"Who?"
Alf sneered.
"You!—You're only her husband!" and decamped swiftly.
Ernie did not move. He stood with folded arms, rather white, following his retreating brother with his eyes. Then he said to the Colonel quietly,
"Yes, sir. That's Alf. Now you know."
"I'm beginning to," said the Colonel.
"And time too," came Ruth's voice cold and quivering.
In the cool of the evening the Colonel walked down Terminus Road.
Outside the office of Caspar's Road-Touring Syndicate Alf was standing, awaiting the return of his argosies. He was scanning the evening paper and still wore the injured and offended air of one who has a personal grievance against his Creator and means to get his own back some day.
"Any news, sir?" he asked.
The Colonel stopped.
"Germany sent Belgium an ultimatum last night demanding right of way. And the King of Belgium took the field this morning."
"Then he ought to be shot," snarled Alf. "Provoking of em on, I call it."
The Colonel walked on to the East-end, his eyes about him, and heart rising.
The country was facing the situation with dignity and composure.
The streets were thronged. Everywhere men and women gathered in knots and talked. There was no drunken-ness, no rioting, no Jingo manifestations—and that though it was August Bank Holiday. The gravity of the situation had sobered all men.
The Colonel passed on into Seagate to find the hero of Sunday afternoon's battle.
Joe Burt stood in his shirt-sleeves in the door of his lodgings with folded arms and cocked chin. His pipe was in his mouth and he was sucking at it fiercely with turned-in lips and inflated nostrils.
The engineer was clearly on the defensive; the Colonel saw it at once and knew why. On the main issue Joe had proved fatally, irretrievably wrong. But he had been "on the platform" now for twenty years. In other words he was a politician, and in the Colonel's view no politician ever admitted that he was wrong. To cover his retreat he would almost certainly resort to the correct tactical principle of a counter-offensive.
"That was a great speech of yours, Burt," the Colonel began.
The engineer sucked and puffed unmoved.
"We must fight," he said. "There's no two ways about it. The Emperors have asked for it; and they shall have it. No more crowned heads! We've had enoof o yon truck!"
In his elemental mood accent had coarsened, phrase become colloquial. He took his pipe from his mouth.
"Sitha!—this'll be a fight to a finish atween the Old Order and the New—atween what you stand for and what A do."
"And what do I stand for?" asked the Colonel.
"Imperialism—Capitalism—call it what you will. It's the domination of the workers by brute force."
The Colonel turned a quiet eye upon him.
"Is that fair?" he asked.
The engineer stuffed his pipe back into his mouth.
"Happen not of you. Of your class, yes." He felt he had been on dangerous ground and came off it. "Weshall fight because we must," he said. "What about you?"
He was making a direct offensive now, and turned full face to his adversary.
"Us?" asked the Colonel puzzled.
"Yes," retorted the other. "The officers of the Army?—shall you fight?"
The Colonel looked away.
Joe eyed him shrewdly.
"Last time you were asked to, you refused," he remarked. "Said you'd resign rather. One General said if there was war he'd fight against England. It was a piece in theDaily Telegraph. A've got it pasted in ma Ammunition Book. Coom in and see!"
The Colonel did not move.
"I think the officers will be there or thereabouts all right if the're wanted," he said.
Joe appeared slightly mollified.
"Well, you came out against the railway-men in 1911," he said. "A will say that for you. A wasn't sure you'd feel same gate when it coom to Emperors."
They strolled back together to Pevensey Road; and for the first time the Colonel actively disliked the man at his side. That wind of the spirit which had blown through the engineer yesterday purging him of his dross had passed on into the darkness. To-day he was both politically dishonest and sexually unclean.
In fact his life that had been rushing down the mountain like a spate with extraordinary speed and power, confined between narrow banks, just as it was emerging at the estuary into the sea had met suddenly the immense weight of the returning ocean-tide, advancing irresistible—to be swamped, diverted, turned back on itself. This man once so strong, of single purpose, and not to be deflected from it by any human power, was now spiritually for all his bluff a tumbling mass of worry and confusion and dirty yellow foam....
The pair had passed into the main thoroughfare.
"What about that woman?" asked the Colonel moodily.
Joe was chewing his pipe-stem.
"What woman'll that be?"
"Why the one you were talking about to me on Saturday night,—whether you should bolt with her or not."
Joe halted on the kerb-stone and regarded the traffic imperturbably.
"A know nowt o no such woman," he said.
The Colonel glanced at him. Just then he heard the sound of a horn and looking back saw one of the new motor-char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate returning crowded to the brim. A man stood on the step with a horn and tootled. Ernie sat in front with Ruth, the boy in her lap asleep against her breast. The Colonel marked the strength and tranquillity of her pose, her arms clasped around the sleeping child. Father, mother, and child were profoundly at peace; one with each other, so it seemed to him, one with life. Joe took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed with the stem.
"Yon's her," he said, with stunning impudence.
"I know that then," answered the Colonel. "Your own friend's wife."
Ernie who had seen Joe waved and winked and nudged Ruth. She could not or would not see. Joe waved back casually. Then he turned to the Colonel with a Silenus-like twinkle, his little black eyes of a bear glittering.
"He'll have to go now," he said, gurgling like an amused baby.
The Colonel looked him in the eyes. "Devil!" he said.
The engineer peeped up at him with something of the chuckle of the young cuckoo.
"Ah, don't you talk, Colonel! I'm not the only one."
"What you mean?" fiercely.
"What you told me Saturday night."
"I never betrayed my pal, whatever else."
"You would ha done," remorselessly. "Only you lost your nerve at the last moment. That's nothing to boast on."
The man's brazen cynicism revolted the Colonel.
"Ah, you don't know me," he muttered.
"A know maself," the other answered. "And that's the same."
The Colonel felt as feels a man who watches the casual immoralities of a big and jolly dog. Then he came to himself and broke away, firing a last shot over his shoulder.
"I suppose you'll wait till he has gone," he sneered.
"A doubt," the other answered, cool and impudent to the last.
The Colonel tramped home, sore at heart.
Opposite the Wish he stumbled on Mr. Trupp, who brought him up with a jerk.
"There's going to be a Coalition Government," the old surgeon told his friend. "Lloyd George and the pacifists are leaving the Cabinet; and Smith and Carson and Bonar Law coming in."
Just then Stanley Bessemere rushed by in a powerful car. He waved to the two men, neither of whom would see him.
