CHAPTER XXXIV

THE STATION

Next day Ernie was to join up.

After dinner he kissed Susie and Jenny, gave them each a penny, and despatched them to play. Hand in hand they stamped away to Motcombe Garden with clacking heels, roguish backward glances and merry tongues.

Then he asked Ruth to go into the backyard. Left alone with Alice he lifted her on to the kitchen-table, took her hands in his, and looked gravely into her eyes.

"I trust you to look after mother and the little ones when I'm gone, Lal," he said.

The little maid, swift and sympathetic as her mother, nodded at him, nibbling her handkerchief, her heart too full for words. Then she raised her crumpled face, that at the moment was so like her mother's, for a last kiss, and as she wreathed her arms round his neck she whispered,

"You are my daddy, aren't you, daddy?"

"Of course I am," he murmured, and lifted her down.

She ran away swiftly, not trusting herself to look back.

A moment later Ruth entered the kitchen, slowly and with downcast eyes. He was standing before the fire, awaiting her.

"Ruth," he said quietly. "I've tried to do well by your child; I'll ask you to do the same by mine."

She came to him and hung about his neck, riven with sobs, her head on his shoulder.

"O Ern!" she cried. "And is that your last word to me?"

She lifted anguished eyes to him and clung to him.

"I love them all just the same, only we been through so much together, she and me. That's where it is."

His arms were about her and he was stroking her.

"I knaw that then," he said, husky himself.

"See, they got you and each other and all the world," Ruth continued. "Little Alice got nobody only her mother."

"And me," said Ernie.

She steadied and drew her hand across rain-blurred eyes.

"Ern," she said, deeply. "I do thank you for all your lovin kindness to that child. I've never forgot that all through--whatever it seemed."

"She's mine just as well as yours," he answered, smiling and uncertain. "Always has been. Always will be."

She pressed her lips on his with a passion that amazed him.

Then he took the boy from the cot and rocked him. The tears poured down his face. This, then, was War!--All his light-heartedness, his detachment, had gone. He was a husband and a father torn brutally away from the warmth and tenderness of the home that was so dear to him, to be tossed into the arena among wild beasts who not long since had been men just like himself, and would be men still but for the evil power of their masters to do by them as his masters had done by him. Then he put the child back and turned to say good-bye to Ruth.

The passionate wife of a few minutes since had changed now into the mother parting from her schoolboy. She took him to her heart and hugged him.

"You'll be back before you know," she told him, cooing, comforting, laughing through her tears. "They all say it'll be over soon, whatever else. A great war like this ca'an't go on. Too much of it, like."

"Please God, so," said Ernie. "It's going to be the beginning of a new life for me--for you--for all of us, as Joe says.... God keep you till we meet again."

Then he walked swiftly down the street with swimming eyes.

The neighbours, who were all fond of Ern, stood in their doors and watched him solemnly.

He was going into _IT_.

Like as not they would never see him again.

Many of the women had handkerchieves to their lips, as they watched, and over the handkerchieves their eyes showed awed. Some turned away, hands to their hearts. Others munched their aprons and wept. A mysterious rumour in the deeps of them warned them of the horror that had him and them and the world in its grip.

They could not understand, but they could feel.

And this working man with the uncertain mouth and blurred eyes--this man whose walk, whose speech, whose coal-grimed face, and the smell even of his tarry clothes, was so familiar to them--was the symbol of it all.

A big navvy came sheepishly out of the last house in the row and stopped him. It was the man who had insulted Ernie in the _Star_ six months before.

"I ask your pardon, Ern," he said. "I didn't mean what I said."

Ern shook hands. Years before the two had been at school together under Mr. Pigott.

"It wasn't you, Reube," he said. "I knaw who spread the dung you rolled in."

"I shan't be caught again," replied the other. "That's a sure thing."

Ern jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

"Keep an eye to her!" he whispered.

"You may lay to it," the big man answered.

At the corner a young girl of perhaps fifteen ran out suddenly, flung herself into his arms, kissed him, with blind face lifted to the sky, and was gone again.

At the bottom of Borough Lane a troop of Boy-Scouts in slouch hats, knickers, and with staves, drawn up in order, saluted. A tiny boy in his mother's arms blew him shy kisses. Just outside the yard of the Transport Company his mates, who had been waiting him, came out and shook him by the hand. Most were very quiet. As he passed on the man among them he disliked most called for three cheers. A ragged noise was raised behind him.

