CHAPTER XXII

OLD TOWN

When Ern got out of the train on to the very platform where Alf, six years before, had prophesied his return in glory, nothing much happened.

True, the conditions were not quite as Alf had foretold. Rather the reverse. Whereas it was a dapper young clerk who had left Beachbourne, it was a solid working-man who returned to it; one who by his clothes, boots, hands, hair, and even walk, testified that he was of those who bear on their shoulders the burden of our industrial civilization. And that perhaps was why the promised brass-band was conspicuous by its absence, and there were present no fathers of the city expanding ample paunches preparatory to delivering an address of welcome to the returning soldier. Instead there was upon the platform one unkempt porter, who took his ticket very casually, and when asked by Ern whether he recognized him, replied with more honesty than tact that he didn't know but thought not.

"See, I sees so many," he remarked apologetically.

"I'm Ernie Caspar," said Ernie, noting with critical military eye that the other did not seem to have had his hair cut since last they met. "I was at the Moot School along o you. Aaron Huggett, aren't it?"

The porter's face betrayed a flicker of sardonic interest.

"I expagt you'll be Alf Caspar's brother," he said.

"That's it," Ernie answered, a thought sourly.

Back in Beachbourne he was not himself; he was just his younger brother's brother, it seemed.

Things were not quite as he had expected. Everywhere was a subtle change of atmosphere. Beside the book-stall now stood a sentry-box with glass doors. In it a man with something to his ear was talking to himself.

Ernie felt somehow disconsolate.

Outside the station, in Cornfield Road, he paused and took in the scene.

There was more traffic than of old, and it was swifter. In the country from which he came the ox was still the principal motive-power upon the roads: here clearly horses were becoming out of date.

He asked a policeman when the bus for Old Town ran.

"There she is," said the man, pointing. "On the bounce!"

Just across the street, under the particular plane-tree the starlings haunted of evenings, where in the past old Huggett in his bottle-green coat would wait indefinitely with his mouldy pair of browns, there stood a gaudy motor-bus, decked on top. A spruce conductor was pulling the bell sharply; and a board on which were printed the starting-times hung from a neighbouring lamp. It was all very precise, powerful, and efficient. Ernie was not sure whether he liked it or not.

But he had little time to think. This mechanical monster was not the old gentlemanly horse-bus with its easy tolerance. It gave no law and knew no mercy. It was swift and terrible; and its heart was of the same stuff as its engines.

He crossed the road and leapt on to the great lurching thing.

Carelessly it bore him along the Old Road to Lewes and then swung away under the Chestnuts into Water Lane.

Here at least nothing had changed but the vehicle that carried him. On his left was Saffrons Croft, just as of old, with its group of splendid elms and the Downs seen through the screen of them; in front on the hill, above the roofs of Old Town, the church-tower with its squat spire, bluff against a background of green.

Two ladies were walking down the hill, a middle-aged and gracious mother, escorted by a tall daughter.

Ernie's neighbour nudged him confidentially.

"Mrs. Trupp," he said.

Ernie leaned over. Except for the silver in her hair, his god-mother had altered little; but he would hardly have recognized in the stately young woman who walked at her side the flapper who had waved him good-bye from the nursery-window years before.

His neighbour was conveying to him information about the great surgeon.

"He's our greatest man by far. Mr. Trupp _of Beachbourne_. They come from all parts to him. He saved the Tsar of Dobrudja--when all the rest had taken to their prayers."

"Ah," said Ernie, "I think I ave eard of im."

The bus, for all its rushing manners of a parvenu, stopped opposite the _Star_; but the old beam across the road was gone.

Ernie felt himself aggrieved, and complained to the conductor as he got down.

"Well, you didn't want your head took off every time, did you?" said that unsympathetic worthy.

Ernie strolled up Church Street, living his past over again. Here at least he found the rich, slow atmosphere he had expected. There was the long-backed church standing massive and noble as of old on its eminence above the Moot; beneath it in the hollow the brown roof of the Quaker Meeting-house; and on his left the little ironmonger's shop outside which Alf had seen Mrs. Pigott and her dog Sharkie on the fatal day they sacked the walnut-tree.

