the door. " Anne," he said, " I wish you to pay Ruth's rent in future out of the money my father left you." The voice was mild but there was a note of authority, firm if faint, running through it. Anne rose grimly to her feet, thin as a stiletto, and almost as formidable. " That woman ! " He nodded at her down the passage. " My daughter/' Anne turned full face. " D'you know she's had a love-child ? " she shrilled, discordant as a squeaking wheel. The old gentleman, fumbling at the door of his study, dropped his bearded chin, and beamed at the angry woman, moonwise over his spectacles. " Why shouldn't she ? " he asked. There was something crisp, almost curt, in the interro- gation. THE GRANDMOTHER 125 " But she's not respectable ! " Again he dropped his chin and seemed to gape blankly. " Why should she be ? "he asked. She heard the key turn, and knew that she was locked out for the night. Later she crept in list-slippers to the door and knocked with the slow and solemn knuckles of fate, a calculated pause between each knock. " Alf's going up, Era's going down/' she said, nodding with grim relish. " Goo^-night, old dad." Next evening Joe called at the cottage, to fetch Ernie for the class. He arrived as he sometimes had done of late, a little before Ernie was due home from the yard. At this hour the little ones had already been put to bed ; and Ruth would be alone with Alice, between whom and the engineer there had sprung up a singular intimacy ever since the even- ing on which he had carried her home like a dead thing in his arms from Saffrons Croft. Ruth had not seen him since his clash with Alfred in the door ; and he had obviously avoided her. Now she thrilled faintly. Was he in love with her ? she was not sure. He entered without speaking and took his seat as always before the fire, broad-spread and slightly huddled in his overcoat, chin on chest, staring into the fire. Ruth, busy baking, her arms up to the elbow in dough, made her decision swiftly. She would meet him, face him, fight him. " Well, Joe," she said, not looking at him. It was the first time she had called him that. He peeped up at her, only his eyes moving, small, black-brown, and burning like a bear's. " That's better," he muttered. She flashed up at him. Innocence and cunning, the I 2 6 ONE WOMAN schoolboy and the brute, Pan and Silenus fought, leered, and frolicked in his face. Ruth dropped her gaze and kneaded very deliberately. Yes ... it was so ... Now she would help him ; and she could hold him. She would transmute his passion into friendship. She would bridle her bull, ride him, tame him. It was dangerous, and she loved danger. It was sport ; and she loved sport. It was an adventure after the heart of a daring woman. He was a fine man, too, and fierce, warrior and orator ; worth conquering and subduing to her will. His quality of a fighting male called to her. She felt the challenge and answered it with singing blood. That laughing hidalgo who in Elizabethan days had landed from his galleon in the darks at the Haven to bring terror and romance to some Sussex maid ; that Spaniard who lurked obscurely in her blood, gave her her swarthy colouring, her indolent magnificence and surprising quality, was stirring uneasily within her once again. She lifted her eyes from the froth of yeast and looked across at him, accepting battle if he meant battle. And he did : there was no doubt of that. He sat there, hunched, silent, breathing heavily. Then little Alice slipped down from the kitchen table on which she had been sitting at her mother's side, danced across to her friend, and climbed up on his knee. Ruth took her arms out of the bowl, white to the elbow with flour, came across to the pair, firm-faced, and deliberately removed the child. Joe rose and went out. In the outer door he stumbled on a man half-hidden on the threshold. " That you, Joe ? " said Ernie quietly. "There he is I Alf on the spy. See his head bob there 1 At the bottom of Borough Lane It's her he's after." Joe peeped over his friend's shoulder, his bullet head thrust out like a dog who scents an enemy. " That sort ; is he ? " he muttered. " I'll after him ! " CHAPTER XVII THE CHALLENGE JOE BURT had that passion for saving souls which is the hall-mark of the missionary in every age. Had he been a child of the previous generation he would have become a minister in some humble denomination and done his fighting from the pulpit, Bible in hand, amid the pot-banks of a Black Country township or the grimy streets of a struggling mining village in the North. As it was he appealed to the mass from the platform, and, a true fisher of men, flung his net about the individual in the class-room and at conferences. Always seeking fresh fields to conquer, he had established a political footing now even in Tory Old Town. He had opened a discussion at the Institute, and actually given an address to the local Church of England's Men's Society on Robert Owen and early English Socialists ; and he owed his triumph in the main to Bobby Chislehurst. It is not without a pang that we part from the most cherished of our prejudices, and as Joe launched out into an always larger life it had come to him as something of a shock to find amongst the younger clergy some who preserved an attitude of firm and honest neutrality in the great battle to which he had pledged his life, and even a few, here and there, who took their stand on the side of the revolutionaries of the Spirit. And such a one was Bobby. Because of that, the young curate, who was up and down all day amid the humble dwellers in the Moot, innocent and happy as a child, was forgiven his solitary sin. For Bobby was a Scout-master, unashamed ; and Joe Burt, like most 197 128 ONE WOMAN of his battle-fellows of that date looked askance on the Boy- Scout Movement as one of the many props of militarist Toryism none the less effective because it was unavowed. The Cherub, bold, almost blatant in sin, passed his happiest hours in a rakish sombrero, shorts, and a shirt bedizened with badges, tramping the Downs at the head of the Old Town Troop of devoted Boy-Scouts, lighting forbidden fires in the gorse, arguing with outraged farmers, camping in secluded coombes above the sea. Up there on the hill, between sky and sea, Joe Burt, he too with his little flock of acolytes from the East-end, would sometimes meet the young shepherd on Saturday afternoons, trudging along, in his hand a pole in place of a crook. " I forgive you Mr. Chislehurst, because I know you don't know what you're doing," he once said, gravely. " You're like the Israelite without guile." " The greatest of men have their little failings, "giggled the sinner. The two men, besides their political sympathies, had another point in common : they meant to save Ernie from himself. But Joe was no longer single-eyed. He saw now in Ernie two men a potential recruit of value for the cause of Labour, and the man who possessed the woman he loved. In the troubled heart of the engineer there began to be a confused conflict between the fisher of men and the covetous rival. Ernie was entirely unconscious of the tumult in the bosom of his friend of which he was the innocent cause. Not so Ruth. She was rousing slowly now like a hind from her lair in the bracken, and sniffing the air at the approach of the ant- lered stranger. As he drew always nearer with stops and starts and dainty