That night Sir Edward Grey made the historic speech, which swung the nation into line like one man, and launched Great Britain on the supreme adventure of her history.
The one bright spot in the situation is Ireland.
Redmond had followed in a speech which filled the Colonel's eyes with tears and his heart with gladness as he read it next morning, so generous it was, so chivalrous.
I say to the Government they may withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose Catholics in the South will join the Protestants in the North.
The Colonel paced to and fro on his lawns, the paper flapping in his hand.
Not even the spectacle of Carson, sulking in his tent, and answering never a word to his opponent's magnanimous appeal, could mar that vision splendid.
All day long the Colonel never left his garden, hovering round the telephone. Anything might happen at any moment.
Then news came through.
The Government had sent Germany an ultimatum. If she failed to give us an assurance before 11 p.m. that she would not violate the neutrality of Belgium, England would go to war.
The Colonel sighed his thankfulness.
All day he quarter-decked up and down the loggia, Zeiss glasses in hand. His telescope he arranged on the tripod on the lawn, and with it swept earth and sky and sea. Towards evening he marked a bevy of men swing round the shoulder of the hill from Meads into the coombe. They were in mufti, and not in military formation; but they marched, he noted, and kept some sort of order, moving rhythmically, restrained as a pack of hounds on the way to the meet, and yet with riot in their hearts. He turned the telescope full on them, marked Ernie among them, and knew them forthwith for the Reservists from Old Town training for IT. A wave of emotion surged through him. He went down to the fence and stood there with folded arms, and high head, his sparse locks grey in the evening light, watching them go by. Then he saluted.
They saw the old soldier standing bare-headed at the fence, recognised him, and shouted a greeting.
"Good-evening, sir."
"That's the style!" he cried gruffly. "Getting down to it."
Then Ernie broke away and came across the grass to him at the double, grinning broadly, and gay as a boy.
"Yes, sir. Old Town Troop we call ourselves. Long march to-night. Through Birling Gap to the Haven and home over Windhover about midnight. What I stepped across to say, sir, was I'm thinkin Ruth'd better stay where she is for the time being--if it's all the same to you, sir; and not move to the garage."
"As you like," replied the Colonel. "Undercliff's the most exposed house in Beachbourne--that's certain. If there's trouble from the sea we shall catch it; or if their Zeppelins bomb the signalling station on the Head some of it may come our way."
Ernie looked shy.
"That little turn-up with Alf in the road yesterday, sir," he said confidentially. "I was glad you was there." He came forward stealthily. "See, I know what you thought, sir. It's not Joe after her. It's Alf--always has been; from before we married. Joe's all right."
The Colonel stared grimly over the sea.
"I think you're wrong," he said.
"Then I know I'm not, sir," Ernie flashed.
The Colonel returned to his watch.
That night he did not go to bed. Instead he sat up in his pyjamas in the corner-room that looked out over the sea, and on to Beau-nez. If we went in the news would be flashed at once to the coastguard on the Head; and the petty officer on duty up there had promised to signal it down to the house in the coombe beneath.
The Colonel watched and waited.
The window was open. It was a still and brilliant night. He could hear the fall, and swish, and drone of the sea, rhythmical and recurrent, at the foot of the cliff. From the crest of the hill behind the house came the occasional tinkle of the canister-bell of some old wether of the flock.
Then the silence was disturbed by a growing tumult in the darkness.
A squadron of destroyers was thrashing furiously round the Head, not a light showing, close inshore, too, only an occasional smudge of white in the darkness revealing their position and the feather of foam they bore along like a plume before them.
Out of the darkness they came at a speed incredible, and into the darkness they were gone once more like a flash.
The Colonel breathed again.
At least the Navy was ready, thanks to Churchill.
Was the Army?
He recalled a remark reported to him as having been made at a P.S.A. in the East-end some weeks since: that the Army no longer trusted its officers, and the country no longer trusted its Army. Could it be true?
