Chapter 2

She had still no suspicion of Richard's visit of chastisement to the Hall!

“Now, what do you mean?” said Frankl.

“Why, you might guess that I know your handwriting by this time!” she said coquettishly, and held out the notes and the envelope.

His eyes twinkled; he meditated; he had, more than ever, need of her; and he said: “Well, you are as 'cute as they make them!”

“But instead of sending us this, which I am not at all sure that Richard will touch, why couldn't you pay it to yourself, and not turn us out--”

“I let business take its course: and afterwards I do my charity. But it wasn't for your brother, you know, that I sent it--but for _you_”.

“I must be running--”

When she reached the farm, she gave the carman a secret glimpse of the notes, while Hogarth, who was now there, went to seek the old Hogarth, for whom a nest had been made among the furniture in the cart.

He was found above-stairs in an empty room, searching the floor for something.

“Come, sir”, said Hogarth, and led him step by step.

But as the old man passed the threshold, he fell flat on the slabs of the porch, striking his forehead, printing a stain there.

And the next day, the day of the sale, he still lay in the old chamber, on the ancient bed, dead.

VI

“PEARSON'S WEEKLY”

“Rose Cottage” was without roses: but had a good-sized “garden” at the back; and here Hogarth soon had a shed nailed together, with bellows, anvil, sledges, rasps, setts, drifts, and so on, making a little smithy.

He engaged a boy; and soon John Loveday would be leaning all a forenoon at the shed door, watching the lithe ply of Hogarth's hips, and the white-hot iron gushing flushes; while Margaret, peeping, could see Loveday's slovenly ease of pose, his numberless cigarettes, and hear the rhymes of the sledges chiming.

As to Loveday's £50, she had dared to say nothing to Richard, but kept them, intending to make up the amount already spent, and give them to Frankl. Loveday, meantime, she avoided with constant care.

So two weeks passed, till, one day, Loveday, leaning at the forge-door, happened to say: “Are you interested in current politics? The East Norfolk division is being contested, one of the candidates, Sir Bennett Beaumont, is a friend of mine, and I was thinking that I might go to the meeting to-night, if you could come--”

“I invite you to supper here instead”.

“Not interested?” queried Loveday.

“Not at all. Stop--I'll show you something in which I _am_ interested”.

He ran to a corner, picked up a _Pearson's Weekly_, and pointed to a paragraph headed:

“FIVE HUNDRED-POUND NOTES!

“FIFTY TEN-POUND NOTES!!

“ONE HUNDRED FIVE-POUND NOTES!!!” --a prize for “the most intelligent” article, explaining the cause, or causes, of “the present distress and commercial crisis”.

Loveday read it smiling.

“Ah”, said he, “but who is to be the judge of 'the most intelligent' article? Pearson must himself be of the highest intelligence to decide”.

“True”, said Hogarth. “But the man who offered that prize has indicated to the nation the thing which it should be doing. If I was able to form an Association to enter this competition--and why not? Stop--I will go with you--”

So that evening they walked to Beccles, and took train for Yarmouth.

The candidate to speak was a Mr. Moses Max, a Liberal Jew; the chair to be taken by Baruch Frankl; and in the midst of a row, the stately great men entered upon the platform and occupied it, hisses like the escape of steam mixing with “He's a jolly good fellow”. Midway down the pit sat Loveday, and with him Hogarth, whose large stare ranged solemnly round and down from galleries to floor.

Frankl sipped water, and rose, amid shouts of: “Circular!” “Caps-and-tassels!”

He made a speech of which nothing was known, except the amiable bows, for a continual noising filled the hall; and up rose Mr. Moses Max, a stout fair Jew, whose fist struck with a regular, heavy emphasis. After ten minutes, when he began to be heard, he was saying:

“...Sir Bennett Beaumont! Is _he_ the sort of man you'd send to represent you? (Cries of: “Yes!”) What is he?--ask yourselves the question: a fossilized Tory, a man who's about as much idea of progress as a mummy--people actually say he's _got_ a collection of mummies in his grand fashionable mansion at Aylesham, and it's only what we should expect of him. (Cheers, and cries of: “Oh, oh!”) And what has he ever done for East Norfolk? Gentlemen, you may say as you like about Jews--Jews this, and Jews that--and every man has a right to his opinion in this land of glorious Saxon liberty--but no one can deny that it's Jews who know how to make the money. (Cheers and hisses.) They know how to make it for themselves (hisses)--and, yes, they know how to make it for the nation! (Loud triumph of cheers.) _That's_ the point--_that_ touches the spot! (Cries of: “Oh, oh!”) Righteousness, it is said, exalteth a nation: well, so do Jews--”

“That is false”, said a voice--Hogarth, who had stood up.

