CHAPTER XXX

THE END OF THE WORLD

The next day was Bank Holiday; and such a holiday as no living man had

known or would ever know again. Half the world had already tumbled

into hell; and the other half was poised breathless on the brink,

awaiting the finger-push that should send it too roaring down to death.

On that brilliant summer day nations crouched in the stubble like

coveys of partridges beneath the shadow of some great hawk hovering far

away in the blue.

A silence like a cloud enveloped England.

The tocsin was about to sound that was to call millions of rosy lads

from their mothers, splendid youths from their girls, sober middle-aged

men away from their accustomed place in church and chapel, from the

office stool, from the warm companionable bed and the lovely music of

children's voices, to strange destinies in unknown seas, on remote

deserts, beside alien rivers; calling them in a voice that was not to

be denied to lay their bones far from the village church-yard and the

graves of innumerable ancestors, in rotting swamps, on sun-bleached

mountains, with none to attend their obsequies save the nosing jackal

and raw-necked vulture.

Early in the morning the Colonel walked across to Old Town to see Bobby

Chislehurst, and put the curb on him if possible; for the _Daily

Citizen_ had come out with a full-page appeal to lovers of peace to

attend an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar-square.

On his way the Colonel gleaned straws of news; and the gleaning was not

hard. The most reserved were expansive; the most exclusive sociable.

For the moment all barriers of class were down. By the time he had

reached the _Star_ he was _au courant_ with all the happenings, local

and general.

The Archdeacon who, when he put his snuff-box aside, and took the

gloves off, could be really moving, had from his hill thundered a

magnificent call to arms--"purely pagan, of course." Mr. Trupp, whom

he met, told the Colonel, "but fine for all that." Mr. Geddes in the

plain had answered back in an appeal which had moved many to tears on

behalf of Him, Whose sad face on the Cross looks down on This after the

passion of a thousand years.

The Fleet had gone to war-stations; the Territorials had been

mobilised. Haldane had returned to the War Office.

As the Colonel dropped down the steep pitch to Church-street, under the

chesnuts of the Manor-house garden, he met a couple of toddlers

climbing the hill shepherded by an efficient little maiden of seven or

eight, who smiled at him with familiar eyes.

"Hullo, little Alice," he said. "Where you off to so busily with your

little flock?"

"Saffrons Croft for the day--me and my little ones," she answered, not

without a touch of self-importance. "I got the dinner here. Dad and

Mother's taking baby a drive on the bus to see Granny at Auston."

She turned and waved to her mother, who was standing at the top of

Borough Lane with Ernie, amongst a little group opposite the _Star_,

where was one of the char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate picking up

passengers from the Moot.

The Colonel walked down the hill towards them. Ruth, seeing him

approach, climbed to her place on the char-a-banc. Ernie handed little

Ned to her, and then turned to meet the Colonel.

"Givin Alf the benefit," he said, with a grin. "Backin the family and

baptizin the bus. Goin the long drive over the hill to Friston and

Seaford; then up the valley to Auston. Dinner there. And home by

Hailsham and Langney in the evening.--I wanted her to ask Joe. But she

wouldn't. Fickle I call her."

The Colonel glanced up; but Ruth steadfastly refused to meet his eye.

"I suppose one wants the family to one-salf some-times, even a

workin-woman doos," she muttered.

And the Colonel saw that Ern had made his remark to show that the

tension between him and his wife, so marked yesterday, had eased.

"My wife's right," he thought. "Caspar is a gentleman. Blood _does_

tell."

Just then Alf came down the steps of the Manor-house opposite, looking

smug and surly. He crossed the road to the char-a-banc and said a word

to the driver.

Ruth leaned over, glad of the diversion.

"Ain't you comin along then, Alf?" she asked quietly.

"Caspar's my name," the Managing Director answered, never lifting his

eyes to his tormentor.

The young woman bent down roguishly, disregarding Ern's warning glances.

"Not to your own sister, Alfie," she answered, demure and intimate.

They were mostly Old Town folk on the char-a-banc, many from the Moot;

and they all tittered, even the driver.

Alf stood back in the road and said deliberately, searching with his

eye the top of the bus.

