CHAPTER XXVI

THE AVALANCHE MOVES

The placard, seen by the Colonel, announced the opening of a new scene in the Irish tragedy.

The King had summoned a Conference at Buckingham Palace in order if possible to find a solution of the difficulty. When the Conference met the King opened it in person and, speaking as a man weighed down by anxiety, told the members that for weeks he had watched with deep misgivings the trend of events in Ireland. "To-day the cry of Civil War is on the lips of the most responsible of my people," he said; and had added, so Mr. Trupp told the Colonel, in words not reported in the Press, that the European situation was so ominous as imperatively to demand a solution of our domestic differences in order that the nation might present a solid front to the world.

"And I bet he knows," ended the old surgeon, as he said good-bye on the steps of the Manor-house.

"I bet he does," replied the Colonel. "Thank God there's one man in the country who's above party politics." He climbed thoughtfully on to the top of the bus outside the _Star_, and, as it chanced, found himself sitting beside Ernie, who was deep in his paper and began to talk.

"They ain't got it all their own way, then," he said, grimly. "I see the Irish Guards turned out and lined the rails and cheered Redmond as he came down Birdcage Walk back from the Conference."

"I don't like it," replied the Colonel gloomily. "Rotten discipline. The Army has no politics."

"What about the officers at the Curragh?" asked Ernie almost aggressively. "They begun it. Give the men a chance too."

"Two wrong things don't make a right," retorted the Colonel sharply.

Ernie got down at the station without a word. Was it an accident the Colonel, sensitive as a girl, asked himself? was it a deliberate affront? What was the world coming to? That man an old Hammer-man! One of Bobby Bermondsey yahoos wouldn't treat him so!

Indeed the avalanche was now sliding gradually down the mountain-side, gathering way as it went, to overwhelm the smiling villages sleeping peacefully in the valley.

Next day oppressed by imminent catastrophe, the Colonel, climbing Beau-nez in the afternoon to take up his habitual post of vigil by the flag-staff, found Joe Burt and Mr. Geddes already there.

Both men, he marked, greeted him almost sombrely.

"It looks to me very serious," he said. "Austria means to go for Serbia, that's clear; and if she does Russia isn't going to stand by and see Serbia swallowed up. What d'you think, Mr. Geddes?"

The other answered him on that note of suppressed indignation which characterised increasingly his utterance when he touched on this often discussed subject.

"I think Colonel, what I've thought all along," he answered: "that if we're in the eve of a European eruption the attitude of the officers of the British Army is perfectly _inexplicable_."

He was firm almost to ferocity.

"Hear! hear!" growed Joe.

"But they don't know, poor beggars!" cried the Colonel, exasperated yet appealing. He felt as he had felt throughout the controversy that he was fighting with his hands tied behind his back. "Do be just, Mr. Geddes. They are merely the playthings of the politicians. O, if you only knew the regimental officer as I know him! He's like that St. Bernard dog over there by the coast-guard station--the most foolish and faithful creature on God's earth. Smith pats him on the head and tells him he's a good dorg, and he'll straightway beg for the privilege of being allowed to die for Smith. What's a poor ignorant devil of a regimental officer quartered at Aldershot or the Curragh or Salisbury Plain likely to know of the European situation?"

The tall minister was not to be appeased.

"Ignorance seems to me a poor justification for insubordination in an Army officer," he said. "And even if one is to accept that excuse for the regimental officers, one can't for a man like the Director of Military Strategics, who is said to have specialised in war with Germany. Yet that is the man who has co-operated, to put it at the mildest, in arming a huge rebel force with guns from the very country he has always affirmed _we're bound to fight_. It's stabbing the Empire in the back, neither more nor less."

He was pale, almost dogmatic.

Then Joe barged in, surly and brutal.

"The whole truth is," he said, "that the officers of the British Army to-day don't know how to spell the word Duty. Havelock did. Gordon did. And all the world respected them accordingly. These men don't. They've put their party before their coontry as A've always said they would when the pinch came."

The Colonel was trembling slightly.

"If the test comes," he said, "we shall see."

"The test _has_ come," retorted the other savagely, "And we _have_ seen."

The Colonel walked swiftly away. In front of him half a mile from the flag-staff, he marked a man standing waist-deep in a clump of gorse. There was something so forlorn about the figure that the Colonel approached, only to find that it was Ernie, who on his side, seeing the other, quitted the ambush, and came slowly towards him. To the Colonel the action seemed a cry of distress. All his resentment at the incident on the bus melted away in a great compassion.

"She and me used to lay there week-ends when first we married," Ern said dreamily, nodding towards the gorse he had just left.

"And she and you will live _there_ for many happy years, I hope," replied the Colonel warmly, pointing towards the garage in the coombe beneath them.

Ernie regarded him inquiringly.

"What's that, sir?"

"Aren't you coming?"

"Where to?"

"My garage?"

Ernie did not understand and the Colonel explained.

"Didn't Mrs. Caspar tell you?"

"Ne'er a word," the other answered blankly.

The Colonel dropped down to Carlisle Road. There Mr. Trupp picked him up and drove him on to the club for tea. Fresh news from Ulster was just being ticked off on the tape. An hour or two before, a rebel unit, the East Belfast regiment of volunteers, some 5,000 strong, armed with Mausers imported from Germany, and dragging machine-guns warm from Krupp's, had marched through the streets of Belfast. The police had cleared the way for the insurgents; and soldiers of the King, officers and men, had looked on with amusement.

