"I wish it was." He put his hand to his heart. "I've got notice to quit. Rivers gives me eighteen months at most. Damn nuisance." He stared out of the window at the two women under the elm. "I don't feel like dying. And there was so much to do."
"Let's see," said the Doctor.
He applied the stethoscope, and then replaced it in his pocket without comment. It was clear from the negative expression of his face that he agreed with Sir Audrey Rivers' judgment.
Mr. Caspar, intuitive as his friend, asked no questions.
"That's it," said he. "Machine wearing out. I've rattled her about too much, I suppose. Well, a man must live—my sort of man at least. I could never be content to rust. There's nothing to be done. It's just good-bye and noau revoirthis time. That's why I came down. I wanted to see the boy before I pushed off." He turned suddenly. "How's he getting on?"
Mr. Trupp shrugged his shoulders.
"No improvement?" asked the other.
"I wouldn't say that. He's put the brake on a bit of late."
"Or had it put on for him," muttered Mr. Caspar.
He mused for some time.
"I'd have taken a peerage but for him," he said at last. "I can't see Ned as a hereditary legislator."
"Oh, I don't know," mumbled Mr. Trupp. He was an aggressive radical of the then active school of Dilke and Chamberlain. "I think he'd do very well in the House of Lords."
The young man had touched the springs of laughter in the other's heart. Hans Caspar's immense vitality asserted itself again. He resumed himself with a shout, sweeping the clouds boisterously away.
"Ned's a true Beauregard," he said. "Just his mother over again. So charming and so ineffectual! Always some weak strain in an hereditary aristocracy."
"Must be," muttered Mr. Trupp. "They're never weeded out. They're above the laws of Nature. Case of Survival of the Unfittest—protected by Law and living on you and me to whom they dictate the Law. Albino bunnies in a gilded hutch with a policeman watching over em!"
"Good!" cried Mr. Caspar. "Albino bunnies is good. It took my albino in the way of religious orgies. I prefer Ned's trouble of the two. Less humbug about it." He got up and began restlessly to pace the room. "There's nothing like religion to eat a man's soul away, Trupp—to say nothing of a woman's.Youdon't let your wife go to church, I understand. Well, you're a shrewd fellow. That way lies the bottomless pit. Mine took to it—it was in her blood, mind you—when I was away in the River Plate driving the Trans-Argentine Railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific. When I came back—good Lord! Priests to luncheon, Bishops to dinner, Deaconesses to tea. Missionary meetings in the drawing-room, altars in the alcove, parasites everywhere. In her last illness shewouldhave areligeuseto see to her instead of one of our nurses from the Whitechapel. Of course she died. Serve her right, too, say I." He paused. "With Ned it was just touch and go which way it would take him. I thought at one time his mother's trouble'd got him, but in the end it was..." He jiggled his elbow.
"He's not a bad sort," muttered Mr. Trupp.
Hans Caspar took the other by the lapel of his coat.
"But that's just what makes me so mad, man!" he cried. "If he'd been vicious I could have kicked his back-side with joy. But you couldn't kick Ned. You can't kick a pathetic vacuum." He added with a swagger: "No man can accuse Hans Caspar of being afraid to use the jack-boot. You don't kick bottoms half enough in England."
"There's plenty of kicking bottoms," answered the other. "The trouble is that the men who kick bottoms never get their own kicked. If every man who kicked knew for certain that he would automatically be kicked in his turn, we might get on a bit."
Hans Caspar chuckled.
"Your idea of Utopia," he said. "Everybody standing round in a circle, with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, hacking him. I like it."
"I believe," chanted Mr. Trupp, "in the Big Stick. That's my creed. But I want it applied by everybody to everybody—not by the strong to the weak as we do in this country, and you do in yours."
"My firm belief you're this new-fangled creature—a Socialist," said Hans Caspar.
"What if I am!" grunted the other. In fact, in London he had attended meetings of the recently born Fabian Society, and had heard William Morris preach on Sunday evenings in the stables of Kelmscott House. The young surgeon had found himself in general sympathy with the views expounded, but like many another man could not tolerate the personalities of the expounders of the new creed. "Apart from Morris, they're such prigs," he would say, "and so blatant about it. Always thrusting their alleged intellectual superiority down your throat. And after all, they're only advocating what every sensible man must advocate—the application of the method of Science to the problems of Government."
Mr. Caspar had gone to the window and was staring out.
"How long'll that boy of mine last the pace he's going?" he asked, subdued again.
"He might last thirty years yet," the other answered.
Hans Caspar turned round.
"With that woman to run him, you mean?"
"What woman's that?"
"His wife."
It was Mr. Trupp's turn to look away.
"She's the sort for him," he mumbled warily.
The other broke in with vehement enthusiasm.
"The sort for him!—why, if I'd married a woman like that—with a back-bone like steel, and the jaws of a rat-trap—I'd have been a Napoleon."
Mr. Trupp's face was still averted. Its naturally shrewd expression had for the moment a satirical touch.
"You think he's a lucky fellow to get her?" said the other.
Mr. Trupp's silence was eloquent enough.
"Ah," continued Hans Caspar knowingly. "I see. You thinkshegot him. I dare say. She's the sort of woman who'd get anything she wanted. And he's the kind of man who'd be got by the first woman who wanted him. I took the measure of her at first sight. Fact I was just going to offer her the job of manageress of my canteen at rail-head—when I found out. She'd make the navvies sit up, I'll swear."
"Her hands are pretty full as it is," commented Mr. Trupp.
The other nodded.
"I expect so," he said. "Ned alone's one woman's job. And the two children." He put his hand on the surgeon's arm. "That eldest boy, Trupp!"
"What about him?"
"He's his grandmother over again. Watch him!"
A bell in the street clanged.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Station-bus," said Mr. Trupp. "The driver strikes the coaching-bell over theStaras he passes."
"I must catch it."
The big man put on his coat and went out. At the door of the inn a two-horse bus was drawn up.
Mr. Caspar climbed up beside the driver.
The young surgeon closed the front-door and turned.
His wife stood framed in the garden-window against a background of green.
"Did he find out?" she asked anxiously.
"My dear," her husband answered, "he did."
