The avalanche, once started, was moving fast now. The Irish Nationalists who had lost faith in the power of the Government and the will of the Army to protect them, had decided at last to arm in view of the default of the law that they might resist invasion from the North-East.
On the very day after the parade of insurrectionaries in Belfast a famous Irishman, soldier, sailor, statesman, man of letters, who in his young manhood had served throughout the long-drawn South African War the Empire which had refused liberty to his country alone of all her Colonies, and in the days to come, though now in his graying years, was to be the hero of one of the most desperate ventures of the Great War, ran the little Asgarde, her womb heavy with strange fruit, into Howth Harbour while the Sunday bells peeled across the quiet waters, calling to church.
The arms were landed and marched under Nationalist escort towards Dublin. The police and a company of King's Own Scottish Borderers met the party and blocked the way. After a parley the Nationalists dispersed and the soldiers marched back to Dublin through a hostile demonstration. Mobbed, pelted, provoked to the last degree, at Bachelor's Walk, on the quay, where owing to the threatening attitude of the crowd they had been halted, the men took the law into their own hands and fired without the order of their officer. Three people were killed.
The incident led to the first quarrel that had taken place between Ernie and Joe Burt in a friendship now of some years standing.
"Massacre by the military," said Joe. "That's what it is."
The old soldier in Ernie leapt to the alert.
"Well, what would you have had em do?" he cried hotly. "Lay down and let emselves be kicked to death?"
"If the soldiers want to shoot at all let em shoot the armed rebels," retorted Joe.
"Let em shoot the lot, I says," answered Ernie. "I'm sick of it. Ireland! Ireland! Ireland all the time. No one's no time to think of poor old England. Yet we've our troubles too, I reck'n."
Joe went out surlily without saying good-night. When he was gone, Ruth who had been listening, looked up at Ernie, a faint glow of amusement, interest, surprise, in her eyes.
"First time ever I knaw'd you and Joe get acrarst each other," she said.
Ernie, biting home on his pipe, did not meet her gaze.
"First," he said. "Not the last, may be."
She put down dish-cloth and dish, came to him, and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Let me look at you, Ern!"
His jaw was set, almost formidable: he did not speak.
"Kiss me, Ern," she said.
For a moment his eyes hovered on her face.
"D'you mean anything?" he asked.
"Not that," she answered and dropped her hand.
"Then to hell with you!" he cried with a kind of desperate savagery and thrust her brutally away. "Sporting with a man!"
He put on his cap and went out.
In a few minutes he was back. Paying no heed to her, he sat down at the kitchen-table and wrote a note, which he put on the mantel-piece.
"You can give this to Alf next time he comes round for the rent," he said.
"What is it?" asked Ruth.
"Notice," Ern answered. "We're going to shift to the Colonel's garage."
Ruth gave battle instantly.
"Who are?" she cried, facing him.
He met her like a hedge of bayonets.
"I am," he answered. "Me and my children."
The volley fired on Bachelor's Walk, as it echoed down the long valleys of the world, seemed to serve the purpose of Joshua's trumpet. Thereafter all the walls of civilisation began to crash down one after another with the roar of ruined firmaments.
Forty-eight hours later Austria declared war.
On Thursday Mr. Asquith, speaking in a crowded and quiet house, proposed the postponement of the Home Rule Bill.
Even the hotheads were sober now.
Stanley Bessemere discarded his uniform of an Ulster Volunteer in haste, and turned up at the club in chastened mood. He was blatant still, a little furtive, notably less truculent. The martial refrain Smith and I had given place to the dulcet coo We must all pull together.
"Is he ashamed?" Mrs. Lewknor asked her husband, hushed herself, and perhaps a little guilty.
"My dear," the Colonel replied. "Shame is not a word known to your politician. He's thoroughly frightened. All the politicians are. There're bluffing for all they're worth."
On the Saturday morning the Colonel went to the club. The junior member for Beachbourne, who was there, and for once uncertain of himself, showed himself childishly anxious to forget and forgive.
"Now look here, Colonel!" he said, charming and bright. "If there's an almighty bust-up now, shall you really blame it all on Ulster? Honest Injun!"
The Colonel met him with cold flippancy.
"Every little helps," he said. "A whisper'll start an avalanche, as any mountaineer could tell you."
He took up the Nation of August 1st and began to read the editor's impassioned appeal to the country to stand out. The Colonel read the article twice over. There could be no question of the white-hot sincerity of the writer, and none that he voiced the sentiments of an immense and honest section of the country.
He put the paper down and walked home.
"If we don't go in," he said calmly to his wife at luncheon, "all I can say is, that I shall turn my back on England for ever and go and hide my head for the rest of my days on the borders of Thibet."
In those last days of peace good men and true agonised in their various ways. Few suffered more than the Colonel; none but his wife knew the agony of his doubt.