At the _Star_ corner a beery patriot, wearing the South African medals, mug to his lips, hailed him.

"Gor bless the Hammer-men!" he cried. "Gor bless the old ridgiment!" and tried to lure Ernie into the familiar bar-parlour.

"Not me, thank ye!" cried Ernie stoutly. "This ain't a beano, my boy! This is War!"

As he rounded the corner he glanced up at the sturdy old church with its tiny extinguisher spire, standing on the Kneb behind him, four-square to the centuries, the symbol of the rough and ready England which at that moment was passing away, with its glories and its shames, into the limbo of history.

At the station all that was most representative in Beachbourne had gathered to see the reservists off.

The Mayor was there in his chain of office; the Church Militant in the person of the Archdeacon; Mr. Glynde, the senior member for Beachbourne, middle-aged, swarthy, his hair already white, making a marked contrast to his junior colleague, the fair-haired young giant, talking to the Archdeacon.

The old gentleman looked ghastly; his face colourless save for the shadows of death which emphasised his pallor. Then he saw Bobby Chislehurst busy among the departing soldiers, and beckoned him austerely.

"I thought you were a pacifist, Chislehurst!" he said, his smile more kindly and less histrionic than usual.

"So I am, sir," answered Bobby, brightly. "But there are several of our men from the Moot going off. It's not their fault they've got to go, poor beggars!"

"Their _fault_!" cried the Archdeacon. "It's their privilege." He added less harshly, "We must all stand by the country now, Chislehurst."

"Yes, sir," said Bobby. "I shan't give the show away," and he bustled off.

Then the Colonel stalked up.

"Well, Archdeacon, what d'you make of it all?" he asked, curious as a child to gather impressions.

The Archdeacon drew himself up.

"Just retribution," he answered in voice that seemed to march. "If a nation will go a-whoring after false gods in the wilderness what can you expect? Gahd does not forget."

The Colonel listened blankly, his long neck elongated like a questing schoolboy.

"What you mean?" he asked.

"Welsh Disestablishment Bill," the other answered curtly.

Mr. Trupp now entered the station, and the Colonel, who though quiet outwardly, was in a condition of intense spiritual exaltation that made him restless as dough in which the yeast is working, joined his pal. He had cause for his emotion. The Cabinet had stood. The country had closed its ranks in a way that was little short of a miracle. All men of all parties had rallied to the flag. In Dublin the Irish mob which had provoked the King's Own Scottish Borderers to bloody retaliation, had turned out and cheered the battalion as it marched down to the transports for embarkation.

"Well, we're roused at last," said the Colonel, as he looked round on that humming scene.

"Yes," answered Mr. Trupp. "It's taken a bash in the face to do it though."

"Should be interesting," commented the Colonel, hiding his emotion behind an air of detachment. "An undisciplined horde of men who believe themselves to be free against a disciplined mass of slaves."

Just then Mr. Pigott approached. The old Nonconformist had about him the air of a boy coming up to the desk to take his punishment. He was at once austere and chastened.

"Well, Colonel," he said. "You were right."

The Colonel took the other's hand warmly.

"Not a bit of it!" he cried. "That's the one blessed thing about the whole situation. _We've all been wrong_. I believed in the German menace--till a month or two ago. And then...."

"That's it," said Mr. Trupp. "We must all swing together, and a good job too. If there's any hanging done Carson and Bonar Law, Asquith and Haldane, Ramsay Macdonald and Snowden ought to grace the same gallows seems to me. And when we've hanged our leaders for letting us in we must hang ourselves for allowing them to let us in."

The old surgeon had turned an awkward corner with the gruff tact peculiar to him; and Mr. Pigott at least was grateful to him.

"You've heard Carson's committed suicide?" he said. "Shot himself this morning on St. Stephen's Green."

"Not a bit of it," replied the Colonel. "He's far too busy holding up recruiting in Ulster while he haggles for his terms, to do anything so patriotic."