tread, and she became increasingly aware of his savage presence, his fierce intentions, she withdrew instinctively for protection towards her rightful lord. He grazed on the hill-side blind to his danger, blind to hers, blind to the presence of his enemy. Ernie's indeed was that THE CHALLENGE 129 innocence, that simplicity, which rouses in the heart of primitive woman not respect but pity and in the rose-bud of pity, unless it be virgin white, lurks always the canker of contempt and the worm of cruelty. Sometimes of evenings, as Ernie dozed before the fire in characteristic neglig6, collarless, tie-less, somnolent as the cat, she watched him with growing resentment, comparing him to that Other, so much the master of himself and his little world. " You we slack," she said once, more to herself than him. " I got a right to be, I reck'n, a'ter my day's work/' he answered sleepily. " Joe's not like that," she answered, wetting her thread. " He's spry, he is. Doos a long day's work too and earns big money, Joe do. Brings home more'n twice as much what you do Saraday and no wife nor children neether." Ernie looked up and blinked. For a moment she hoped and feared she had stung him to eruption. Then he nodded off again. That was what annoyed Ruth. He would not flare. He was like his father. But qualities a woman admires in an old man she may despise in her lover. As she retired upon him she felt him giving way behind her. She was seeking support and finding emptiness. And as that Other, shaggy-maned and mighty, stole towards her with his air of a conqueror, trampling the heather under-foot, the inadequacy of her own mate forced itself upon her notice always more. Ruth, now thirty, was in the full bloom of her passionate womanhood ; drawing with her far-flung fragrance the pollen-bearing bee and drawn to him. The girl who had been seized and overthrown by a passing brigand was a woman now who looked life in the face with steadfast eyes and meant to have her share of the fruits of it. The old Christian doctrines of patience, resignation, abnegation of the right to a full life, made no appeal to her. Richly dowered herself, she would not brook a starved existence. I 3 o ONE WOMAN She who was empty yearned for fulness. After her catas- trophe, itself the consequence of daring, Ern had come into her life and given her what she had needed most just then rest, security, above all children. On that score she was satisfied now ; and perhaps for that very reason her spirit was all the more a-thirst for adventure in other fields. She was one of those women who demand everything of life and are satisfied with nothing less. Like many such her heart was full of children but her arms were empty. For her fulfilment she needed children and mate. Some women were content with one, some with the other. Great woman that she was, nothing less than both could satisfy her demands ; and her emptiness irked her increasingly. Ruth's in fact was the problem of the unconquered woman a problem at least as common among married women who have sought absorption and found only dis- satisfaction as amongst the unmarried. Royal had seized her imagination for a moment ; to Ernie she had sub- mitted. But that complete immersion in a man and his work which is for a full woman love, she had never experi- enced, and longed to experience. After five years of marriage Ernie was still outside her, an accretion, a circumstance, a part of her environment, necessary perhaps as her clothes, but little more : for there was no purpose in his life. And then just at the moment her lack was making itself most felt, the Man had come a real man too, with a work ; a pioneer, marching a-head, axe in hand, hewing a path-way through the Forest, and calling to her with ever increasing insistency to come out to him and aid him in his enterprise. But always as she fingered in her dreams the bolts of the gate that, once opened, would leave her face to face with the importunate adventurer, there came swarming about her, unloosing her fingers as they closed upon the bolts, the children. And as one or other of them stirred or called THE CHALLENGE 131 out in sleep in the room above her, she would start, wake, and shake herself. Yet even the pull of the children was not entirely in one direction. There were four of them now ; and they were growing, while Ernie's wages were standing still. That was one of the insistent factors of the situation. Were they too to be starved ? Often in her dim kitchen she asked herself that question. For if in her dreams she was always the mate of a man, she was in fact, and before all things, the mother of children. Who then was to save them and her ? Ernie ? who was now little more than a shadow, an irritating shadow, wavering in the background of her life ? If so, God help them all. ... One evening she was in the little back-yard taking down the washing, when she heard a man enter the kitchen. She paid no heed. If it was Joe he could wait ; if it was Ernie she needn't bother. Then she heard a second man enter, and instantly a male voice, harsh with challenge. She went in hastily. There was nobody in the kitchen ; but Ern was standing at the outer door. His back was to her, but she detected instantly in the hunch of his shoulders a rare combativeness. " You know me/ 1 he was growling to somebody outside. " None of it now ! " He turned slowly, a dark look in his face which did not lighten when he saw her. " Who was it, Ern ? " she asked. " Alf," he answered curtly. That night as he sat opposite her she observed him warily as she worked and put to herself an astonishing question : Was there another Ernie ? an Ernie asleep she had not succeeded in rousing ? Was the instrument sound and the fault in her, the player ? A chance phrase of Mrs. Trupp's now recurred to her. " There's so much in Ernie if you can only get it out." I32 ONE WOMAN The man opposite rose slowly, came slowly to her, bent slowly and kissed her. " I ask your pardon if I was rough with you this evening, Ruth/' he said. " But Alf ! he fairly maddens me. I feel to him as you shouldn't feel to any human being, let alone your own brother. You know what he's after ? " he continued. She stirred and coloured, as she lifted her eyes to his, dark with an unusual tenderness. " Reckon so, Ern," she said. He stood before the fire, for once almost handsome in his vehemence. " Layin his smutty hands on you ! " he said. That little scene, with its suggestion of passion suppressed, steadied Ruth. . . . And it was time. That Other was always drawing nearer. And as she felt his approach, the savage power of him, his fierce virility, and was conscious of the reality of the danger, she resolved to meet it and fend it off. He should save Ernie instead of destroying her. And the way was clear. If this new intellectual life, the seeds of which the engineer had been sowing so patiently for so long in the unkempt garden of Ernie's spirit became a reality for him, a part of himself, growing in such strength as to strangle the weeds of carelessness, he was saved so much Ruth saw. " Once he was set alight to, all his rubbish'd go up in a flare, and he'd burn bright as aflame," she told the engineer once seizing her chance ; and ended on the soft note of the turtle-dove " There's just one could set him ablaze and only one. And that's you, Joe." At the moment Joe was sitting before the fire in