CHAPTER XIII

NIGHTMARE

A few days later on his way back to the Manor-house from visiting his little patient in the Moot, the old surgeon met Mr. Pigott, who stopped to make enquiries.

"She'll do now," said Mr. Trupp.

"And that fellow?"

"Who?"

"Her father."

Mr. Trupp looked at the windy sky, torn to shreds and tatters by the Sou-west wind above the tower of the parish-church.

"He wanted the Big Stick and he got it," he said. "If it came down on his shoulders once a week regularly for a year he'd be a man. Steady pressure is what a fellow like that needs. And steady pressure is just what you don't get in a disorganised society such as ours."

The old Nonconformist held up a protesting hand.

"You'd better go to Germany straight off!" he cried. "That's the only place _you'd_ be happy in."

Mr. Trupp grinned.

"No need," he said, "Germany's coming here. Ask the Colonel!"

"Ah!" scolded the other. "You and your Colonels! You go and hear Norman Angell on the _Great Illusion_ at the Town Hall on Friday. You go and hear a sensible man talk sense. That'll do you a bit of good. Mr. Geddes is going to take the chair."

The old surgeon turned on his way, grinning still.

"The Colonel's squared Mr. Geddes," he said. "He's all right now."

What Mr. Trupp told Mr. Pigott, more it is true in chaff than in earnest, was partially true at least. Liberalism was giving way beneath the Colonel's calculated assault. After Lord Roberts's visit to Beachbourne the enemy dropped into the lines of the besiegers sometimes in single spies and sometimes in battalions. Only Mr. Pigott held out stubbornly, and that less perhaps from conviction than from a sense of personal grievance against the Colonel. For three solid years the pugnacious old Nonconformist had been trying to fix a quarrel on the man he wished to make his enemy; but his adversary had eluded battle with grace and agility. That in itself happily afforded a good and unforgiveable cause of offence.

"They won't fight, these soldiers!" he grumbled to his wife.

"They leave that to you pacifists," replied the lady, brightly.

"Pack o poltroons!" scolded the old warrior. "One can respect the Archdeacon at least because he has the courage of his opinions. But this chap!"

Yet if Liberalism as a whole was finding grace at last, Labour in the East-end remained obdurate, as only a mollusc can; and Labour was gaining power for all men to see.

In the general elections of 1910, indeed, the two Conservative candidates, Stanley Bessemere, East, and Mr. Glynde, West, romped home. The Colonel was neither surprised nor deceived by the results of the elections. He knew now that in modern England in the towns at all events, among the rising generation, there were few Conservative working men--though there were millions who might and in fact did vote for Conservative candidates; and not many Radicals--apart from a leaven of sturdy middle-aged survivors of the Gladstonian age. The workers as a whole, it was clear, as they grew in class-consciousness, were swinging slow as a huge tide, and almost as unconscious, towards the left. But they were not articulate; they were not consistent; they changed their labels as they changed their clothes, and as yet they steadfastly refused to call themselves Socialists. Indeed, in spite of the local Conservative victory, the outstanding political feature of the moment, apart from the always growing insurgency of Woman, was the advance of Labour, as the Colonel and many other thoughtful observers noted. He began, moreover, to see that behind the froth, the foam, and arrant nonsense of the extreme section of the movement, there was gathering a solid body of political philosophy. The masses were becoming organised--an army, no longer a rabble; with staff, regimental officers, plan of campaign, and an always growing discipline. And, whether you agreed with it or not, there was no denying that the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission was a political portent.

When Joe Burt came up to Undercliff, as he sometimes did, to smoke and chat with the Colonel, Mrs. Lewknor, a whole-hearted Tory, would attack him on the tyranny of Trade Unions with magnificent fury.

She made no impression on the engineer, stubborn as herself.

"War is war; and discipline is discipline. And in war it's the best disciplined Army that wins. A should have thought a soldier'd have realised that much. And this isna one o your _little_ wars, mind ye! This is the Greatest War that ever was or will be. And we workers are fighting for our lives."

