CHAPTER XXX

THE END OF THE WORLD

The next day was Bank Holiday; and such a holiday as no living man had known or would ever know again. Half the world had already tumbled into hell; and the other half was poised breathless on the brink, awaiting the finger-push that should send it too roaring down to death.

On that brilliant summer day nations crouched in the stubble like coveys of partridges beneath the shadow of some great hawk hovering far away in the blue.

A silence like a cloud enveloped England.

The tocsin was about to sound that was to call millions of rosy lads from their mothers, splendid youths from their girls, sober middle-aged men away from their accustomed place in church and chapel, from the office stool, from the warm companionable bed and the lovely music of children's voices, to strange destinies in unknown seas, on remote deserts, beside alien rivers; calling them in a voice that was not to be denied to lay their bones far from the village church-yard and the graves of innumerable ancestors, in rotting swamps, on sun-bleached mountains, with none to attend their obsequies save the nosing jackal and raw-necked vulture.

Early in the morning the Colonel walked across to Old Town to see Bobby Chislehurst, and put the curb on him if possible; for the _Daily Citizen_ had come out with a full-page appeal to lovers of peace to attend an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar-square.

On his way the Colonel gleaned straws of news; and the gleaning was not hard. The most reserved were expansive; the most exclusive sociable. For the moment all barriers of class were down. By the time he had reached the _Star_ he was _au courant_ with all the happenings, local and general.

The Archdeacon who, when he put his snuff-box aside, and took the gloves off, could be really moving, had from his hill thundered a magnificent call to arms--"purely pagan, of course." Mr. Trupp, whom he met, told the Colonel, "but fine for all that." Mr. Geddes in the plain had answered back in an appeal which had moved many to tears on behalf of Him, Whose sad face on the Cross looks down on This after the passion of a thousand years.

The Fleet had gone to war-stations; the Territorials had been mobilised. Haldane had returned to the War Office.

As the Colonel dropped down the steep pitch to Church-street, under the chesnuts of the Manor-house garden, he met a couple of toddlers climbing the hill shepherded by an efficient little maiden of seven or eight, who smiled at him with familiar eyes.

"Hullo, little Alice," he said. "Where you off to so busily with your little flock?"

"Saffrons Croft for the day--me and my little ones," she answered, not without a touch of self-importance. "I got the dinner here. Dad and Mother's taking baby a drive on the bus to see Granny at Auston."

She turned and waved to her mother, who was standing at the top of Borough Lane with Ernie, amongst a little group opposite the _Star_, where was one of the char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate picking up passengers from the Moot.

The Colonel walked down the hill towards them. Ruth, seeing him approach, climbed to her place on the char-a-banc. Ernie handed little Ned to her, and then turned to meet the Colonel.

"Givin Alf the benefit," he said, with a grin. "Backin the family and baptizin the bus. Goin the long drive over the hill to Friston and Seaford; then up the valley to Auston. Dinner there. And home by Hailsham and Langney in the evening.--I wanted her to ask Joe. But she wouldn't. Fickle I call her."

The Colonel glanced up; but Ruth steadfastly refused to meet his eye.

"I suppose one wants the family to one-salf some-times, even a workin-woman doos," she muttered.

And the Colonel saw that Ern had made his remark to show that the tension between him and his wife, so marked yesterday, had eased.

"My wife's right," he thought. "Caspar is a gentleman. Blood _does_ tell."

Just then Alf came down the steps of the Manor-house opposite, looking smug and surly. He crossed the road to the char-a-banc and said a word to the driver.

Ruth leaned over, glad of the diversion.

"Ain't you comin along then, Alf?" she asked quietly.

"Caspar's my name," the Managing Director answered, never lifting his eyes to his tormentor.

The young woman bent down roguishly, disregarding Ern's warning glances.

"Not to your own sister, Alfie," she answered, demure and intimate.

They were mostly Old Town folk on the char-a-banc, many from the Moot; and they all tittered, even the driver.

Alf stood back in the road and said deliberately, searching with his eye the top of the bus.