The tender creature's face fell.
"Oh, the poor Caspars!" she cried.
Sir Audrey Rivers' diagnosis proved correct. Just a year after his visit to Beachbourne Mr. Caspar died.
His will caused malicious merriment to those who knew "Unser Hans," as he was called in Society.
He left the bulk of his vast fortune in trust for the Whitechapel Hospital—with one proviso: that no clergyman was to act as a trustee. For the rest he bequeathed £300 a year for life, free of Income Tax, to his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Edward Caspar; and should she pre-decease her husband, the sum was to be continued to his son.
"Sound fellow that," said Mr. Trupp, when he heard. "Old Man Caspar to the end."
"It's rather hard on our Mr. Caspar," remarked his wife, who had known Edward Caspar in London before either had married.
"My dear," replied the surgeon, with the slight sententiousness peculiar to him, "the only way to help that sort of son is to be hard on him."
"I hope you'll never help my Joe like that," cried the beautiful woman warmly.
Mr. Trupp loved to tease his wife.
"If your Joe goes that way I will," he grinned—"and worse. So mind your eye!"
Another woman who was not amused by Hans Caspar's will was the woman who benefited by it.
Anne Caspar had the qualities of her kind. If she was hard, she was passionately loyal and genuinely devoted to her Ned. When she had told Mr. Trupp that her marriage had been a love-match she had but spoken the truth as regards her part in it. Therefore on the morning she opened the letter from the lawyers announcing that she had come by miracle into what was for the daughter of the Ealing tobacconist a fortune, she felt a slight had been put upon her husband and was perturbed accordingly.
With pensive face she went into the study, wearing the long blue over-all in which Edward Caspar had first seen her.
Her husband stood in his shirt-sleeves, pipe in mouth, a loose, round-shouldered figure, splashing away with vague enthusiasm at a canvas in the sunny bow-window.
She realized in a moment that she had caught him in one of his rare uplifted moods.
"Ned," she said.
"What-ho, my Annie!"
"Your father's left us £300 a year."
He chuckled as he painted, one eye on the gleaming mystery of the Downs.
"Been opening my letters, you burglar?"
"The letter's to me."
This time he turned, saw her face, and steadied.
She offered him the envelope.
He glanced at the address.
"Yes, it's to you all right. Funny they didn't write to me."
"Won't you read it, Ned?" she said gently.
He skimmed the contents and winced.
"That's all right, Anne," he said, handing it back to her, and patting her hand. "The old man's been as good as his word—and better, by the amount of Income Tax."
"Such a way to do it and all," said Anne censoriously.
He pinched her arm.
"Perhaps it's for the best," he said. "And anyway, it doesn't much matter." If Edward Caspar was by no means sure of himself, he was sure beyond question of the woman life had given him.
She lifted her face to his, and it was beautiful.
"Ned," she said; and he kissed her.
The Domesday Book tells us that King Edward the Confessor held the Manor of Burne, and gave the endowment of the Church of St. Michael to the Abbey of Fecamp, along with the Lordships of Steyning and Rye and Winchelsea and other jewels from the crown of Sussex; as all who have read Mr. Dudgeon's scholarly history of Beachbourne will recall.
Harold cancelled the grant, with the result, so legend has it, that William the Norman landed at Pevensey just across the way to enforce restitution. In those days the parish of Burne covered like a blanket the western promontory of the great Bay. At each of the four corners of the blanket, holding it down as it were, was a rude hamlet. On the bourne itself a few hovels clustered round the wooden church upon the Kneb; in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, carved out of the flank of Beau-nez, was Holy Well, haunted by pilgrims from the Continent; on the sea-front there was the Wish, beneath which of old a Roman dock had been; and further east was Sea-gate with its fishing-station and the earth-work which guarded the entrance to the Bay whose waters swept inland over what are now the Levels to Ratton and Horsey and the borders of Hailsham.
In the reign of Henry II the Norman church, much as we know it to-day, succeeded the crazy wooden building in which our Saxon forefathers heard the Word of the Promise first brought to Sussex by Bishop Wilfrith, who starting from the North, dared the perils of the Forest, and somehow fought his way through brake and marsh and thicket, among wild beasts and wilder men, to the ancient Roman settlement at Chichester; thence to spread the news all along the high bleak coast-line on which at river-mouths and lagoon-like estuaries the Saxon adventurers had gained a footing.
Till the nineteenth century the parish that lay scattered thus between the Downs, the marshes, and the sea, changed but little, experiencing the ordinary vicissitudes of an English village. Bishops made their visitations. Rectors lived and died. Outlaws sought sanctuary at the altar of the church above the Moot, which was still the centre of the life of the little pastoral community. In the last half of the fourteenth century the massive tower was added which dominated the village as it dominates the town to-day; built perhaps as a thank-offering for the passing of the Black Death, which slew half the population, reduced the monks at Michelham to five, and, with indiscriminating zeal, laid a clammy hand on the Abbot of Battle and Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes; while giving rise to a wave of industrial unrest which a few years later sent the rebellious men of Sussex Londonwards behind the ragged banner of Jack Cade.
In 1534 the Proclamation repudiating the Pope was read from the pulpit of the church upon the Kneb; and ten years later the first outburst of Puritanism stripped the consecrated building of many shrines, pictures, ornaments, as our historian has recently reminded us.
The village thrilled to the threat of the Spanish Armada, and, what is more, prepared to meet it; the inhabitants having—time out of memory of man, we are told—a reputation, the outcome of experience and necessity, for dealing with the landings of forraine enemies.
During the Parliamentary troubles the Squire of Beachbourne was of course a stout-hearted Royalist; and his friend the Rector was brought up before the authorities on a charge of "malignancy." Found guilty, he was removed from office; whereupon, as his brass quaintly reminds us, the gallant gentlemanmori maluit—preferred to die. And it is on record that the parish was only saved from the ravages of Civil War by the abominable condition of the roads of East Sussex. Perhaps the same factor told against the prosperity of the place. For, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Beachbourne, as it was now called, had dwindled in population to a few hundred souls. Later in the same century, about the time Newhaven was born, it began to blossom out as a health resort. A celebrity or two discovered its remote charm. A peer succeeded the Squire at the big house. Behind the Wish a row of sea-houses sprang into being on the front. But Dr. Russell of Lewes and the Prince Regent, in turning the fishing-village of Brightelmstone into fashionable Brighton, ruined for the moment its rival under Beau-nez. Beachbourne had to wait its turn until the iron horse, running on an iron road, across country that not long since had been washed by tides, overcame with astounding ease the difficulties that teams of snorting oxen up to the hocks in mud had found insuperable.