"Discipline is one thing and tyranny is quite another!" cried Mrs. Lewknor, with flashing eyes.

The Colonel, who delighted in these pitched battles, sat and sucked his pipe on the fringe of the hub-bub; only now and then turning the cooling hose of his irony on the combatants.

"It is," he said in his detached way. "Discipline is pressure you exert on somebody else. And tyranny is pressure exerted by somebody else upon you."

And it was well he was present to introduce the leaven of humour into the dough of controversy, for Mrs. Lewknor found the engineer a maddening opponent. He was so cool, so logical, and above all so _dam_ provocative, as the little lady remarked with a snap of her still perfect teeth. He gave no quarter and asked none.

"I don't like him," she said with immense firmness to the Colonel after one of these encounters, standing in characteristic attitude, her skirt a little lifted, and one foot daintily poised on the fender-rail. "I don't trust him one inch."

"He is a bit mad-doggy," the other said, entwining his long legs. "But he is genuine."

Then two significant incidents cast the shadow of coming events on the screen of Time.

In July, 1911, Germany sent the _Panther_ to Agadir. There ensued a sudden first-class political crisis; and a panic on every Stock Exchange in Europe.

Even Ernie was moved. This man who, in spite of Joe Burt's teaching, took as yet little more account of political happenings than does the field-mouse of the manoeuvres of the reaping machine that will shortly destroy its home, crossed the golf links one evening and walked through Meads to find out what the Colonel thought.

"What's it going to be, sir?" he asked.

The other refused to commit himself.

"Might be anything," he said. "Looks a bit funny."

"Think the reservists will be called up?"

The old soldier evinced a curious restrained keenness as of a restive horse desiring to charge a fence and yet uncertain of what it will find on the far side. The Colonel, appraising him with the shrewd eyes of the man used to judging men, was satisfied.

"I shouldn't be surprised," was all he would say.

The old Hammer-man walked away along the cliff in the direction of Meads, and dropped down on to the golf links to go home by the ha-ha outside the Duke's Lodge. Then he swung away under the elms of Compton Place Road and turned into Saffrons Croft, where Ruth and the children were to have met him. He looked about for them in vain. The cricketers were there as always, the idlers strolling from group to group, but no Ruth. Ernie who had been looking forward to a quiet half-hour's play with little Alice and Susie on the turf in the shade of the elms before bed-time felt himself thwarted and resentful. Ruth as a rule was reliable; but of late, ever since his unkindness to her at the time of Susie's illness, three weeks since, he had marked a change in her, subtle perhaps but real. True she denied him nothing; but unlike herself, she gave without generosity, coldly and as a duty.

Nursing his grievance, he dropped down the steep hill under the Manor-house wall, past the Greys, into Church Street.

At the _Star_ a little group was gossiping, heads together. As he crossed the road they turned and looked at him with curiosity and in silence. Then a mate of his in the Transport Company called across,

"Sorry to hear this, Ern."

Ernie, thinking the man referred to the probabilities that he would be called back to the Army, and proud of his momentary fortuitous importance, shouted back with an air of appropriate nonchalance,

"That's all right, Guy. I wouldn't mind a spell with the old regiment again--that I wouldn't."

At the foot of Borough Lane he met Alf bustling along. His brother did not pause, but gave Ernie a searching look as he passed and said, "Watch it, Ern!"

Ern experienced a strange qualm as he approached his home. The door was open; nobody was about; there was not a sound in the house--neither the accustomed chirp of the children, nor the voice and movements of their mother.

The nightmare terrors that are wont to seize the sensitive at such times, especially if their conscience is haunted, laid hold of him. The emptiness, the silence appalled him. Death, so it seemed to his imaginative mind, reigned where the life and warmth and pleasant human busyness the woman and her children create had formerly been. Ever since that dark moment when he had let loose those foul and treacherous words, he had been uneasy in his mind; and yet, though usually the humblest of men, some stubborn imp of pride had possessed him and refused to allow him to express the contrition he genuinely felt. Perhaps the very magnitude of his offence had prevented him from making just amends.