Then Mr. Trupp telephoned to say that Germany had sent an ultimatum to Russia, and that France was mobilising. Mr. Cambon had interviewed the King. The Government was still wavering.
The Colonel's course was evident. The little organisation for which he was responsible must express itself, if only in the shrill sharp voice of a mosquito. A meeting of the League must be convened. Tingling with hope, doubt, fear, shame, he set off in the evening to interview Alfred Caspar. Swiftly he crossed the golf-links and turned into Saffrons Croft. There he paused.
It was one of those unforgettable evenings magnificently calm, which marked with triumphant irony the end of the world. The green park with its cluster of elms presented its usual appearance on a Saturday afternoon. The honest thump of the ball upon the bat, so dear to English hearts, resounded on every side: the following cry--Run it out! the groups of youths sprawling about the scorers, the lounging spectators. Not a rumour of the coming storm had touched those serene hearts. Close to him a bevy of women and children were playing a kind of rounders. The batter was a big young woman whom he recognised at once as Ruth.
One of the the fielders was little Alice scudding about the surface of green on thin black legs like a water-beetle on a pond. Then Ernie saw him and came sauntering towards him, a child clinging solemnly to one finger of each hand. There was an air of strain about the old Hammer-man, as of one waiting on the alert for a call, that distinguished him, so the Colonel thought, from the gay throng.
"What about it, sir?" he asked gravely.
"It's coming, Caspar," the Colonel answered. "That's my belief."
"And I shan't be sorry if it does," said Ernie with a quiet vindictiveness.
"Shall you go?" asked the Colonel. He knew the other's time as a reservist was up.
"Sha'n't I?" Ernie answered with something like a snort.
The Colonel was not deceived. It was not the patriot, not the old soldier, who had uttered that cry of distress: it was the human being, bruised and suffering, and anxious to vent his pain in violence on something or somebody, no matter much who.
"Yes, sir, I shall go, if it's only as cook in the Army Service Corps."
The Colonel shook his head.
"If it comes," he said, "every fighting man'll be wanted in his right place. Would you like to rejoin the old battalion at Aldershot, if I can work it for you? Then you'd go out with the Expeditionary Force."
Ernie's eyes gleamed.
"Ah, just wouldn't I?" he said.
Just then there was a shout from the players. Ruth was out and retired. She came towards them, glowing, laughing, her fingers touching her hair to order. She was thirty now, but at that moment she did not look twenty-five. Then she saw the Colonel and deliberately turned away. Susie and Jenny pursued their mother.
The Colonel walked off through the groups of white-clad players towards Alf's garage in the Goffs. A tall man was standing at the gate on to Southfields Road, contemplating the English scene with austere gaze.
It was Royal--the man who would know.
"You think it's going to be all right?" asked the Colonel so keen as to forget his antipathy.
"Heaven only knows with this Government," the other replied. "I've just been on the telephone. Haldane's going back to the War Office, they say."
"Thank God for it!" cried the Colonel.
His companion shrugged.
"Henry Wilson's in touch with Maxse and the Conservative press," he said. "He's getting at the Opposition. There's to be a meeting at Lansdowne House to-night. H.W.'s going to ginger em."
The Colonel looked away.
"And what are you doing down here?" he asked.
"They sent me down to Newhaven last night--embarkation. I'm off in two minutes." He jerked his head towards a racing car standing outside the garage, white with dust. "Got to catch the 7 o'clock at Lewes, and be back at the War Office at 9 p.m. An all-night sitting, I expect." That austere gaze of his returned to the playing-fields. "Little they know what they're in for," he said, as though to himself.
For the first time the Colonel found something admirable, almost comforting, in the hardness of his old adjutant. He followed the other's gaze and then said quietly, almost tenderly, as one breathing a secret in the ear of a dying man.
"That's the child, Royal--that one in the white frock and black legs running over by the elms. And that's her mother in the brown dress--the one waving. And there's her husband under the trees--that shabby feller."
Royal arched his fine eyebrows in faint surprise.
"Is she married?" he asked coolly.
"Yes," replied the Colonel. "The feller who seduced her wouldn't do the straight thing by her."
Again the eyebrows spoke, this time with an added touch of sarcasm, almost of insolence.
"How d'you know?"
The Colonel was roused.
"Well, did you?" he asked, with rare brutality.
Royal shrugged. Then he turned slow and sombre eyes on the other. There was no anger in them, no hostility.
"Perhaps I shall make it up to them now, Colonel," he said....