Then, and only then, the four corners of the parish came together apace. The old bourne disappeared, the source of it in the Moot under the church-crowned Kneb now no more than a stagnant pond. And by the time of our story a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants had risen where men, still middle-aged, could recall meadows that swept down to the sea, the voice of the corn-crake harsh everywhere as they sauntered down Water Lane of evenings after church, and the last fight of the "gentlemen" and the Revenue Officers that took place on a desolate strip of shore to the sound of calling sea-birds, on the site of what is now the Cecil Hotel.
Next time Mr. Trupp called at 60 Rectory Walk, he marked that the familiar chocolate notice in the upper window had gone.
He chaffed Mrs. Caspar in his grim way.
"No more rooms to let, I see," he said.
"No," the woman answered. "No more lies to have to tell just at present."
She was in one of her tartest moods; and when he congratulated her on being through her troubles, she answered,
"Some of em. Plenty more to follow. There'll be enough money for Ned and me and the boys. That's one thing."
"And a big thing too," said Mr. Trupp.
"The biggest," admitted the woman surlily. "Speaking worldly-wise, I don't say nay to that."
After the birth of her second son, Mr. Trupp had told her that she would have no more children and she was glad: for her hands were going to be full enough throughout her life; so much the shrewd woman saw clearly. There was her husband; and there was her eldest son, Ernie, who was his father over again.
He had his father's face, his father's charm, his father's soft and generous heart; and, unless she was mistaken, other qualities of his father that were by no means so desirable. And the curious thing was that the characteristics which in her husband Anne Caspar secretly admired, only exasperated her in Ernie.
Alf, the second son, whatever his faults, certainly did not trace them to his dad. He was as much his mother's child as Ernie was his father's. And whether for that reason or because for years she had to wrestle for his miserable little life with the Angel of Death, his mother loved him with the fierce, protecting passion of an animal.
"Nobody but his mother could have saved him," Mr. Trupp told his wife.
While Mrs. Caspar said to the same lady,
"But for Mr. Trupp he wouldn't be here."
A proud woman, Mrs. Caspar was also a very lonely one. Her genuine pride in her rather ramshackle husband—his birth, his breeding, his obvious air of a gentleman—which evinced itself in her almost passionate determination that he should dress himself "as such," prevented her from associating with her own class; and the women of her husband's class would not associate with her. Mrs. Trupp, the kindest of souls, was the solitary exception. But the two women were antipathetic. The doctor's wife, who possessed in full measure the noble toleration that marks the best of her kind, was forced to admit to her conscience, that she could not bring herself to like Mrs. Caspar. The large and beautiful nature of the former, brought to fruition in the sunshine and shelter of a cultivated home, could not understand the harsh combativeness of the daughter of the small tobacconist, who had fought from childhood for the right to live.
"She's like a wolf," Mrs. Trupp told her husband. "Even with her children."
"My dear," said the wise Doctor, "she's had to snap to survive. You haven't. Others have done your snapping for you."
"She needn't snap and snarl at that dear, gentle husband of hers," retorted Mrs. Trupp.
"If she didn't," replied her husband drily, "she'd be a widow in a week."
"Anyway she might be kind to that eldest boy," continued Mrs. Trupp, who at Edward Caspar's request had stood sponsor to Ernie. "He's beautiful, and such breeding. A true Beauregard."
"What d'you make of the baby?" asked her husband with sudden interest.
"Why, he's like a little rat," answered Mrs. Trupp. "He's the only baby I've ever seen I didn't want to handle."
"Yet there's something in him," replied the other thoughtfully. "He wouldn't have lived else. A touch of Old Man Caspar about that child somewhere.He'llbite all right if he lives to be a man."
And to the Doctor's shrewd and seeing eye it was clear from the start that Alfred meant to live to be a man. Somewhere in the depths of his wretched little body there glowed a spark that all the threats and frosts of a hostile Nature failed to extinguish. On that spark his mother blew with a tenacity surpassing words; Mr. Trupp blew in his wise way, working the bellows of Science with the easy skill of the master-workman; little Ernie, most loving of children, blew too. Even Edward Caspar leaned over the cot in his quilted dressing gown and said,
"He's coming on."
But even as he leant, the sensitive fellow knew that there was not and could never be any bond between him and his youngest born. His heart was with Ernie. And the way his mother rebuffed the elder lad, only endeared him the more to his father.
The two lads grew: Ernie strong in body, loving in heart, lacking in will; Alf ardent of spirit, ruthless as a stoat upon the trail, and rickety as an old doll.
There was a first-rate elementary school in Old Town to which the two boys went when the time came. The headmaster, Mr. Pigott, was also manager of the chapel in the Moot which Mrs. Caspar attended regularly.
The hard woman was religious in the common Puritan way, so dear to the English lower-middle-class of her generation. Her Chapel and her God were both a great deal to the austere woman, especially the former. She had a stern and narrow moral code of her own which she mistook for love of Christ. From that code she never departed herself, and punished to the utmost of her power all those who did depart from it.
In a chapel of her own denomination she had insisted on being married, in spite of the fact that she risked by her obstinacy losing the only man she had ever loved.
Ned Caspar, for his part, took his religion, as most of us do, from his mother. He was High Church at a time when to be so was far less fashionable than it is at present. He called himself a Catholic, and spoke always of the Mass in a way that shocked his fellow-churchmen who were in those days still content to speak of themselves as Protestants and the sacramental act as Holy Communion. And after marriage he maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would have expected of the soft-willed man. Indeed, it was the one point on which, aided by his mother's memory, he stood up to his wife for long.
"I'll wear you down yet, my son," Anne told him grimly. "May as well come off the perch now as later."