His thoughts turned with passionate sympathy to Gough and the simple regimental officers who had been lured by politicians into the dreadful business of the Army Conspiracy. But that other feller!--that yappin chap at the War Office, who ought to have known better! ...
Away on the crest of Beau-nez, humping a huge black back against the brilliant darkness, someone was swinging a lantern--once, twice.
The Colonel flashed his electric torch in answer.
The gaunt figure at the window turned.
"Rachel," he said low, to the woman in the bed beneath him.
"Jocko," came the answering voice, quiet as his own.
"We're going in."
"Thank God."
In the darkness she reached up arms, white and trembling as a bride's, and drew him to her.
He kissed her eyelids and found them wet.
"I can't help it, Jocko," she sobbed. "Jock!"
Her boy was in India with the second battalion; but she knew very well that now the crash had come every battalion in the Service would be flung into the furnace.
The Colonel went back to the window and she came to his side. His arm crept about her, and she trembled in the curve of it. A mild but ghastly beam, as of the moon, fell on them standing at the window. A battleship was playing its searchlight full on them. The cold wan beam roamed along the hill-side callous and impersonal, exposing every bush and scar. It fell on the white bluff of Beau-nez and came creeping, like the fingers of a leper, along the cliff. Just opposite the hostel, at the spot where the path ran down to the beach, it stayed, pointing as it were, at a little pillar of solid blackness erect on the cliff edge.
The Colonel caught his breath with a gasp.
"Don't look!" he cried sharply and snatched his wife away. As he did so the pillar broke up in two component parts, as though dissolved by the white encircling flood of light.
A woman's stifled scream came through the open window.
"Joe!"
Then there was a slither of chalk as the pair stampeded down the path out of sight, and crashed into the beach beneath. The Colonel let down the blind with a rattle.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT
Ernie clattered into the kitchen at a busy trot, and stumbled upstairs without a word to his wife at the sink.
There was such an air of stir and secret purposefulness about him that Ruth followed him up to the bedroom. There she found him on his knees in a litter of things, packing a bundle frantically.
A dish-cloth in her hand, she watched his efforts.
"Where away then?" she asked.
"Berlin this journey. Hand me them socks!"
Her eyes leapt. "Is it war?"
"That's it."
She sat down ghastly, wrapping her hands in her apron as if they had been mutilated and she wished to hide the stumps.
Men abuse the Army when they are in it and take their discharge at the earliest possible moment; but when the call comes they down tools with avidity, and leaving the mill, the mine, the shunting yard, and the shop, they troop back to the colours with the lyrical enthusiasm of those who have re-discovered youth on the threshhold of middle-age.
Ern, you may be sure, was no exception to the rule.
Packing and unpacking his bundle on his knees, he was busy, happy, important. But there was no such desperate hurry after all: for he did not join the crowds which thronged the recruiting stations in those first days: he waited for the Colonel to arrange matters so that he could join his old battalion at Aldershot direct.
Ruth watched him with deep and jealously guarded eyes in which wistfulness and other disturbing emotions met and mingled.
Once only she put to him the master question.
"What about us, Ern?"
He was standing at the time contemplating the patient and tormented bundle.
"Who?"
"Me and the children."
"There's one Above," said Ernie. "He'll see to you."
"He don't most in general not from what I've seen of it," answered Ruth. "What if He don't?"
There was a moment's pause. Then Ern dropped a word as a child may drop a stone in a well.
"Joe."
Ruth caught her breath.
In those days Ernie grew on her as a mountain looming out of the dawn-mist grows on the onlooker. Joe did not even come to see her; and she was glad. For all his virility and bull-like quality, now that the day of battle had come, Ern was proving spiritually the bigger man.