"You know what he's after?" said Mr. Trupp.
"What?" asked the Colonel.
"Spreading it round that Haldane's holding up the Expeditionary Force."
The Colonel struck the ground.
"My God!" he cried. "Party politics even at this hour!"
The other shrugged.
"They've got to find a scape goat or take it in the neck themselves," he said.
The Colonel walked home in the twilight along the deserted brick-walk, under the tamarisk bank stirring gracefully in the evening breeze. At the extreme end of the bricks where a path climbs up a chalk-pit to Holywell he came on a tall dark solitary figure looking out over the sea.
It was Mr. Geddes.
The old soldier approached him quietly and touched his arm.
"Well, Mr. Geddes," he said gently. "What you thinking of?"
The tall man turned his fine face.
"I was thinking about a carpenter," he said.
"Of Nazareth?"
"No, of Berlin. Of Papa Schumacher and that boy Joseph, who was trying so hard to be an English sport—and black-eyed Joanna and the old Mutter."
The Colonel swallowed.
"Let's shake hands, Geddes," he said.
"With all my heart, Colonel," the other answered.
Then the old soldier went up the slope laboriously, his hands upon his knees.
His wife was waiting him on the cliff, a little figure, distinguished even in the dusk, about her shoulders the scarlet cape that had been the gift of a Rajput Princess.
"I pray it will be all right," he said.
"I pray so," the little lady answered.
War meant ruin for her and the destruction of all her hopes for Toby.—And her own Jock!—but she never wavered.
That night Sir Edward Grey made the historic speech, which swung the nation into line like one man, and launched Great Britain on the supreme adventure of her history.
The one bright spot in the situation is Ireland.
Redmond had followed in a speech which filled the Colonel's eyes with tears and his heart with gladness as he read it next morning, so generous it was, so chivalrous.
I say to the Government they may withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose Catholics in the South will join the Protestants in the North.
The Colonel paced to and fro on his lawns, the paper flapping in his hand.
Not even the spectacle of Carson, sulking in his tent, and answering never a word to his opponent's magnanimous appeal, could mar that vision splendid.
All day long the Colonel never left his garden, hovering round the telephone. Anything might happen at any moment.
Then news came through.
The Government had sent Germany an ultimatum. If she failed to give us an assurance before 11 p.m. that she would not violate the neutrality of Belgium, England would go to war.
The Colonel sighed his thankfulness.
All day he quarter-decked up and down the loggia, Zeiss glasses in hand. His telescope he arranged on the tripod on the lawn, and with it swept earth and sky and sea. Towards evening he marked a bevy of men swing round the shoulder of the hill from Meads into the coombe. They were in mufti, and not in military formation; but they marched, he noted, and kept some sort of order, moving rhythmically, restrained as a pack of hounds on the way to the meet, and yet with riot in their hearts. He turned the telescope full on them, marked Ernie among them, and knew them forthwith for the Reservists from Old Town training forIT. A wave of emotion surged through him. He went down to the fence and stood there with folded arms, and high head, his sparse locks grey in the evening light, watching them go by. Then he saluted.
They saw the old soldier standing bare-headed at the fence, recognised him, and shouted a greeting.
"Good-evening, sir."
"That's the style!" he cried gruffly. "Getting down to it."
Then Ernie broke away and came across the grass to him at the double, grinning broadly, and gay as a boy.
"Yes, sir. Old Town Troop we call ourselves. Long march to-night. Through Birling Gap to the Haven and home over Windhover about midnight. What I stepped across to say, sir, was I'm thinkin Ruth'd better stay where she is for the time being—if it's all the same to you, sir; and not move to the garage."
"As you like," replied the Colonel. "Undercliff's the most exposed house in Beachbourne—that's certain. If there's trouble from the sea we shall catch it; or if their Zeppelins bomb the signalling station on the Head some of it may come our way."
Ernie looked shy.
"That little turn-up with Alf in the road yesterday, sir," he said confidentially. "I was glad you was there." He came forward stealthily. "See, I know what you thought, sir. It's not Joe after her. It's Alf—always has been; from before we married. Joe's all right."
The Colonel stared grimly over the sea.
"I think you're wrong," he said.
"Then I know I'm not, sir," Ernie flashed.
The Colonel returned to his watch.
That night he did not go to bed. Instead he sat up in his pyjamas in the corner-room that looked out over the sea, and on to Beau-nez. If we went in the news would be flashed at once to the coastguard on the Head; and the petty officer on duty up there had promised to signal it down to the house in the coombe beneath.
The Colonel watched and waited.
The window was open. It was a still and brilliant night. He could hear the fall, and swish, and drone of the sea, rhythmical and recurrent, at the foot of the cliff. From the crest of the hill behind the house came the occasional tinkle of the canister-bell of some old wether of the flock.
Then the silence was disturbed by a growing tumult in the darkness.
A squadron of destroyers was thrashing furiously round the Head, not a light showing, close inshore, too, only an occasional smudge of white in the darkness revealing their position and the feather of foam they bore along like a plume before them.
Out of the darkness they came at a speed incredible, and into the darkness they were gone once more like a flash.
The Colonel breathed again.
At least the Navy was ready, thanks to Churchill.
Was the Army?
He recalled a remark reported to him as having been made at a P.S.A. in the East-end some weeks since: that the Army no longer trusted its officers, and the country no longer trusted its Army. Could it be true?
His thoughts turned with passionate sympathy to Gough and the simple regimental officers who had been lured by politicians into the dreadful business of the Army Conspiracy. But that other feller!—that yappin chap at the War Office, who ought to have known better! ...
Away on the crest of Beau-nez, humping a huge black back against the brilliant darkness, someone was swinging a lantern—once, twice.
The Colonel flashed his electric torch in answer.
The gaunt figure at the window turned.
"Rachel," he said low, to the woman in the bed beneath him.
"Jocko," came the answering voice, quiet as his own.
"We're going in."
"Thank God."
In the darkness she reached up arms, white and trembling as a bride's, and drew him to her.
He kissed her eyelids and found them wet.
"I can't help it, Jocko," she sobbed. "Jock!"
Her boy was in India with the second battalion; but she knew very well that now the crash had come every battalion in the Service would be flung into the furnace.
