CHAPTER XXIX

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS

Once a week Ernie had a half-day off, which he invariably spent in the same way.

He took the bus from the Redoubt up to Old Town, went home, and coaxed his father out for a walk to Beech-hangar or the Downs above the chalk-pit. Then back to tea, and a long and quiet smoke in the study.

In this matter he always had a faint resistance to overcome, part real, part simulated: his father's excuse for not going being the curious one that he was too busy.

"You forget that I'm a man of action now," he would say, the imp dancing remotely in his blue eyes. "I've an official position."

It was true too in a sense. Edward Caspar, during Ernie's absence in India, had been appointed a visitor to the workhouse at the back of Rectory Walk. And there in that cess-pool of our civilization, into which filtered drop by drop the sewage of all our defective social processes, amid the derelicts of the vast ocean of Empire, prostitutes sickening to death, the idiot offspring of incestuous intercourse, the half-witted mother who had fallen a prey to the prowling male, the decent girl who had succumbed to her own affections, the young man broken in the industrial arena, the middle-aged who were not wanted, the old for whom there was no place beside the fire at home, amid all those of every age and class whom Society was too cruel to kill, and not capable as yet of stimulating to life, Edward Caspar wandered vaguely like a cloud, full of sunshine, blessing alike and blessed.

In his old-fashioned roomy tail-coat of a country gentleman, always fresh, his beautiful linen, that showed Anne Caspar's care, his blue tie of an artist running loosely through a gold ring, he became a familiar figure in the wards of the Bastille, with his beard, his spectacles, his morning air, radiating a mild warmth of love and pity.

Almost daily he might be seen, sitting at the bedside of some broken boy picked up off the roads to be patched up and flung again under the wheels of the Juggernaut car of modern Industrialism that had crushed him, or listening to the tale of some ancient in corduroys--not seldom according to his own account the scion of an illustrious but ruined house--who had laboured on the land for sixty years, to be cast alive into the cess-pool when he had been broken in the service of his country.

All the inmates of the Bastille, from the unwanted babies in the nursery, to the grannies and daddies propped up like dreadful dolls in bed in the wards of the Infirmary, liked the visits of this shambling man who said so little and looked so much.

The Lady Augusta Willcocks, a fierce and efficient Guardian, tramping the wards in short skirts, broad-toed boots, and cropped woolly white hair, cross-questioned the Master as to what Mr. Caspar said to the inmates.

The Master, a kind man, something of a mystic himself, answered:

"He don't seem to say much. Mostly he listens."

"Oh, that's all right," said the lady with relief. "Only we don't want a lot of nonsense talked in here."

"Seems to soothe em," continued the Master. "Afore now when I've had them violent in the casuals' cells I've sent for him. They call him the Prophet."

The Master smiled to himself as the masterful lady tramped on her way.

He had noticed that Edward Caspar invariably left the ward when the Reverend Spink entered to hold Divine Service; and that if the Archdeacon marched through the wards like a conqueror amid the dreadful human debris of a battle-field the visitor, sitting quietly at the bedside of some cast-away, never seemed to see him.

In spite of the pressure of affairs, Ernie rarely failed to lure his father out into the sunshine on the hill.

Once, as they sat together by the roadside in Beech-hangar, Ernie propounded a solemn question.

"Dad."

"Well."

"Didn't you once say there was a Spanish strain in the real old Sussex peasant stock?"

The father eyed his son obliquely.

"So they say," he answered. "A Spanish galleon in the days of the Armada wrecked in Ruther Haven. That's the story. And I'm inclined to think there's something in it. Any way there's more foreign blood in the genuine peasantry of Sussex and Kent than in all the rest of England. Propinquity to the Continent, you see. All the refugees came here first--Dutchmen in the days of Alva; Huguenots after the Revocation; Royalists during the Terror; and smugglers of all sorts all the time from the days of Cæsar."

That evening, as Anne Caspar brushed her hair in the bedroom before going to bed, she heard her husband in the little dressing-room talking to himself as his manner was.

She stayed the sweeping motion of her hand and listened.

"I met Mr. Pigott in Church Street this evening," she called. "He stopped me and said, 'What's come to Ernie?'"

There was a silence; then the voice from next door answered,

"She's dark. That's all I know."