The words were the signal for a shower of cheers swept by gusts of hisses; and immediately one region of the pit was seen to be a scrimmage of fisticuffs, mixed with policemen, sticks, savage faces, and bent backs; while the two galleries, craning to see, bellowed like Bashan.

Moses Max was leaning wildly, gesticulating, with shouts; while Loveday, who had turned pale on Hogarth's rising, touched Hogarth's coat-tail, whereupon Hogarth, stooping to his ear, shouted: “We will have some fun...”

“The paid agents of Beaumont!” now shouted Moses Max; “sent to disturb our meeting! Englishmen! will you submit to this? The nation shall hear--”

At that point Moses Max, in his gesticulation, happening to touch a switch in the platform-rail, out glowered into darkness every light at that end of the hall: at which thing the audience was thrown into a state of boisterous lawlessness, a tumult reigning in the gloom like the constant voice of Niagara, until suddenly the platform was again lit up, and the uproar lulled.

And now again Moses Max was prone to speak, with lifted fist; but before ever he could utter one single word, a voice was ringing through the Assembly Rooms:

“_Where_ was Moses when the light went out?”

This again was Hogarth; and it ended Moses Max for that night.

Hogarth had not sat since he had called out “That is false”: his tall figure was recognized; and, with that electric spontaneity of crowds, he was straightway the leader of the meeting, men darting from their seats with waving hats, sticks, arms, and vociferous mouth, the chairman half standing, with a shivering finger directed upon Hogarth, shrieking to the police: but too late--Hogarth had brushed past Loveday's knees--was dashing for the crowded platform-steps--was picking his way, stumbling, darting up them.

Crumpled in his hand was a _Pearson's Weekly_.

Now he is to the front--near Frankl.

“Friends! I have ventured to take the place of our friend, Moses, here--no ill-will to him--for with respect to the question before us, whether we elect Beaumont or Max, I care, I confess, little. I'm rather an Anti-Jew myself (hissing and cheers), but it strikes me that the Jews are the least of our trouble. To a man who said to me that the cause of all our evil days is the inability of England to feed these few million Jews I'd answer: “I don't know how you can be so silly!” Why, the whole human race, friends, can find room on the Isle of Wight--the earth laughs at the insignificant drawings upon her made by the small infantry called Man. Then, why do we suffer, friends? We _do_ suffer, I suppose? I was once at Paris, and at a place called 'the Morgue' I saw exposed young men with wounded temples, and girls with dead mouths twisted, and innocent old women drowned; and there must be a biggish cry, you know, rising each night from the universal earth, accusing some hoary fault in the way men live together! What is the fault? If you ask _me_, I answer that I am only a common smith: _I_ don't know: but I know this about the fault, that it is something simple, commonplace, yet deep-seated, or we should all see it; but it is hidden from us by its very ordinariness, like the sun which men seldom look at. It _must_ be so. And shall we never find the time to think of it? Or will never some grand man, mighty as a garrison, owning eyes that know the glances of Truth, arise to see for us? Friends! but, lacking him, what shall we do to be saved?--for truly this 'civilization' of ours is a blood-washed civilization, friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for that's the trouble--that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our Parliament--a hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides, and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We are still a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized society? It can only be one in which the people are proud and happy! The people of Africa are happy, not proud; not civilized; the people of England have a certain pride, not a millionth part as superb as it might be, but are far from happy: far from civilized. The fact is, Man has never begun to live, but still sleeps a deep sleep. Well! let us do our best, we here! I have here a paper offering a prize to the man of us who will go to the root of our troubles, and my idea in usurping the place of our friend, Mr. Max, was to ask you to form an association with me to enter that competition. There is no reason why our association should not be large as the nation, nor why it should not spread to France and Turkey. For the thing presses, and to-morrow more of the slaughtered dead will be swarming in the mortuaries of London. Will you, then? The understanding will be this: that each man who writes his name in a note-book which will lie at Rose Cottage, Thring, or who sends his name, will devote sixty minutes each day to the problem. I happen to be in a position to use a chapel at Thring, and there I will hold a meeting--”

At this point Frankl rose: Thring was _his_, his own, own, own; and now his eyes had in them that catlike blaze which characterized his rages.