"Besides why should he?" interposed a harsh and jeering voice. "Treason's all right if you're rich and powerful. Jim Larkin got six months a year ago for sedition and inciting to violence. What'll these chaps get for provoking the greatest war that ever was or will be? I'll tell ye, _Fat jobs_. Where'll they be at the end of the war? under the sod alongside the millions of innocent men who've had to pay the price of their mistakes? No fear! They'll be boolgin money, oozin smiles, fat with power, and big-bellied wi feedin on the carcases of better men."

It was Joe Burt who had come up with Mr. Geddes.

The Colonel, giving his shoulder to the engineer, turned to the tall minister, who was stiff, a little self-conscious, and very grave.

Possessed of a far deeper mind than Mr. Pigott, Mr. Geddes was still haunted by doubts. Were we wholly in the right?

The Colonel, intuitive as a girl, recognised the other's distress, and guessed the cause of it.

"Well, Mr. Geddes," he said gently. "Evil has triumphed for the moment at least."

"Yes," replied the other. "Liebknecht's shot, they say."

"All honour to him!" said the Colonel. "He was the one man of the lot who stood to his guns when the pinch came. All the rest of the Social Democrats stampeded at the first shot."

Joe Burt edged up again. Like Mr. Pigott he had made his decision irrevocably and far sooner than the old Nonconformist; but there was a vengeful background still to his thoughts. He refused to forget.

"I hear the Generals are in uproarious spirits," he said.

"One of them," answered the Colonel quietly.

"They won't pay the price," continued Joe. "They'll make--trust them. _There's_ the man they'll leave to take the punishment they've brought on the coontry." He nodded to Ernie who was busy with some mates extracting chocolates from a penny-in-the-slot-machine.

The Colonel's eye glittered. He had spied Stanley Bessemere doing, indeed over-doing, the hearty amongst the men by the barrier.

"After all it's nothing to what we owe our friend there and the politicians," he said brightly, and made towards his victim, with an almost mincing motion.

Since the declaration of war his solitary relief from intolerable anxieties had been baiting the junior member for the Borough. He left him no peace, hanging like a gadfly on his flank. At the club, in the street, on committees at the Town-hall there rose up to haunt the young man this inexorable spectre with the death's head, the courteous voice, and the glittering smile.

"Ah, Bessemere!" he said gently. "Here still!--I heard you had enlisted, you and Smith."

The other broke away and, seeing Ernie close by, shook hands with him. The move was unfortunately countered by Joe Burt.

"You've shook 'ands with Mr. Caspar five times since I've been here," he remarked tartly. "Can't you give somebody else a turn now?"

Just then, mercifully, Mr. Trupp rolled up, coughing.

Summer or winter made no difference to the great man's cold, which was always with him, and lovingly cherished; but he liked to mark the change between the two seasons by exchanging the long woollen muffler of winter for a silken wrapper in which he swaddled his neck in the summer months.

"Good luck, Ernie," he said in his brief way, his eyes shrewd and sweet behind his pince-nez.

"Keep an eye to Ruth, won't you, sir?" said Ernie in his most confidential manner.

"We'll do our best," replied the other hoarsely. "Here's Mr. Pigott. Quite a jingo these days."

"Who isn't?" the old school-master answered with an attempt at the familiar truculence. "Well, you look like it, Ern." He added almost with admiration. "Quite a changed man."

Then the Colonel joined the little group.

"Coming along sir?" asked Ernie keenly.

"No luck," replied the other gloomily. "Too old at sixty... What about that brother of yours?"

Ern's face darkened.

"Ah, I ain't seen him," he said.

"There he is by the bookstall," muttered Mr. Pigott. "Envying the men who are going to fight his battles! I know him."

Alf, indeed, who had clearly recovered from the first shock of war, was very much to the fore, modest, fervent, the unassuming patriot. Now he approached his brother with a mixture of wariness and manly frankness.

"Will you shake 'ands, Ernest?" he asked.

"I will _not_," said Ern. "It was you who done the dirty on our Lal."

"Never!" cried Alf and came a step closer. "I'll tell you who it were." He nodded stealthily in the direction of Joe. "That's the chap that's out to spoil your home. Wrecker I call him. I tell you what, Ern," he whispered. "I'll watch out against him for you while you are away so you don't suffer."

"I thank you," said Ern, unmoved.

Just then Joe came up, took him by the arm, and bustled him off to the departure platform.

"You'll be late else, ma lad," said the engineer.