CHAPTER IX

THE TWO BOYS

Next time Mr. Trupp called at 60 Rectory Walk, he marked that the familiar chocolate notice in the upper window had gone.

He chaffed Mrs. Caspar in his grim way.

"No more rooms to let, I see," he said.

"No," the woman answered. "No more lies to have to tell just at present."

She was in one of her tartest moods; and when he congratulated her on being through her troubles, she answered,

"Some of em. Plenty more to follow. There'll be enough money for Ned and me and the boys. That's one thing."

"And a big thing too," said Mr. Trupp.

"The biggest," admitted the woman surlily. "Speaking worldly-wise, I don't say nay to that."

After the birth of her second son, Mr. Trupp had told her that she would have no more children and she was glad: for her hands were going to be full enough throughout her life; so much the shrewd woman saw clearly. There was her husband; and there was her eldest son, Ernie, who was his father over again.

He had his father's face, his father's charm, his father's soft and generous heart; and, unless she was mistaken, other qualities of his father that were by no means so desirable. And the curious thing was that the characteristics which in her husband Anne Caspar secretly admired, only exasperated her in Ernie.

Alf, the second son, whatever his faults, certainly did not trace them to his dad. He was as much his mother's child as Ernie was his father's. And whether for that reason or because for years she had to wrestle for his miserable little life with the Angel of Death, his mother loved him with the fierce, protecting passion of an animal.

"Nobody but his mother could have saved him," Mr. Trupp told his wife.

While Mrs. Caspar said to the same lady,

"But for Mr. Trupp he wouldn't be here."

A proud woman, Mrs. Caspar was also a very lonely one. Her genuine pride in her rather ramshackle husband--his birth, his breeding, his obvious air of a gentleman--which evinced itself in her almost passionate determination that he should dress himself "as such," prevented her from associating with her own class; and the women of her husband's class would not associate with her. Mrs. Trupp, the kindest of souls, was the solitary exception. But the two women were antipathetic. The doctor's wife, who possessed in full measure the noble toleration that marks the best of her kind, was forced to admit to her conscience, that she could not bring herself to like Mrs. Caspar. The large and beautiful nature of the former, brought to fruition in the sunshine and shelter of a cultivated home, could not understand the harsh combativeness of the daughter of the small tobacconist, who had fought from childhood for the right to live.

"She's like a wolf," Mrs. Trupp told her husband. "Even with her children."

"My dear," said the wise Doctor, "she's had to snap to survive. You haven't. Others have done your snapping for you."

"She needn't snap and snarl at that dear, gentle husband of hers," retorted Mrs. Trupp.

"If she didn't," replied her husband drily, "she'd be a widow in a week."

"Anyway she might be kind to that eldest boy," continued Mrs. Trupp, who at Edward Caspar's request had stood sponsor to Ernie. "He's beautiful, and such breeding. A true Beauregard."

"What d'you make of the baby?" asked her husband with sudden interest.

"Why, he's like a little rat," answered Mrs. Trupp. "He's the only baby I've ever seen I didn't want to handle."

"Yet there's something in him," replied the other thoughtfully. "He wouldn't have lived else. A touch of Old Man Caspar about that child somewhere. _He'll_ bite all right if he lives to be a man."

And to the Doctor's shrewd and seeing eye it was clear from the start that Alfred meant to live to be a man. Somewhere in the depths of his wretched little body there glowed a spark that all the threats and frosts of a hostile Nature failed to extinguish. On that spark his mother blew with a tenacity surpassing words; Mr. Trupp blew in his wise way, working the bellows of Science with the easy skill of the master-workman; little Ernie, most loving of children, blew too. Even Edward Caspar leaned over the cot in his quilted dressing gown and said,

"He's coming on."

But even as he leant, the sensitive fellow knew that there was not and could never be any bond between him and his youngest born. His heart was with Ernie. And the way his mother rebuffed the elder lad, only endeared him the more to his father.

The two lads grew: Ernie strong in body, loving in heart, lacking in will; Alf ardent of spirit, ruthless as a stoat upon the trail, and rickety as an old doll.

There was a first-rate elementary school in Old Town to which the two boys went when the time came. The headmaster, Mr. Pigott, was also manager of the chapel in the Moot which Mrs. Caspar attended regularly.

The hard woman was religious in the common Puritan way, so dear to the English lower-middle-class of her generation. Her Chapel and her God were both a great deal to the austere woman, especially the former. She had a stern and narrow moral code of her own which she mistook for love of Christ. From that code she never departed herself, and punished to the utmost of her power all those who did depart from it.

In a chapel of her own denomination she had insisted on being married, in spite of the fact that she risked by her obstinacy losing the only man she had ever loved.

Ned Caspar, for his part, took his religion, as most of us do, from his mother. He was High Church at a time when to be so was far less fashionable than it is at present. He called himself a Catholic, and spoke always of the Mass in a way that shocked his fellow-churchmen who were in those days still content to speak of themselves as Protestants and the sacramental act as Holy Communion. And after marriage he maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would have expected of the soft-willed man. Indeed, it was the one point on which, aided by his mother's memory, he stood up to his wife for long.

"I'll wear you down yet, my son," Anne told him grimly. "May as well come off the perch now as later."

In this one matter her taunts served only, so it seemed, to strengthen her husband's resistance.

He went white, shook, perspired, and continued to attend High Mass at St. Michael's, in spite of his growing distaste for the man who administered it--his neighbour, Prebendary Willcocks, across the road.

A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake, desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his own way for a time without protest--as the cat permits the mouse a little liberty.

When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said--and Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occasion--

"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do feel it so that we never worship in common."

That was the beginning of the end of his resistance.

He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little community.

And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely.

But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of the Church of England, often of Sunday afternoons in the spring and summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the "chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and fighting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a "chucker-in" himself; but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at 8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles of which were darkened that tramp and prostitute might sit there unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occasional visitors from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin, extempore prayer, readings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle, that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in days to come should gather thus, without priest or ceremonial, simply to rejoice together in the blessing of a common life and universal Father.