“Here, police! police!” he hissed low, “what's the use of police that don't act!” And now he raised his voice to a scream: “Jews! Shew yourselves! Don't let this man stay here...!”

About twenty Jews leapt at the challenge; at the same time Hogarth, seeing two policemen running forward from the back, folded his arms, and cried out: “Friends! I have not finished! Don't let me be removed...”

Whereupon practically every man in the pit was in motion, for or against him, the galleries two oblongs of battle.

As up the two curving stairs stormed the mob, by a sudden rush like an ocean-current he was borne off his feet toward the side, and was about to bring down his sharp-pointed little knuckles, when his eye fell upon the face of a lady who had fainted.

He had had no idea that she was there!--Rebekah Frankl.

She had quietly fainted, not at the rush--but before--during Hogarth's speech.

Hogarth managed to fight his way to a door at the platform back with her, entered a room where some chairs were, but, seeing a stair, could not let her go from his embrace, but descended, passed along a passage and out into a patch of green.

She, under the dark sky, whispered: “It is you”, her forehead on his shoulder; and added: “My carriage, I think, is yonder”.

Hogarth saw the carriage-lights at the field's edge, bore her thither, laid her with care on the cushions, kissed her hand: and this act Frankl saw--with incredulity of his own eyes. As he approached, Hogarth walked away.

Frankl mastered his voice to say blandly in Spanish: “Well, how did you get through, sweet child? Who was that man--? But stay: where are those two fools?”

This meant the two familiars--the Arabs, Isaac and Mephibosheth, one of whom had come as footman, the other as coachman--and, as he went raging about the carriage, with stamps, his boot struck against a body. There was enough light to reveal to his peering that it was Mephibosheth, whom Isaac had stabbed, and fled...

Frankl lowered his ear--doubted whether he could detect a breathing; and though scared, he being a Cohen, and the presence of death defilement, yet he stayed, bending over Mephi several minutes, thinking, not of him, but of Hogarth.

“It is that fool, Isaac, has done it”, he thought; “and if the man be dead--” What then? “_If_ he be dead, I've got you, Mr. Hogarth, in the hollow of this hand....”

His fingers passed over the body: there, sticking in the breast, was a cangiar which Isaac, in his panic, had left, and Frankl's hand rested on the handle; if he did not consciously press the knife home, very heavily his hand rested on it, eyes blazing, beard shaking....

Then he drew out the knife carefully, to hide it in the carriage, listened again close, felt sure now that death was there, and now scuttled, as if from plague, guiltily hissing: “Putrid dog...!”

Presently he led his carriage to the station, and made a deposition of the murder.

Asked if he had any suspicion as to the culprit, he said: “Not the least: I left the man alone with the carriage, and who could have had any motive for killing him beats me.”

VII

THE ELM

Hogarth, meantime, had made his way to the front of the room, then vomiting its throng, discovered Loveday, and, deciding to walk home, they were soon on the cliffs.

And suddenly Loveday: “To-morrow will conclude my fifth week in Westring. What, do you suppose, has made me stay?”

“I have wondered”.

“I work better here...Hogarth, you inspirit me”.

“Is that so?”