"Where is he, then?"

Ern flashed round on him.

"Who?"

Alf sneered.

"You!--You're only her husband!" and decamped swiftly.

Ernie did not move. He stood with folded arms, rather white, following his retreating brother with his eyes. Then he said to the Colonel quietly,

"Yes, sir. That's Alf. Now you know."

"I'm beginning to," said the Colonel.

"And time too," came Ruth's voice cold and quivering.

In the cool of the evening the Colonel walked down Terminus Road.

Outside the office of Caspar's Road-Touring Syndicate Alf was standing, awaiting the return of his argosies. He was scanning the evening paper and still wore the injured and offended air of one who has a personal grievance against his Creator and means to get his own back some day.

"Any news, sir?" he asked.

The Colonel stopped.

"Germany sent Belgium an ultimatum last night demanding right of way. And the King of Belgium took the field this morning."

"Then he ought to be shot," snarled Alf. "Provoking of em on, I call it."

The Colonel walked on to the East-end, his eyes about him, and heart rising.

The country was facing the situation with dignity and composure.

The streets were thronged. Everywhere men and women gathered in knots and talked. There was no drunken-ness, no rioting, no Jingo manifestations--and that though it was August Bank Holiday. The gravity of the situation had sobered all men.

The Colonel passed on into Seagate to find the hero of Sunday afternoon's battle.

Joe Burt stood in his shirt-sleeves in the door of his lodgings with folded arms and cocked chin. His pipe was in his mouth and he was sucking at it fiercely with turned-in lips and inflated nostrils.

The engineer was clearly on the defensive; the Colonel saw it at once and knew why. On the main issue Joe had proved fatally, irretrievably wrong. But he had been "on the platform" now for twenty years. In other words he was a politician, and in the Colonel's view no politician ever admitted that he was wrong. To cover his retreat he would almost certainly resort to the correct tactical principle of a counter-offensive.

"That was a great speech of yours, Burt," the Colonel began.

The engineer sucked and puffed unmoved.

"We must fight," he said. "There's no two ways about it. The Emperors have asked for it; and they shall have it. No more crowned heads! We've had enoof o yon truck!"

In his elemental mood accent had coarsened, phrase become colloquial. He took his pipe from his mouth.

"Sitha!--this'll be a fight to a finish atween the Old Order and the New--atween what you stand for and what A do."

"And what do I stand for?" asked the Colonel.

"Imperialism--Capitalism--call it what you will. It's the domination of the workers by brute force."

The Colonel turned a quiet eye upon him.

"Is that fair?" he asked.

The engineer stuffed his pipe back into his mouth.

"Happen not of you. Of your class, yes." He felt he had been on dangerous ground and came off it. "_We_ shall fight because we must," he said. "What about you?"

He was making a direct offensive now, and turned full face to his adversary.

"Us?" asked the Colonel puzzled.

"Yes," retorted the other. "The officers of the Army?--shall you fight?"

The Colonel looked away.

Joe eyed him shrewdly.

"Last time you were asked to, you refused," he remarked. "Said you'd resign rather. One General said if there was war he'd fight against England. It was a piece in the _Daily Telegraph_. A've got it pasted in ma Ammunition Book. Coom in and see!"

The Colonel did not move.

"I think the officers will be there or thereabouts all right if the're wanted," he said.

Joe appeared slightly mollified.

"Well, you came out against the railway-men in 1911," he said. "A will say that for you. A wasn't sure you'd feel same gate when it coom to Emperors."

They strolled back together to Pevensey Road; and for the first time the Colonel actively disliked the man at his side. That wind of the spirit which had blown through the engineer yesterday purging him of his dross had passed on into the darkness. To-day he was both politically dishonest and sexually unclean.

In fact his life that had been rushing down the mountain like a spate with extraordinary speed and power, confined between narrow banks, just as it was emerging at the estuary into the sea had met suddenly the immense weight of the returning ocean-tide, advancing irresistible--to be swamped, diverted, turned back on itself. This man once so strong, of single purpose, and not to be deflected from it by any human power, was now spiritually for all his bluff a tumbling mass of worry and confusion and dirty yellow foam....