In this one matter her taunts served only, so it seemed, to strengthen her husband's resistance.
He went white, shook, perspired, and continued to attend High Mass at St. Michael's, in spite of his growing distaste for the man who administered it—his neighbour, Prebendary Willcocks, across the road.
A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake, desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his own way for a time without protest—as the cat permits the mouse a little liberty.
When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said—and Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occasion—
"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do feel it so that we never worship in common."
That was the beginning of the end of his resistance.
He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little community.
And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely.
But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of the Church of England, often of Sunday afternoons in the spring and summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the "chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and fighting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a "chucker-in" himself; but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at 8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles of which were darkened that tramp and prostitute might sit there unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occasional visitors from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin, extempore prayer, readings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle, that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in days to come should gather thus, without priest or ceremonial, simply to rejoice together in the blessing of a common life and universal Father.
Edward Caspar went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife. He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediæval formulæ, the iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his mother in its grip.
As a student of comparative religion his intellect was still interested in forms which his seeking mind had long rejected as empty, ludicrous, or inadequate.
His reading for his book, his experience of life, and most of all an inner urge, led him in time to look for the spiritual comfort that was his most vital need outside the walls of the consecrated prison in which he had been bred.
Quia fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiscat in Tewas the motto that hung above his writing-desk. And his restless heart found increasingly its peace sometimes in music, sometimes amid the hum of men and women in the crowded streets of the East End of the town, and most often in quiet communion with Nature on the Downs or beside the sea in some gap far from the haunts of men.
He would ramble the lonely hills by the hour, lost in thought, Ernie skirmishing about him.
Sometimes Mr. Trupp, riding with his little daughter up there between the sky and sea, would meet the couple.
"Like a bear and a terrier, Bess," he would smile.
Then in some secluded valley, father and son would lie down in the "loo" of the hill, as Ernie called it.
Resting there with contented spirits amid the gorse, they would watch the gulls, white-winged and desolately crying over the plough, while the larks purred above them.
These were the best moments of Ernie's childhood, never to pass from him in the tumult and battle of later life. A child of the earth, even his tongue, touched with the soft slur of Sussex caught from school-mates, betrayed him for a countryman. He loved the feel of the turf solid beneath him; he loved the sound of the gorse-pods snapping in the sun; he loved the thump of the sea crashing on the beach far below; and most of all he loved the larks pouring comfort into the cistern of his mind until it too seemed to brim with the music of praise.
"Loving, idn't they?" he would say in his sweet little voice, his hands behind his head, his eyes on a speck of song thrilling in the blue.
"That's it, Boy-lad," his father's answer would come from beneath the cavern of his hat; and Edward Caspar forthwith would repeat, in a voice that seemed to co-ordinate the harmonies of earth and sky and sea, Wordsworth'sLines above Tintern Abbey:
... That serene and blessed mood,In which the affections gently lead us on,—Until, the breath of this corporeal frameAnd even the motion of our human bloodAlmost suspended, we are laid asleepIn body, and become a living soul:
Alf never came on these excursions. The bent of the two brothers was indeed entirely different. If they left the house together, as often as not they parted at the garden-gate. Ern turned his face towards the green hills that blocked the end of the road, Alf turned his back on them.
"Nothin doin there," he would say with a knowing wink. He hated walking, and he feared the loneliness of the hills. His heart was in the East End of the growing town. Down there, beyond the gas-works, at the edge of the Levels, where the trams clanged continually, where you heard strange tongues, and saw new types of faces, Alf found himself. The little urchin, who seemed all eyes in a hideous square head, would wander by the hour in Sea-gate, among the booths and barrows, drinking in the life about him, and return home at night tired but contented.
In bed the two boys would compare their experiences.
"What did you see?" Ern would ask.
"Everythink," Alf would answer. "Folks and a fight and all."
"I see something, too," said Ernie, deliberate alike of speech and mind.
"What then?" asked Alf, scornfully.
"I see angels," Ernie answered. "Dad see em too."
But Alf only sniggered.
At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. Beyond it lay the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire, the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth. Old Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had endured for centuries. In its steep streets you might hear the undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days.
Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new.
Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp, incisive, twanging.
In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the Lewes Road. Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school.
His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door.
"Where you been then?" she asked ferociously.
"With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie. "Dis lambin time. His boy's run'd away."
The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman.
Alf peeped round his mother's skirts.
"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.
"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.
Alf sneered.
"Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"
Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending accent.
When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles into Anne's unsympathetic ear.
"What a way to talk!" he groaned.
"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "Theyaren't going to Harrow and Trinity."
The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been given.
"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.
She put her hand on his shoulder.
Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar sometimes demonstrated affection.
"And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work." Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class held of their rulers and their education.
Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school in the hollow between the church and Rodmill.
New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot, where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will.
Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel. Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably.
The boys attended both.
Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in particular.
As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he didn't care to use them.
"He's a little gentleman though—like his father," ended the schoolmaster.
Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us. As an honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while money was very little to him. But for the mysterious quality of breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence of something finer than ourselves. And on the rare occasions in which Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice—"There's English for you! Don't you wish you could talk like that...?"
Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it never failed to do.
"That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly. "But Ern's got to make his own way in the world."
"He'll do," said Mr. Pigott. "He won't be forgotten, you'll see. He's a good lad, and that's something even in these days."
And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he excelled. Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike him in his marked athletic capacity.
True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was disliked by everybody and gloried in it. He won all the gilt-edged prizes, while Ern took the canings.
Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home.
"Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening. "They fairly sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"
His recollections of the scene were so spicy that—for once—he was dreadfully affectionate to the brother who had given him such prurient pleasure.
"Ern in trouble of course!" cried the mother angrily. "You needn't tell me! A nice credit to his home and all! I'm ashamed to look Mr. Pigott in the face come Sunday!'
"Now then, mother!" grumbled Mr. Caspar. "Let the boy alone!"
"Yes, you're always for him!" flared Mrs. Caspar, buttering the bread. "Setting him against his mother! But for you he'd be all right."
Alf sat like a little wizened devil at the end of the table in his high chair, his eyes twinkling malignantly over his bib, enjoying the fun.