“It is, yes. Merely your presence is for me a freshness and an enthusiasm: I catch in the turn of your body hints of adventurous Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles; and sibylline meanings in some glance of yours infect my fancy with images of Moses, blind old Homers--prophet, lawgiver, poet--”

They were passing along a stretch of sand, with some lights of Lowestoft in sight, arm in arm; and Hogarth said: “Well, you speak some big words. But my life, you understand, has been as simple and small as possible. I will tell you: my father sent me to an extraordinary school--where he got the coin I could never find out--Lancing College at Shoreham. There I did very well--only that I was continually _getting_ it! What was the matter with me when a boy I can't understand: I was the devil. One summer vacation (I was fourteen) I stole three pounds from the old man, and ran away one Sunday night. Passed through London and soon was apprentice in a blacksmith's shop in a Kent village called Bigham. But in six months I had the forge at my fingers' ends, and was off: nothing could hold me long. One day I turned up before the Recruiting Office of Marines in Bristol--just of the right age for what they call 'second-class boys'--and decided upon the sea--that sea there--which, from the moment I saw it at the age of four, caused me a swelling of the breast with which, to this day, it afflicts me. Well, I got the birth-certificate of another boy, scraped through, was entered into a District Ship, and finally sailed in the _St. Vincent_ to the Pacific Station.

“However, my trial of His Majesty's ships was not a success: twice I was in irons, once leapt into mid-ocean; nor could the battleship hold me when she had nothing to teach me; so I did to the King what I had done to the old man--cut and ran.

“It was at Valparaiso, and I made my way across the continent to Buenos Ayres.

“I forget now what took me to Bristol: but there I was one day when I happened to see--what do you think?--a girl--sixteen--I a stripling of nineteen, or so--but she most precocious, spoke like a woman--a grating in a wall between us. Ah, well, God is good, and His Mercy endureth for ever. But she said it could never be--she a Jewess: though that, by the way, is nonsense, for she is a Jewess, and a Parisienne, and a Hindoo, and a Negress, and a Japanese, and the man who marries her will have a harem. My friend, I have seen her this very night!”

He was silent. Suddenly he broke out: “I came home raving! The old man was scared out of his wits by my frenzy--I drank like ten men--in a month was the terror of Westring. One midnight, going home through the beech-wood--I don't know if you have noticed a hollow elm-tree which stands to the right of the path?”

“I think I have”, said Loveday.

“We shall pass near it presently; and at the moment when we approach it, I shall feel a little thrill in my back: always it is so with me. But I was saying: that midnight, as I passed the tree, drunk as I was, I saw a naked black man with a long beard run out; I took to my heels; he was after me; till I reached the bridge, when I stopped, faced him, fired a blow into his eyes, and he vanished.

“During the week I continued to see apparitions. My groans were heard in the farm-yard: Lord have mercy upon me! Christ have mercy upon me! I was visited by the Methodist preacher at Thring; and finally I found solace: I became a class-member, a leader, a local preacher.

“For some time I have been conscious of dissatisfaction among the people with my preaching, who say that my God 'is not a personal God', and that my Christianity is 'rum stuff': I am therefore meaning to give it up. But I still preach every second Thursday night.

“It was about that time that, by accident, I found out the power of my hand to cure headache, and things like that, and the sensation among these villagers was enormous, I can tell you, six years ago; now they come to be touched without the slighest sense of the unusual. But what I have done well in was--the farming. I knew little of agriculture--”

At this point they turned into the lane to Westring: and Loveday went with him a little beyond Priddlestone to see the fatal elm.

VIII

THE METEOR

The next morning, after breakfast, Hogarth went down old Thring Street, and spent a penny for a note-book to contain the signatures of his association.

But this was no day for interest in that scheme: for under the projecting first-floor of the paper-shop were newspaper placards bearing such words as:

THE EARTH IN DANGER

SHALL WE PERISH TO-NIGHT?

and Hogarth was soon bending in the street over a paragraph, short--but in _pica_.

M. Tissot, the astronomer, had, at half-past ten the previous night, observed through the 40-inch telescope of the Nice observatory a body which seemed a tiny planet or aerolite of abnormal size. It was sighted at a point two degrees W. of _a_ Librae at an angle of 43 1/2° with the horizon, and had been photographed, its elements calculated, its spectrum taken. The ascertained diameter was 3° 17”, or about 73 miles, and its substance seemed to consist of ironstone mixed with diamond.

By noon a fresh light was thrown upon the little world, the Yerkes observatory and Greenwich both uttering their voice, the Astronomer Royal announcing that the so-called planet was merely a meteor--not more than 400 yards in diameter, with a low velocity of two miles a second; and its distance was less than a tenth of that estimated by Tissot. The Yerkes observatory fixed the diameter at 230 yards. All, however, agreed in the opinion that it must strike the earth between ten and twelve that night.