The Colonel went back to the window and she came to his side. His arm crept about her, and she trembled in the curve of it. A mild but ghastly beam, as of the moon, fell on them standing at the window. A battleship was playing its searchlight full on them. The cold wan beam roamed along the hill-side callous and impersonal, exposing every bush and scar. It fell on the white bluff of Beau-nez and came creeping, like the fingers of a leper, along the cliff. Just opposite the hostel, at the spot where the path ran down to the beach, it stayed, pointing as it were, at a little pillar of solid blackness erect on the cliff edge.
The Colonel caught his breath with a gasp.
"Don't look!" he cried sharply and snatched his wife away. As he did so the pillar broke up in two component parts, as though dissolved by the white encircling flood of light.
A woman's stifled scream came through the open window.
"Joe!"
Then there was a slither of chalk as the pair stampeded down the path out of sight, and crashed into the beach beneath. The Colonel let down the blind with a rattle.
Ernie clattered into the kitchen at a busy trot, and stumbled upstairs without a word to his wife at the sink.
There was such an air of stir and secret purposefulness about him that Ruth followed him up to the bedroom. There she found him on his knees in a litter of things, packing a bundle frantically.
A dish-cloth in her hand, she watched his efforts.
"Where away then?" she asked.
"Berlin this journey. Hand me them socks!"
Her eyes leapt. "Is it war?"
"That's it."
She sat down ghastly, wrapping her hands in her apron as if they had been mutilated and she wished to hide the stumps.
Men abuse the Army when they are in it and take their discharge at the earliest possible moment; but when the call comes they down tools with avidity, and leaving the mill, the mine, the shunting yard, and the shop, they troop back to the colours with the lyrical enthusiasm of those who have re-discovered youth on the threshhold of middle-age.
Ern, you may be sure, was no exception to the rule.
Packing and unpacking his bundle on his knees, he was busy, happy, important. But there was no such desperate hurry after all: for he did not join the crowds which thronged the recruiting stations in those first days: he waited for the Colonel to arrange matters so that he could join his old battalion at Aldershot direct.
Ruth watched him with deep and jealously guarded eyes in which wistfulness and other disturbing emotions met and mingled.
Once only she put to him the master question.
"What about us, Ern?"
He was standing at the time contemplating the patient and tormented bundle.
"Who?"
"Me and the children."
"There's one Above," said Ernie. "He'll see to you."
"He don't most in general not from what I've seen of it," answered Ruth. "What if He don't?"
There was a moment's pause. Then Ern dropped a word as a child may drop a stone in a well.
"Joe."
Ruth caught her breath.
In those days Ernie grew on her as a mountain looming out of the dawn-mist grows on the onlooker. Joe did not even come to see her; and she was glad. For all his virility and bull-like quality, now that the day of battle had come, Ern was proving spiritually the bigger man.
And his very absorbtion in the new venture appealed to Ruth even while it wounded. Ern had been "called" as surely as Clem Woolgar, the bricklayer's labourer, her neighbour in the Moot, who testified every Sunday afternoon in a scarlet jersey at theStarcorner to the clash of cymbals. Clem it was true, spoke of his call as Christ; to Ernie it went by the name of country. In Ruth's view the name might differ but the Thing was the same. A voice had come to Ern which had spoken to him as she had not, as the children had not. Because of it he was a new man—"converted," as Clem would say, prepared to forsake father and mother, and wife, and child, and follow, follow.
England was calling; and he seemed deaf to every other voice. She seemed to have gone clean out of his life; but the children had not—she noticed it with a pang of jealousy and a throb of hope. For each of the remaining nights after dark, he went round their cots. She was not to know anything about that, she could see, from the stealthy way in which he stole upstairs when her back was supposed to be turned. But the noises in the room overhead, the murmur of his voice, the shuffling of his feet as he got up from the bedsides betrayed his every action.
On the third night, as he rejoined her, she rose before him in the dusk, laying down her work.
"Anything for me too, Ern," she asked humbly—"the mother of em?"
"What d'you mean?" he asked almost fiercely.
"D'you want me, Ern?"
He turned his back on her with an indifference that hurt far more than any brutality, because it signified so plainly that he did not care.
"You're all right," he said enigmatically, and went out.
He could ask anything of her now, and she would give him all, how gladly! But he asked nothing.
In another way, too, he was torturing her. It was clear to her that he meant to do his duty by her and the children—to the last ounce; and nothing more. He cared for their material wants as he had never done before. All his spare moments he spent handying about the house, hammer in hand, nails in mouth, doing little jobs he had long promised to do and had forgotten; putting little Ned's mail-cart to rights, screwing on a handle, setting a loose slate. She followed him about with wistful eyes, holding the hammer, steadying the ladder, and receiving in return a few off-hand words of thanks. She did not want words: she wanted him—himself.
Then news came through, and he was straightway full of mystery and bustle.
"Join at Aldershot to-morrow. Special train at two," he told Ruth in the confidential whisper beloved of working-men. "Don't say nothing to nobody." As though the news, if it reached the Kaiser, would profoundly affect the movements of the German armies.
That evening Ernie went up to the Manor-house to say good-bye.
Mrs. Trupp was far more to him than his god-mother: she was a friend known to him from babyhood, allied to him by a thousand intimate ties, and trusted as he trusted no one else on earth, not even his dad.
Now he unbosomed to her the one matter that was worrying him on his departure—that he should be leaving Ruth encumbered with debt.
Mrs. Trupp met him with steady eyes. It was her first duty, the first duty of every man, woman and child in the nation to see that the fighting-men went off in good heart.
"You needn't worry about Ruth," she said, quietly. "She'll have the country behind her. All the soldiers' wives will."
Ernie shook his head doubtfully.
"Ah, I don't hold much by the country," he said.
The lady's grave face, silver-crowned, twinkled into sudden mischievous life. She rippled off into the delicious laughter he loved so dearly.
"I know who's been talking to you!" she cried.
Ernie grinned sheepishly.
"Who then?"
"Mr. Burt."
Ernie admitted the charge.
"If you don't trust the country, will you trust Mr. Trupp and me?" the other continued.
Ernie rose with a sigh of relief.
"Thank you kindly, 'm," he said. "That's what I come after."
Ernie went on to Rectory Walk, to find that his mother too had joined the crucified. In the maelstrom of emotion that in those tragic hours was tossing nations and individuals this way and that, the hard woman had been humbled at last. Stripped to the soul, she saw herself a twig hurled about in the sea of circumstance she could no more control than a toy-boat a-float on the Atlantic can order the tides. No longer an isolated atom hard and self-contained, she was one of a herd of bleating sheep being driven by a remorseless butcher to the slaughter-house. And the first question she put to him revealed the extent of the change that had been wrought in her.
