A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, the Colonel was sitting in the loggia of the hostel looking out over the sea when he saw two men coming down the shoulder of Beau-nez along the coast-guard path.
The tall man in black with flying coat-tails he recognised at once. It was Mr. Geddes, the one outstanding minister of the Gospel in Beachbourne: a scholar, yet in touch with his own times, eloquent and broad, with a more than local reputation as a Liberal leader. His companion was a sturdy fellow in a cap, with curly black hair and a merry eye.
The Colonel, who never missed a chance, went out to waylay the pair. Mr. Geddes introduced his friend--Mr. Burt, who'd come down recently from Mather and Platt's in the North to act as foreman fitter at Hewson and Clarke's in the East-end.
The Colonel reached out a bony hand, which the other gripped fiercely.
"I know you're both conspirators," he said with a wary smile. "What troubles are you hatching for me now?"
Mr. Geddes laughed, and the engineer, surly a little from shyness and self-conscious as a school-boy, grinned.
"Mr. Burt and I are both keen on education," said the minister. "He's been telling me of Tawney's tutorial class at Rochdale. We're hatching a branch of the W.E.A. down here. That's our only conspiracy."
"What's the W.E.A.?" asked the Colonel, always keen.
"It's the Democratic wing of the National Service League," the engineer answered in broad Lancashire--"Workers' Education Association."
The Colonel nodded.
"He's getting at me!" he said. "I'm always being shot at. Will you both come in to tea and talk?--I should like you to meet my wife, Burt. She'll take you on. She's a red-hot Tory and a bonnie fighter."
But Mr. Geddes had a committee, and--"A must get on with the Revolution," said Burt gravely.
"What Revolution's that?" asked the Colonel.
"The Revolution that begun in 1906--and that's been going on ever since; and will go on till we're through!" He said the last words with a kind of ferocity; and then burst into a sudden jovial roar as he saw the humour of his own ultra-seriousness.
Mrs. Lewknor, who had been watching the interview from the loggia, called to her husband as he returned to the house.
"Who was that man with Mr. Geddes?" she asked.
"Stanley Bessemere's friend," the Colonel answered. "A red Revolutionary from Lancasheer--on the bubble; and a capital good fellow too, I should say."
That evening the Colonel rang up Mr. Geddes to ask about the engineer.
"He's the new type of intellectual artizan," the minister informed him. "The russet-coated captain who knows what he's fighting for and loves what he knows. Unless I'm mistaken he's going to play a considerable part in our East-end politics down here." He gave the other the engineer's address, adding with characteristic breadth,
"It might be worth your while to follow him up perhaps, Colonel."
Joe Burt lodged in the East-end off Pevensey Road in the heart of the new and ever-growing industrial quarter of Seagate, which was gradually transforming a rather suburban little town of villas with a fishing-station attached into a manufacturing city, oppressed with all the thronging problems of our century. There the Colonel visited his new friend. Burt was the first man of his type the old soldier, who had done most of his service in India, had met. The engineer himself, and even more the room in which he lived, with its obvious air of culture, was an eye-opener to the Colonel.
There was an old sideboard, beautifully kept, and on it a copper kettle and spirit lamp; a good carpet, decent curtains. On the walls were Millais's Knight Errant, Greiffenhagen's Man with a Scythe, and Clausen's Girl at the Gate. But it was the books on a long deal plank that most amazed the old soldier; not so much the number of them but the quality. He stood in front of them and read their titles with grunts.
Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics lolled up against the Webbs' Industrial Democracy; Bradley's lectures on the tragedies of Shakespeare hobnobbed with Gilbert Murray's translations from Euripides. Few of the standard books on Economics and Industrial History, English or American, were missing. And the work of the modern creators in imaginative literature, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett were mixed with Alton Locke, Daniel Deronda, Sybil, and the essays of Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter.
"You're not married then?" said the Colonel, throwing a glance round the well-appointed room.
"Yes, A am though," the engineer answered, his black-brown eyes twinkling. "A'm married to Democracy. She's ma first loov and like to be ma last."
"What you doing down South?" asked the Colonel, tossing one leg over the other as he sat down to smoke.
"Coom to make trouble," replied the other.
"Good for you!" said the Colonel. "Hotting things up for our friend Stan. Well, he wants it. All the politicians do."
His first visit to Seagate Lane was by no means his last: for the engineer's courage, his integrity, his aggressive tactics, delighted and amused the scholarly old soldier; but when he came to tackle his man seriously on the business of the National Service League he found he could not move him an inch from the position he invariably took up: The Army would be used by the Government in the only war that matters--the Industrial war; and therefore the Army must not be strengthened.
