One evening at the club, Mr. Trupp asked the Colonel what had happened to Captain Royal.
"He went through the Staff College, and now he's at the War Office, I believe," the other answered curtly.
"Ever hear from him?" asked Mr. Trupp, warily.
"No," said the Colonel. "He's not a friend of mine." And to save himself and an old brother-officer for whom he had neither liking nor respect, he changed the conversation to the theme that haunted him.
Mr. Trupp might chaff the Colonel about his idée fixe, but he, too, like most men of his class, had the fear of Germany constantly before his eyes and liked nothing better than to discuss the familiar topic with his friend over a cigar.
"Well, how are we getting on?" he asked encouragingly.
"Not so bad," the Colonel answered through the smoke. "Haldane's sent for Haig from India."
"Who's Haig?" puffed the other.
"Haig's a soldier who was at Oxford," the Colonel answered. "You didn't know there was such a variety, did you?"
"Never mind about Oxford," grunted the great surgeon. "Oxford turns out as many asses as any other institution so far as I can see. Does he know his job? That's the point."
"As well as you can expect a soldier to know it," replied the other, still in the ironic vein. "Sound but slow's his reputation. He and Haldane are the strongest combination there's been at the War Office in my time." He added more seriously--"They ought to get a move on between 'em, if anybody can."
"In time?" asked Mr. Trupp.
The Colonel, in spite of the recurrent waves of despair, which inundated him, was at heart an unrepentant optimist.
"I don't see why not," he said. "Bobs says Germany can't strike till the Kiel Canal's open for battleships. That won't be till 1912 or so."
The old doctor moved into the card-room with a cough.
"Gives you time to get on with your job, too, Colonel," he said. "I wish you well. Good-night."
The Colonel was retired now; but his brain was as active as ever, his heart as big, if his body was no longer so sure an instrument as it once had been. And Lord Roberts, when he asked his old comrade in arms to undertake work which he did not hesitate to describe as vital to the Empire, knew that the man to whom he was appealing possessed in excelsis the quality which has always made the British Army the nursery of spirits who put the good of the Service before their own advancement. The little old hero, like all great soldiers, had his favourite regiments, the result of association and experience; and it was well known that the Hammer-men stood at the top of the list. Fifty years before the date of this story they had sweated with him on the Ridge before Delhi; under his eyes had stormed the Kashmir Gate; with him had watched Nicholson die. Twenty years later they had gone up the Kurrum with the young Major-General, and made with him the famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Another twenty years and they were making the pace for the old Field Marshal in the great trek from Paardeberg to Bloemfontein. He knew most of the officers, some of them intimately. And on hearing that Jocko Lewknor had settled down at Beachbourne wrote at once and asked him to become Secretary of the local branch of the National Service League, which existed to establish in England universal military training on the lines of Switzerland's Militia.
The Colonel made one of his rare trips to London and lunched at the Rag with the leader who had been his hero ever since as a lad he had gone up the Peiwar Khotal with the First Hammer-men at the order of Bahadur Bobs.
The Field Marshal opened the Colonel's eyes to the danger threatening the Empire.
"The one thing in our favour is this," he said, as they parted at the hall-door. "We've yet time."
The Colonel, inspired with new life, returned to Beachbourne and told his wife. She listened with vivid interest.
"You've got your work cut out, my Jocko," she said. "And I shan't be able to help you much."
"No," replied the Colonel. "You must stick to the hostel. I'll plough my own furrow."
Forthwith he set to work with the quiet tenacity peculiar to him. From the start he made surprising headway, perhaps because he was so unlike the orthodox product of the barrack-square; and like his leader he eschewed the party politics he had always loathed.
When he took up the work of the League he found it one of the many non-party organisations, run solely by the Conservatives quartered in Meads and Old Town, because, to do them justice, nobody else would lend a hand. Liberalism, camped in mid-town about Terminus Road, was sullenly suspicious; Labour, at the East-end, openly hostile. The opposition of Liberalism, the Colonel soon discovered, centred round the leader of Nonconformity in the town, Mr. Geddes, the powerful Presbyterian minister at St. Andrew's; the resistance of Labour, inchoate as yet and ineffective as the Labour Party from which it sprang, was far more difficult to tackle as being more vague and imponderable.
In those days, always with the same end in view, the Colonel spent much time in the East-end, winding his way into the heart of Industrial Democracy. He sloughed some old prejudices and learnt some new truths, especially the one most difficult for a man of his age and tradition to imbibe--that he knew almost nothing of modern England. Often on Sundays he would walk across from Meads to Sea-gate and spend his afternoon wandering in the Recreation Ground, gathering impressions on the day that Labour tries to become articulate.
