CHAPTER XXXII

THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT

Ernie clattered into the kitchen at a busy trot, and stumbled upstairs without a word to his wife at the sink.

There was such an air of stir and secret purposefulness about him that Ruth followed him up to the bedroom. There she found him on his knees in a litter of things, packing a bundle frantically.

A dish-cloth in her hand, she watched his efforts.

"Where away then?" she asked.

"Berlin this journey. Hand me them socks!"

Her eyes leapt. "Is it war?"

"That's it."

She sat down ghastly, wrapping her hands in her apron as if they had been mutilated and she wished to hide the stumps.

Men abuse the Army when they are in it and take their discharge at the earliest possible moment; but when the call comes they down tools with avidity, and leaving the mill, the mine, the shunting yard, and the shop, they troop back to the colours with the lyrical enthusiasm of those who have re-discovered youth on the threshhold of middle-age.

Ern, you may be sure, was no exception to the rule.

Packing and unpacking his bundle on his knees, he was busy, happy, important. But there was no such desperate hurry after all: for he did not join the crowds which thronged the recruiting stations in those first days: he waited for the Colonel to arrange matters so that he could join his old battalion at Aldershot direct.

Ruth watched him with deep and jealously guarded eyes in which wistfulness and other disturbing emotions met and mingled.

Once only she put to him the master question.

"What about us, Ern?"

He was standing at the time contemplating the patient and tormented bundle.

"Who?"

"Me and the children."

"There's one Above," said Ernie. "He'll see to you."

"He don't most in general not from what I've seen of it," answered Ruth. "What if He don't?"

There was a moment's pause. Then Ern dropped a word as a child may drop a stone in a well.

"Joe."

Ruth caught her breath.

In those days Ernie grew on her as a mountain looming out of the dawn-mist grows on the onlooker. Joe did not even come to see her; and she was glad. For all his virility and bull-like quality, now that the day of battle had come, Ern was proving spiritually the bigger man.

And his very absorbtion in the new venture appealed to Ruth even while it wounded. Ern had been "called" as surely as Clem Woolgar, the bricklayer's labourer, her neighbour in the Moot, who testified every Sunday afternoon in a scarlet jersey at the _Star_ corner to the clash of cymbals. Clem it was true, spoke of his call as Christ; to Ernie it went by the name of country. In Ruth's view the name might differ but the Thing was the same. A voice had come to Ern which had spoken to him as she had not, as the children had not. Because of it he was a new man--"converted," as Clem would say, prepared to forsake father and mother, and wife, and child, and follow, follow.

England was calling; and he seemed deaf to every other voice. She seemed to have gone clean out of his life; but the children had not--she noticed it with a pang of jealousy and a throb of hope. For each of the remaining nights after dark, he went round their cots. She was not to know anything about that, she could see, from the stealthy way in which he stole upstairs when her back was supposed to be turned. But the noises in the room overhead, the murmur of his voice, the shuffling of his feet as he got up from the bedsides betrayed his every action.

On the third night, as he rejoined her, she rose before him in the dusk, laying down her work.

"Anything for me too, Ern," she asked humbly--"the mother of em?"

"What d'you mean?" he asked almost fiercely.

"D'you want me, Ern?"

He turned his back on her with an indifference that hurt far more than any brutality, because it signified so plainly that he did not care.

"You're all right," he said enigmatically, and went out.

He could ask anything of her now, and she would give him all, how gladly! But he asked nothing.

In another way, too, he was torturing her. It was clear to her that he meant to do his duty by her and the children--to the last ounce; and nothing more. He cared for their material wants as he had never done before. All his spare moments he spent handying about the house, hammer in hand, nails in mouth, doing little jobs he had long promised to do and had forgotten; putting little Ned's mail-cart to rights, screwing on a handle, setting a loose slate. She followed him about with wistful eyes, holding the hammer, steadying the ladder, and receiving in return a few off-hand words of thanks. She did not want words: she wanted him--himself.

Then news came through, and he was straightway full of mystery and bustle.

"Join at Aldershot to-morrow. Special train at two," he told Ruth in the confidential whisper beloved of working-men. "Don't say nothing to nobody." As though the news, if it reached the Kaiser, would profoundly affect the movements of the German armies.

That evening Ernie went up to the Manor-house to say good-bye.

Mrs. Trupp was far more to him than his god-mother: she was a friend known to him from babyhood, allied to him by a thousand intimate ties, and trusted as he trusted no one else on earth, not even his dad.

Now he unbosomed to her the one matter that was worrying him on his departure--that he should be leaving Ruth encumbered with debt.

Mrs. Trupp met him with steady eyes. It was her first duty, the first duty of every man, woman and child in the nation to see that the fighting-men went off in good heart.

"You needn't worry about Ruth," she said, quietly. "She'll have the country behind her. All the soldiers' wives will."

Ernie shook his head doubtfully.

"Ah, I don't hold much by the country," he said.

The lady's grave face, silver-crowned, twinkled into sudden mischievous life. She rippled off into the delicious laughter he loved so dearly.