"Where is he, then?"

Ern flashed round on him.

"Who?"

Alf sneered.

"You!--You're only her husband!" and decamped swiftly.

Ernie did not move. He stood with folded arms, rather white, following

his retreating brother with his eyes. Then he said to the Colonel

quietly,

"Yes, sir. That's Alf. Now you know."

"I'm beginning to," said the Colonel.

"And time too," came Ruth's voice cold and quivering.

In the cool of the evening the Colonel walked down Terminus Road.

Outside the office of Caspar's Road-Touring Syndicate Alf was standing,

awaiting the return of his argosies. He was scanning the evening paper

and still wore the injured and offended air of one who has a personal

grievance against his Creator and means to get his own back some day.

"Any news, sir?" he asked.

The Colonel stopped.

"Germany sent Belgium an ultimatum last night demanding right of way.

And the King of Belgium took the field this morning."

"Then he ought to be shot," snarled Alf. "Provoking of em on, I call

it."

The Colonel walked on to the East-end, his eyes about him, and heart

rising.

The country was facing the situation with dignity and composure.

The streets were thronged. Everywhere men and women gathered in knots

and talked. There was no drunken-ness, no rioting, no Jingo

manifestations--and that though it was August Bank Holiday. The

gravity of the situation had sobered all men.

The Colonel passed on into Seagate to find the hero of Sunday

afternoon's battle.

Joe Burt stood in his shirt-sleeves in the door of his lodgings with

folded arms and cocked chin. His pipe was in his mouth and he was

sucking at it fiercely with turned-in lips and inflated nostrils.

The engineer was clearly on the defensive; the Colonel saw it at once

and knew why. On the main issue Joe had proved fatally, irretrievably

wrong. But he had been "on the platform" now for twenty years. In

other words he was a politician, and in the Colonel's view no

politician ever admitted that he was wrong. To cover his retreat he

would almost certainly resort to the correct tactical principle of a

counter-offensive.

"That was a great speech of yours, Burt," the Colonel began.

The engineer sucked and puffed unmoved.

"We must fight," he said. "There's no two ways about it. The Emperors

have asked for it; and they shall have it. No more crowned heads!

We've had enoof o yon truck!"

In his elemental mood accent had coarsened, phrase become colloquial.

He took his pipe from his mouth.

"Sitha!--this'll be a fight to a finish atween the Old Order and the

New--atween what you stand for and what A do."

"And what do I stand for?" asked the Colonel.

"Imperialism--Capitalism--call it what you will. It's the domination

of the workers by brute force."

The Colonel turned a quiet eye upon him.

"Is that fair?" he asked.

The engineer stuffed his pipe back into his mouth.

"Happen not of you. Of your class, yes." He felt he had been on

dangerous ground and came off it. "_We_ shall fight because we must,"

he said. "What about you?"

He was making a direct offensive now, and turned full face to his

adversary.

"Us?" asked the Colonel puzzled.

"Yes," retorted the other. "The officers of the Army?--shall you

fight?"

The Colonel looked away.

Joe eyed him shrewdly.

"Last time you were asked to, you refused," he remarked. "Said you'd

resign rather. One General said if there was war he'd fight against

England. It was a piece in the _Daily Telegraph_. A've got it pasted

in ma Ammunition Book. Coom in and see!"

The Colonel did not move.

"I think the officers will be there or thereabouts all right if the're

wanted," he said.

Joe appeared slightly mollified.

"Well, you came out against the railway-men in 1911," he said. "A will

say that for you. A wasn't sure you'd feel same gate when it coom to

Emperors."

They strolled back together to Pevensey Road; and for the first time

the Colonel actively disliked the man at his side. That wind of the

spirit which had blown through the engineer yesterday purging him of

his dross had passed on into the darkness. To-day he was both

politically dishonest and sexually unclean.

In fact his life that had been rushing down the mountain like a spate

with extraordinary speed and power, confined between narrow banks, just

as it was emerging at the estuary into the sea had met suddenly the

immense weight of the returning ocean-tide, advancing irresistible--to

be swamped, diverted, turned back on itself. This man once so strong,

of single purpose, and not to be deflected from it by any human power,

was now spiritually for all his bluff a tumbling mass of worry and

confusion and dirty yellow foam....