"It's him and Ern against you and me, mum, ayn't it?" he cried, shuffling on his seat.
Whether it was his son's accent or a sense of the tragic truth underlying his child's words, that affected him, Mr. Caspar rose and shuffled out of the kitchen into the study, which was looked on in the family as dad's sanctuary.
The scene had taken place in the kitchen at tea, which was the one meal the family shared. Breakfast, dinner, supper, Edward Caspar had by himself in the little back room looking out on the fig-tree; and Mrs. Caspar waited on him.
That was by her desire, not his: for from the start of their married life Anne had determined that, so far as in her lay, her husband should have everything just as he was accustomed to. Thus from earliest infancy the children had been taught by their mother to understand that the two sitting-rooms were sacred to dad, and never to be entered except by permission. Their place was the kitchen. She herself set the example by always knocking on the door of either room before entering.
And the atmosphere of these two rooms was radically different from that of the rest of the house. Anne knew it and rejoiced. Everywhere else the tobacconist's daughter reigned obviously supreme. These rooms were the habitat of a scholar and a gentleman. The little back-room, indeed, was remarkable for little but the solidity of its few articles of furniture, and the old silver salver with the crest, reposing on the mahogany side-board. But the front sitting-room, with the bow-window looking out on to Beech-hangar and the long spur of the Downs that hid Beau-nez from view, was known in the family as the study, and looked what it was called.
The room, flooded with sunshine, was Mrs. Caspar's secret pride. She knew very well that there was nothing quite like it in Beachbourne, Old or New, and preserved it jealously. She did not understand it, much preferring her own kitchen, but she recognized that it stamped her husband for what he was, admired its atmosphere of distinction, and loved showing it to her rare visitors. On these occasions she stood herself in the passage, one arm of steel barring the door, like a priest showing the sanctuary to one without the pale. And it gave her malicious pleasure when Canon Willcocks, from the Rectory, opposite, calling one day, showed surprise, not untinged with jealousy, at what he was permitted to see. The Canon clearly thought it unseemly that Lazarus living at the Rectory gate should boast a room like that. And he was seriously annoyed when Anne, pointing to the Cavalier upon the wall, referred to the first Lord Ravensrood as "my children's ancestor."
On the evening of the squabble in the kitchen, Ernie joined his father in the study after tea.
As Alf was fond of remarking, "Ern's welcome there if no one else ayn't."
Edward Caspar was sitting by the fire as usual, brooding over the meerschaum he was colouring. His manuscript lay where it usually lay on the chair at his side, and a critical eye would have noted that it was little thicker than when Mr. Trupp had first seen it some years before.
"Ain't you well then, dad?" asked the boy in his beautiful little treble.
"I'm all right, Boy-lad," the other answered. "Mother didn't touch you, did she?"
There was something reassuring always about Ernie's manner with his father, as of a woman dealing with a sick child.
"No," he replied. "She said I was to come to you."
"Why were you caned at school?" asked the father, after a pause.
The boy's eyes were down, and he scraped the floor with one foot.
"Fighting," he said at last reluctantly. "Where it were, Alf sauce Aaron Huggett in de playground, and Aaron twist Alf's arm. Allowed he'd had more'n enough of Alf's lip. And he wouldn't leggo. So I paint his nose for him. And it bled."
Edward Caspar puffed.
"Why don't you let Alfred fight his own battles?"
Steadfast to the tradition of his own class in this matter if in no other, he revolted against the common abbreviation of his younger son's name.
"Alf fight!" cried Ernie with rare scorn. "He couldn't fight no-hows. D'isn't in him. He'd just break."
"Then why does he sauce em?"
Ernie resumed his foot scraping.
"That's what I says to him," he admitted in his slow ca-a-ing speech. "Only where it seems he ca'an't keep his tongue tidy. Seems he ca'an't elp issalf like. Then he gets into trouble. Then I avs to fight for him."
"And if you don't fight for him no one else will?" said his father.
"No," replied Ernie with the delightful reluctance of innocence and youth. "See no one do'osn't like Alf—only issalf." He added as a slow after-thought, "And I be his brother like."
Edward Caspar held out a big hand.
Ern saw his father was pleased, he didn't know why; and he was glad.
In Ern's estimation there was no one in the world like dad—the kind, the comforter.
Once indeed in Sunday-school, some years before, when Mr. Pigott had been expatiating on the character of our Lord, the silence had been broken by the voice of a very little lad,
"My dad's like that."
In fact, as Ernie said, the two were brothers, and in some sort complementary.
Ern had to the full the chivalrous qualities of the Beauregards. He never forgot that he was Alf's elder brother, or that Alf was a poor little creature with a chest in which Mr. Trupp took an abnormal interest. He fought many battles, bore many blows for his young brother. Alf took it all as a matter of course, regarding himself as a little god whom Ernie was privileged to serve and suffer for. Ern accepted the other's constant suggestion of superiority without revolt, and took the second place with the lazy good-nature characteristic of him.
Ern indeed was nothing of a leader. In all the adventurous vicissitudes of boy-life the initiative lay with Alf, who planned the mischief; while Ern, obedient to his brother, for whose brains he had the profoundest admiration, carried it out and paid the penalty, as a rule uncomplainingly, at home and abroad.
Old Town was now creeping west along the foot of the Downs towards Lewes. On its outskirts and in the corn-fields where are to-day rows of red-brick villas, were still to be found flint cottages, long blue-roofed barns, and timbered farmsteads among elms. As little by little the town, with its border of allotment gardens, flooded along the New Road, sweeping up Rodmill and brimming over towards Ratton and the Decoy on the edge of the marshes, these buildings that dated from another age were gradually diverted from their pristine use to be the habitations of those who no longer drew their living from the earth.
Thus in the house which had once been the huntsman's lodge, beside the now abandoned kennels, lived Mr. Pigott—one foot in the country, as he said, one in the town.
Every morning he walked across the foot-path, past Moot Farm, to school. Mr. Pigott's house stood in a hollow coombe a long way back from the road. The gorse-clad sides of the Down rose steeply at the back of it. In front was an orchard in which a walnut-tree lorded it, conspicuous over the lesser trees.
