CHAPTER VIII
BEACHBOURNE

The Domesday Book tells us that King Edward the Confessor held the Manor of Burne, and gave the endowment of the Church of St. Michael to the Abbey of Fecamp, along with the Lordships of Steyning and Rye and Winchelsea and other jewels from the crown of Sussex; as all who have read Mr. Dudgeon's scholarly history of Beachbourne will recall.

Harold cancelled the grant, with the result, so legend has it, that William the Norman landed at Pevensey just across the way to enforce restitution. In those days the parish of Burne covered like a blanket the western promontory of the great Bay. At each of the four corners of the blanket, holding it down as it were, was a rude hamlet. On the bourne itself a few hovels clustered round the wooden church upon the Kneb; in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, carved out of the flank of Beau-nez, was Holy Well, haunted by pilgrims from the Continent; on the sea-front there was the Wish, beneath which of old a Roman dock had been; and further east was Sea-gate with its fishing-station and the earth-work which guarded the entrance to the Bay whose waters swept inland over what are now the Levels to Ratton and Horsey and the borders of Hailsham.

In the reign of Henry II the Norman church, much as we know it to-day, succeeded the crazy wooden building in which our Saxon forefathers heard the Word of the Promise first brought to Sussex by Bishop Wilfrith, who starting from the North, dared the perils of the Forest, and somehow fought his way through brake and marsh and thicket, among wild beasts and wilder men, to the ancient Roman settlement at Chichester; thence to spread the news all along the high bleak coast-line on which at river-mouths and lagoon-like estuaries the Saxon adventurers had gained a footing.

Till the nineteenth century the parish that lay scattered thus between the Downs, the marshes, and the sea, changed but little, experiencing the ordinary vicissitudes of an English village. Bishops made their visitations. Rectors lived and died. Outlaws sought sanctuary at the altar of the church above the Moot, which was still the centre of the life of the little pastoral community. In the last half of the fourteenth century the massive tower was added which dominated the village as it dominates the town to-day; built perhaps as a thank-offering for the passing of the Black Death, which slew half the population, reduced the monks at Michelham to five, and, with indiscriminating zeal, laid a clammy hand on the Abbot of Battle and Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes; while giving rise to a wave of industrial unrest which a few years later sent the rebellious men of Sussex Londonwards behind the ragged banner of Jack Cade.

In 1534 the Proclamation repudiating the Pope was read from the pulpit of the church upon the Kneb; and ten years later the first outburst of Puritanism stripped the consecrated building of many shrines, pictures, ornaments, as our historian has recently reminded us.

The village thrilled to the threat of the Spanish Armada, and, what is more, prepared to meet it; the inhabitants having—time out of memory of man, we are told—a reputation, the outcome of experience and necessity, for dealing with the landings of forraine enemies.

During the Parliamentary troubles the Squire of Beachbourne was of course a stout-hearted Royalist; and his friend the Rector was brought up before the authorities on a charge of "malignancy." Found guilty, he was removed from office; whereupon, as his brass quaintly reminds us, the gallant gentleman mori maluit—preferred to die. And it is on record that the parish was only saved from the ravages of Civil War by the abominable condition of the roads of East Sussex. Perhaps the same factor told against the prosperity of the place. For, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Beachbourne, as it was now called, had dwindled in population to a few hundred souls. Later in the same century, about the time Newhaven was born, it began to blossom out as a health resort. A celebrity or two discovered its remote charm. A peer succeeded the Squire at the big house. Behind the Wish a row of sea-houses sprang into being on the front. But Dr. Russell of Lewes and the Prince Regent, in turning the fishing-village of Brightelmstone into fashionable Brighton, ruined for the moment its rival under Beau-nez. Beachbourne had to wait its turn until the iron horse, running on an iron road, across country that not long since had been washed by tides, overcame with astounding ease the difficulties that teams of snorting oxen up to the hocks in mud had found insuperable.