And his very absorbtion in the new venture appealed to Ruth even while it wounded. Ern had been "called" as surely as Clem Woolgar, the bricklayer's labourer, her neighbour in the Moot, who testified every Sunday afternoon in a scarlet jersey at the Star corner to the clash of cymbals. Clem it was true, spoke of his call as Christ; to Ernie it went by the name of country. In Ruth's view the name might differ but the Thing was the same. A voice had come to Ern which had spoken to him as she had not, as the children had not. Because of it he was a new man--"converted," as Clem would say, prepared to forsake father and mother, and wife, and child, and follow, follow.
England was calling; and he seemed deaf to every other voice. She seemed to have gone clean out of his life; but the children had not--she noticed it with a pang of jealousy and a throb of hope. For each of the remaining nights after dark, he went round their cots. She was not to know anything about that, she could see, from the stealthy way in which he stole upstairs when her back was supposed to be turned. But the noises in the room overhead, the murmur of his voice, the shuffling of his feet as he got up from the bedsides betrayed his every action.
On the third night, as he rejoined her, she rose before him in the dusk, laying down her work.
"Anything for me too, Ern," she asked humbly--"the mother of em?"
"What d'you mean?" he asked almost fiercely.
"D'you want me, Ern?"
He turned his back on her with an indifference that hurt far more than any brutality, because it signified so plainly that he did not care.
"You're all right," he said enigmatically, and went out.
He could ask anything of her now, and she would give him all, how gladly! But he asked nothing.
In another way, too, he was torturing her. It was clear to her that he meant to do his duty by her and the children--to the last ounce; and nothing more. He cared for their material wants as he had never done before. All his spare moments he spent handying about the house, hammer in hand, nails in mouth, doing little jobs he had long promised to do and had forgotten; putting little Ned's mail-cart to rights, screwing on a handle, setting a loose slate. She followed him about with wistful eyes, holding the hammer, steadying the ladder, and receiving in return a few off-hand words of thanks. She did not want words: she wanted him--himself.
Then news came through, and he was straightway full of mystery and bustle.
"Join at Aldershot to-morrow. Special train at two," he told Ruth in the confidential whisper beloved of working-men. "Don't say nothing to nobody." As though the news, if it reached the Kaiser, would profoundly affect the movements of the German armies.
That evening Ernie went up to the Manor-house to say good-bye.
Mrs. Trupp was far more to him than his god-mother: she was a friend known to him from babyhood, allied to him by a thousand intimate ties, and trusted as he trusted no one else on earth, not even his dad.
Now he unbosomed to her the one matter that was worrying him on his departure--that he should be leaving Ruth encumbered with debt.
Mrs. Trupp met him with steady eyes. It was her first duty, the first duty of every man, woman and child in the nation to see that the fighting-men went off in good heart.
"You needn't worry about Ruth," she said, quietly. "She'll have the country behind her. All the soldiers' wives will."
Ernie shook his head doubtfully.
"Ah, I don't hold much by the country," he said.
The lady's grave face, silver-crowned, twinkled into sudden mischievous life. She rippled off into the delicious laughter he loved so dearly.
"I know who's been talking to you!" she cried.
Ernie grinned sheepishly.
"Who then?"
"Mr. Burt."
Ernie admitted the charge.
"If you don't trust the country, will you trust Mr. Trupp and me?" the other continued.
Ernie rose with a sigh of relief.
"Thank you kindly, 'm," he said. "That's what I come after."
Ernie went on to Rectory Walk, to find that his mother too had joined the crucified. In the maelstrom of emotion that in those tragic hours was tossing nations and individuals this way and that, the hard woman had been humbled at last. Stripped to the soul, she saw herself a twig hurled about in the sea of circumstance she could no more control than a toy-boat a-float on the Atlantic can order the tides. No longer an isolated atom hard and self-contained, she was one of a herd of bleating sheep being driven by a remorseless butcher to the slaughter-house. And the first question she put to him revealed the extent of the change that had been wrought in her.
"What about Ruth?" she asked.
It was the only occasion on which his mother had named his wife to Ern during his married life.
"She's all right, mother," Ernie replied. "She's plenty of friends."