characteristic attitude, hands deep in his pockets, legs stretched out, the toes of his solid boots in the air. For a moment he did not answer. It was as though he had not heard. Then he turned that slow, bull-like glare of his full on her. THE CHALLENGE 133 " A'm to save him that he may enjoy you that's it, is it ? " he said. " A'm to work ma own ruin/' It was the first time he had openly declared himself. Now that it had come she felt, like many another woman in such case, a sudden instant revulsion. Her dreams blew away like mist at the discharge of cannon. She was left with a sense of shock as one who has fallen from a height. At the moment of impact she was ironing, and glad of it. Baring her teeth unconsciously she pressed hard down on the iron with a little hiss. " You've no call to talk to me like that, Joe. It's not right." Deliberately he rose and turned his back. " A don't know much," he growled in his chest, " but A do know that then." . Her heart thumped against her ribs. " I thart you were straight, Joe," she said. He warmed his hands at the blaze ; and she knew he was grinning, and the nature of the grin. " A thought so maself till A found A wasn't," he answered. " No man knows what's in him till he's tried that's ma notion of it. Then he'll have a good few surprises, same as A've done. A man's a very funny thing when he's along of a woman he loves that's ma experience." Ruth trembled, and her hand swept to and fro with the graceful motions of a circling eagle over the child's frock she was ironing. " You make me feel real mean," she said. He kept a sturdy back to her. " Then A make you feel just same gate as A feel maself." There was.ja pause. " You ought to marry, Joe a man like you with all that nature in you." " Never only if so be A can get the woman A want." She said with a gulp, " And I thart you was Em's friend ! " i 3 4 ONE WOMAN He looked up at the ceiling. " So A am trying to be." There was another silence. Then the woman spoke again, this time with the hushed curiosity of a child. " Are all men like that ? " " The main of em, A reck'n." Her hand swooped rhythmically ; and there was the gentle accompanying thud of the iron taking the table and circling smoothly about its work. "My Ern isn't." " Your Ern's got what he wants and what A want too." Boots brushing themselves on the mat outside made themselves heard. Then the door opened. Joe did not turn. "Coom in, Ern," he said. "Just right. Keep t' peace atween us. She and me gettin across each other as usual." CHAPTER XVIII A SKIRMISH A FEW days later Ernie came home immediately after work instead of repairing to the Star. As he entered the room Ruth saw there was something up. He was sober terribly so. " I done it, Ruth, old lass/' he said. She knew at once. " Got the sack ? " she asked. He nodded. " I've no one to blame only meself," he said, disarming her, as he disarmed everyone by his Christian quality. Ruth did not reproach him : that was not her way. Nor did she sit down and cry : she had expected the catastrophe too long. She took the boy from the cradle and opened her bodice. " You shan't suffer anyways," she said, half to herself, half to the child, and stared out of the window, babe at breast, rocking gently and with tapping foot. Ern slouched out ; and Ruth was left alone, to face as best she could the spectre that haunts through life the path of the immense majority of the human race. She had watched its slinking approach for years. Now with a patter of hushed feet, dreadful in the fury of its assault, it was on her. Remorseless in attack as in pursuit it was hounding her and hers slowly down a dreary slope to a lingering death, of body and spirit alike, in that hungry morass, the name of which is Unemployment. Two days later when Joe entered the cottage he found Ruth for once sitting, listless. All the children were in bed, even little Alice. He saw at once why. There was no fire, though it was January. " Where's Ern, then ? " he asked. 135 136 ONE WOMAN " Lookin for work/' Ruth answered. Joe stared, aghast. " Is he out ? " he asked. Ruth rose and turned her shoulder to him. " Yes. They've stood him off. And I don't blame em." " What for ? " Joe was genuinely concerned. " He didn't say. Bad time, I reckon. Only don't tell anyone, Joe, for dear's sake, else they'll stop my credit at the shop and I'll be done." Her eyes filled and she bit her lip. " Four of em," she said. " And nothing a week to do it on let alone the rent "... She might hush it up ; but the news spread. Alf, with his ears of a lynx, was one of the first to hear. For a moment he hovered in a dreadful state of trepidation. It was a year and a half since he had stalked his white heifer, bent on a kill, only to be scared away by the presence of that mysterious old man he had found at her side in the heart of the covert. But his lust was by no means dead because it had been for the time suppressed. Ruth had baffled him ; and Alf had not forgotten it. Ern possessed a beautiful woman he longed for ; and Alf had not forgiven him. Perhaps because he had beaten down his desire for so long, it now rushed out ravening from its lair, and drove all else before it. Throwing caution to the winds, he came stealing along like a stoat upon the trail, licking his lips, wary yet swift. First he made sure that Ernie was out, looking for a job of work. Then he came down the street. Ruth met her enemy blithely and with taunting eyes. In battle she found a certain relief from the burthen of her distress. And here she knew was no question of pity or consideration. " Monday's your morning, isn't it ? " she said. " Come along then, will you, Alf ? And you'll see what I got for you." A SKIRMISH 137 Alf shook a sorrowful head, studying his rent-book. " It can't go on/' he said in the highly moral tone he loved to adopt. " It ain't right." He raised a pained face and looked away. " Of course if you was to wish to wipe it off and start clean " Ruth was cold and smiling. She handled Alf always with the caressing contempt with which a cat handles a mouse. " Little bit of accommodation," she said. " No thank you, Alf. I shouldn't feel that'd help me to start clean." " See Em's down and out," continued the tempter in his hushed and confidential voice. " Nobody won't give him a job." Ruth trembled slightly, though she was smiling still and self-contained. " You'll see to that now you're on high, won't you ? " she said " for my children's sake." " It'd be doin Ern a good turn, too," Alf went on in the same low monotone. "Brotherly," said Ruth. "But he mightn't see it tHat way." " He wouldn't mind," continued Alf gently. " See he's all for Joe Burt and the classes now. Says you're keeping him back. Nothin but a burthen to him, he says. Her and her brats, as he said last night at the Institute. Don't give a chap a chance." Alf wagged his head. " Course he shouldn't ha said it. I know that. Told him so at the time afore them all. Tain't right I told him straight your own wife and all." " My Ern didn't say that, Alf," Ruth answered simply. His eyes came seeking hers furtively, and were gone instantly on meeting them. " Then you won't do him a good turn ? " Ruth's fine eyes flashed and danced, irony, laughter, scorn, all crossing swords in their brown deeps. There were aspects of Alf that genuinely amused her. 138 ONE WOMAN " Would you like to talk it over with him ? " she