Then, and only then, the four corners of the parish came together apace. The old bourne disappeared, the source of it in the Moot under the church-crowned Kneb now no more than a stagnant pond. And by the time of our story a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants had risen where men, still middle-aged, could recall meadows that swept down to the sea, the voice of the corn-crake harsh everywhere as they sauntered down Water Lane of evenings after church, and the last fight of the "gentlemen" and the Revenue Officers that took place on a desolate strip of shore to the sound of calling sea-birds, on the site of what is now the Cecil Hotel.

CHAPTER IX
THE TWO BOYS

Next time Mr. Trupp called at 60 Rectory Walk, he marked that the familiar chocolate notice in the upper window had gone.

He chaffed Mrs. Caspar in his grim way.

"No more rooms to let, I see," he said.

"No," the woman answered. "No more lies to have to tell just at present."

She was in one of her tartest moods; and when he congratulated her on being through her troubles, she answered,

"Some of em. Plenty more to follow. There'll be enough money for Ned and me and the boys. That's one thing."

"And a big thing too," said Mr. Trupp.

"The biggest," admitted the woman surlily. "Speaking worldly-wise, I don't say nay to that."

After the birth of her second son, Mr. Trupp had told her that she would have no more children and she was glad: for her hands were going to be full enough throughout her life; so much the shrewd woman saw clearly. There was her husband; and there was her eldest son, Ernie, who was his father over again.

He had his father's face, his father's charm, his father's soft and generous heart; and, unless she was mistaken, other qualities of his father that were by no means so desirable. And the curious thing was that the characteristics which in her husband Anne Caspar secretly admired, only exasperated her in Ernie.

Alf, the second son, whatever his faults, certainly did not trace them to his dad. He was as much his mother's child as Ernie was his father's. And whether for that reason or because for years she had to wrestle for his miserable little life with the Angel of Death, his mother loved him with the fierce, protecting passion of an animal.

"Nobody but his mother could have saved him," Mr. Trupp told his wife.

While Mrs. Caspar said to the same lady,

"But for Mr. Trupp he wouldn't be here."

A proud woman, Mrs. Caspar was also a very lonely one. Her genuine pride in her rather ramshackle husband—his birth, his breeding, his obvious air of a gentleman—which evinced itself in her almost passionate determination that he should dress himself "as such," prevented her from associating with her own class; and the women of her husband's class would not associate with her. Mrs. Trupp, the kindest of souls, was the solitary exception. But the two women were antipathetic. The doctor's wife, who possessed in full measure the noble toleration that marks the best of her kind, was forced to admit to her conscience, that she could not bring herself to like Mrs. Caspar. The large and beautiful nature of the former, brought to fruition in the sunshine and shelter of a cultivated home, could not understand the harsh combativeness of the daughter of the small tobacconist, who had fought from childhood for the right to live.

"She's like a wolf," Mrs. Trupp told her husband. "Even with her children."

"My dear," said the wise Doctor, "she's had to snap to survive. You haven't. Others have done your snapping for you."

"She needn't snap and snarl at that dear, gentle husband of hers," retorted Mrs. Trupp.

"If she didn't," replied her husband drily, "she'd be a widow in a week."

"Anyway she might be kind to that eldest boy," continued Mrs. Trupp, who at Edward Caspar's request had stood sponsor to Ernie. "He's beautiful, and such breeding. A true Beauregard."

"What d'you make of the baby?" asked her husband with sudden interest.

"Why, he's like a little rat," answered Mrs. Trupp. "He's the only baby I've ever seen I didn't want to handle."

"Yet there's something in him," replied the other thoughtfully. "He wouldn't have lived else. A touch of Old Man Caspar about that child somewhere. He'll bite all right if he lives to be a man."

And to the Doctor's shrewd and seeing eye it was clear from the start that Alfred meant to live to be a man. Somewhere in the depths of his wretched little body there glowed a spark that all the threats and frosts of a hostile Nature failed to extinguish. On that spark his mother blew with a tenacity surpassing words; Mr. Trupp blew in his wise way, working the bellows of Science with the easy skill of the master-workman; little Ernie, most loving of children, blew too. Even Edward Caspar leaned over the cot in his quilted dressing gown and said,

"He's coming on."

But even as he leant, the sensitive fellow knew that there was not and could never be any bond between him and his youngest born. His heart was with Ernie. And the way his mother rebuffed the elder lad, only endeared him the more to his father.