Ruth on her side had said nothing; but she had felt profoundly the wound he had inflicted on her heart. So much her silence and unusual reserve had told him. Had he gone too far? Had her resentment been deeper than he had divined? Had he by his stupid brutality in a moment of animal panic and animal pain snapped the light chain that bound him to this woman he loved so dearly and knew so little? And none was more conscious than he how fragile was that chain. Ruth had never been immersed in love for him: she had never pretended to be. He knew that. She had been an affectionate and most loyal friend; and that was all.

On the threshold of his home he paused and stared down with the frightened snort of a horse suddenly aware of an abyss gaping at his feet.

For the first time in his married life the instant sense of his insecurity, always present in his subconsciousness, leapt into the light of day.

He gathered himself and marched upstairs as a man marches up the steps of the scaffold to pay the merited punishment for his crimes.

Then he heard a little noise. The door of the back room where the children, all but the baby, slept, was open. He peeped in. Susie was there, and Jenny with her. Hope returned to him. They were sitting up in bed still in outdoor clothes. Then he noticed that the baby's cot which stood of wont in the front room beside the big bed was here too. His sudden relief changed to anguish. He saw it all: _his_ children, the three of them, packed away together like fledgelings in a nest--for him to mother; and the mother-bird herself and _her_ child flown!

And he had brought his punishment on to his own head!

Susie waved a rag-doll at him and giggled.

"Neddy seeps with Susie!" she cried. "Susie nurse him! Mummy's gone with man!"

Brutally Ernie burst into the bedroom.

Two people stood beside the bed--his wife and a man; one on either side of it.

The man was Joe Burt; the woman Ruth.

On the bed between them lay little Alice, wan as a lily, her eyes closed apparently in death.

As he entered Joe raised a hushing finger.

"It's all right, Ern. She isna dead," said the engineer, comfortably.

Ruth, who was the colour of the child on the bed, had turned to him and now wreathed her arms about him.

"O Ern!" she cried in choking voice. "I _am_ that glad you've come."

For a moment she hung on him, dependent as he had never known her.

Then the child stirred, opened her eyes, saw Ernie at the foot of the bed, and smiled.

"Daddy," came her sweet little voice.

Her eyes fell on Joe; her lovely brow crumpled and she wailed,

"Don't want man."

"That's me," said Joe gently, and stole towards the door on tip-toe. Ern followed him out.

Mr. Trupp met them on the stairs.

At the outer door Joe gave a whispered account of what had happened. He had been crossing Saffrons Croft on the way up to see Ernie, when he had noticed Ruth and the children under the elms. Little Alice had seen him and come rushing through the players towards her friend. A cricket-ball had struck her on the forehead; and he had carried her home like a dead thing. Outside the cottage they had met Alf, and Ruth had asked him to go for Mr. Trupp.

Ernie ran back upstairs.

The old surgeon, bending over the child, gave him a reassuring glance.

"The child's all right," he said. "See to the mother!" and nodded to Ruth, who was holding on to the mantel-piece.

She was swaying. Ern gathered her to him. The whole of her weight seemed on him. His eyes hung on her face, pale beneath its dark crown as once, and only once, he had seen it before--that time she lay on the bed in Royal's dressing-room on the dawn of her undoing.

"Ruth," he called quietly.

Slowly she returned to life, opening her eyes, and drawing her hand across them.

"Is that you, Ern?" she sighed. "O, that's right. I come all over funny like. Silly! I'm all right now."

Ernie lowered her into a chair.

She sat a moment, gathering herself. Then she looked up at him--and remembered. She had been caught. Fear came over her, and she began to tremble.

He bent and kissed her.

"I'm sorry I said that, Ruth," he whispered in her ear.

A lovely light welled up into her eyes. At that moment she was nearer loving him than she had ever been. Regardless of Mr. Trupp's presence, she put a hand on either of his shoulders, and regarded him steadfastly, a baffling look on her face.

"Dear Ern!" she said. "Only I'd liefer you didn't say it again. See, it _do_ hurt from you."