asked. " And supposing I have ? " " He'll be back in a moment/' she said, sweet and bright. " I'll ask him." Alf was silent, fumbling with his watch-chain. Then he began again in the same hushed voice, and with the same averted face. " And there's another thing between us." His eyes were shut, and he was weaving to and fro like a snake in the love- dance. " Sorry you're trying to make bad blood between me and my old dad," he said. " Very sorry, Ruth." " I aren't," Ruth answered swiftly. " You was always un-friends from the cradle, you and dad. See he don't think you're right." She added a little stab of her own " No one does. That's why they keep you on as sidesman, Mr. Chislehurst says. Charity-like. They're sorry for you. So'm I." The words touched Alf's vital spot the conceit that was the most obvious symptom of his insanity. His face changed, but his voice remained as before, stealthy and insinuating. He came a little closer, and his eyes caressed her figure covetously. " You see I wouldn't annoy me, not too far, not if I was you, Ruth. You can go too far even with a saint upon the cross." Ruth put out the tip of her tongue daintily. " Crook upon the cross, don't you mean, Alf ? " He brushed the irrelevancy aside, shooting his head across to hers. His face was ugly now, and glistening. With deliberate insolence he flicked a thumb and finger under her nose. " And I do know what I do know, and what nobody else don't know only you and me and the Captin, my tuppenny tartlet." She was still and white, formidable in her very dumbness. He proceeded with quiet stealth. f A SKIRMISH 139 " See that letter I wrote you used to hold over against me before you married that's destroyed now. And a good job, too, for it might have meant trouble for Alfured. But it's gone ! I know that then. Ern told me. He's a drunkard, old Ern is but he's not a liar. I will say that for my brother ; I will stick up for him if it was ever so ; I will fight old Ern's battles for him." " As you're doin now," said Ruth. Alf grinned. " And the short of it all is just this, Ruthie," he con- tinued, and reaching forth a hand, tapped her upon the shoulder " I got you, and you ain't got me. And I can squeeze the heart out of that great bosom o yours " he opened and clenched his hand in pantomine " if I don't get my way any time I like. So just you think it over ! Think o your children if you won't think of nothing else ! " Outside in the road he ran into Joe, who gripped him. " What you come after ? " asked the engineer ferociously. " After my rent," answered Alf, shouting from fear. Joe looked dangerous, but loosed his hold. " How much ? " he asked, taking a bag from his pocket. " Sixteen shilling. You can see for yourself." Obliging with the obligingness of the man who is scared to death, Alf produced his book. Joe, lowering still, examined it. Then he paid the money into the other's hand. That done he escorted Alf policemanwise to the bottom of Borough Lane. " If A find you mouchin round here again A'll break your bloody little back across ma knee," he told the other, shouldering over him. " A mean it, sitha ! " Alf withdrew up the hill towards the Star. At a safe distance he paused and called back confidentially, his face white and sneering, " Quite the yard-dog, eh ? Bought her, ain't yer ? " Joe returned to the cottage and entered. At the head of the stairs a lovely little figure in a white I4 o ONE WOMAN gown that enfolded her hugely like a cloud, making billows about the woolly red slippers which had been Bess Trupp's Christmas gift, smiled at him. " Uncle Joe/' little Alice chirped, " please tell Mum I are ready." He ran up the stairs, gathered her in his arms, and bore her back to bed in the room where Susie and Jenny already slept. " Hush ! " she whispered, laying a tiny finger on his lips" The little ones ! " He tucked her up and kissed her. " You're the proper little mother, aren't you ? " he whispered. In the kitchen he found Ruth, a row of tin-tacks studding her lips, soling Alice's boots. The glint of steel between her lips, and the inward curl of her lips, gave her a touch of unusual grimness. " Always at it," he said. " Yes," she answered between muffled lips. " Got to be. Snob this time. Only the soles are rotten. It's like puttin nails into wet brown paper." She was suffering terribly he felt it ; and suppressed accordingly. But if her furnaces were damped down, he could hear the flames roaring behind closed doors ; and her passion, which typified for him the sufferings of those inno- cent millions to the redemption of whom he had consecrated his life, moved him profoundly. He flung the bag on the table before her almost savagely. It jingled as it fell and squatted there, dowdy, and lacka- daisical as a dumpling in a swoon. Ruth eyed it, her lips still steel-studded. " How much ? " she mumbled. " Ten pound," he answered. " That's not what I mean." " What do you mean, then ? " " What's the price ? " A SKIRMISH 141 He glared at her ; then thumped the table with a great fist. " Nothin then ! " he shouted. " What doest' take me for ? " She munched her tin- tacks sardonically, regarding him. How sturdy he was, with his close curly black hair, and on his face the set and resolute look of the man approaching middle-age, who knows that he wants and how to win it ! " A man, Joe/' He snorted sullenly. " Better'n a no-man any road," he sneered. The words stung her. All the immense and tender motherliness of her nature rose up like a wave that curls in roaring majesty to a fall. She swept the tin-tacks from her mouth and met him, flashing and glorious. " See here, Joe ! " she cried, deep- voiced as a blood- hound. " Ne'er a word against my Em ! I won't have it. " " Your Em \ " She was white and heaving. " Yes, my Ern ! He's down and out, and you take advan- tage to come up here behind his back and insult him and me. You're the one to call anudder man a no-man, aren't you ? " Taking the bag of money she tossed it at him with a flinging scorn that was magnificent. " Take your filfth away and yourself with it ! " He went, humbled and ashamed. She watched him go this sanguine, well-conditioned man, with his good boots, his sensible clothes, his air of solid prosperity. Then she sat down, spent. Her savagery had been largely defensive. Like the brave soldier she was she had attacked to hide the weakness of her guard. She was sick at heart ; worn out. These men . . . first Alf, then Joe . . . This champing boar, foam in the corner of his lips . . . that red-eyed weasel squealing on the trail. . . . An hour later Ern came home. I 4 2 ONE WOMAN She knew at once from the wan look of him that he had been tramping all day on an empty stomach. That, with all his faults, was Era. So long as there was a crumb in the cupboard she and the children should share it : he would tighten his belt. Even now he just sat down, an obviously beaten man, and did not ask for a bite. What she had she put before him ; and it was not much. " Any luck, Era ? " she asked with a touch of tenderness. Sullenly he shook his head. " Walked my bloody legs off on an empty belly, and got a mouthful of insults at the end of it," he muttered. " That's all I got. That's all they give the working man in Old England. Joe's right. Sink the country ! Blast the bloody Empire ! That's all it's good for ! " It was the first time he had ever used bad language in her