The pair had passed into the main thoroughfare.

"What about that woman?" asked the Colonel moodily.

Joe was chewing his pipe-stem.

"What woman'll that be?"

"Why the one you were talking about to me on Saturday night,--whether you should bolt with her or not."

Joe halted on the kerb-stone and regarded the traffic imperturbably.

"A know nowt o no such woman," he said.

The Colonel glanced at him. Just then he heard the sound of a horn and looking back saw one of the new motor-char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate returning crowded to the brim. A man stood on the step with a horn and tootled. Ernie sat in front with Ruth, the boy in her lap asleep against her breast. The Colonel marked the strength and tranquillity of her pose, her arms clasped around the sleeping child. Father, mother, and child were profoundly at peace; one with each other, so it seemed to him, one with life. Joe took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed with the stem.

"Yon's her," he said, with stunning impudence.

"I know that then," answered the Colonel. "Your own friend's wife."

Ernie who had seen Joe waved and winked and nudged Ruth. She could not or would not see. Joe waved back casually. Then he turned to the Colonel with a Silenus-like twinkle, his little black eyes of a bear glittering.

"He'll have to go now," he said, gurgling like an amused baby.

The Colonel looked him in the eyes. "Devil!" he said.

The engineer peeped up at him with something of the chuckle of the young cuckoo.

"Ah, don't you talk, Colonel! I'm not the only one."

"What you mean?" fiercely.

"What you told me Saturday night."

"I never betrayed my pal, whatever else."

"You would ha done," remorselessly. "Only you lost your nerve at the last moment. That's nothing to boast on."

The man's brazen cynicism revolted the Colonel.

"Ah, you don't know me," he muttered.

"A know maself," the other answered. "And that's the same."

The Colonel felt as feels a man who watches the casual immoralities of a big and jolly dog. Then he came to himself and broke away, firing a last shot over his shoulder.

"I suppose you'll wait till he has gone," he sneered.

"A doubt," the other answered, cool and impudent to the last.

The Colonel tramped home, sore at heart.

Opposite the Wish he stumbled on Mr. Trupp, who brought him up with a jerk.

"There's going to be a Coalition Government," the old surgeon told his friend. "Lloyd George and the pacifists are leaving the Cabinet; and Smith and Carson and Bonar Law coming in."

Just then Stanley Bessemere rushed by in a powerful car. He waved to the two men, neither of whom would see him.

"You know what he's after?" said Mr. Trupp.

"What?" asked the Colonel.

"Spreading it round that Haldane's holding up the Expeditionary Force."

The Colonel struck the ground.

"My God!" he cried. "Party politics even at this hour!"

The other shrugged.

"They've got to find a scape goat or take it in the neck themselves," he said.

The Colonel walked home in the twilight along the deserted brick-walk, under the tamarisk bank stirring gracefully in the evening breeze. At the extreme end of the bricks where a path climbs up a chalk-pit to Holywell he came on a tall dark solitary figure looking out over the sea.

It was Mr. Geddes.

The old soldier approached him quietly and touched his arm.

"Well, Mr. Geddes," he said gently. "What you thinking of?"

The tall man turned his fine face.

"I was thinking about a carpenter," he said.

"Of Nazareth?"

"No, of Berlin. Of Papa Schumacher and that boy Joseph, who was trying so hard to be an English sport--and black-eyed Joanna and the old Mutter."

The Colonel swallowed.

"Let's shake hands, Geddes," he said.

"With all my heart, Colonel," the other answered.

Then the old soldier went up the slope laboriously, his hands upon his knees.

His wife was waiting him on the cliff, a little figure, distinguished even in the dusk, about her shoulders the scarlet cape that had been the gift of a Rajput Princess.

"I pray it will be all right," he said.

"I pray so," the little lady answered.

War meant ruin for her and the destruction of all her hopes for Toby.--And her own Jock!--but she never wavered.