She smiled up at him gallantly.
"It's all right, dad," she said, consolingly. "I'm not afraid ohimwhatever 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 persists inevitably between every pair from the first mating till death, the victory in this case would be 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."
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 interrogation.
"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, Ern's going down," she said, nodding with grim relish. "Good-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 evening 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 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! Alf—on the spy. See his head bob—there! 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!"
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 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 antlered 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 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 negligé, 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.
"Youareslack," 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. She who was empty yearned for fulness. After her catastrophe, 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 dissatisfaction as amongst the unmarried. Royal had seized her imagination for a moment; to Ernie she had submitted. But that complete immersion in a man and his work which is for a full woman love, she had never experienced, 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 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," 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."
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.
"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 a 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 Ern's friend!"
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."
A few days later Ernie came home immediately after work instead of repairing to theStar. 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.
"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."
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 Ern'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.
"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.
"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! Iknowthat 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 continued, 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 theStar. 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 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 innocent 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 lackadaisical 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."
"Whatdoyou mean, then?"
"What's the price?"
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 bloodhound. "Ne'er a word against my Ern! I won't have it."
"YourErn!"
She was white and heaving.
"Yes, my Ern! He's down and out, and you take advantage 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 filth 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.
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 Ern. 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, Ern?" 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 unemployment, 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."
Mrs. Trubb 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 assumption, 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."
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 tell 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.
"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 curate; but he presented a firm face now to the other's entreaties.
"Every chance I've 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 unconditionally 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."
"Send him to me," said the old schoolmaster threateningly. "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."
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.
"Whatdoyou 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.
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!"
"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 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 workman, found in him their most wholehearted supporter.
"That's a job!" he'd say to a mechanic. "I congratulate 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, 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 alwaysThumbs 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 punishing 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.
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 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," 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 theStar. 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 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 over 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 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. Joyfully 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.
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.
"Ern," she said, and turned away.
He followed her submissively through the crowd, slipping his shirt over his head.
Swiftly the woman walked away up the hill. Her scarecrow, 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.