The two lads grew: Ernie strong in body, loving in heart, lacking in will; Alf ardent of spirit, ruthless as a stoat upon the trail, and rickety as an old doll.

There was a first-rate elementary school in Old Town to which the two boys went when the time came. The headmaster, Mr. Pigott, was also manager of the chapel in the Moot which Mrs. Caspar attended regularly.

The hard woman was religious in the common Puritan way, so dear to the English lower-middle-class of her generation. Her Chapel and her God were both a great deal to the austere woman, especially the former. She had a stern and narrow moral code of her own which she mistook for love of Christ. From that code she never departed herself, and punished to the utmost of her power all those who did depart from it.

In a chapel of her own denomination she had insisted on being married, in spite of the fact that she risked by her obstinacy losing the only man she had ever loved.

Ned Caspar, for his part, took his religion, as most of us do, from his mother. He was High Church at a time when to be so was far less fashionable than it is at present. He called himself a Catholic, and spoke always of the Mass in a way that shocked his fellow-churchmen who were in those days still content to speak of themselves as Protestants and the sacramental act as Holy Communion. And after marriage he maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would have expected of the soft-willed man. Indeed, it was the one point on which, aided by his mother's memory, he stood up to his wife for long.

"I'll wear you down yet, my son," Anne told him grimly. "May as well come off the perch now as later."

In this one matter her taunts served only, so it seemed, to strengthen her husband's resistance.

He went white, shook, perspired, and continued to attend High Mass at St. Michael's, in spite of his growing distaste for the man who administered it—his neighbour, Prebendary Willcocks, across the road.

A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake, desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his own way for a time without protest—as the cat permits the mouse a little liberty.

When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said—and Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occasion—

"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do feel it so that we never worship in common."

That was the beginning of the end of his resistance.

He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little community.

And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely.

But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of the Church of England, often of Sunday afternoons in the spring and summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the "chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and fighting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a "chucker-in" himself; but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at 8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles of which were darkened that tramp and prostitute might sit there unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occasional visitors from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin, extempore prayer, readings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle, that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in days to come should gather thus, without priest or ceremonial, simply to rejoice together in the blessing of a common life and universal Father.

CHAPTER X
OLD AND NEW

Edward Caspar went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife. He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediÆval formulÆ, the iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his mother in its grip.

As a student of comparative religion his intellect was still interested in forms which his seeking mind had long rejected as empty, ludicrous, or inadequate.

His reading for his book, his experience of life, and most of all an inner urge, led him in time to look for the spiritual comfort that was his most vital need outside the walls of the consecrated prison in which he had been bred.

Quia fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiscat in Te was the motto that hung above his writing-desk. And his restless heart found increasingly its peace sometimes in music, sometimes amid the hum of men and women in the crowded streets of the East End of the town, and most often in quiet communion with Nature on the Downs or beside the sea in some gap far from the haunts of men.

He would ramble the lonely hills by the hour, lost in thought, Ernie skirmishing about him.

Sometimes Mr. Trupp, riding with his little daughter up there between the sky and sea, would meet the couple.

"Like a bear and a terrier, Bess," he would smile.

Then in some secluded valley, father and son would lie down in the "loo" of the hill, as Ernie called it.

Resting there with contented spirits amid the gorse, they would watch the gulls, white-winged and desolately crying over the plough, while the larks purred above them.

These were the best moments of Ernie's childhood, never to pass from him in the tumult and battle of later life. A child of the earth, even his tongue, touched with the soft slur of Sussex caught from school-mates, betrayed him for a countryman. He loved the feel of the turf solid beneath him; he loved the sound of the gorse-pods snapping in the sun; he loved the thump of the sea crashing on the beach far below; and most of all he loved the larks pouring comfort into the cistern of his mind until it too seemed to brim with the music of praise.

"Loving, idn't they?" he would say in his sweet little voice, his hands behind his head, his eyes on a speck of song thrilling in the blue.