"What about Ruth?" she asked.
It was the only occasion on which his mother had named his wife to Ern during his married life.
"She's all right, mother," Ernie replied. "She's plenty of friends."
"Mrs. Trupp," jealously. "Well, why don't ye say so? What about the children?"
"They'll just stay with their mother," answered Ernie.
"I could have em here if she was to want to go out to work," Anne said grudgingly; and must add, instigated by the devil who dogged her all her life—"Your children, of course."
Ernie answered quite simply:
"No, thank-you, mother," and continued with unconscious dignity—"They're all my children."
A gleam of cruelty shone in his mother's eyes.
"She's behind with her rent. You know that? And Alf's short. He says he's dropped thousands over his Syndicate. Ruined in his country's cause, Alf says."
"If he's dropped thousands a few shillings more or less won't help him," said Ernie curtly.
"And yet he'll want em," Anne pursued maliciously. "He was sayin so only last night.Every penny, he said."
"He may want," retorted Ernie. "He won't get."
His mother made a little grimace.
"If Alf wants a thing he usually gets it."
Ernie flashed white.
"Ah," he said. "We'll see what dad says."
It was a new move in the family game, and unexpected. Anne was completely taken a-back. She felt that Ernie was not playing fair. There had always been an unwritten family law, inscribed by the mother on the minds of the two boys in suggestible infancy, that dad should be left outside all broils and controversies; that dad should be spared unpleasantness, and protected at any cost.
She was shocked, almost to pleading.
"You'd never tell him!"
"He's the very one I would tell then!" retorted Ernie, rejoicing in his newly-discovered vein of brutality.
"Only worry him," she coaxed.
"He ain't the only one," Ern answered. "I'm fairly up against it, too." Grinning quietly at his victory, he turned down the passage to the study.
His father was sitting in his favourite spot under the picture of his ancestor, watching the tree-tops blowing in the Rectory garden opposite. The familiar brown-paper-clad New Testament was on his knee.
Ernie marked at once that here was the one tranquil spirit he had met since the declaration of war. And this was not the calm of stagnation. Rather it was the intense quiet of the wheel which revolves so swiftly that it appears to be still.
He drew his chair beside his father's.
"What d'you make of it all, dad?" he asked gently.
The old man took his thumb out of his New Testament, and laid his hand upon his son's.
"And behold there was a great earthquake," he quoted. "For the Angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door of the Tomb."
Ernie nodded thoughtfully. For the first time perhaps the awful solemnity of the drama in which he was about to play his part came home to him in all its overwhelming power.
"Yes, dad," he said deeply. "Only I reck'n it took some rolling."
The old man gripped and kneaded the hand in his just as Ruth would do in moments of stress.
"True, Boy-lad," he answered. "But it had to be rolled away before the Lord could rise."
Ernie assented.
Hand-in-hand they sat together for some while. Then Ernie rose to go. In the silence and dusk father and son stood together on the very spot where fourteen years before they had said good-bye on Ernie's departure for the Army. The Edward Caspar of those days was old now; and the boy of that date a matured man, scarred already by the wars of Time.
"It won't be easy rolling back the stone, Boy-lad," said the old man. "But they that are for us are more than they that are against us."
It was not often that Ernie misunderstood his father; but he did now.
"Yes," he said. "And they say the Italians are coming in too."
"The whole world must come in," replied the other, his cheeks rosying faintly with an enthusiasm which made him tremble. "And we must all push together." He made a motion with his hand—"English and Germans, Russians and Austrians, and roll it back, back, back! and topple it over into the abyss. And then the Dawn will break on the risen Lord."
Ernie went out into the passage. His mother in the kitchen was waiting for him. She looked almost forlorn, he noticed.
"Give me a kiss, Ern," she pleaded in sullen voice that quavered a little. "Don't let's part un-friends just now—you and me—After all, you're my first."
Ernie's eyes filled. He took her in his arms, this withered old woman, patted her on the back, kissed her white hair, her tired eyelids.
"There!" he said. "I should knaw you arter all these years, Mum. Always making yourself twice the terror you are—and not meaning it."
He returned to the Moot to find little Alice crying in the door. A pathetic little shrimp of a creature she looked, huddled against the door-post, her face hidden, her shoulders quivering, her back to the hostile world. Some children who had been mocking her drew away on Ernie's approach.
"What's up, Lal?" he asked tenderly, bending over her.
She would not look up.
"It's nothing, daddy," she sobbed and crept away up the street, like a wounded animal.
Ernie went in. Ruth was sitting alone in the kitchen forlorn and wistful as he had never known her. It was clear to him that the sorrow, whatever it might be, was shared by mother and daughter. He watched her quietly for a minute; then came to her.
"What is it, mother?" he asked with unusual gentleness.
His tone touched the spring of tears in her heart. She bit her lip.
"Its Alf," she said with gasps. "He's been settin em on to her again... He's spiteful because the war's spoilt his Syndicate... So he takes it out of her... They've been tormenting her... Only she wouldn't tell you because she wanted your last day to be happy."
Ern went out, found little Alice once again in the door, her pinafore still to her eyes, took her up in his arms and put her in her mother's lap.
"Love one another," he said huskily. "And don't forget me."
Then he went out again, burning his battle-flare.
In half an hour he was back with Joe Burt.
There was a strange hushed dignity about him as he entered the kitchen. He might have been a priest about to conduct a ceremony at the altar of the Most High. Joe lagged behind sullen and with downward eyes, twisting his cap. Somehow he looked strangely common beside his friend. Ruth, as she rose to meet the two men, was profoundly conscious of the contrast between them.
"Joe," said Ernie, still and solemn, "I bequeath Ruth to you..."
In a flash the woman seized the situation.
"—to have and to hold," she murmured quietly, her head down to stifle sobs and laughter.
Ernie with that love of ritual which characterises his class continued with the smile-less intensity of a child.
"Yes, to have and to hold ... her and her children ... for me ... till I return."
Joe was obviously staggered. His eyes roved the floor; his head weaved to and fro.
"Here, I didn't bargain for this," he muttered.
Ruth thrust out her hand almost sternly, as though to silence him. He took it grudgingly, and then Ern's.