presence. That gradual demoralisation which unem- ployment, however caused, and its consequences brings inevitably in its train was already showing its corrupt fruits. The tragedy of it moved her. " Joe's been up," she said after a bit. " I met him," he answered. He was warmer after his meal, less sullen, and drew up his chair from habit before the fireless range. " He wants me to go North to his folk. Says his brother-in-law can find me a job. Runs a motor-transport business in Oldham." Her back was to him at the moment. " Does he ? " she asked quietly. " What about me and my children ? " " That's what I says to him." " What did he say ? " " Said he'd look after you and them." Ruth was still as a mouse awaiting the cat's pounce. " And what did you say to that ? " " Told him to go to hell." Ruth stirred again and resumed her quiet busyness. " Alf's been up again," she told him. " Messin round." CHAPTER XIX PITCHED BATTLE MRS. TRUPP happened on Ernie's mother next day in Church Street. The surgeon's wife, whenever she met Mrs. Edward Caspar, acted always deliberately on the assump- tion, which she knew to be unfounded, that relations between Ruth and her mother-in-law were normal. " It's a nuisance this about Ernie," she now said. " Such a worry for Ruth." The hard woman with the snow-white hair and fierce black eye-brows made a little sardonic moue. " She's all right," she answered. " You needn't worry for her. There's a chap payin her rent." Mrs. Trupp changed colour. " I don't believe it," she said sharply. " You mayn't believe it," retorted the other sourly. " It's true all the same. Alf's her landlord. He told me." Mrs. Trupp, greatly perturbed, reported the matter to her husband. He tackled Alf, who at the moment was driving for his old employer again in the absence of the regular chauffeur. Alf admitted readily enough that the charge against his sister-in-law was true. " That's it, sir," he said. " It's that chap Burt. And he don't do what he done for nothin, I'll lay ; a chap like that don't." He produced his book from his pocket, and held it out for the other to see, half turning away with becoming modesty. " I don't like it, sir me own sister-in-law. And I've said so to Reverend Spink. Makes talk, as they say. Still it's no concern of mine." 143 i 4 4 ONE WOMAN Mrs. Trupp, on hearing her husband's report, went down at once to see Ruth and point out the extraordinary unwisdom of her action. Ruth met her, fierce and formidable as Mrs. Trupp had never known her. " It's a lie," she said, deep and savage as a tigress. " It may be," Mrs. Trupp admitted. " But Alfred did show Mr. Trupp his book. And the rent had been paid down to last Monday. I think you should ask Mr. Burt." That evening when Joe came up Ruth straightway tackled him. She was so cold, so terrible, that the engineer was frightened, and lied. " Not as I'd ha blamed you if you had/' said Ruth relaxing ever so little. " It's not your fault I'm put to it and shamed afore em all." The bitterness of the position in which Ern had placed her was eating her heart away. That noon for the first time she had taken the three elder children to the public dinner for necessitous children at the school. Anne Caspar who had been there helping to serve had smirked. When Joe saw that the weight of her anger was turned against Ernie and not him, he admitted his fault. " A may ha done wrong," he said. " But A acted for the best. Didn't want to see you in young Alf's clutches." " You bide here," Ruth said, " and keep house along o little Alice. I'll be back in a minute." Hatless and just as she was, she marched up to the Manor-house. " You were right, 'M," she told Mrs. Trupp. " It were Joe. He just teU me. Only I didn't knaw nothin of it." " It'll never do for you to be in his debt, Ruth," said the lady. " No," Ruth admitted sullenly. Mrs. Trupp went to her escritoire and took out sixteen shillings. Ruth took it. PITCHED BATTLE 145 " Thank-you," was all she said, and she said that coldly. Then she returned home with the money and paid Joe. An hour later Ernie came in. Ruth was standing at the table waiting him, cold, tall, and inexorable. " Anything ? " she asked. Surly in self-defence, he shook his head and sat down. She gave him not so much as a crumb of sympathy. " No good settin down/' she told him. " You ain't done yet. You'll take that clock down to Goldmann's after dark, and you'll get sixteen shillings for it. If he won't give you that for it, you'll pop your own great coat." Ernie stared at her. He was uncertain whether to show fight or not. " Dad's clock ? what he give me when I married ? " " Yes. Dad's clock." She regarded him with eyes in which resentment flamed sullenly. " Can I feed six on the shilling a week he gives me rent and all ? " Ernie went out and brought back the money. She took it without a word, and wrapping it up in a little bit of paper, left it at the Manor-house. Mrs. Trupp, who was holding a council with Bess and Bobby Chislehurst, unwrapped the packet and showed the money. " She's put something up the spout," said the sage Bobby. The three talked the situation over. There was only one thing to be done. Somebody must go round to Mr. Pigott and intercede for Ernie. Bobby was selected. " You'll get him round if anybody can," Bess told her colleague encouragingly. Bobby, shaking a dubious head, went. Mr. Pigott, like everybody else in Old Town, was devoted to the young 10 I4 6 ONE WOMAN curate ; but he presented a firm face now to the other's entreaties. " Every chance IVe given him/' he said, and scolded and growled as he paced to and fro in the little room looking across Victoria Drive on to the allotments. " He's a lost soul, is Ernie Caspar. That's my view, if you care for it." Bobby retreated, not without hope, and bustled round to Ruth. " You must go and see him ! " he rapped out almost imperiously " yourself this evening after work at 6.30 to the minute." He would be praying at that hour. Ruth, who was fighting for her life now, went. Mr. Pigott, at the window, saw her coming. " Here she comes," he murmured. " O dear me ! You women, you know, you're the curse of my life. I'd be a good and happy man only for you." Mrs Pigott was giggling at his elbow. " She'll get round you, all right, my son," she said. " She'll roll you up in two ticks till you're just a little round ball of nothing in particular, and then gulp you down." " She won't ! " the other answered truculently. " You don't know me ! " And he swaggered masterfully away to meet the foe. Mrs. Pigott proved, of course, right. Ruth's simplicity and beauty were altogether too much for the susceptible old man. He put up no real fight at all ; but after a little bluff and bounce surrendered uncon- ditionally with a good many loud words to salve his conscience and cover his defeat. " It's only postponing the evil day, I'm afraid," he said ; but he agreed to take the sinner back at a lower wage to do a more menial job if he'd come. " He'll come, sir," said Ruth. " He's humble. I will say that for Ern." PITCHED BATTLE 147 " Send him to me," said the old schoolmaster threaten- ingly. " I'll dress him down. What he wants is to get religion." " He's got religion, sir," answered simple Ruth. " Only where it is it's no good to him." That evening, when Ern entered, heavy once again with defeat, she told him the news. At the moment she was standing at the sink