"That's it, Boy-lad," his father's answer would come from beneath the cavern of his hat; and Edward Caspar forthwith would repeat, in a voice that seemed to co-ordinate the harmonies of earth and sky and sea, Wordsworth's Lines above Tintern Abbey:

... That serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:

Alf never came on these excursions. The bent of the two brothers was indeed entirely different. If they left the house together, as often as not they parted at the garden-gate. Ern turned his face towards the green hills that blocked the end of the road, Alf turned his back on them.

"Nothin doin there," he would say with a knowing wink. He hated walking, and he feared the loneliness of the hills. His heart was in the East End of the growing town. Down there, beyond the gas-works, at the edge of the Levels, where the trams clanged continually, where you heard strange tongues, and saw new types of faces, Alf found himself. The little urchin, who seemed all eyes in a hideous square head, would wander by the hour in Sea-gate, among the booths and barrows, drinking in the life about him, and return home at night tired but contented.

In bed the two boys would compare their experiences.

"What did you see?" Ern would ask.

"Everythink," Alf would answer. "Folks and a fight and all."

"I see something, too," said Ernie, deliberate alike of speech and mind.

"What then?" asked Alf, scornfully.

"I see angels," Ernie answered. "Dad see em too."

But Alf only sniggered.

At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. Beyond it lay the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire, the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth. Old Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had endured for centuries. In its steep streets you might hear the undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days.

Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new.

Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp, incisive, twanging.

In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the Lewes Road. Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school.

His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door.

"Where you been then?" she asked ferociously.

"With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie. "Dis lambin time. His boy's run'd away."

The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman.

Alf peeped round his mother's skirts.

"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.

"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.

Alf sneered.

"Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"

Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending accent.

When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles into Anne's unsympathetic ear.

"What a way to talk!" he groaned.

"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "They aren't going to Harrow and Trinity."

The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been given.

"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar sometimes demonstrated affection.

"And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work." Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class held of their rulers and their education.

CHAPTER XI
THE STUDY

Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school in the hollow between the church and Rodmill.

New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot, where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will.

Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel. Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably.

The boys attended both.

Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in particular.

As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he didn't care to use them.

"He's a little gentleman though—like his father," ended the schoolmaster.

Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us. As an honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while money was very little to him. But for the mysterious quality of breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence of something finer than ourselves. And on the rare occasions in which Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice—"There's English for you! Don't you wish you could talk like that...?"

Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it never failed to do.

"That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly. "But Ern's got to make his own way in the world."

"He'll do," said Mr. Pigott. "He won't be forgotten, you'll see. He's a good lad, and that's something even in these days."

And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he excelled. Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike him in his marked athletic capacity.

True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was disliked by everybody and gloried in it. He won all the gilt-edged prizes, while Ern took the canings.

Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home.

"Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening. "They fairly sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"

His recollections of the scene were so spicy that—for once—he was dreadfully affectionate to the brother who had given him such prurient pleasure.

"Ern in trouble of course!" cried the mother angrily. "You needn't tell me! A nice credit to his home and all! I'm ashamed to look Mr. Pigott in the face come Sunday!'

"Now then, mother!" grumbled Mr. Caspar. "Let the boy alone!"

"Yes, you're always for him!" flared Mrs. Caspar, buttering the bread. "Setting him against his mother! But for you he'd be all right."

Alf sat like a little wizened devil at the end of the table in his high chair, his eyes twinkling malignantly over his bib, enjoying the fun.

"It's him and Ern against you and me, mum, ayn't it?" he cried, shuffling on his seat.

Whether it was his son's accent or a sense of the tragic truth underlying his child's words, that affected him, Mr. Caspar rose and shuffled out of the kitchen into the study, which was looked on in the family as dad's sanctuary.

The scene had taken place in the kitchen at tea, which was the one meal the family shared. Breakfast, dinner, supper, Edward Caspar had by himself in the little back room looking out on the fig-tree; and Mrs. Caspar waited on him.

That was by her desire, not his: for from the start of their married life Anne had determined that, so far as in her lay, her husband should have everything just as he was accustomed to. Thus from earliest infancy the children had been taught by their mother to understand that the two sitting-rooms were sacred to dad, and never to be entered except by permission. Their place was the kitchen. She herself set the example by always knocking on the door of either room before entering.