It was towards the end of their school time, when Ern was nearly fourteen, that Alf planned a raid upon this tree, famous in the locality for its beauty and fruitfulness.
The adventure needed careful thinking out.
The approach to the house was along an unscreened path that led across the arable land. Between the path and the house was the orchard in which stood the tree with its coveted treasure.
The trouble was that Mrs. Pigott's window overlooked the orchard, and she was always in that window—so much Alf, in his many reconnaissances of the position, discovered.
Now it was well known in the school that Mrs. Pigott had but one eye, and that of glass, which accounted perhaps for its extraordinary powers of vision. And besides Mrs. Pigott with her one sharp eye, there was Mrs. Pigott's little dog with his many sharp teeth. There was also in the background Mr. Pigott, who, outside the chapel, was athletic and regrettably fierce.
Alf waited long for his opportunity, in terror lest the tree should be beaten before he had worked his will upon it, but his chance came at last.
One Saturday afternoon he and Ern were loitering in Church Street, marching along with the starts and stops, the semi-innocent and semi-surreptitious manner of boys waiting for Satan to enter into them and prompt them to definite action, when Alf dug his brother with a warning elbow.
Mrs. Pigott was staring with her glass eye into the ironmonger's opposite the church. On her arm was a basket and at her feet her dog. It was clear that she was doing her week-end shopping.
Alf, swift to seize his opportunity, set off up the hill, hot-foot, silent, with a bustle of arms and legs, his brow puckered as he concentrated ruthlessly upon his purpose.
Ern followed the fierce, insistent, little figure more leisurely.
"Steady on!" he called. "Where away then?"
"Walnut-tree," panted Alf. "Now's yer chance."
Ern, who knew from experience that the dirty and dangerous work would fall to his lot, lagged.
"Mr. Pigott's there," he grumbled.
"Now he ayn't then," cried Alf, spurring the laggard on. "He's gone over to Lewes for the Conference. Didn't you hear mother at breakfast?"
There had been in truth a split in the chapel. The Established Methodists were breaking away from the Foundation Methodists, and the Primitive Methodists were thinking of following suit. The little community was therefore a tumult of warring tongues.
Alf led up the hill, past the chalk-pit, along the side of the Downs, and dropped down on his objective from the rear. Coming to the fence that ran round the orchard, he peeped at the low house lying in the background under the green flank of the hill.
Ern followed reluctantly, as one drawn to his doom by a fate he cannot withstand.
He wanted the walnuts; he wanted to be brave; but he liked Mr. Pigott, and, usually obedient to his brother's suggestions, had qualms in this case.
"Go on then!" urged Alf. It was a favourite phrase of his. "There ayn't no one there."
"Come on yourself," answered Ern without enthusiasm.
"Now, I'll stay and watch the path for you against her," piped Alf.
But for once Ern was firm.
"I aren't a-gooin unless you cooms too," he said doggedly.
"What's the good of me, then?" scoffed Alf in his fierce and feverish way. "Can I climb the tree? Only wish I could. I'd show you. I suppose you'll be throwin that up at me next! My belief you're afraid."
But Ernie was not to be moved from the position which he had taken up. Just now and then Alf had remarked that his brother for all his softness became hard—adamant indeed—in a way that rather frightened Alf.
"I'll goo up the tree and shake em down to you," Ern said in his slow, musical voice. "You stand at the foot of her and gather em."
"Fine!" jeered Alf. "And when Mr. Pigott comes out you'll be up the tree safe as dysies, and I'll be on the floor for him to paste!"
"I thart you said he'd gone to Lewes," retorted Ern, unusually alert.
"So he has," replied Alf sourly. "Only I suppose he won't stay there for ever, will he?"
Ern, however, was proof against all the other's logic; and finally the two boys climbed the fence together.
The walnut was a majestic tree, with boughs that dropped almost to the ground, making a splendid pavilion of green.
Ern swarmed the tree. Alf stood at the foot, sheltered by the drooping branches. Thus he could watch the house, while nobody in the house could see anything of him but a pair of meagre black legs.
He was fairly safe and knew it, but even so his heart pattered, he bit his nails continually, and kept a furtive eye on the line of his retreat.
"Hurry!" he kept on calling.
Ern, up aloft, went to work like a man. He tossed the branches to and fro. The ripe walnuts came rattling down. Alf, underneath, gathered rich harvest. He filled his pockets, his cap, his handkerchief. Opening his shirt, he stuffed the brown treasure into his bosom and grew into a portly urchin who rattled when he moved.
"I got nigh a bushel!" he cried keenly. "Throw your coat down, and I'll fill the pockets!"
The little devil darted to and fro, tumbling spiderlike upon the falling riches, absorbed in accumulation. His heart and eyes burned. There was money in this—money. And money was already taking its appointed place in Alf's philosophy.
He would sell the nuts at so much a pound—some wholesale to a fruiterer he knew in the remote East End; some retail to his schoolfellows.
The quality and quantity of the loot so absorbed him that he forgot his fears. And when he glanced up through the screen of thick branches to see a pair of grey-stockinged legs, thick and formidable to a degree, advancing upon the tree with dreadful deliberation, his heart stopped.
The enemy was on them.
Alf emptied handkerchief, pockets, cap: he emptied himself by a swift ducking motion that sent the treasure heaped against his heart pouring forth with a rattle about his neck and head and ears.
Then he cast fearful eyes to the rear. It was thirty yards to the fence and beyond there was but the unscreened path without a scrap of cover, leading across the plough, past the Moot Farm and abandoned kennels to the New Road.
Alf saw at a glance that escape was impossible. Mr. Pigott, for all his forty years, could sprint.
Swift as a cornered rat, Alf made his decision.
He marched out from his shelter towards the approaching legs, a puny little creature with pale peaked face, and Ern's coat flung over his arm.
Mr. Pigott was advancing, very grim and grey, across the rough grass, his hands behind him, dragging something. He seemed in no hurry, and not in the least surprised to see Alf, whom he ignored.
"Please, sir," said Alf, perking his face up with an air of frankness, "there's a boy up your tree. Here's his coat."
Mr. Pigott walked slowly on, drawing behind him a sixty-foot hose, which issued like a white snake from the scullery window.