washing up, and did not even turn to face him. He made as though to approach her and then halted. Something about her back forbade him. " It shan't happen again, Ruth," he said. She met him remorseless as a rock of granite. " No, not till next time," she answered. He stood a moment eyeing her back hungrily. Then he went out. He was hardly gone when his father lumbered into the kitchen. The old gentleman's eyes fell at once on the clock-deserted mantel-piece. " Gone to be mended," he said to himself, and took out of his waistcoat pocket the huge old gold watch with a coat of arms on the back, beloved of the children, that had itself some fifteen years before made a romantic pilgrimage to Mr. Goldmann's in Sea-gate. Then he bustled to the cupboard where was the box containing a hammer and a few tools. He put a nail in the wall, hammered his thumb, sucked it with a good deal of slobber, but got the nail in at last. " Without any help too," he said to himself, not without a touch of complacency as he hung the watch on it. Ruth watched him with wistful affection. Pleased with himself and his action, as is only the man who rarely uses his hands, he stood back and admired his work. " There ! " he said. " Didn't know I was a handy man, did you ? It'll keep you going anyway till the clock comes back." I 4 8 ONE WOMAN He left more hurriedly than usual, and when he was gone Ruth found two shillings on the mantel-piece. The old man's kindness and her own sense of humiliation were too much for Ruth. She went out into the back-yard ; and there Joe found her, standing like a school-girl, her hands behind her, looking up at the church-tower. Quietly he came to her and peeped round at her face, which was crumpled and furrowed, the tears pouring down. " I'd as lief give up all together for all the good it is," she gulped between her sobs. He put out his hand to gather her. She turned on him, her eyes smouldering and sullen beneath the water-floods. " Ah, you, would you ? " she snarled. As she faced him he saw that the brooch she usually wore at her throat was gone, and her neck, round and full, was exposed. She saw the direction of his eyes. " Yes," she said, " that's gone too. I'll be lucky soon if I'm left the clothes I stand up in." He put out a sturdy finger and stroked her bare throat. She struck it aside with ferocity. " What do you want then ? " he asked. " You know what I want," she answered huskily. " What's that ? " " A man to make a home and keep the children." " Well, here's one a-waitin." She flung him off and moved heavily into the kitchen. Just then there was a tap at the window. It was little Alice calling for her mother to come and tuck her up. CHAPTER XX THE VANQUISHED WHEN Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor called at the Manor-house a few days later, Mrs. Trupp told them what had happened. " Burt paid her rent ? " queried the Colonel. " Without her knowledge/' said Mrs. Trupp. The Colonel shrugged. " I'm afraid our friend Ernie's a poor creature/' he said. " Wishy-washy ! That's about the long and short of it." " And yet he's got it in him ! " commented Mrs. Trupp. " That's what I say," remarked Mrs. Lewknor with a touch of aggressiveness. The little lady, with the fine loyalty that was her characteristic, never forgot whose son Ernie was, nor her first meeting with him years before in hospital at Jubbulpur. " He's got plenty in him ; but she don't dig it out." " He got a good fright though, this time," said Bess. " It may steady him." Mr. Trupp shot forth one of his short epigrams, solid and chunky as a blow from a hammer. " Men won't till they must," he said. " It's Must has been the making of Man. He'll try when he's got to, and not a moment before." Ten minutes later Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor were walking down Church Street towards the station. Just in front of them a woman and two men were marching a-breast. The woman was flanked by her comrades. " What a contrast those two men make," remarked the Colonel. " That feller Burt's like a bull ! " 149 ISO ONE WOMAN " Too like/ retorted Mrs. Lewknor sharply. " Give me the fellow who's like a gentleman." The Colonel shook his head. " Flame burns too feebly." " But it burns pure/' snapped the little lady. Both parties had reached the foot of the hill at the Goffs when the woman in front swerved. It was the motion of the bird in flight suddenly aware of a man with a gun. She passed through the stile and fled swiftly across Saffrons Croft. The men with her, evidently taken by surprise, followed. Only the Colonel saw what had happened. A tall man, coming from the station, had turned into Alf's garage. " Royal," he said low to his companion. Captain Royal had come down to Beachbourne to see Alf Caspar, who wanted more capital for his Syndicate which was prospering amazingly. Alf, indeed, now that he had established his garages in every important centre in East Sussex, was starting a Road-touring Syndicate to exploit for visitors the hidden treasures of a country-side amazingly rich in historic memories for men of Anglo-Saxon blood. The Syndicate was to begin operations with a flourish on the Easter Bank Holiday, if the necessary licence could be obtained from the Watch Committee ; and Alf anticipated little real trouble in that matter. Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, who had never forgiven Alf for being Alf, watched the growing prosperity of the Syndicate and its promoter with undisguised annoyance. " It beats me," said Bess, " why people back the little beast. Everybody knows all about him." Next day as they rode down the valley towards Birling Gap, Mr. Trupp expounded to his daughter the secret of Alf s success. " When you're as old as I am, my dear, and have had as THE VANQUISHED 151 long an experience as I have of this slip-shod world, you'll know that people will forgive almost anything to a man who gets things done and is reliable. Alf drove me for nearly ten years tens of thousands of miles ; and I never knew him to have a break-down on the road. Why ? because he took trouble." Alf, indeed, with all his amazing deficiencies, mental and moral, was a supremely honest workman. He never scamped a job, and was never satisfied with anything but the best. He was gloriously work-proud. A hard master, he was hardest on himself, as all the men in his yard knew. One and all they disliked him ; one and all they respected him because he could beat them at their own job. His work was his solitary passion, and he was an artist at it. Here he was not even petty. Good work, and a good work- man, found in him their most wholehearted supporter. " That's a job ! " he'd say to a mechanic. " I con- gratulate you." " You should know, Mr. Caspar," the man would answer, pleased and purring. For Alf s reputation as the best motor-engineer in East Sussex was well-established and well-earned. And because he was efficient and thorough the success of his Syndicate was never in doubt. Alf was on the way now, in truth, to becoming a rich man. Yet he lived simply enough above his original garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old Town. And from that eyrie, busy though he was, he still made time to watch with interest and pleasure his brother's trousers coming down and indeed to lend a helping hand in the process : for he worked secretly on his mother, who regarded Ernie when he