And the atmosphere of these two rooms was radically different from that of the rest of the house. Anne knew it and rejoiced. Everywhere else the tobacconist's daughter reigned obviously supreme. These rooms were the habitat of a scholar and a gentleman. The little back-room, indeed, was remarkable for little but the solidity of its few articles of furniture, and the old silver salver with the crest, reposing on the mahogany side-board. But the front sitting-room, with the bow-window looking out on to Beech-hangar and the long spur of the Downs that hid Beau-nez from view, was known in the family as the study, and looked what it was called.

The room, flooded with sunshine, was Mrs. Caspar's secret pride. She knew very well that there was nothing quite like it in Beachbourne, Old or New, and preserved it jealously. She did not understand it, much preferring her own kitchen, but she recognized that it stamped her husband for what he was, admired its atmosphere of distinction, and loved showing it to her rare visitors. On these occasions she stood herself in the passage, one arm of steel barring the door, like a priest showing the sanctuary to one without the pale. And it gave her malicious pleasure when Canon Willcocks, from the Rectory, opposite, calling one day, showed surprise, not untinged with jealousy, at what he was permitted to see. The Canon clearly thought it unseemly that Lazarus living at the Rectory gate should boast a room like that. And he was seriously annoyed when Anne, pointing to the Cavalier upon the wall, referred to the first Lord Ravensrood as "my children's ancestor."

On the evening of the squabble in the kitchen, Ernie joined his father in the study after tea.

As Alf was fond of remarking, "Ern's welcome there if no one else ayn't."

Edward Caspar was sitting by the fire as usual, brooding over the meerschaum he was colouring. His manuscript lay where it usually lay on the chair at his side, and a critical eye would have noted that it was little thicker than when Mr. Trupp had first seen it some years before.

"Ain't you well then, dad?" asked the boy in his beautiful little treble.

"I'm all right, Boy-lad," the other answered. "Mother didn't touch you, did she?"

There was something reassuring always about Ernie's manner with his father, as of a woman dealing with a sick child.

"No," he replied. "She said I was to come to you."

"Why were you caned at school?" asked the father, after a pause.

The boy's eyes were down, and he scraped the floor with one foot.

"Fighting," he said at last reluctantly. "Where it were, Alf sauce Aaron Huggett in de playground, and Aaron twist Alf's arm. Allowed he'd had more'n enough of Alf's lip. And he wouldn't leggo. So I paint his nose for him. And it bled."

Edward Caspar puffed.

"Why don't you let Alfred fight his own battles?"

Steadfast to the tradition of his own class in this matter if in no other, he revolted against the common abbreviation of his younger son's name.

"Alf fight!" cried Ernie with rare scorn. "He couldn't fight no-hows. D'isn't in him. He'd just break."

"Then why does he sauce em?"

Ernie resumed his foot scraping.

"That's what I says to him," he admitted in his slow ca-a-ing speech. "Only where it seems he ca'an't keep his tongue tidy. Seems he ca'an't elp issalf like. Then he gets into trouble. Then I avs to fight for him."

"And if you don't fight for him no one else will?" said his father.

"No," replied Ernie with the delightful reluctance of innocence and youth. "See no one do'osn't like Alf—only issalf." He added as a slow after-thought, "And I be his brother like."

Edward Caspar held out a big hand.

Ern saw his father was pleased, he didn't know why; and he was glad.

In Ern's estimation there was no one in the world like dad—the kind, the comforter.

Once indeed in Sunday-school, some years before, when Mr. Pigott had been expatiating on the character of our Lord, the silence had been broken by the voice of a very little lad,

"My dad's like that."

CHAPTER XII
ALF SHOWS HIS COLOURS

In fact, as Ernie said, the two were brothers, and in some sort complementary.

Ern had to the full the chivalrous qualities of the Beauregards. He never forgot that he was Alf's elder brother, or that Alf was a poor little creature with a chest in which Mr. Trupp took an abnormal interest. He fought many battles, bore many blows for his young brother. Alf took it all as a matter of course, regarding himself as a little god whom Ernie was privileged to serve and suffer for. Ern accepted the other's constant suggestion of superiority without revolt, and took the second place with the lazy good-nature characteristic of him.