On one such Sunday afternoon he came on a large old gentleman in gold spectacles, fair linen, and roomy tailcoat, meandering on the edge of a dirty and tattered crowd who were eddying about a platform. The old gentleman seemed strangely out of place and delightfully unconscious of it; wandering about, large, benevolent and undisturbed, like a moon in a stormy sky.
"Well, Mr. Caspar," said the Colonel quietly. "What do you make of it all?"
The large soft man turned his mild gaze of a cow in calf on the lean tall one at his side. It was clear he had no notion who the speaker was; or that they had been at Trinity together forty years before.
"To me it's extraordinarily inspiring," he said with an earnestness that was almost ridiculous. "I feel the surge of the spirit beating behind the bars down here as I do nowhere else.... It fills me with an immense hope."
The Colonel, standing by the other like a stick beside a sack, sighed.
"They fill me with a fathomless despair," he said gently. "One wants to help them, but they won't let you."
The other shook a slow head.
"I don't look at it like that," he replied. "I go to them for help."
The Colonel made a little moue.
"D'you get it?" he asked
"I do," Mr. Caspar replied with startling conviction.
The Colonel moved sorrowfully upon his way. He was becoming a man of one idea--Germany....
A few nights later, after supper, he strolled up Beau-nez under a harvest-moon spreading silvery wings moth-like over earth and sea. He was full of his own thoughts, and and for once heavy, almost down-hearted, as he took up his familiar post of vigil beside the flagstaff on the Head and looked out over the shining waters. The Liberals were moving at last, it seemed. The great cry for Dreadnoughts, more Dreadnoughts,
_We want eight!
We won't wait!_
had gone up to the ears of Government from millions of middle-class homes; but the Working Man still slept.
Would nothing rouse him to the Terror that stalked by night across those quiet waters? ... The Working Man, who would have to bear the brunt of it when the trouble came.... The Working Man...?
The Head was deserted save for the familiar goat tethered outside the coast-guard station. The moon beamed down benignantly on the silver-sabled land, broad-bosomed about him, and the waters stirring far beneath him with a rustle like wind in corn. Then he heard a movement at his back, and turned to see behind him, shabby, collarless, sheepish, the very Working Man of whom he had been thinking.
The Colonel regarded the mystic figure, gigantic in the moonlight, a type rather than an individual, with an interest that was half compassionate and half satirical.
Yes. That was the feller! That was the chap who would take it in the neck! That man with the silly smile--God help him!
"Come to look for it?" he said to the shadow, half to himself--"wiser than your kind?"
"Look for what, sir?"
"The Creeping Death that's stealing across the sea to swallow you and yours."
The shadow sidled towards him.
"Is that you, sir?" a voice said. "I thought it were."
The Colonel emerged from his dream.
"What, Caspar!" he replied. "What are you doing up here at this time of night?"
"Just come up for a look round before turning in, me and my wife, sir," the other answered. "Ruth," he called, "it's the Colonel."
A young woman with an orange scarf about her hair issued from the shadow of the coast-guard station and came forward slowly.
"I've heard a lot about you from Ern, sir," she said in a deep voice that hummed like a top in the silvery silence. "When you commanded his battalion in India and all."
The Colonel, standing in the dusk, listened with a deep content as to familiar music, the player unseen; and was aware that his senses were stirred by a beauty felt rather than seen...... Then he dropped down the hill to the hostel twinkling solitary in the coombe beneath.
"Your friend Caspar's married," he told his wife on joining her in the loggia. The little lady scoffed.
"Married!" she cried. "He's been married nearly a year. They spent their honeymoon on the hill at the back last autumn. I could see them from my room."
"Why ever didn't you tell me?" asked the Colonel. "I'd have run em in for vagrancy."
"No, you wouldn't," answered Mrs. Lewknor.
"Why not?"
"Because, my Jocko, she's a peasant Madonna. You couldn't stand up against her. No man could."
"A powerful great creature from what I could see of her," the Colonel admitted. "A bit of a handful for Master Ernie, I should guess."
Mrs. Lewknor's fine face became firm. She thought she scented a challenge in the words and dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in them.
"Ernie'll hold her," she said. "He could hold any woman. He's a gentleman like his father before him."
He reached a long arm across to her as he sat and raised her fingers to his lips.
Years ago a bird had flashed across the vision of his wife, coming and going, in and out of the darkness, like the sparrow of the Saxon tale; but this had been no sparrow, rather a bird of Paradise. The Colonel knew that; and he knew that the fowler who had loosed the jewel-like bird was that baggy old gentleman who lived across the golf links in the little house that overlooked the Rectory. He knew and understood: for years ago the same bird had flashed with radiant wings across the chamber of his life too, swiftly coming, swiftly going.