The pair had passed into the main thoroughfare.

"What about that woman?" asked the Colonel moodily.

Joe was chewing his pipe-stem.

"What woman'll that be?"

"Why the one you were talking about to me on Saturday night,--whether

you should bolt with her or not."

Joe halted on the kerb-stone and regarded the traffic imperturbably.

"A know nowt o no such woman," he said.

The Colonel glanced at him. Just then he heard the sound of a horn and

looking back saw one of the new motor-char-a-bancs of the Touring

Syndicate returning crowded to the brim. A man stood on the step with

a horn and tootled. Ernie sat in front with Ruth, the boy in her lap

asleep against her breast. The Colonel marked the strength and

tranquillity of her pose, her arms clasped around the sleeping child.

Father, mother, and child were profoundly at peace; one with each

other, so it seemed to him, one with life. Joe took his pipe out of

his mouth and pointed with the stem.

"Yon's her," he said, with stunning impudence.

"I know that then," answered the Colonel. "Your own friend's wife."

Ernie who had seen Joe waved and winked and nudged Ruth. She could not

or would not see. Joe waved back casually. Then he turned to the

Colonel with a Silenus-like twinkle, his little black eyes of a bear

glittering.

"He'll have to go now," he said, gurgling like an amused baby.

The Colonel looked him in the eyes. "Devil!" he said.

The engineer peeped up at him with something of the chuckle of the

young cuckoo.

"Ah, don't you talk, Colonel! I'm not the only one."

"What you mean?" fiercely.

"What you told me Saturday night."

"I never betrayed my pal, whatever else."

"You would ha done," remorselessly. "Only you lost your nerve at the

last moment. That's nothing to boast on."

The man's brazen cynicism revolted the Colonel.

"Ah, you don't know me," he muttered.

"A know maself," the other answered. "And that's the same."

The Colonel felt as feels a man who watches the casual immoralities of

a big and jolly dog. Then he came to himself and broke away, firing a

last shot over his shoulder.

"I suppose you'll wait till he has gone," he sneered.

"A doubt," the other answered, cool and impudent to the last.

The Colonel tramped home, sore at heart.

Opposite the Wish he stumbled on Mr. Trupp, who brought him up with a

jerk.

"There's going to be a Coalition Government," the old surgeon told his

friend. "Lloyd George and the pacifists are leaving the Cabinet; and

Smith and Carson and Bonar Law coming in."

Just then Stanley Bessemere rushed by in a powerful car. He waved to

the two men, neither of whom would see him.

"You know what he's after?" said Mr. Trupp.

"What?" asked the Colonel.

"Spreading it round that Haldane's holding up the Expeditionary Force."

The Colonel struck the ground.

"My God!" he cried. "Party politics even at this hour!"

The other shrugged.

"They've got to find a scape goat or take it in the neck themselves,"

he said.

The Colonel walked home in the twilight along the deserted brick-walk,

under the tamarisk bank stirring gracefully in the evening breeze. At

the extreme end of the bricks where a path climbs up a chalk-pit to

Holywell he came on a tall dark solitary figure looking out over the

sea.

It was Mr. Geddes.

The old soldier approached him quietly and touched his arm.

"Well, Mr. Geddes," he said gently. "What you thinking of?"

The tall man turned his fine face.

"I was thinking about a carpenter," he said.

"Of Nazareth?"

"No, of Berlin. Of Papa Schumacher and that boy Joseph, who was trying

so hard to be an English sport--and black-eyed Joanna and the old

Mutter."

The Colonel swallowed.

"Let's shake hands, Geddes," he said.

"With all my heart, Colonel," the other answered.

Then the old soldier went up the slope laboriously, his hands upon his

knees.

His wife was waiting him on the cliff, a little figure, distinguished

even in the dusk, about her shoulders the scarlet cape that had been

the gift of a Rajput Princess.

"I pray it will be all right," he said.

"I pray so," the little lady answered.

War meant ruin for her and the destruction of all her hopes for

Toby.--And her own Jock!--but she never wavered.