CHAPTER XXIV

ALF

If Ernie was now the working-man, Alf on his side was very much the gentleman.

He dressed the part to the best of his ability; and--when he remembered--even tried to talk it.

But he had not arrived at his present position without a struggle.

When he was through his apprenticeship, he left Hewson & Clarke, and inducing his mother to lend him a little capital, started a car and garage of his own in the Chestnuts between Old Town and the station.

At first he did not prosper. The horse-industry, with a tradition of tens of thousands of years behind it, would not yield its pride of place without a struggle. Competitors were many and fierce. And just when he believed that he was finding his feet at last, a big London Syndicate started the Red Cross Garages throughout Kent and Sussex.

Alf for the first time felt the full weight of capitalism--the Juggernaut with Mammon at the wheel that crushes beneath its rollers the bodies and souls of the weak and impotent.

His sense of helplessness embittered him.

His garage was empty; his car in little request; he had few repairs. Old Town at one end of Beachbourne and Holywell on the foot-hills under Beau-nez at the other were the quarters of the resident aristocracy amongst whom it was the convention to avoid "the front" as bad form. These clung to their sleek pairs and cockaded coachmen just as they clung to the Church and Joseph Chamberlain and the belief, so often re-affirmed by Archdeacon Willcocks, that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was the one man living who knew how to rule the masses. _The firm hand, sir!_

The doctors, on the other hand, were beginning to possess little cars of their own which they drove themselves or had driven for them; while the progressive Town Council started motor buses and deprived Alf of some station-work. Mr. Pigott, now a radical alderman, was responsible for this last injustice.

Alf knew it, and in revenge, ceased to attend chapel.

Mr. Pigott, with an unerring eye for the defaulters of his flock, marked his absence and tackled the lost sheep on the subject.

"You've given up God then!" he said, fierce and frowning.

"There ain't none," answered Alf, as brief and brutal. "Where there's no justice, there can't be no God." His little eyes sparkled dreadfully. "Look at young Albert Hewson. He went through the shops with me. Is he as good an engineer as me?--Can he strip an engine same as me?--Can he turn to the thousandth part of an inch?--Ask the chaps in the yard. Yet because he's got all the money, been to Rugby and Oxford, they make him deputy-chairman of the Red Cross Syndicate at £1,000 a year straight from the shop, and Managing Director of Ball-Bearings, Limited, and I don't know what all."

He became a violent Socialist; spent his Sundays attending Labour demonstrations in the East-end; read Robert Blatchford in the _Clarion_; and sulked with his mother.

For a moment he even contemplated the abandonment of his ambitions.

When Mr. Pigott, after his second marriage, finally gave up schoolmastering and became Manager of the Southdown Transport Company, Alf applied for the position of working foreman.

The application was discussed at a meeting of the Directors.

"He's the chap that made the wage-slave speech to the Engineers at the Salvation Army Citadel on Labour Day," said one.

"What d'_you_ think, Pigott?" asked another.

"I won't have Alf Caspar in my yard," replied the Manager with characteristic emphasis. "I know Alf."

"Then that settles it," said the chairman.

Alf rightly attributed his defeat to his old schoolmaster.

"So you've turned me down, Mr. Pigott," he said, stopping the other in Church Street a few days later.

Mr. Pigott, like most professing pacifists, was always ready for a fight.

"I thought you wanted to be a master-man!" he cried. "And here you're applying for a job as a wage-slave--to use your own term."

Alf was white, trembling, and sour-faced.

"All I want is a fair chance," he said doggedly. "And if I don't get it there'll be trouble." He came a step closer. His eyes were down, and he looked dangerous. "See here, Mr. Pigott--if you turn on full-steam same time you seal up the safety-valve, something'll burst. That's science, that is."

Mr. Pigott was not at all dismayed.

"Now look here!" he said. "You take a pull, young man. You're going altogether too far and too fast. And I'm speaking not as a magistrate but as your old school-master."

At the Bowling Green Committee that evening, while the minutes were being read, he retailed the incident to Mr. Trupp.

"That little ewe-lamb o yours is turning tiger because he can't have it all his own way," he said. "Going to upset Society because he's not King."

Mr. Trupp was amused.

"Arrested development," he said. "He's an interesting study in pathology."

"Criminal pathology," muttered Mr. Pigott.

Whether in the interests of Science, or of expediency, next day Mr. Trupp rolled into Alf's garage, with a blue long-dog, a descendant of the original _She_, wearing the studded collar of her ancestress, at his heels.

No man had made a stiffer fight against the new and aggressive locomotive than the great surgeon.

Pests of the road, he called them, and refused to recognize his friends when driving them. He affirmed that they upset his horses and his patients; made the place stink; and whirled through the country-side disseminating disease in clouds of dust. But he was no fool, and increasingly busy. A machine that could whisk him over to Lewes in little more than thirty minutes, and land him at the Metropole in Brighton in the hour, was not to be scoffed at.

Alf was cleaning his car when Mr. Trupp, greatly muffled in spite of the heat, strolled into his yard.

"Look here, Alf," growled the great man. "I'm never going to own one of those things. But I've got to use one to get about. If you like to do my driving we'll arrange something."

Alf's attitude to life changed in the twinkling of an eye.

He bustled home that evening, a new man.

"All O.K.," he called to his mother. "I got me first contract."

"What?" she asked sullenly.

"Driving for Mr. Trupp."

She took a saucepan off the fire.

"Then you're a made man," she said; and she did not exaggerate.

The job, or as Alf preferred to call it, the contract, meant honour; it meant money; it meant--above all--a start. Mr. Trupp had been for long the first surgeon in Sussex: since the operation, as daring as discreet, by which he had preserved the life of a Balkan Tsar to disgrace a throne, his fame had become world-wide.

That evening, uplifted on a wave of humility and thankfulness, Alf walked to Mr. Pigott's house and apologized to him.

"I said a lot of silly things, I know," he said. "There is a God and a good God too."

Mr. Pigott was sitting with his new wife, who was as much his junior as the first had been his senior.

She was a young woman, with a mischievous face and bright hair.

"He'll be glad to have you on His side again," she remarked demurely. "He was missing you."

Mr. Pigott scowled melodramatically at the offender.

She refused to catch his eye, busy with her work.

"Five pound a week isn't a bad God as times go," she went on.

Alf smirked.

"It's seven pound ten," he said, and withdrew.

"Elsie Pigott!" roared her husband, when the outside door had shut.

"Sir!" answered his bride, and added--"Mr. Trupp's taken him on.... Mrs. Trupp's furious...."

Alf, in spite of his access of faith, never returned to chapel.

As he remarked to his mother,

"I got me principles. And I must stick to em."

"That's it," said his mother. "Stick to em--until you want to change em."

Anne Caspar cherished now no illusions about her second son.

She no longer cared for Alf--for he was no longer dependent on her; nor did she respect him. But his naïveté, the outrageous sincerity of his egotism, appealed to a certain grim sense of humour she possessed.