Ern indeed was nothing of a leader. In all the adventurous vicissitudes of boy-life the initiative lay with Alf, who planned the mischief; while Ern, obedient to his brother, for whose brains he had the profoundest admiration, carried it out and paid the penalty, as a rule uncomplainingly, at home and abroad.

Old Town was now creeping west along the foot of the Downs towards Lewes. On its outskirts and in the corn-fields where are to-day rows of red-brick villas, were still to be found flint cottages, long blue-roofed barns, and timbered farmsteads among elms. As little by little the town, with its border of allotment gardens, flooded along the New Road, sweeping up Rodmill and brimming over towards Ratton and the Decoy on the edge of the marshes, these buildings that dated from another age were gradually diverted from their pristine use to be the habitations of those who no longer drew their living from the earth.

Thus in the house which had once been the huntsman's lodge, beside the now abandoned kennels, lived Mr. Pigott—one foot in the country, as he said, one in the town.

Every morning he walked across the foot-path, past Moot Farm, to school. Mr. Pigott's house stood in a hollow coombe a long way back from the road. The gorse-clad sides of the Down rose steeply at the back of it. In front was an orchard in which a walnut-tree lorded it, conspicuous over the lesser trees.

It was towards the end of their school time, when Ern was nearly fourteen, that Alf planned a raid upon this tree, famous in the locality for its beauty and fruitfulness.

The adventure needed careful thinking out.

The approach to the house was along an unscreened path that led across the arable land. Between the path and the house was the orchard in which stood the tree with its coveted treasure.

The trouble was that Mrs. Pigott's window overlooked the orchard, and she was always in that window—so much Alf, in his many reconnaissances of the position, discovered.

Now it was well known in the school that Mrs. Pigott had but one eye, and that of glass, which accounted perhaps for its extraordinary powers of vision. And besides Mrs. Pigott with her one sharp eye, there was Mrs. Pigott's little dog with his many sharp teeth. There was also in the background Mr. Pigott, who, outside the chapel, was athletic and regrettably fierce.

Alf waited long for his opportunity, in terror lest the tree should be beaten before he had worked his will upon it, but his chance came at last.

One Saturday afternoon he and Ern were loitering in Church Street, marching along with the starts and stops, the semi-innocent and semi-surreptitious manner of boys waiting for Satan to enter into them and prompt them to definite action, when Alf dug his brother with a warning elbow.

Mrs. Pigott was staring with her glass eye into the ironmonger's opposite the church. On her arm was a basket and at her feet her dog. It was clear that she was doing her week-end shopping.

Alf, swift to seize his opportunity, set off up the hill, hot-foot, silent, with a bustle of arms and legs, his brow puckered as he concentrated ruthlessly upon his purpose.

Ern followed the fierce, insistent, little figure more leisurely.

"Steady on!" he called. "Where away then?"

"Walnut-tree," panted Alf. "Now's yer chance."

Ern, who knew from experience that the dirty and dangerous work would fall to his lot, lagged.

"Mr. Pigott's there," he grumbled.

"Now he ayn't then," cried Alf, spurring the laggard on. "He's gone over to Lewes for the Conference. Didn't you hear mother at breakfast?"

There had been in truth a split in the chapel. The Established Methodists were breaking away from the Foundation Methodists, and the Primitive Methodists were thinking of following suit. The little community was therefore a tumult of warring tongues.

Alf led up the hill, past the chalk-pit, along the side of the Downs, and dropped down on his objective from the rear. Coming to the fence that ran round the orchard, he peeped at the low house lying in the background under the green flank of the hill.

Ern followed reluctantly, as one drawn to his doom by a fate he cannot withstand.

He wanted the walnuts; he wanted to be brave; but he liked Mr. Pigott, and, usually obedient to his brother's suggestions, had qualms in this case.

"Go on then!" urged Alf. It was a favourite phrase of his. "There ayn't no one there."

"Come on yourself," answered Ern without enthusiasm.

"Now, I'll stay and watch the path for you against her," piped Alf.