"I know," he said with suppressed quiet. "And I know who set him on to it. I can't beat you because you'd break if I touched you. But I'll take your brother's skin off him though he's twice the man you are, you dirty little cur!"
He brought the hose to bear on the brigand in the tree, and loosed the water-spout and the vials of his wrath together.
"Ah, you young scoundrel!" he roared, finding joy in explosive self-expression. "I'll teach you come monkeying after my nuts!"
Swish went the stream of water through the branches.
Ern hid as best he could on the leeward side of the trunk.
Mr. Pigott brought his artillery mercilessly to bear upon the boy's clasping hands. Ern, spluttering and sprawling, came down the tree with a rush and made a bolt for the fence.
Mr. Pigott, roaring jovially, played the stream full on him. It was a powerful gush, and floored the boy. The avenger knew no mercy and drenched his victim as he lay.
It was a sodden little figure who crept home disconsolately ten minutes later.
Alf had been back some time and had already told his tale, gibbering with excitement and fear.
Ern's mother, in a white fury, was awaiting the boy in the kitchen.
"I'll learn you disgrace me!" she cried. "Robbing your own chapel-manager's orchard—and then come home like a drownded rat!"
She set about the lad in good earnest.
Alf, perched upon the dresser to be out of the way, watched the fun, biting his nails.
"You mustn't hit her back then!" he screamed. "Your own mother!"
"I aren't hittin' her back then!" cried Ern, dogged, dazed, and warding off the blows as best he might. "I'm only defendin of mesalf."
The noise of the scuffle was considerable.
Outside in the passage was the sound of slippered feet. Then some one tried the door.
"It's only dad!" cried the devil on the dresser, white and with little black eyes that danced.
"What's up?" called an agitated voice from outside. "Hold on, mother! Give the boy a chance."
Some one rattled the door.
"Go about your business!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "There's a pair of you!"
Her anger exhausted and shame possessing her, she was going out into the yard to shelter herself in the little shed against the Workhouse wall, when Alf's sudden scream stayed her.
"Mum!—down't leave me!—he'll kill me!"
She turned to mark a white flare burning in the face of her elder son.
She had seen it before and had been afraid.
When Ern looked like that he ceased to be Ern: he became transfigured—yes, and terrible: like, she sometimes thought, the cavalier in the picture must have been in anger.
"Take them sopping duds off," she said quietly, "and then go up and put your Sundays on."
Half an hour later Ern, wearing dry clothes, entered the study.
He was sweet, smiling, and a thought abashed.
His father, on the other hand, evinced signs of terrible emotion.
His face was mottled, and he was shaking.
Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood before the fire, trying pitifully to preserve his dignity, and moving uneasily from leg to leg like a chained elephant.
"Did she hurt you?" he asked, seeking to steady his voice.
Ern shook his head.
"She laid about me middlin tidy," he admitted. "But she didn't not to say hurt me. She don't know how—a woman don't. Too much flusteration along of it."
Edward Caspar collapsed into a chair.
"What happened?" he asked.
Ern recounted the story truthfully, the white glimmer in his face coming and going between pants as he told.
"Why d'you let him lead you astray?" asked the father irritably, at the end.
Ern wagged his head slowly and began to scrape once more with his foot.
"Alf's artfuller nor me!" he said at last in a shamefaced way.
Both boys turned up at Sunday-school next morning: Alf defiant, Ern abashed.
Mr. Pigott ignored the former, snubbed him brutally when occasion offered, and showed himself benignant to the prime sinner.
After chapel Mrs. Caspar spoke to him.
"I don't know what you think of my son, Mr. Pigott," she began.
"Which son?" asked the other in his bluff way.
"Why, Ernie to be sure. He's always bringing shame upon me."
"He's worth twice the other," cried Mr. Pigott, letting off steam.
"Ah, yes, you've got your favourites, Mr. Pigott!" retorted the woman.
"And I'm not the only one!" answered the outraged schoolmaster. "Ern's a boy. And boys will be boys, as we all know. But he's a little gentleman, Ern is. He's his father over again."
The comparison of Ernie to his father, however well intentioned, always touched Mrs. Caspar on the raw. Her eyes sparkled. Every now and then she reminded you forcibly that her grandmother had lived in a by-street—off Greyhound Road, Fulham.
"Ah," she muttered vengefully, "I'll cut his little liver out yet, you'll see."
Mr. Pigott rounded on her, genuinely shocked.
"And you a religious woman!" he cried. "Shame on you!"
"I don't care," answered Mrs. Caspar. "I see it coming. I always have. And it's just more than I can bear."
Mr. Pigott did not understand the cause of the woman's emotion, but he recognized that it was genuine and so respected it.
"Well, he's leaving school now," he said more gently. "He'll settle down once he's got his nose to the grindstone."
Later, at the meeting of the Bowling Green Committee, in the Moot, the schoolmaster reported Mrs. Caspar's saying to Mr. Trupp.
"She's a hard un," he commented.
"She's need to be," growled the other.
"What's that, Doctor?" asked Mr. Pigott.
"If she let go of him, he'd be dead in a month," mumbled Mr. Trupp.
"Mr. Caspar would?"
The Doctor looked at the grey church-tower bluff against the sky.
"But she won't let go," he added. "She's got her qualities."
"She has," said Mr. Pigott, treading the green. "She's a diamond—as hard, as keen."
The two always sparred when they met and loved their friendly bouts. Both were radicals; but they had arrived at their convictions by very different routes. The schoolmaster had inherited his opinions from tough, dissenting ancestors, the man of science had acquired them from Huxley and Darwin. Politics the pair rarely discussed, except at election time; for on that subject they were in rough agreement. But the two men wrangled genially over religion, the ethics of sport, even the two Caspar boys; for Mr. Trupp was the one man in Old Town who alleged a preference for the younger boy—mainly, his wife declared, because he must be "contrary."
Mr. Pigott now told the stubborn man almost with glee the story of Alf's treachery.
"What d'ye think of that now?" he asked defiantly.
"Why," grunted the Doctor, "what I should expect."
"Of course," said the sarcastic Mr. Pigott.