"A suppose A'll do ma best," he said, and slouched out hasty as a schoolboy escaping from the schoolroom.
When he was gone Ruth laid both hands on Ernie's shoulders and looked at him her eyes dazzled with laughter and tears.
"You should never ha done it, Ern!" she said. "Never!"
"There was nothing for it only that," Ern answered sturdily. "It's a world of wolves. Somebody must see to you while I'm away."
She withdrew her hands and stood before him, defenceless now, humble, beautiful, appealing.
"Ern," she said with a little sob, "will you take me up along to the Ambush—our last night and all?"
He looked at her steadily. Then he caught her hand.
"All right, old lass," he said.
They had not visited their couching-place that summer and the romance of old and intimate association was on them both now as they came to the tryst in the scented dusk. The gorse, unpruned, had grown over the track that led to the heart of the covert. Ernie forced his way through, Ruth following him, anchored jealously to his hand. Behind her the bushes closed, blocking the way; and she was glad. Her eyes were on the shoulders of her man, wistful still but triumphant; and she found herself smiling secretly as she marked how bride-like she felt, how warm and shy and tremulous. In this great hour the tides of her ebbing youth had returned with power and the desert bloomed afresh. The world-catastrophe had wrought a miracle. Spring had quickened the stale summer air. Here at the parched noon was a hint of dawn, dew-drenched and lovely.
Waist-deep in the dark covert, the man and woman stood on the summit of the hill, under the sky, the sea spread like a dulled shield beneath them.
It was already nine o'clock; a perfect evening of that never-to-be-forgotten August. The sun had long gone down behind the Seven Sisters. In Paradise a nightjar was thrumming harshly. Below in the coombe the lights of Undercliff began to twinkle. On the Head Brangwyn-like figures were moving heavily. A night-shift was working there behind windy flares, screened by tarpaulins from enemy eyes at sea. Ernie knew what they were doing.
"They're building a battery to protect the new wireless station against aircraft attack," he told Ruth. "That dark thing in the road's a fire-engine to dowse the flares if a night attack's made."
Then above the noise of the navvies busy with pick and shovel, and the pleasant gargle of the night-jar, blended another sound. A hollow ominous rumbling like the voice of a great ghost laughing harshly in his grave came rolling across the sea out of the darkness.
"Guns," said Ernie. "They're at it in the Bight."
Ruth drew closer and took his arm. One finger was to her lips. She was a little bit afraid. He felt it, and pressed her arm.
From the distance, muffled by the shoulder of the hill, came the hammer-hammer that would endure all night of the emergency gangs, rushed down in special trains from the North, to run up a huge camp in the great coombe at the end of Rectory Walk where of old lambs had often roused Ernie as a lad on bleak March mornings by their forlorn music of spirits exiled and crying for home.
He stood and looked and listened.
"Who'd ever ha beleft it'd ha come to this when we first lay out here six years ago?" he mused.
"Or now for that matter," answered Ruth, her voice deep and hushed as the evening. "All so good and quiet as it looks."
She pulled him down into the darkness of the covert.
"D'is safer here, I reck'n," she said, and nuzzled up against him.
Ernie peeped though the gorse at the lights flickering on the Head.
"They ca-a-n't see us here," he said.
"And a good job, too, I reck'n," answered Ruth sedately, fingering her hair.
Ernie chuckled.
"Listen!" he said.
They sat close in their ambush, walled about with prickly darkness, roofed in by the living night.
Beneath them the sea came and went, rose and fell, rhythmical and somnolent, as it had done in the days when badger and wolf and bear roamed the hill, with none to contest their sovereignty but the hoary old sea-eagle from the cliffs; as it might still do when man had long passed away. Sounds ancient almost as the earth on which they lay, which had lulled them and millions of their forefathers to sleep, were crossed by others, new, man-made, discordant.
Down the road at the back of the covert, not a hundred yards away, came a sudden bustling phut-phut-phut.
"Despatch-rider," said Ernie, peering. "Light out and all. Rushin it to Birling Gap. There's a company of Territorials there, diggin emselves in behind barbed wire to guard the deep-sea cables."
"The Boy-Scouts were layin out all day on the road to Friston, Mr. Chislehurst told me," remarked Ruth. "They took the number of every motor and motor-bike on the road to Newhaven."
She unloosed her hair that fell about her like a torrent of darkness.
A huge beetle twanged by above them; and then in the covert close at hand there was a snuffling and grunting, so loud, so close, so portentous that Ruth, creature of the earth though she was, was startled and paused in her undoing.
"What-ever's that?" she asked, laying a hand on Ernie.
"Hedge-pig, I allow."
"Sounds like it might be a wild boar routin and snoutin and carryin on," she laughed.
Ruth reclined on the bed of sand. The calm blessedness of night embraced her; and the stars lay on her face. She lifted her lips to them, seeming to draw them down with each breath, and blow them away again, babe-like. A dreamy amazement still possessed her.
"Who'd ever ha beleft it?" she said quietly.
Then she turned her face to him and laughed.
"Ernie!" she called.
"Whose are you now?" he said fiercely in her ear.
She chuckled and gathered him to her bosom.
He sighed his content.
"That's better," he murmured. "Now, never no more of it!"
A great mate, Ruth was a still greater mother; and this living, pulsing creature in her arms was her child, her first-born cub.
In the stress and conflict of the last few years necessity had compelled her to discard the royal indolence that was her natural habit. The lioness in her, roused by conflict, had made her fierce and formidable in any battle. Six months ago she had fought Ernie—because he was weak; now she would shield him—because he was strong.
Jealously she pressed him to her.
"They shan't get you, my lad," she said between her teeth. "I'll see to that."
"I'm not afraid o them," answered Ernie drowsily. "I knaw the Germans. All you got to do is to say Shoo!—and goo with your arms and they're off like rabbits from the garden."
She thrust his head back till she saw it as a dim blob against the shining night; and looked up into his eyes, her own so close to his, so deep, so dear.
"You're my soldier," she murmured in his ear. "I always knew you was."
Then she drew his face down to hers, till their lips met.
"I got something to tell you, Ern."
Now she leaned over him. The moon shone on the smooth sweep of her shoulders, rounded and luminous.
"I only deceived you the once, Ern," she whispered, her voice murmuring like a stream that issued from the slowly-heaving ocean of her chest. "Afore we were married. He ne'er wrote me ne'er a letter."