But for once Ern was firm.

"I aren't a-gooin unless you cooms too," he said doggedly.

"What's the good of me, then?" scoffed Alf in his fierce and feverish way. "Can I climb the tree? Only wish I could. I'd show you. I suppose you'll be throwin that up at me next! My belief you're afraid."

But Ernie was not to be moved from the position which he had taken up. Just now and then Alf had remarked that his brother for all his softness became hard—adamant indeed—in a way that rather frightened Alf.

"I'll goo up the tree and shake em down to you," Ern said in his slow, musical voice. "You stand at the foot of her and gather em."

"Fine!" jeered Alf. "And when Mr. Pigott comes out you'll be up the tree safe as dysies, and I'll be on the floor for him to paste!"

"I thart you said he'd gone to Lewes," retorted Ern, unusually alert.

"So he has," replied Alf sourly. "Only I suppose he won't stay there for ever, will he?"

Ern, however, was proof against all the other's logic; and finally the two boys climbed the fence together.

The walnut was a majestic tree, with boughs that dropped almost to the ground, making a splendid pavilion of green.

Ern swarmed the tree. Alf stood at the foot, sheltered by the drooping branches. Thus he could watch the house, while nobody in the house could see anything of him but a pair of meagre black legs.

He was fairly safe and knew it, but even so his heart pattered, he bit his nails continually, and kept a furtive eye on the line of his retreat.

"Hurry!" he kept on calling.

Ern, up aloft, went to work like a man. He tossed the branches to and fro. The ripe walnuts came rattling down. Alf, underneath, gathered rich harvest. He filled his pockets, his cap, his handkerchief. Opening his shirt, he stuffed the brown treasure into his bosom and grew into a portly urchin who rattled when he moved.

"I got nigh a bushel!" he cried keenly. "Throw your coat down, and I'll fill the pockets!"

The little devil darted to and fro, tumbling spiderlike upon the falling riches, absorbed in accumulation. His heart and eyes burned. There was money in this—money. And money was already taking its appointed place in Alf's philosophy.

He would sell the nuts at so much a pound—some wholesale to a fruiterer he knew in the remote East End; some retail to his schoolfellows.

The quality and quantity of the loot so absorbed him that he forgot his fears. And when he glanced up through the screen of thick branches to see a pair of grey-stockinged legs, thick and formidable to a degree, advancing upon the tree with dreadful deliberation, his heart stopped.

The enemy was on them.

Alf emptied handkerchief, pockets, cap: he emptied himself by a swift ducking motion that sent the treasure heaped against his heart pouring forth with a rattle about his neck and head and ears.

Then he cast fearful eyes to the rear. It was thirty yards to the fence and beyond there was but the unscreened path without a scrap of cover, leading across the plough, past the Moot Farm and abandoned kennels to the New Road.

Alf saw at a glance that escape was impossible. Mr. Pigott, for all his forty years, could sprint.

Swift as a cornered rat, Alf made his decision.

He marched out from his shelter towards the approaching legs, a puny little creature with pale peaked face, and Ern's coat flung over his arm.

Mr. Pigott was advancing, very grim and grey, across the rough grass, his hands behind him, dragging something. He seemed in no hurry, and not in the least surprised to see Alf, whom he ignored.

"Please, sir," said Alf, perking his face up with an air of frankness, "there's a boy up your tree. Here's his coat."

Mr. Pigott walked slowly on, drawing behind him a sixty-foot hose, which issued like a white snake from the scullery window.

"I know," he said with suppressed quiet. "And I know who set him on to it. I can't beat you because you'd break if I touched you. But I'll take your brother's skin off him though he's twice the man you are, you dirty little cur!"

He brought the hose to bear on the brigand in the tree, and loosed the water-spout and the vials of his wrath together.

"Ah, you young scoundrel!" he roared, finding joy in explosive self-expression. "I'll teach you come monkeying after my nuts!"

Swish went the stream of water through the branches.

Ern hid as best he could on the leeward side of the trunk.

Mr. Pigott brought his artillery mercilessly to bear upon the boy's clasping hands. Ern, spluttering and sprawling, came down the tree with a rush and made a bolt for the fence.