At Billing's Corner he was reassured to find the high flint-wall that ran at the back of Rectory Walk making its old sharp corner and the fig-tree peeping over it. The Rectory, too, still stood in pharisaic aloofness amid gloomy evergreens. And out of it was coming the Rector, walking mincingly just as of yore.

That finikin old man had not changed much at all events, and yet ... and yet ... as he came closer, Ernie was aware of some subtle spiritual difference here too. At first he thought the Rector had grown. Then he recognized that the change was in the top-hat and those tall attenuated legs. They were clothed in gaiters now, and gave the wearer just that air of old-world distinction it was his passion to assume.

In fact pseudo-Canon Willcocks had in Ernie's absence become Archdeacon, to his own ineffable satisfaction and that of his lady. Now he marched down the middle of the road with his hands behind his back, in the meditative pose he always hoped passers-by would mistake for prayer.

Ernie touched his hat; and the Archdeacon with an air of royal indifference imitated to the life from his hero, the late Emperor of the French, acknowledged the salute with an "Ah! my friend!" and titupped delicately upon his way.

Ernie, grinning, turned the corner and stopped short.

He had little notion as to what was before him.

During his absence his mother's letters, it is true, had been very regular and most curt. It was indeed astonishing how little she had contrived to tell him. His father, on the other hand, had written seldom but at length, yet never mentioning home-news; while Alf, of course, had not written at all.

Ernie was therefore in the dark as to the welcome awaiting him.

The Downs at the end of the Walk greeted him; but a row of red-brick villas on the far side the New Road imposed a barrier between him and them. True, they nodded at him friendly over the intruding roofs; but he was shut out from the great Coombe which of old had gathered the shadows in the evening and echoed in the spring to the melancholy insistent cry of lambs.

All around the builder had been busy.

When he left, the windows of Rectory Walk had looked across over rough fields to the Golf Links and Beech-hangar beyond. Now detached houses on the westward side of the road blocked the view.

His own home at least had changed not at all. The virginia-creeper was brilliant as ever on its walls; the arabis humming with bees beneath the study-window.

As he passed through the gate, his mother, who must have been waiting, opened to him quietly, and held up a warning finger.

She was beautiful still, but showing wear, as must a woman of fifty, who has never spared herself. Her hair was now snow-white; her complexion, as seen in the passage, fine as ever; her eyes the same startling blue under fierce brows, but the lines about them had an added kindness.

She led past the study-door into the kitchen, walking a little stiffly, her bones more apparent than of old.

Ern followed her with a smile, his hand scraping the familiar varnished paper, his eye catching that of the converted drain-pipe.

She was still clearly a woman of one idea--dad.

Cautiously his mother closed the door of the kitchen behind him. Then she turned and put her hands upon his shoulders.

There was something yearning in her gesture as of a puzzled child asking an explanation. Ern's quick intuitions told him that since he had last seen her his mother had lost something and was missing it. This he noticed and her hands--how worn they were. Fondly he kissed them, realizing a little wistfully that his mother now was an old woman.

She smiled at him.

"Let me see you," she said, and her eyes dwelt upon his face. For the first time in his life he felt that his mother was depending on him, and was moved accordingly.

"You're changed," she said at last. "You're a man now. But your eyes are the same."

"How's dad?" he asked.

She withdrew from his arms and turned away.

"He's an old man now, Ernie," she said.... "He's not what he was.... I don't rightly know what to make of him.... He goes to Meeting now." She was puzzled and pathetic.

"Has he turned Quaker?" asked Ernie.

"He says not."

Just then quiet music sounded from the study.

"Is that dad?" asked Ernie, amazed.

His mother nodded.

"One of them new-fangled machines. Pianolas, don't they call em? I give him one for his birthday."

Ernie listened in awed silence.

"That's Beethoven," he said. "I'd know it anywhere.... In old days we used to have to go out for that, me and dad did."

The music ceased.

"Now," said his mother, and opened the kitchen-door.