"I knew that then," muttered Ernie, sleepily, his head beside her own.
"It was Madame," Ruth continued. "She come over in a car and told the tale."
Her confession made she waited; but in a moment his breathing told her that he had fallen off to sleep.
She stroked him rhythmically, just as she would her children when they were tired.
He was going back to the regiment—to Captain Royal—to the Unknown. She was not afraid for him—nor for herself—nor for the children. An immense peace had fallen on her.
Then all about her a murmur as of wings grew. There was a whispering patter as of rain upon the turf that ringed the covert; but no rain fell. Through the patter came the tinkle of a bell. An immense flock of sheep was rippling dimly like a flood over the parched turf to the dew-pond by the old wall on the brow. The whisper grew louder, as though the rain had turned to hail. The flock was crossing the road. Then there was almost a silence, and in the silence the leader ba-a-a-d. The flock had reached the waters of refreshing.
Ruth slept, strangely comforted.
Next day Ernie was to join up.
After dinner he kissed Susie and Jenny, gave them each a penny, and despatched them to play. Hand in hand they stamped away to Motcombe Garden with clacking heels, roguish backward glances and merry tongues.
Then he asked Ruth to go into the backyard. Left alone with Alice he lifted her on to the kitchen-table, took her hands in his, and looked gravely into her eyes.
"I trust you to look after mother and the little ones when I'm gone, Lal," he said.
The little maid, swift and sympathetic as her mother, nodded at him, nibbling her handkerchief, her heart too full for words. Then she raised her crumpled face, that at the moment was so like her mother's, for a last kiss, and as she wreathed her arms round his neck she whispered,
"You are my daddy, aren't you, daddy?"
"Of course I am," he murmured, and lifted her down.
She ran away swiftly, not trusting herself to look back.
A moment later Ruth entered the kitchen, slowly and with downcast eyes. He was standing before the fire, awaiting her.
"Ruth," he said quietly. "I've tried to do well by your child; I'll ask you to do the same by mine."
She came to him and hung about his neck, riven with sobs, her head on his shoulder.
"O Ern!" she cried. "And is that your last word to me?"
She lifted anguished eyes to him and clung to him.
"I love them all just the same, only we been through so much together, she and me. That's where it is."
His arms were about her and he was stroking her.
"I knaw that then," he said, husky himself.
"See, they got you and each other and all the world," Ruth continued. "Little Alice got nobody only her mother."
"And me," said Ernie.
She steadied and drew her hand across rain-blurred eyes.
"Ern," she said, deeply. "I do thank you for all your lovin kindness to that child. I've never forgot that all through—whatever it seemed."
"She's mine just as well as yours," he answered, smiling and uncertain. "Always has been. Always will be."
She pressed her lips on his with a passion that amazed him.
Then he took the boy from the cot and rocked him. The tears poured down his face. This, then, was War!—All his light-heartedness, his detachment, had gone. He was a husband and a father torn brutally away from the warmth and tenderness of the home that was so dear to him, to be tossed into the arena among wild beasts who not long since had been men just like himself, and would be men still but for the evil power of their masters to do by them as his masters had done by him. Then he put the child back and turned to say good-bye to Ruth.
The passionate wife of a few minutes since had changed now into the mother parting from her schoolboy. She took him to her heart and hugged him.
"You'll be back before you know," she told him, cooing, comforting, laughing through her tears. "They all say it'll be over soon, whatever else. A great war like this ca'an't go on. Too much of it, like."
"Please God, so," said Ernie. "It's going to be the beginning of a new life for me—for you—for all of us, as Joe says.... God keep you till we meet again."
Then he walked swiftly down the street with swimming eyes.
The neighbours, who were all fond of Ern, stood in their doors and watched him solemnly.
He was going intoIT.
Like as not they would never see him again.
Many of the women had handkerchieves to their lips, as they watched, and over the handkerchieves their eyes showed awed. Some turned away, hands to their hearts. Others munched their aprons and wept. A mysterious rumour in the deeps of them warned them of the horror that had him and them and the world in its grip.
They could not understand, but they could feel.
And this working man with the uncertain mouth and blurred eyes—this man whose walk, whose speech, whose coal-grimed face, and the smell even of his tarry clothes, was so familiar to them—was the symbol of it all.
A big navvy came sheepishly out of the last house in the row and stopped him. It was the man who had insulted Ernie in theStarsix months before.
"I ask your pardon, Ern," he said. "I didn't mean what I said."
Ern shook hands. Years before the two had been at school together under Mr. Pigott.
"It wasn't you, Reube," he said. "I knaw who spread the dung you rolled in."
"I shan't be caught again," replied the other. "That's a sure thing."
Ern jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
"Keep an eye to her!" he whispered.
"You may lay to it," the big man answered.
At the corner a young girl of perhaps fifteen ran out suddenly, flung herself into his arms, kissed him, with blind face lifted to the sky, and was gone again.
At the bottom of Borough Lane a troop of Boy-Scouts in slouch hats, knickers, and with staves, drawn up in order, saluted. A tiny boy in his mother's arms blew him shy kisses. Just outside the yard of the Transport Company his mates, who had been waiting him, came out and shook him by the hand. Most were very quiet. As he passed on the man among them he disliked most called for three cheers. A ragged noise was raised behind him.
At theStarcorner a beery patriot, wearing the South African medals, mug to his lips, hailed him.
"Gor bless the Hammer-men!" he cried. "Gor bless the old ridgiment!" and tried to lure Ernie into the familiar bar-parlour.
"Not me, thank ye!" cried Ernie stoutly. "This ain't a beano, my boy! This is War!"
As he rounded the corner he glanced up at the sturdy old church with its tiny extinguisher spire, standing on the Kneb behind him, four-square to the centuries, the symbol of the rough and ready England which at that moment was passing away, with its glories and its shames, into the limbo of history.
At the station all that was most representative in Beachbourne had gathered to see the reservists off.
The Mayor was there in his chain of office; the Church Militant in the person of the Archdeacon; Mr. Glynde, the senior member for Beachbourne, middle-aged, swarthy, his hair already white, making a marked contrast to his junior colleague, the fair-haired young giant, talking to the Archdeacon.
The old gentleman looked ghastly; his face colourless save for the shadows of death which emphasised his pallor. Then he saw Bobby Chislehurst busy among the departing soldiers, and beckoned him austerely.