"If the Army was used for the only purpose it ought to be used for--defence--A'd be with you. So'd the boolk of the workers. But it's not. They use it to croosh strikes!" And he brought his fist down on the table with a characteristic thump. "That's to croosh us!--For the strike's our only weapon, Colonel."
The power, the earnestness, even the savagery he displayed, amazed the other. Here was a reality, an elemental force of which he had scarcely been aware. This was Democracy incarnate. And whatever else he might think he could not but admire the sincerity and strength of it. But he always brought his opponent back to what was for him the only issue.
"Germany!" he said.
"That's blooff!" replied the other. "They'll get the machine-guns for use against Germany, and when they've got em they'll use them against us. That's the capitalists' game.--Then there's the officers."
"What about em?" said the Colonel cheerfully. "They're harmless enough, poor devils."
"Tories to a man. Coom from the capitalist class."
"What if they do?"
"The Army does what the capitalist officer tells it. And he knows where his interest lies aw reet."
"Well, of course you know the British officer better than I do, Burt," replied the Colonel, nettled for once.
His opponent was grimly pleased to have drawn blood.
"In the next few years if things go as they look like goin we shall see," was his comment. "Wait till we get a Labour Government in power!"
The Colonel knocked out his pipe.
"Well, Burt, I'll say this," he remarked. "If we could get half the passion into our cause you do into yours, we should do."
"We're fighting a reality, Colonel," the other answered. "You're fighting a shadow, that's the difference."
"I hope to God it may prove so!" said the Colonel, as they shook hands.
The two men thoroughly enjoyed their spars. And the battle was well matched: for the soldier of the Old Army and the soldier of the New were both scholars, well-read, logical, and fair-minded.
On one of his visits the Colonel found Ernie Caspar in the engineer's room standing before the book-shelf, handling the books. Ernie showed himself a little shame-faced in the presence of his old Commanding Officer.
"How do they compare to your father's, Caspar?" asked the Colonel, innocently unaware of the other's mauvaise honte and the cause of it.
"Dad's got ne'er a book now, sir," Ernie answered gruffly. "Only just the Bible, and Wordsworth, and Troward's Lectures. Not as he'd ever anythink like this--only Carpenter. See, dad's not an economist. More of a philosopher and poet like."
"I wish they were mine," said the Colonel, turning over Zimmeni's Greek Commonwealth.
"They're all right if so be you can afford em," answered Ernie shortly, almost sourly.
"Books are better'n beer, Ernie," said Joe Burt, a thought maliciously; and added with the little touch of priggishness that is rarely absent from those who have acquired knowledge comparatively late in life--"They're the bread of life and source of power."
"Maybe," retorted Ernie with a snort; "but they aren't the equal of wife and children, I'll lay."
He left the room surlily.
Burt grinned at the Colonel.
"Ern's one o the much-married uns," he said.
"D'you know his wife?" the Colonel asked.
Joe shook his bull-head.
"Nay," he said. "And don't wish to."
"She's a fine woman all the same," replied the Colonel.
"Happen so," the other answered. "All the more reason a should avoid her. They canna thole me, the women canna. And A don't blame em."
"Why can't they thole you?" asked the Colonel curiously.
"Most Labour leaders rise to power at the expense of their wives," the other explained. "They go on; but the wives stay where they are--at the wash-tub. The women see that; and they don't like it. And they're right."
"What's the remedy?"
"There's nobbut one." Joe now not seldom honoured the Colonel by relapsing into dialect when addressing him. "And that's for the Labour leader to remain unmarried. They're the priests of Democracy--or should be."
"You'll never make a Labour leader out of Caspar," said the Colonel genially. "I've tried to make an N.C.O. of him before now and failed."
"A'm none so sure," Joe said, and added with genuine concern: "He's on the wobble. Might go up; might go down. Anything might happen to yon lad now. He's just the age. But he's one o ma best pupils--if he'll nobbut work."
"Ah," said the Colonel with interest. "So he's joined your class at St. Andrew's Hall, has he?"
"Yes," replied the other. "Mr. Chislehurst brought him along--the new curate in Old Town. D'ye know him?"
"He's my cousin," replied the Colonel. "I got him here. He'd been overworking in Bermondsey--in connection with the Oxford Bermondsey Mission."
"Oh, he's one of them!" cried the other. "That accounts for it. A know them. They were at Oxford when A was at Ruskin. They're jannock,--and so yoong with it. They think they're going to convert the Church to Christianity!" He chuckled.
"In the course of history," remarked the Colonel, "many Churchmen have thought that. But the end of it's always been the same."