"Mrs. Trupp," jealously. "Well, why don't ye say so? What about the children?"
"They'll just stay with their mother," answered Ernie.
"I could have em here if she was to want to go out to work," Anne said grudgingly; and must add, instigated by the devil who dogged her all her life--"Your children, of course."
Ernie answered quite simply:
"No, thank-you, mother," and continued with unconscious dignity--"They're all my children."
A gleam of cruelty shone in his mother's eyes.
"She's behind with her rent. You know that? And Alf's short. He says he's dropped thousands over his Syndicate. Ruined in his country's cause, Alf says."
"If he's dropped thousands a few shillings more or less won't help him," said Ernie curtly.
"And yet he'll want em," Anne pursued maliciously. "He was sayin so only last night. Every penny, he said."
"He may want," retorted Ernie. "He won't get."
His mother made a little grimace.
"If Alf wants a thing he usually gets it."
Ernie flashed white.
"Ah," he said. "We'll see what dad says."
It was a new move in the family game, and unexpected. Anne was completely taken a-back. She felt that Ernie was not playing fair. There had always been an unwritten family law, inscribed by the mother on the minds of the two boys in suggestible infancy, that dad should be left outside all broils and controversies; that dad should be spared unpleasantness, and protected at any cost.
She was shocked, almost to pleading.
"You'd never tell him!"
"He's the very one I would tell then!" retorted Ernie, rejoicing in his newly-discovered vein of brutality.
"Only worry him," she coaxed.
"He ain't the only one," Ern answered. "I'm fairly up against it, too." Grinning quietly at his victory, he turned down the passage to the study.
His father was sitting in his favourite spot under the picture of his ancestor, watching the tree-tops blowing in the Rectory garden opposite. The familiar brown-paper-clad New Testament was on his knee.
Ernie marked at once that here was the one tranquil spirit he had met since the declaration of war. And this was not the calm of stagnation. Rather it was the intense quiet of the wheel which revolves so swiftly that it appears to be still.
He drew his chair beside his father's.
"What d'you make of it all, dad?" he asked gently.
The old man took his thumb out of his New Testament, and laid his hand upon his son's.
"And behold there was a great earthquake," he quoted. "For the Angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door of the Tomb."
Ernie nodded thoughtfully. For the first time perhaps the awful solemnity of the drama in which he was about to play his part came home to him in all its overwhelming power.
"Yes, dad," he said deeply. "Only I reck'n it took some rolling."
The old man gripped and kneaded the hand in his just as Ruth would do in moments of stress.
"True, Boy-lad," he answered. "But it had to be rolled away before the Lord could rise."
Ernie assented.
Hand-in-hand they sat together for some while. Then Ernie rose to go. In the silence and dusk father and son stood together on the very spot where fourteen years before they had said good-bye on Ernie's departure for the Army. The Edward Caspar of those days was old now; and the boy of that date a matured man, scarred already by the wars of Time.
"It won't be easy rolling back the stone, Boy-lad," said the old man. "But they that are for us are more than they that are against us."
It was not often that Ernie misunderstood his father; but he did now.
"Yes," he said. "And they say the Italians are coming in too."
"The whole world must come in," replied the other, his cheeks rosying faintly with an enthusiasm which made him tremble. "And we must all push together." He made a motion with his hand--"English and Germans, Russians and Austrians, and roll it back, back, back! and topple it over into the abyss. And then the Dawn will break on the risen Lord."
Ernie went out into the passage. His mother in the kitchen was waiting for him. She looked almost forlorn, he noticed.
"Give me a kiss, Ern," she pleaded in sullen voice that quavered a little. "Don't let's part un-friends just now--you and me--After all, you're my first."
Ernie's eyes filled. He took her in his arms, this withered old woman, patted her on the back, kissed her white hair, her tired eyelids.
"There!" he said. "I should knaw you arter all these years, Mum. Always making yourself twice the terror you are--and not meaning it."