"I thought you were a pacifist, Chislehurst!" he said, his smile more kindly and less histrionic than usual.
"So I am, sir," answered Bobby, brightly. "But there are several of our men from the Moot going off. It's not their fault they've got to go, poor beggars!"
"Theirfault!" cried the Archdeacon. "It's their privilege." He added less harshly, "We must all stand by the country now, Chislehurst."
"Yes, sir," said Bobby. "I shan't give the show away," and he bustled off.
Then the Colonel stalked up.
"Well, Archdeacon, what d'you make of it all?" he asked, curious as a child to gather impressions.
The Archdeacon drew himself up.
"Just retribution," he answered in voice that seemed to march. "If a nation will go a-whoring after false gods in the wilderness what can you expect? Gahd does not forget."
The Colonel listened blankly, his long neck elongated like a questing schoolboy.
"What you mean?" he asked.
"Welsh Disestablishment Bill," the other answered curtly.
Mr. Trupp now entered the station, and the Colonel, who though quiet outwardly, was in a condition of intense spiritual exaltation that made him restless as dough in which the yeast is working, joined his pal. He had cause for his emotion. The Cabinet had stood. The country had closed its ranks in a way that was little short of a miracle. All men of all parties had rallied to the flag. In Dublin the Irish mob which had provoked the King's Own Scottish Borderers to bloody retaliation, had turned out and cheered the battalion as it marched down to the transports for embarkation.
"Well, we're roused at last," said the Colonel, as he looked round on that humming scene.
"Yes," answered Mr. Trupp. "It's taken a bash in the face to do it though."
"Should be interesting," commented the Colonel, hiding his emotion behind an air of detachment. "An undisciplined horde of men who believe themselves to be free against a disciplined mass of slaves."
Just then Mr. Pigott approached. The old Nonconformist had about him the air of a boy coming up to the desk to take his punishment. He was at once austere and chastened.
"Well, Colonel," he said. "You were right."
The Colonel took the other's hand warmly.
"Not a bit of it!" he cried. "That's the one blessed thing about the whole situation.We've all been wrong. I believed in the German menace—till a month or two ago. And then...."
"That's it," said Mr. Trupp. "We must all swing together, and a good job too. If there's any hanging done Carson and Bonar Law, Asquith and Haldane, Ramsay Macdonald and Snowden ought to grace the same gallows seems to me. And when we've hanged our leaders for letting us in we must hang ourselves for allowing them to let us in."
The old surgeon had turned an awkward corner with the gruff tact peculiar to him; and Mr. Pigott at least was grateful to him.
"You've heard Carson's committed suicide?" he said. "Shot himself this morning on St. Stephen's Green."
"Not a bit of it," replied the Colonel. "He's far too busy holding up recruiting in Ulster while he haggles for his terms, to do anything so patriotic."
"Besides why should he?" interposed a harsh and jeering voice. "Treason's all right if you're rich and powerful. Jim Larkin got six months a year ago for sedition and inciting to violence. What'll these chaps get for provoking the greatest war that ever was or will be? I'll tell ye,Fat jobs. Where'll they be at the end of the war? under the sod alongside the millions of innocent men who've had to pay the price of their mistakes? No fear! They'll be boolgin money, oozin smiles, fat with power, and big-bellied wi feedin on the carcases of better men."
It was Joe Burt who had come up with Mr. Geddes.
The Colonel, giving his shoulder to the engineer, turned to the tall minister, who was stiff, a little self-conscious, and very grave.
Possessed of a far deeper mind than Mr. Pigott, Mr. Geddes was still haunted by doubts. Were we wholly in the right?
The Colonel, intuitive as a girl, recognised the other's distress, and guessed the cause of it.
"Well, Mr. Geddes," he said gently. "Evil has triumphed for the moment at least."
"Yes," replied the other. "Liebknecht's shot, they say."
"All honour to him!" said the Colonel. "He was the one man of the lot who stood to his guns when the pinch came. All the rest of the Social Democrats stampeded at the first shot."
Joe Burt edged up again. Like Mr. Pigott he had made his decision irrevocably and far sooner than the old Nonconformist; but there was a vengeful background still to his thoughts. He refused to forget.
"I hear the Generals are in uproarious spirits," he said.
"One of them," answered the Colonel quietly.
"They won't pay the price," continued Joe. "They'll make—trust them.There'sthe man they'll leave to take the punishment they've brought on the coontry." He nodded to Ernie who was busy with some mates extracting chocolates from a penny-in-the-slot-machine.
The Colonel's eye glittered. He had spied Stanley Bessemere doing, indeed over-doing, the hearty amongst the men by the barrier.
"After all it's nothing to what we owe our friend there and the politicians," he said brightly, and made towards his victim, with an almost mincing motion.
Since the declaration of war his solitary relief from intolerable anxieties had been baiting the junior member for the Borough. He left him no peace, hanging like a gadfly on his flank. At the club, in the street, on committees at the Town-hall there rose up to haunt the young man this inexorable spectre with the death's head, the courteous voice, and the glittering smile.
"Ah, Bessemere!" he said gently. "Here still!—I heard you had enlisted, you and Smith."
The other broke away and, seeing Ernie close by, shook hands with him. The move was unfortunately countered by Joe Burt.
"You've shook 'ands with Mr. Caspar five times since I've been here," he remarked tartly. "Can't you give somebody else a turn now?"
Just then, mercifully, Mr. Trupp rolled up, coughing.
Summer or winter made no difference to the great man's cold, which was always with him, and lovingly cherished; but he liked to mark the change between the two seasons by exchanging the long woollen muffler of winter for a silken wrapper in which he swaddled his neck in the summer months.
"Good luck, Ernie," he said in his brief way, his eyes shrewd and sweet behind his pince-nez.
"Keep an eye to Ruth, won't you, sir?" said Ernie in his most confidential manner.
"We'll do our best," replied the other hoarsely. "Here's Mr. Pigott. Quite a jingo these days."
"Who isn't?" the old school-master answered with an attempt at the familiar truculence. "Well, you look like it, Ern." He added almost with admiration. "Quite a changed man."
Then the Colonel joined the little group.
"Coming along sir?" asked Ernie keenly.
"No luck," replied the other gloomily. "Too old at sixty... What about that brother of yours?"
Ern's face darkened.
"Ah, I ain't seen him," he said.
"There he is by the bookstall," muttered Mr. Pigott. "Envying the men who are going to fight his battles! I know him."