came to Rectory Walk to take his father out with eyes of increasing displeasure ; for her eldest son was shabby and seedy almost now as in the days when he had been out of work after leaving the Hohenzollern. The word failure was stamped upon him in letters few could mis-read. And Anne Caspar had for all those who fail, with one exception, I 5 2 ONE WOMAN that profound sense of exasperation and disgust which finds its outlet in the contemptuous pity that is for modern man the camouflaged expression of the cruelty inherent in his animal nature. It seemed that all the love in her and there was love in her as surely there is in us all was exhausted on her own old man. For the rest her attitude towards the fallen in the arena was always Thumbs down with perhaps an added zest of rancour and resentment because of the one she spared. " She has brought you low/' she commented one evening to Ernie in that pseudo-mystical voice, as of one talking in her sleep, from the covert of which some women hope to shoot their poisoned arrows with impunity. This time, however, she was not to escape just punishment. Ernie flared. " Who says she has then ? " Anne Caspar had struck a spark of reality out of the moss- covered flint ; and now as had happened at rare intervals throughout his life Ernie made his mother suddenly afraid. " Everyone/' she said, lamely, trying vainly to cover her retreat. " Ah/' said Ernie, nodding. " I knaw who, and I'll let him knaw it too." " Best be cautious," replied his mother with a smirk. " He's your landlord now. And you're behind." Ernie rose. " He may be my landlord," he cried. " But I'm the daddy o he yet." Sullenly he returned to the house that was now for him no home : for the woman who had made it home was punish- ing not without just cause the man who had betrayed it. Ruth was standing now like a rock in the tide-way, the passions of men beating about her, her children clinging to her, the grey sky of circumstance enfolding her. THE VANQUISHED 153 She had sought adventure and had found it. Battle now was hers ; but it was battle stripped of all romance. Danger beset her ; but it was wholly sordid. The battle was for bread to feed her household ; and soap to keep her home and children clean. The danger was lest all the creeping diseases and hideous disabilities contingent upon penury, unknown even by name except in their grossest form to the millions whose lot it is to face and fight them day in, day out, should sap the powers of resistance of her and hers, and throw them on the scrap-heap at the mercy of Man, the merciless. Tragic was her dilemma. To Ruth her home was everything because it meant the environment in which she must grow the souls and bodies of her children. And her home was threatened. That was the position, stark and terrible, which stared her in the eyes by day and night. The man provided her by the law had proved a No-man, as Joe called it. He was a danger to the home of which he should have been the support. And while her own man had failed her, another, a true man as she believed, was offering to take upon his strong and capable shoulders the burthen Ernie was letting fall. Ruth agonised and well she might. For Joe was pressing in upon her, overpowering her, hammering at her gate with always fiercer insistence. Should she surrender ? should she open the gate of a citadel of which the garrison was starved and the ammunition all but spent ? should she fight on ? Through the muffled confusion and darkness of her mind, above the tumult of cries old and new besetting her, came always the still small voice, heard through the hubbub by reason of its very quiet, that said Fight. Inherently spiritual as she was, Ruth gave ear to it, putting forth the whole of her strength to meet the enemy, who was too much her friend, and overthrow him. Yet she could not forget that she owed her position to 154 ONE WOMAN Ernie, since at every hour of every day she was being pricked by the ubiquitous pin of poverty. Fighting now with her back to the wall, for her home and children, and stern because of it, she did not spare him. When Ernie called her hard, as he was never tired of doing, she answered simply, " I got to be." " No need to bully a chap so then/ 1 Ernie complained. " A'ter all I am a human being though I may be your husband/' " You're not the only one I got to think of," replied Ruth remorselessly. " And it's no good talking. I shan't forgive you till you've won back the position you lost when he sack you. Half a dollar a week makes just the difference between can and can't to me. See, I can't goo to the wash- tub now as I could to make up one time o day when I'd only the one. So I must look to you. And if I look in vain you got to hear about it. I mean it, Ernie," she continued. " I'm fairly up against it. There's no gettin round me this time. And if you won't think o me, you might think o the children. It's they who suffer." She had touched the spot this time. " Steady with it then ! " cried Ernie angrily. " Don't I think o you and the children ? " " Not as you should," answered Ruth calmly. " Not by no means. We should come first. Four of them now and twenty-two bob to keep em on. Tain't in reason." She faced him with calm and resolute eyes. " And it mustn't happen again, Ern," she said. " See, it's too much. Nobody's fault but your own." Ernie went out in sullen mood, and for the first time since the smash turned into the Star. He had not been there many minutes when a navvy, clouded with liquor, leaned over and inquired friendly how his barstards were. Ern set down his mug. " What's this then ? " he asked, very still. THE VANQUISHED 155 The fellow leaned forward, leering, a great hand plaistered on either knee. " Don't you know what a bloody barstard is ? "he asked. He was too drunk to be afraid ; too drunk to be accountable. Ernie dealt with him as a doctor deals with a refractory invalid patiently. " Who's been sayin it ? " he asked. " Your own blood-brother Alf." Ernie tossed off his half -pint, rose, and went out. He walked fast down the hill to the Goffs. People marked him as he passed, and the look upon his face : he did not see them. Alf was in his garage, talking to a man. The man wore a burberry and a jaeger hat, with a hackle stuck in the riband. There was something jaunty and sword-like about him. Ern, as he drew rapidly closer, recognised him. It was Captain Royal. The conjunction of the two men at that moment turned his heart to steel. He was walking ; but he seemed to himself to be sliding oyer the earth towards his enemies, swift and stealthy as a hunting panther. As he went he clutched his fists and knew that they were damp and very cold. When Ernie was within a hundred yards of him Royal, all unconscious of the presence of his enemy, swung out of the garage and walked off in his rapid, resolute way. Alf went slowly up the steps into his office. He was grinning to himself. " 'Alf a mo then ! " said Ernie quietly, hard on his heels. " Just a word with you, Alf." Alf turned, saw his brother crossing the yard, marked the danger-flare on his face, remembered it of old, and bolted incontinently, without shame, locking the house door behind him. Ern hammered on the door. Alf peeped out of an upper window, upset a jug of water over his brother, and in his panic fury flung the jug after 156 ONE WOMAN it. It broke on Ernie's head and crashed to pieces