These later announcements so much allayed the panic, that by one o'clock Hogarth, on peeping into the note-book on the box before the smithy, saw six signatures; and a young man who came about six P.M. to sign, cried out: “Hullo! the book is filled up!” on which Hogarth ran out, saying: “Don't run away on that account, I'll run and get--” darting into the house to ask Margaret where a certain account-book was.

“Didn't I throw it into the box of rubbish in the cellar at Lagden, when we were leaving?” she asked; on which he threw off his apron, and was off toward Lagden Dip to get it.

He had almost cleared the village when he was blocked by a crowd before a cottage, from out of which were coming screams--a woman's; and he ran in, found a man named Fred Bates beating his wife, planted a blow on his chest.

The next morning the wife of Bates was found dead, greatly disfigured about the face, whereupon Bates was arrested, and Hogarth, as we shall see, was subpoenaed to give evidence of the beating.

In ten minutes he was at the old farm-house of the Hogarths.

The new tenant was a Mr. Bond, a bankrupt metal-broker, who had two hobbies--farming and astronomy; and, as Hogarth approached the yard-gate, he saw Mr. Bond, his two daughters, his servants, grouped round an optic tube mounted on a tripod. He asked permission to get the account-book, got it, in a few minutes was again passing through, and, as he went by, bowing his thanks, Mr. Bond said: “But--have you seen the asteroid?”

“No--whereabouts?”

“Not quite visible to the naked eye yet: but come--you shall see”.

He himself looked through, fixing the sight, turning the adjuster; then with fussy suddenness: “Now, sir--”

Hogarth put an eager eye to the glass.

“You see her?” said Mr. Bond, rubbing his soft old palms; “straight for us she comes--in a considerable hurry by this time, I can tell you! and if she happens to break up in the air, then, pray, sir, that a splinter of her may fall into your back yard--not too big a one! but a nice little comfortable _piece_”--he rubbed his palms--“for you know, no doubt, of what her substance is composed? Diamond, sir, in extraordinary evidence! in conjunction with specular iron ore, commonly called the red haematite, and the ferrous carbonate, or spathic iron. You see her, sir? you see her?”

Hogarth whispered: “Yes”.

There, fairest among ten thousand, sailing the high seas she came; and longer than was modest he stopped there, gazing, then ran, wondering at her daisy loveliness, not dreaming that between himself and her was--a relation.

She broke up with a European display soon after eleven that night over the North Sea.

IX

HOGARTH'S GUNS

At the moment when Hogarth was peering through the telescope, a man was loitering before his cottage--one of the Hall's park-keepers; and when Margaret put out her head to look for Richard's coming, the man whistled.

In a moment a note was in her hand.

“DEAR MISS HOGARTH,

“This is to ask you to be certain sure to meet me this evening at 9 P.M. on the towpath. It isn't to-day that you are well aware of the state of my feelings toward you: but it is not to talk sweethearting that I wish to see you now, but about your brother, and the matter is about as important as can be. If I were in your place, I should destroy this letter.

“Yours, with my respects,

“BARUCH FRANKL”.

Margaret tore it up, and “My goodness!” she thought, “what is anyone to do? If I only had the money to make up those fifty pounds! May the Holy Spirit guide me now...!”

Later in the evening she stole out, and met Frankl.

He assumed a very respectful tone.

“Miss Hogarth”, said he at once, “have you heard?”

“No, sir”.

“You have not been told that your brother has been to the Hall?”

“What in patience for?”

“He came--you couldn't believe--to beat me!”

“Richard! I don't understand. When?”

“Yesterday”. (In reality it was four weeks before.)

“But what about?”

“Revenge! Blind, murderous revenge for turning him neck and crop out of Lagden!”

“You _are_ in a temper! But I can't understand a word of it!”

“Well, that is what I had to tell you. He came to my house--And how good have I been to this man! Didn't I send him the fifty pounds--?”

“Well, that _was_ kind. But I must tell you, Mr. Frankl, that Richard knows nothing of the fifty pounds--”