Alf, indeed, who had clearly recovered from the first shock of war, was very much to the fore, modest, fervent, the unassuming patriot. Now he approached his brother with a mixture of wariness and manly frankness.
"Will you shake 'ands, Ernest?" he asked.
"I willnot," said Ern. "It was you who done the dirty on our Lal."
"Never!" cried Alf and came a step closer. "I'll tell you who it were." He nodded stealthily in the direction of Joe. "That's the chap that's out to spoil your home. Wrecker I call him. I tell you what, Ern," he whispered. "I'll watch out against him for you while you are away so you don't suffer."
"I thank you," said Ern, unmoved.
Just then Joe came up, took him by the arm, and bustled him off to the departure platform.
"You'll be late else, ma lad," said the engineer.
The Archdeacon and his sidesman walked back to Old Town from the station together.
Mr. Trupp and Mr. Pigott followed behind.
"The Archdeacon lags a bit," said the former.
"Yes," answered the other. "And I don't wonder. This war'll be the end of him yet. You heard about last night?"
The veteran had sallied out at midnight with an electric torch and the Reverend Spink to deal with spies who had been signalling from the top of the Downs.
Unhappily the stalker had himself been stalked by another patriot bent on the same errand. The two old gentlemen had arrested each other by the dew-pond on Warren Hill; and report had it that words and worse had passed between the two. In the small hours of the morning Anne Caspar, hearing voices, had risen and seen from her window the Archdeacon stalking down the road, dusty, draggled, his curate trotting with sullen barks at the heels of his chief. The Archdeacon had no prisoner, but he had lumbago, a scratch or two, and an indignant sense that his curate had proved both disloyal and inefficient. The two had parted at the Rectory gate wrathfully, the Reverend Spink offering his resignation.
Opposite his garage in the Golfs, Alf now said goodbye to his Rector, and crossed the road with an almost aggressively sprightly air. Mr. Trupp noticed it.
"What about him and his Touring Syndicate?" he asked.
"He's all right," answered Mr. Pigott. "Trust him for that. Artful isn't in it with Alf. Called his drivers together on the declaration of war, and made em a speech. Said he knew where they wanted to be—where he wanted to be himself: in the fighting line. He'd be the last to stand between them and their duty. He wouldn't keep them to their contract. The Motor Transport was crying for them—five bob a day and glory galore. All he could do was to say God bless you and wish he could go himself—only his responsibilities...."
Mr. Trupp grinned.
"Did they swallow it down?" he asked.
"Like best butter," said Mr. Pigott. "He's got the tongue. He twisted em. Parliament's the place for Alf."
"Ah!" committed the other. "We're only beginning. This war'll find us all out too before we're through." ...
Alf turned into his yard.
A little group of broken down old men were waiting him there.
"Who are you?" he asked fiercely. "What you want?"
"We've come on behalf of the cleaners, sir," said the spokesman, in the uncertain voice of the half-starved. "What about us?—The Army don't want us."
The group tittered a feeble deprecatory titter.
"H'every man for himself in these days!" cried Alf, brief and brisk. "I'm not the Charity Organisation Society."
The old man, a-quaver in voice and body, doddered forward, touching his hat. Undersized and shrunken through starvation during infancy, and brutal usage throughout his growing years, he was an example of the great principle we Christians have enforced and maintained throughout the centuries: that the world's hardest work should be done by the weakest. Tip, as he was called, had been a coal-porter till at fifty-five he dislocated his shoulder shifting loads too heavy for him. Thereafter he was partially disabled, a casualty of the Industrial War, and to be treated as such.
"Would you give us a week's money or notice, sir?" he said now in his shaking voice.
"Did I take you on by the week?" asked Alf ferociously.
"No, sir; by the day."
"Then what ye talking about?—Ain't I paid you up?"
"You paid us up, sir. Only we got to live."
"Very well then. There's the House at the top of the hill for such as you. Ain't that good enough? This is a Christian country, this is."
Alf was half-way up the steps to his office, and he pointed in the direction of the Work-house.
A curious tawny glow lit the old man's eyes. His lips closed over his gums.
"Bloody Bastille," he muttered.
Alf heard him and ran down the steps. He was still with the stillness of the born bully.
"None of that now," he said quietly. "No filthy language in my yard! And no loiterin eether!—Off you go or I send for the police. The country's got something better to think of than you and your likes, I reckon, just now."
He stood in the gate of the yard with the cold domineering air of the warder in charge of convicts.
The cleaners shambled away like a herd of mangy donkeys past work and turned out on waste land to die at their leisure.
They were broken men all, old and infirm, drawn from the dregs of that Reserve of Labour on which the capitalist system has been built. They belonged to no Union; they were incapable of organisation and therefore of defence against the predatory class ...
"We got no bloody country, men like us ain't."
"Nor no bloody Christ."
"The rich got Him too."
"Same as they got everythink else" ...
The last of them gone, Alf skipped up the steps into his office. He was not afraid of them, was not even depressed by their uncalled-for consideration of themselves.
Indeed he was extraordinarily uplifted.
His great scheme had, it is true, been brought low—through no omission on his part; but he had got out with a squeeze after a dreadful period of panic fury, and now experienced the lyrical exhilaration of the man who has escaped by his own exertions from sudden unexpected death.
He had unloaded his drivers on the Army; and sold his buses to the Government. The only big creditor was Captain Royal, and Alf could afford to laugh at him. Besides Captain Royal would be off to the war—and might not come back. Moreover, unless he was much mistaken, the war meant all manner of chances of which the man with his eyes open would take full advantage: world convulsions always did.
Meanwhile he had the garages on which he could rebuild his original edifice at any moment, add to it, alter it as opportunity offered. The war would not last for ever; but it would un-make businesses and devour men—some of them his rivals. While they were away at the Front he would be quietly, ceaselessly strengthening his position at home. And when peace came, as it must some day, he would be ready to reap where he had sown in enterprise and industry.
On his way up to Old Town that evening he met the Reverend Spink and asked him how long the Franco-Prussian war had lasted.
The curate still had the ruffled and resentful air of a fighting cockerel who has a grievance against the referee. Lady Augusta, indeed, had passed a busy morning smoothing his plumage and inducing him to withdraw his resignation. His meeting with Alf served as further balm to his wounded spirit; for above all else the Reverend Spink loved to be appealed to as a scholar.