The Colonel crossed the road to the garage. There was a stir of busyness about two of the new motor char-a-bancs of the Touring Syndicate. Alf was moving amid it all in his shirt-sleeves, without collar or tie, his hands filthy. His moustache still waxed, and his hair parted down the middle and plastered, made an almost comic contrast to the rest of his appearance. But there was nothing comic about his expression. He looked like a dog sickening for rabies; ominous, surly, on the snarl. He did not seem to see the Colonel, who tackled him at once, however, about the need for summoning a meeting of the League.
"Summon it yourself then," said Alf. "I got something better to do than that. Such an idea! Coming botherin me just now. Start on Monday. Ruin starin me in the face. Who wants war? Might ha done it on purpose to do me down."
The Colonel climbed the hill to the Manor-house to sup with the Trupps.
Two hours later, as he left the house, Ernie Caspar turned the corner of Borough Lane, and came towards him, lost in dreams. The Colonel waited for him. There was about the old Hammer-man that quality of forlornness which the Colonel had noted in him so often of late. He took his place by the other's side. They walked down the hill together silently until they were clear of the houses, and Saffrons Croft lay broad-spread and fragrant upon their right.
In the growing dusk the spirits of the two men drew together. Then Ernie spoke.
"It's not Joe, sir," he said. "He's all right, Joe is."
The Colonel did not fence.
"Are you sure?" he asked with quiet emphasis.
"Certain sure," the other answered with astonishing vehemence. "It's Ruth. She won't give me ne'er a chance."
The Colonel touched him in the dusk.
"Bad luck," he muttered. "She'll come round."
It was an hour later and quite dark when he rounded the shoulder of Beau-nez and turned into the great coombe, lit only by the windows of his own house shining out against Beau-nez.
Walking briskly along the cliff, turning over eternally the question whether England would be true to herself, he was aware of somebody stumbling towards him, talking to himself, probably drunk. The Colonel drew aside off the chalk-blazed path to let the other pass.
"A don't know justly what to make on't," came a broad familiar accent.
"Why, it's fight or run away," replied the Colonel, briskly. "No two twos about it."
A sturdy figure loomed up alongside him.
"Then it's best run away, A reckon," answered the other, "afore worse comes on't. What d'you say, Colonel?"
The darkness drew the two men together with invisible bonds just as an hour before it had drawn the Colonel and Ernie.
"What is it, Burt?" asked the Colonel, gently.
He felt profoundly the need of this other human being standing over against him in the darkness, lonely, suffering, riven with conflicting desires.
Joe drew closer. He was sighing, a sigh that was almost a sob. Then he spoke in the hushed and urgent mutter of a schoolboy making a confession.
"It's this, Colonel--man to man. Hast ever been in love with a woman as you oughtn't to be?"
Not for the first time in these last months there was strong upon the Colonel the sense that here before him was an honest man struggling in the toils prepared for him by Nature--the Lion with no mouse to gnaw him free. Yet he was aware more strongly than ever before of that deep barrier of class which in this fundamental matter of sex makes itself more acutely felt than in any other. A man of quite unusual breadth of view, imagination, and sympathy, this was the one topic that some inner spirit of delicacy had always forbidden him to discuss except with his own kind. He was torn in two; and grateful to the kindly darkness that covered him. On the one hand were all the inhibitions imposed upon him by both natural delicacy and artificial yet real class-restraint; on the other there was his desire to help a man he genuinely liked. Should he take the line of least resistance, the line of the snob and the coward? Was it really the fact that because this man was not a gentleman he could not lay bare before him an experience that might save him?
"Yes," he said at last with the emphasis of the man who is forcing himself.
There was a lengthy silence.
"Were you married?"
"No," abruptly. "Of course not."
"Was she?"
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"She wired me to come--in India--years ago."
"Did you go?"
"No--thank God." The honest man in him added: "I never got the wire."
Again there was a pause.
"Are you glad?"
"Yes."
"Had she children."
"No."
The engineer breathed deep.
"Ah," he said. "I'd ha gone."
"Then you'd have done wrong."
"Happen so," stubbornly. "I'd ha gone though--knowing what I know now."
"What's that?"
"What loov is."
The Colonel paused.
"She'd never have forgiven you," he said at last.
"What for?"
"For taking advantage of her hot fit."
The arrow shot in the dark had clearly gone home. The Colonel followed up his advantage.
"Is she in love with you?"
"She's never said so."
"But you think so?"
"Nay, A don't think so," the other answered with all the old violence. "A know it. A've nobbut to reach out ma hand to pluck the flower."
His egotism annoyed the Colonel.
"Seems to me," he said, "we shall all of us soon have something better to do than running round after each other's wives. Seen the evening paper?"
"Nay, nor the morning for that matter."
"And you a politician!"
"A'm two men--same as most: politician and lover. Now one's a-top; now t'other. It's a see-saw."
"And the lover's on top now?" said the Colonel.
"Yes," said the engineer, "and like to stay there too--blast him!" And he was gone in the darkness.
