CHAPTER XVII

THE CHALLENGE

Joe Burt had that passion for saving souls which is the hall-mark of the missionary in every age. Had he been a child of the previous generation he would have become a minister in some humble denomination and done his fighting from the pulpit, Bible in hand, amid the pot-banks of a Black Country township or the grimy streets of a struggling mining village in the North. As it was he appealed to the mass from the platform, and, a true fisher of men, flung his net about the individual in the class-room and at conferences.

Always seeking fresh fields to conquer, he had established a political footing now even in Tory Old Town. He had opened a discussion at the Institute, and actually given an address to the local Church of England's Men's Society on Robert Owen and early English Socialists; and he owed his triumph in the main to Bobby Chislehurst.

It is not without a pang that we part from the most cherished of our prejudices, and as Joe launched out into an always larger life it had come to him as something of a shock to find amongst the younger clergy some who preserved an attitude of firm and honest neutrality in the great battle to which he had pledged his life, and even a few, here and there, who took their stand on the side of the revolutionaries of the Spirit.

And such a one was Bobby.

Because of that, the young curate, who was up and down all day amid the humble dwellers in the Moot, innocent and happy as a child, was forgiven his solitary sin. For Bobby was a Scout-master, unashamed; and Joe Burt, like most of his battle-fellows of that date looked askance on the Boy-Scout Movement as one of the many props of militarist Toryism none the less effective because it was unavowed.

The Cherub, bold, almost blatant in sin, passed his happiest hours in a rakish sombrero, shorts, and a shirt bedizened with badges, tramping the Downs at the head of the Old Town Troop of devoted Boy-Scouts, lighting forbidden fires in the gorse, arguing with outraged farmers, camping in secluded coombes above the sea.

Up there on the hill, between sky and sea, Joe Burt, he too with his little flock of acolytes from the East-end, would sometimes meet the young shepherd on Saturday afternoons, trudging along, in his hand a pole in place of a crook.

"I forgive you Mr. Chislehurst, because I know you don't know what you're doing," he once said, gravely. "You're like the Israelite--without guile."

"The greatest of men have their little failings," giggled the sinner.

The two men, besides their political sympathies, had another point in common: they meant to save Ernie from himself. But Joe was no longer single-eyed. He saw now in Ernie two men--a potential recruit of value for the cause of Labour, and the man who possessed the woman he loved.

In the troubled heart of the engineer there began to be a confused conflict between the fisher of men and the covetous rival. Ernie was entirely unconscious of the tumult in the bosom of his friend of which he was the innocent cause. Not so Ruth.

She was rousing slowly now like a hind from her lair in the bracken, and sniffing the air at the approach of the antlered stranger. As he drew always nearer with stops and starts and dainty tread, and she became increasingly aware of his savage presence, his fierce intentions, she withdrew instinctively for protection towards her rightful lord. He grazed on the hill-side blind to his danger, blind to hers, blind to the presence of his enemy. Ernie's indeed was that innocence, that simplicity, which rouses in the heart of primitive woman not respect but pity; and in the rose-bud of pity, unless it be virgin white, lurks always the canker of contempt and the worm of cruelty.

Sometimes of evenings, as Ernie dozed before the fire in characteristic negligé, collarless, tie-less, somnolent as the cat, she watched him with growing resentment, comparing him to that Other, so much the master of himself and his little world.

"You _are_ slack," she said once, more to herself than him.

"I got a right to be, I reck'n, a'ter my day's work," he answered sleepily.

"Joe's not like that," she answered, wetting her thread. "He's spry, he is. Doos a long day's work too--and earns big money, Joe do. Brings home more'n twice as much what you do Saraday--and no wife nor children neether."

Ernie looked up and blinked. For a moment she hoped and feared she had stung him to eruption. Then he nodded off again. That was what annoyed Ruth. He would not flare. He was like his father. But qualities a woman admires in an old man she may despise in her lover. As she retired upon him she felt him giving way behind her. She was seeking support and finding emptiness.

And as that Other, shaggy-maned and mighty, stole towards her with his air of a conqueror, trampling the heather under-foot, the inadequacy of her own mate forced itself upon her notice always more.

Ruth, now thirty, was in the full bloom of her passionate womanhood; drawing with her far-flung fragrance the pollen-bearing bee and drawn to him. The girl who had been seized and overthrown by a passing brigand was a woman now who looked life in the face with steadfast eyes and meant to have her share of the fruits of it. The old Christian doctrines of patience, resignation, abnegation of the right to a full life, made no appeal to her. Richly dowered herself, she would not brook a starved existence. She who was empty yearned for fulness. After her catastrophe, itself the consequence of daring, Ern had come into her life and given her what she had needed most just then--rest, security, above all children. On that score she was satisfied now; and perhaps for that very reason her spirit was all the more a-thirst for adventure in other fields. She was one of those women who demand everything of life and are satisfied with nothing less. Like many such her heart was full of children but her arms were empty. For her fulfilment she needed children and mate. Some women were content with one, some with the other. Great woman that she was, nothing less than both could satisfy her demands; and her emptiness irked her increasingly.

Ruth's in fact was the problem of the unconquered woman--a problem at least as common among married women who have sought absorption and found only dissatisfaction as amongst the unmarried. Royal had seized her imagination for a moment; to Ernie she had submitted. But that complete immersion in a man and his work which is for a full woman love, she had never experienced, and longed to experience. After five years of marriage Ernie was still outside her, an accretion, a circumstance, a part of her environment, necessary perhaps as her clothes, but little more: for there was no purpose in his life.