"I know who's been talking to you!" she cried.

Ernie grinned sheepishly.

"Who then?"

"Mr. Burt."

Ernie admitted the charge.

"If you don't trust the country, will you trust Mr. Trupp and me?" the other continued.

Ernie rose with a sigh of relief.

"Thank you kindly, 'm," he said. "That's what I come after."

Ernie went on to Rectory Walk, to find that his mother too had joined the crucified. In the maelstrom of emotion that in those tragic hours was tossing nations and individuals this way and that, the hard woman had been humbled at last. Stripped to the soul, she saw herself a twig hurled about in the sea of circumstance she could no more control than a toy-boat a-float on the Atlantic can order the tides. No longer an isolated atom hard and self-contained, she was one of a herd of bleating sheep being driven by a remorseless butcher to the slaughter-house. And the first question she put to him revealed the extent of the change that had been wrought in her.

"What about Ruth?" she asked.

It was the only occasion on which his mother had named his wife to Ern during his married life.

"She's all right, mother," Ernie replied. "She's plenty of friends."

"Mrs. Trupp," jealously. "Well, why don't ye say so? What about the children?"

"They'll just stay with their mother," answered Ernie.

"I could have em here if she was to want to go out to work," Anne said grudgingly; and must add, instigated by the devil who dogged her all her life--"Your children, of course."

Ernie answered quite simply:

"No, thank-you, mother," and continued with unconscious dignity--"They're all my children."

A gleam of cruelty shone in his mother's eyes.

"She's behind with her rent. You know that? And Alf's short. He says he's dropped thousands over his Syndicate. Ruined in his country's cause, Alf says."

"If he's dropped thousands a few shillings more or less won't help him," said Ernie curtly.

"And yet he'll want em," Anne pursued maliciously. "He was sayin so only last night. _Every penny_, he said."

"He may want," retorted Ernie. "He won't get."

His mother made a little grimace.

"If Alf wants a thing he usually gets it."

Ernie flashed white.

"Ah," he said. "We'll see what dad says."

It was a new move in the family game, and unexpected. Anne was completely taken a-back. She felt that Ernie was not playing fair. There had always been an unwritten family law, inscribed by the mother on the minds of the two boys in suggestible infancy, that dad should be left outside all broils and controversies; that dad should be spared unpleasantness, and protected at any cost.

She was shocked, almost to pleading.

"You'd never tell him!"

"He's the very one I would tell then!" retorted Ernie, rejoicing in his newly-discovered vein of brutality.

"Only worry him," she coaxed.

"He ain't the only one," Ern answered. "I'm fairly up against it, too." Grinning quietly at his victory, he turned down the passage to the study.

His father was sitting in his favourite spot under the picture of his ancestor, watching the tree-tops blowing in the Rectory garden opposite. The familiar brown-paper-clad New Testament was on his knee.

Ernie marked at once that here was the one tranquil spirit he had met since the declaration of war. And this was not the calm of stagnation. Rather it was the intense quiet of the wheel which revolves so swiftly that it appears to be still.

He drew his chair beside his father's.

"What d'you make of it all, dad?" he asked gently.

The old man took his thumb out of his New Testament, and laid his hand upon his son's.

"_And behold there was a great earthquake,_" he quoted. "_For the Angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door of the Tomb._"

Ernie nodded thoughtfully. For the first time perhaps the awful solemnity of the drama in which he was about to play his part came home to him in all its overwhelming power.

"Yes, dad," he said deeply. "Only I reck'n it took some rolling."

The old man gripped and kneaded the hand in his just as Ruth would do in moments of stress.

"True, Boy-lad," he answered. "But it had to be rolled away before the Lord could rise."

Ernie assented.

Hand-in-hand they sat together for some while. Then Ernie rose to go. In the silence and dusk father and son stood together on the very spot where fourteen years before they had said good-bye on Ernie's departure for the Army. The Edward Caspar of those days was old now; and the boy of that date a matured man, scarred already by the wars of Time.

"It won't be easy rolling back the stone, Boy-lad," said the old man. "But they that are for us are more than they that are against us."

It was not often that Ernie misunderstood his father; but he did now.

"Yes," he said. "And they say the Italians are coming in too."

"The whole world must come in," replied the other, his cheeks rosying faintly with an enthusiasm which made him tremble. "And we must all push together." He made a motion with his hand--"English and Germans, Russians and Austrians, and roll it back, back, back! and topple it over into the abyss. And then the Dawn will break on the risen Lord."

Ernie went out into the passage. His mother in the kitchen was waiting for him. She looked almost forlorn, he noticed.

"Give me a kiss, Ern," she pleaded in sullen voice that quavered a little. "Don't let's part un-friends just now--you and me--After all, you're my first."

Ernie's eyes filled. He took her in his arms, this withered old woman, patted her on the back, kissed her white hair, her tired eyelids.

"There!" he said. "I should knaw you arter all these years, Mum. Always making yourself twice the terror you are--and not meaning it."