on the step. Ernie, gasping, and bleeding from the head, staggered back into the road, half-stunned. Then he began to tear off his sopping clothes and throw them down into the dust at his feet. His voice was quiet as his face, smeared with blood, was moved. " You've got to ave it ! " he called up to his brother. " May as well come and ave it now as wait for it." There had been a big football match on the Saffrons, and the crowd were just flocking away, in mood for a lark. The drenched and bleeding man stripping in the road, the broken crockery on the door-step, the white-faced fellow at the window, promised just the sensation they sought. Joy- fully they gathered to see. Here was just the right finale pleasant Saturday afternoon. "I'm your landlord!" screamed Alf. "Remember that ! I'll make you pay for this ! " " Will you ? " answered Ernie, truculent and cool. " Then I'll have my money's worth first." This heroic sentiment was loudly applauded by the crowd, who felt an added sympathy for Ern now they knew he was attacking his landlord, one of a class loathed by all good men. Just then Joe Burt emerged from the crowd and took the tumultuous figure of Ernie in his arms. " Coom, then ! " he said. " This'll never do for a Labour Leader. This isna the Highway you should be trampin along." The crowd protested. It was an exhilarating scene- better than the pictures, some opined. And here was a blighter, who talked funny talk, interfering. " Just like these hem furriners," said an old man. " Ca-a-n't let well a-be," Then, happily, or unhappily, the police, who exist to spoil the people's fun, appeared on the scene. THE VANQUISHED 157 They made a little blue knot round Ernie, who stood in the midst of them, stripped and dripping, with something of the forlorn look of a shorn ewe that has just been dipped. Alf , secure now in the presence of the officers of the law, descended from his window and came down the steps of his house towards the growing crowd. A tall man joined him. The pair forced their way through the press to the police. " I'm Captain Royal/' said the tall man, coldly. " I saw what happened." Joe turned on the new-comer. His clothes, his class, a touch of insolence about his tone and bearing, roused all the combative instincts of the engineer. "You wasn't standin by then!" he said ferociously. " You only just come up. A saw you." The other ignored him, drawing a card from an elegant case. " Here's my card," he said to the police. " If you want my evidence you'll know where to find me." Joe boiled over. " That's the gentleman of England touch ! " he sneered. " Swear away a workin man's life for the price of half a pint, they would ! " " Ah ! I know him ! " muttered Ernie, white still, and trembling. " Enough of it now," growled a big policeman, making notes in his pocket-book. Just then the crowd parted and a woman came through. A shawl was wrapped about her head and face. Only her eyes were seen, dark under dark hair. A moment she stood surrounded by the four men who had desired or possessed her. Then she put her hand on the shirt-sleeve of her husband. " Em," she said, and turned away. He followed her submissively through the crowd, slipping his shirt over his head. 158 ONE WOMAN Swiftly the woman walked away up the hill. Her scare- crow, his trousers sopping and sagging about his boots, trudged behind. The crowd looked after them in silence. Then Joe broke away and followed at a distance. Ruth looked back and saw him. " Let us be, Joe/' she called. Joe turned away. His eyes were full of tears. CHAPTER XXI THUNDER THE two brothers had to appear before the Bench on Monday. As it chanced Mr. Pigott, Colonel Lewknor and Mr. Trupp were the only magistrates present. Ernie, who appeared with his head bandaged, admitted his mistake. " Went to pass the time o day with my brother/' he said. " And all he done was to lean out of the window and crash the crockery down on the roof o me head. Did upset me a bit, I admit." " He meant murder all right/' was Alf's testimony, sullenly given. " He knows that/' Joe corroborated Ernie's statement. He had been in the Saffrons on Saturday afternoon and had seen Ernie coming down the hill from Old Town. Having a message to give him he had started to meet him. Ernie had gone up the steps of his brother's house ; and as he did so, Alf had leaned out of the upper window and thrown a jug down on his brother. Alf's solicitor cross-examined the engineer at some length. " What were you doing on the Saffrons ? " "Watching the football." " You were watching the football ; and yet you saw Caspar coming down Church Street ? " " I did." " I suggest that you did nothing of the sort ; and that you only appeared on the scene at the last moment." " Well," retorted Joe, good-humouredly. " A don't blame you for that. It's what you're paid to suggest." 159 160 ONE WOMAN A witness who was to have given evidence for Alf did not appear; and the Bench agreed without retiring. Neither of the brothers had been up before the magistrates before and both were let off with a caution, Ernie having to pay costs. " Your tongue's altogether too long, Alfred Caspar, 11 said Mr. Pigott, the Chairman, and added quite unjudicially " always was. And you're altogether too free with your fists, Ernest Caspar." Ernie left the court rejoicing ; for he knew he had escaped lightly. Outside he waited to thank his friend for his support. " Comin up along ? " he coaxed. " Nay, ma lad," retorted the engineer with the touch of brutality which not seldom now marked his intercourse with the other. " You must face the missus alone. Reck'n A've done enough for one morning." Ern went off down Saffrons Road in the direction of Old Town, crest-fallen as is the man whose little cocoon of self- defensive humbug has suddenly been cleft by a steel blade. Joe marched away down Grove Road. Alf caught him up. The little chauffeur was smiling that cur ds-and- whey smile of his. " Say, Burt ! you aren't half a liar, are you ? " he whispered. Joe grinned genially. " The Church can't have it all to herself," he said. " Leave a few of the lies to the laity." Ern trudged back from the Town Hall, across Saffrons Croft, to the Moot, in unenviable mood ; for he was afraid, and he had cause. Ruth was who standing in the door came stalking to meet him, holding little Alice by the hand. Ern slouched up with that admixture of bluff, lordly insouciance, and aggrieved innocence that is the honoured defence of dog and man alike on such occasions. THUNDER 161 "You've done us," she said almost vengefully. " What are I done then ? " asked the accused, feigning abrupt indignation. Ruth dismissed the child, and turned on Ernie. " Got us turn into the street me and my babies/' she answered, splendidly indignant. " A chap's been round arter the house, while you was up before the beaks settlin whether you were for Lewes Gaol or not. Says Alf s let it him a week from Saraday, and we got to go. I wouldn't let him in." " Ah," said Ernie stubbornly, " don't you worry. Alf's got to give us notice first. And he daren't do that." Ruth was not to be appeased. " Why daren't he, then ? " she asked. " I'll tell you for why," answered Ernie. " He's goin up before the Watch Committee come Thursday to get his licence for his blessed Touring Syndicate. We've friends on that Committee, good friends Mr. Pigott, and the Colonel, not to say Mr. Geddes ;