And then just at the moment her lack was making itself most felt, the Man had come--a real man too, with a work; a pioneer, marching a-head, axe in hand, hewing a path-way through the Forest, and calling to her with ever increasing insistency to come out to him and aid him in his enterprise.

But always as she fingered in her dreams the bolts of the gate that, once opened, would leave her face to face with the importunate adventurer, there came swarming about her, unloosing her fingers as they closed upon the bolts, the children. And as one or other of them stirred or called out in sleep in the room above her, she would start, wake, and shake herself. Yet even the pull of the children was not entirely in one direction. There were four of them now; and they were growing, while Ernie's wages were standing still. That was one of the insistent factors of the situation. Were they too to be starved?

Often in her dim kitchen she asked herself that question. For if in her dreams she was always the mate of a man, she was in fact, and before all things, the mother of children. Who then was to save them and her?--Ernie? who was now little more than a shadow, an irritating shadow, wavering in the background of her life? If so, God help them all....

One evening she was in the little back-yard taking down the washing, when she heard a man enter the kitchen. She paid no heed. If it was Joe he could wait; if it was Ernie she needn't bother. Then she heard a second man enter, and instantly a male voice, harsh with challenge.

She went in hastily. There was nobody in the kitchen; but Ern was standing at the outer door. His back was to her, but she detected instantly in the hunch of his shoulders a rare combativeness.

"You know me," he was growling to somebody outside. "None of it now!"

He turned slowly, a dark look in his face which did not lighten when he saw her.

"Who was it, Ern?" she asked.

"Alf," he answered curtly.

That night as he sat opposite her she observed him warily as she worked and put to herself an astonishing question: Was there another Ernie?--an Ernie asleep she had not succeeded in rousing? Was the instrument sound and the fault in her, the player?

A chance phrase of Mrs. Trupp's now recurred to her.

"There's so much in Ernie--if you can only get it out."

The man opposite rose slowly, came slowly to her, bent slowly and kissed her.

"I ask your pardon if I was rough with you this evening, Ruth," he said. "But Alf!--he fairly maddens me. I feel to him as you shouldn't feel to any human being, let alone your own brother. You know what he's after?" he continued.

She stirred and coloured, as she lifted her eyes to his, dark with an unusual tenderness.

"Reckon so, Ern," she said.

He stood before the fire, for once almost handsome in his vehemence.

"Layin his smutty hands on you!" he said.

That little scene, with its suggestion of passion suppressed, steadied Ruth.... And it was time. That Other was always drawing nearer. And as she felt his approach, the savage power of him, his fierce virility, and was conscious of the reality of the danger, she resolved to meet it and fend it off. He should save Ernie instead of destroying her. And the way was clear. If this new intellectual life, the seeds of which the engineer had been sowing so patiently for so long in the unkempt garden of Ernie's spirit became a reality for him, a part of himself, growing in such strength as to strangle the weeds of carelessness, he was saved--so much Ruth saw.

"Once he was set alight to, all his rubbish'd go up in a flare, and he'd burn bright as aflame," she told the engineer once seizing her chance; and ended on the soft note of the turtle-dove--"There's just one could set him ablaze--and only one. And that's you, Joe."

At the moment Joe was sitting before the fire in characteristic attitude, hands deep in his pockets, legs stretched out, the toes of his solid boots in the air.

For a moment he did not answer. It was as though he had not heard. Then he turned that slow, bull-like glare of his full on her.

"A'm to save him that he may enjoy you--that's it, is it?" he said. "A'm to work ma own ruin."

It was the first time he had openly declared himself. Now that it had come she felt, like many another woman in such case, a sudden instant revulsion. Her dreams blew away like mist at the discharge of cannon. She was left with a sense of shock as one who has fallen from a height. At the moment of impact she was ironing, and glad of it. Baring her teeth unconsciously she pressed hard down on the iron with a little hiss.

"You've no call to talk to me like that, Joe. It's not right."

Deliberately he rose and turned his back.

"A don't know much," he growled in his chest, "but A do know that then."

Her heart thumped against her ribs.

"I thart you were straight, Joe," she said.

He warmed his hands at the blaze; and she knew he was grinning, and the nature of the grin.

"A thought so maself till A found A wasn't," he answered. "No man knows what's in him till he's tried--that's ma notion of it. Then he'll have a good few surprises, same as A've done. A man's a very funny thing when he's along of a woman he loves--that's ma experience."

Ruth trembled, and her hand swept to and fro with the graceful motions of a circling eagle over the child's frock she was ironing.

"You make me feel real mean," she said.

He kept a sturdy back to her.

"Then A make you feel just same gate as A feel maself."

There was a pause.

"You ought to marry, Joe--a man like you with all that nature in you."

"Never--only if so be A can get the woman A want."

She said with a gulp,

"And I thart you was Ern's friend!"

He looked up at the ceiling.

"So A am--trying to be."

There was another silence. Then the woman spoke again, this time with the hushed curiosity of a child.

"Are all men like that?"

"The main of em, A reck'n."

Her hand swooped rhythmically; and there was the gentle accompanying thud of the iron taking the table and circling smoothly about its work.

"My Ern isn't."

"Your Ern's got what he wants--and what A want too."

Boots brushing themselves on the mat outside made themselves heard. Then the door opened.

Joe did not turn.

"Coom in, Ern," he said. "Just right. Keep t' peace atween us. She and me gettin across each other as usual."