"He's got the faults of his physique," continued the other. "He's afraid of a thrashing because he knows it'd kill him. Self-preservation is always the first law of life."
"He's a little cur," said Mr. Pigott. "That's what your young Alf is."
"I've no doubt he is," replied the Doctor. "You would be too if you'd got that body to live in."
"I'd be ashamed," shouted the other. "I'd commit suicide offhand."
"The wonder is he's alive at all," continued Mr. Trupp, quite unmoved. "Must have some grit in him somewhere or he'd have died when he was born."
"That's you and his mother," said the schoolmaster censoriously. "Saving useless human material that ought to be scrapped. And you call yourself a Man of Science! In a properly ordered community you'd stand your trial at Lewes Assizes, the two of you—for adding to the criminal classes. Now if we were back in the good old days, they'd have exposed Alf at birth—and quite right, too."
"Quite so," said Mr. Trupp. "Your Christianity has a lot to answer for, as I've remarked before."
It fell to Mr. Pigott to find a job of work for Ernie when his favourite left school: for at that date there were no Labour Bureaux, no Juvenile Advisory Committees, no attempt to make the most of the country's one solid asset—its Youth. And the rich had not yet made their grand discovery of the last twenty-five years—that the poor have bodies; and that these bodies must be saved, even if it cost a little more than saving their souls, which can always be done upon the cheap.
Mr. Pigott had little difficulty in his self-imposed task, for he did not mean to remain a schoolmaster all his life, and was already dabbling in the commercial life of the growing town.
Ernie started as an office-boy in a coal-merchant's office in Cornfield Road by the Central Station, which formed the junction between the Old Town and the New.
Before the boy embarked on his career, Mr. Pigott invited him to tea and lecture.
"It's your own fault if you don't get on," said the schoolmaster aggressively after the muffins. "Rests with yourself. Office boy to President—like they do in America. Make a romance of it."
"I shall try, sir," cried Era, with the easy enthusiasm characteristic of him.
"I'll lay you won't, then!" retorted the other rudely. "I'll lay all the work I've put into you these ten years past goes down the drain. Now your grandfather..."
He stopped short, remembering Mrs. Caspar had told him that their origin had been kept from the two boys....
At his new job Ern did not work very hard. It was not in him to do that; for he had his father's complete lack of ambition. But he worked just enough to keep his place, to pay his mother for his keep by the time he was seventeen, and have some "spending money," as he called it, over, with which to buy cigarettes, and join the cricket club. In time he even attained to the dignity of an office stool: for his handwriting was excellent, his ability undoubted, and his education as good as most.
"Ern don't lick the stamps no more. He writes the letters," was Alf's report at home.
The younger brother too had now launched out upon the world. But Alf was very different from Ern. He had his own ideas from the start and went his own way. Somehow he had ferreted out the facts about his grandfather's career; and that career it was his deliberate determination to surpass.
Those were the early days of the motor industry and the petrol engine. Alf made his mother apprentice him to Hewson and Clarke, an enterprising young engineering firm in the East End, off Pevensey Road.
"No Old Town for me," he said knowingly. "New Town's the bird!"
And the boy worked with the undeviating energy of an insect. All day he was busy at the shop, and in the evening came home, grimy and tired, to have a wash and then settle down in the kitchen to study the theory of the petrol-engine.
His mother, ambitious as her son, watched him with admiration, guarding his hours of study jealously from interruption.
"He's his grand-dad over again," she confided to her husband in one of their rare moments of intimacy.
Edward Caspar shook his head. He was interested in his second son, although in his heart of hearts he disliked the boy. He disliked ambitious men—their restlessness, their unhappy egoism, their incapacity to give themselves to any cause from which they would not reap personal advantage, offended his spiritual sense; and he followed with amused benevolence the careers of his contemporaries at Harrow and Trinity who were reaping now the fruits of Orthodoxy, and just becoming Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, and the like.
"Alf hasn't got my father's physique," he said.
"You wait," Anne replied. "He'll conquer that too. Last time Mr. Trupp saw him he said he'd do now—if he took care."
Ern watched his brother's feverish activities with ironical smiles.
"He's like a little engine himself," he said. "No time to look around and take a little pleasure in life. All the while a-running along the lines—puff-puff-puff!—with his nose to the ground. Not knowin where he's goin or why; only set on getting somewhere, he don't know where, some day, he don't know when."
Himself he preferred the leisurely life, and was known among his friends as Gentleman Ernie. The office, which prided itself upon its tone, for in it worked a youth who said he had been at a public school, had taken the country accent off his tongue. Ern was indeed a bit of a dandy now, who oiled his hair, and took an interest in his ties; while Alf never spent a penny on his clothes, was always shabby, and seldom clean. The dapper young clerk and the grimy little mechanic, on the rare occasions when they appeared in the streets together, formed a marked contrast, of which Ernie at least was aware.
"You'd never know em for brothers," the passers-by would remark.
Both had arrived at the age when the young male joins a gang, curious about women, but inclining to be suspicious of them. Alf, however, strong in himself, continued on his prickly and independent way. He was not drawn to others, nor were others drawn to him. Companionable Ern, on the other hand, who was everybody's friend, was absorbed into a gang; but he was different from his gang-mates. He used less hair-oil than they did, and wore more modest ties. Moreover, there was nothing of the hooligan about him.
"Such a gentlemanly lad," said Mrs. Trupp. "That's his father coming out in him."
"May the resemblance end there," muttered Mr. Trupp.
The lady speared her husband on the point of her needle.
"Croakie!" she remarked.
Ern could have been a leader among his mates, had he chosen to assume authority. His quiet, his distinction, his happy manner, and above all the fact that he was a promising cricketer and had made half a century on the Frying Pan at Lewes for the Sussex Colts against the Canterbury Wanderers, marked him out. But Ern would not lead. He spent his evenings in the main at home rather than in the lighted streets, and was at his happiest sitting in the study opposite his father. On these occasions the two rarely spoke, but they enjoyed a silent communion that was eminently satisfying to them both. Just sometimes the father would touch the revolving book-case on his right; take out one of the little blue poetry books Ern knew so well, and readThe Scholar GypsyorThe Happy Warrior.