CHAPTER X

OLD AND NEW

Edward Caspar went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife. He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediæval formulæ, the iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his mother in its grip.

As a student of comparative religion his intellect was still interested in forms which his seeking mind had long rejected as empty, ludicrous, or inadequate.

His reading for his book, his experience of life, and most of all an inner urge, led him in time to look for the spiritual comfort that was his most vital need outside the walls of the consecrated prison in which he had been bred.

_Quia fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiscat in Te_ was the motto that hung above his writing-desk. And his restless heart found increasingly its peace sometimes in music, sometimes amid the hum of men and women in the crowded streets of the East End of the town, and most often in quiet communion with Nature on the Downs or beside the sea in some gap far from the haunts of men.

He would ramble the lonely hills by the hour, lost in thought, Ernie skirmishing about him.

Sometimes Mr. Trupp, riding with his little daughter up there between the sky and sea, would meet the couple.

"Like a bear and a terrier, Bess," he would smile.

Then in some secluded valley, father and son would lie down in the "loo" of the hill, as Ernie called it.

Resting there with contented spirits amid the gorse, they would watch the gulls, white-winged and desolately crying over the plough, while the larks purred above them.

These were the best moments of Ernie's childhood, never to pass from him in the tumult and battle of later life. A child of the earth, even his tongue, touched with the soft slur of Sussex caught from school-mates, betrayed him for a countryman. He loved the feel of the turf solid beneath him; he loved the sound of the gorse-pods snapping in the sun; he loved the thump of the sea crashing on the beach far below; and most of all he loved the larks pouring comfort into the cistern of his mind until it too seemed to brim with the music of praise.

"Loving, idn't they?" he would say in his sweet little voice, his hands behind his head, his eyes on a speck of song thrilling in the blue.

"That's it, Boy-lad," his father's answer would come from beneath the cavern of his hat; and Edward Caspar forthwith would repeat, in a voice that seemed to co-ordinate the harmonies of earth and sky and sea, Wordsworth's _Lines above Tintern Abbey_:

_... That serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-- Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul:_

Alf never came on these excursions. The bent of the two brothers was indeed entirely different. If they left the house together, as often as not they parted at the garden-gate. Ern turned his face towards the green hills that blocked the end of the road, Alf turned his back on them.

"Nothin doin there," he would say with a knowing wink. He hated walking, and he feared the loneliness of the hills. His heart was in the East End of the growing town. Down there, beyond the gas-works, at the edge of the Levels, where the trams clanged continually, where you heard strange tongues, and saw new types of faces, Alf found himself. The little urchin, who seemed all eyes in a hideous square head, would wander by the hour in Sea-gate, among the booths and barrows, drinking in the life about him, and return home at night tired but contented.

In bed the two boys would compare their experiences.

"What did you see?" Ern would ask.

"Everythink," Alf would answer. "Folks and a fight and all."

"I see something, too," said Ernie, deliberate alike of speech and mind.

"What then?" asked Alf, scornfully.

"I see angels," Ernie answered. "Dad see em too."

But Alf only sniggered.

At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. Beyond it lay the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire, the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth. Old Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had endured for centuries. In its steep streets you might hear the undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days.

Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new.

Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp, incisive, twanging.

In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the Lewes Road. Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school.

His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door.

"Where you been then?" she asked ferociously.

"With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie. "Dis lambin time. His boy's run'd away."

The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman.

Alf peeped round his mother's skirts.

"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.

"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.

Alf sneered.

"Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"

Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending accent.

When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles into Anne's unsympathetic ear.

"What a way to talk!" he groaned.

"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "_They_ aren't going to Harrow and Trinity."

The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been given.

"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar sometimes demonstrated affection.

"And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work." Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class held of their rulers and their education.