The Colonel turned away.

"Roll up the map of Empire!" he said. "We'd better send a deputation to Lajput Rai and the Indian Home Rulers and beg them to spare us a few baboos to govern us. Its an abdication of Government."

He went into the ante-room.

There was Stanley Bessemere back from Ulster once more. As usual he sat behind a huge cigar, retailing amidst roars of laughter to a sympathetic audience his exploits and those of his caracoling chief. The European situation had not overclouded him.

"There's going to be a Civil War and Smith and I are going to be in it. We shall walk through the Nationalists like so much paper. They've got no arms; and they've got no guts either." He laughed cheerily. "Bad men. Bad men."

The Colonel stood, an accusing figure in the door, and eyed the fair-haired giant with cold resentment.

"You know Kuhlmann from the German Embassy is over with your people in Belfast?" he asked.

The other waved an airy cigar.

"You can take it from me, my dear Colonel, that he's not," he answered.

"I'll take nothing of the sort from you," the Colonel answered acridly. "He's there none the less because he's there incognito."

The young man winced; and the Colonel withdrew.

"Jove!" he said. "I'd just like to know how far these beggars have trafficked in treason with Germany."

"Not at all," replied Mr. Trupp. "They've humbugged emselves into believing they're 'running great risks in a great cause,' as they say--or doing the dirty to make a party score, as you and I'd put it. That's all."

The Colonel walked home, oppressed. After supper, as he sat with his wife in the loggia, he told her of Ruth's strange secretiveness in the matter of the garage.

"There she is!" said Mrs. Lewknor quietly nodding over her work. Ruth, indeed, was strolling slowly along the cliff from the direction of the Meads in the gorgeous evening. Opposite the hostel a track runs down to the beach beneath. At that point she paused as though waiting for somebody; and then disappeared from view.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Lewknor spoke again in the same hushed voice.

"Here's the other!"

The Colonel looked up. Joe was coming rapidly along the cliff from the direction of Beau-nez. He too disappeared down the way Ruth had already taken.

The Colonel removed his glasses.

"I shall give em a quarter of an hour to make emselves quite comfortable," he muttered "and then--"

"Spy," said Mrs. Lewknor.

A moment later, Anne, the parlour-maid, showed Mr. Alfred Caspar on to the loggia.

The face of the Manager of Caspar's Syndicate was very long. Alf, cherishing the simple faith that the Colonel because he had been a soldier must be in the secrets certainly of the War Office and possibly of the Government, had come to ask what he thought of the European situation.

The Colonel was not reassuring, but he refused to commit himself. Alf turned away almost sullenly.

"See, it matters to me," he said. "I start Bank Holiday. Don't want no wars interfering with my Syndicate."

"It matters to us all a bit," replied the Colonel.

Alf departed aggrieved, and obviously suggesting that the Colonel was to blame. He walked away with downward eyes. Suddenly the Colonel saw him pause, creep to the cliff-edge, and peep over. Then he came back to the hostel in a stealthy bustle.

"Go and look for yourself then, sir, if you don't believe me!" he cried in the tone of one rebuffing an unjust accusation. "You're a Magistrate. Police ought to stop it I say. Public 'arlotry I call it."

The Colonel's face became cold and very lofty. "No, Caspar. I don't do that sort of thing," he said.

Alf, muttering excuses, departed. The Colonel watched him walk along the dotted coast-guard track and disappear round the shoulder of the coombe. Then he rose and strolled out to meet Ernie who was approaching.

As he did so he heard voices from the beach beneath him and peeped over. Ruth, on her hands and knees amid the chalk boulders at the foot of the cliff, was smoothing the sand and spreading something on it.

A few yards away Joe was standing at the edge of the tide, which was almost high, flinging pebbles idly into the water. Some earth dislodged from the Colonel's feet and made a tiny land-slide. The woman on her hands and knees in the growing dusk beneath looked up and saw the man standing above her. She made no motion, kneeling there; facing him, fighting him, mocking him.

"Having a nice time together?" he asked genially.

"Just going to, thank-you kindly," Ruth replied and resumed her occupation of sweeping with her hands.

The Colonel turned to find Ernie standing beside him and burning his battle-flare.

"Lucky I see you coming, sir," he said, trembling still. "Else I might ha done him a mischief."

"Who?"

"Alf. Insultin her and me. Met him just along back there in Meads by the _Ship_."

"Go easy, Caspar," said the Colonel quietly. "I remember that left-handed punch of yours of old. It's a good punch too; but keep it for the enemies of your country."

Ernie was hugging a big biscuit-box under his arm.

"What you got there?" asked the other.

Ernie grinned a thought sheepishly.

"It's Joe's birthday," he said. "We are having a bit of a do under the cliff."

He hovered a moment as though about to impart a confidence to the other; and then disappeared down the little track to the beach beneath at the trot, his shoulders back, and heels digging in, carrying a slither of chalk with him.

"'Come into my parlour,' said the spider to the fly," muttered the Colonel as he turned into Undercliff. "Poor fly!"