Mr. Pigott, roaring jovially, played the stream full on him. It was a powerful gush, and floored the boy. The avenger knew no mercy and drenched his victim as he lay.

It was a sodden little figure who crept home disconsolately ten minutes later.

Alf had been back some time and had already told his tale, gibbering with excitement and fear.

Ern's mother, in a white fury, was awaiting the boy in the kitchen.

"I'll learn you disgrace me!" she cried. "Robbing your own chapel-manager's orchard—and then come home like a drownded rat!"

She set about the lad in good earnest.

Alf, perched upon the dresser to be out of the way, watched the fun, biting his nails.

"You mustn't hit her back then!" he screamed. "Your own mother!"

"I aren't hittin' her back then!" cried Ern, dogged, dazed, and warding off the blows as best he might. "I'm only defendin of mesalf."

The noise of the scuffle was considerable.

Outside in the passage was the sound of slippered feet. Then some one tried the door.

"It's only dad!" cried the devil on the dresser, white and with little black eyes that danced.

"What's up?" called an agitated voice from outside. "Hold on, mother! Give the boy a chance."

Some one rattled the door.

"Go about your business!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "There's a pair of you!"

Her anger exhausted and shame possessing her, she was going out into the yard to shelter herself in the little shed against the Workhouse wall, when Alf's sudden scream stayed her.

"Mum!—down't leave me!—he'll kill me!"

She turned to mark a white flare burning in the face of her elder son.

She had seen it before and had been afraid.

When Ern looked like that he ceased to be Ern: he became transfigured—yes, and terrible: like, she sometimes thought, the cavalier in the picture must have been in anger.

"Take them sopping duds off," she said quietly, "and then go up and put your Sundays on."

Half an hour later Ern, wearing dry clothes, entered the study.

He was sweet, smiling, and a thought abashed.

His father, on the other hand, evinced signs of terrible emotion.

His face was mottled, and he was shaking.

Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood before the fire, trying pitifully to preserve his dignity, and moving uneasily from leg to leg like a chained elephant.

"Did she hurt you?" he asked, seeking to steady his voice.

Ern shook his head.

"She laid about me middlin tidy," he admitted. "But she didn't not to say hurt me. She don't know how—a woman don't. Too much flusteration along of it."

Edward Caspar collapsed into a chair.

"What happened?" he asked.

Ern recounted the story truthfully, the white glimmer in his face coming and going between pants as he told.

"Why d'you let him lead you astray?" asked the father irritably, at the end.

Ern wagged his head slowly and began to scrape once more with his foot.

"Alf's artfuller nor me!" he said at last in a shamefaced way.

CHAPTER XIII
ALF MAKES A REMARK

Both boys turned up at Sunday-school next morning: Alf defiant, Ern abashed.

Mr. Pigott ignored the former, snubbed him brutally when occasion offered, and showed himself benignant to the prime sinner.

After chapel Mrs. Caspar spoke to him.

"I don't know what you think of my son, Mr. Pigott," she began.

"Which son?" asked the other in his bluff way.

"Why, Ernie to be sure. He's always bringing shame upon me."

"He's worth twice the other," cried Mr. Pigott, letting off steam.

"Ah, yes, you've got your favourites, Mr. Pigott!" retorted the woman.

"And I'm not the only one!" answered the outraged schoolmaster. "Ern's a boy. And boys will be boys, as we all know. But he's a little gentleman, Ern is. He's his father over again."

The comparison of Ernie to his father, however well intentioned, always touched Mrs. Caspar on the raw. Her eyes sparkled. Every now and then she reminded you forcibly that her grandmother had lived in a by-street—off Greyhound Road, Fulham.

"Ah," she muttered vengefully, "I'll cut his little liver out yet, you'll see."

Mr. Pigott rounded on her, genuinely shocked.

"And you a religious woman!" he cried. "Shame on you!"

"I don't care," answered Mrs. Caspar. "I see it coming. I always have. And it's just more than I can bear."

Mr. Pigott did not understand the cause of the woman's emotion, but he recognized that it was genuine and so respected it.

"Well, he's leaving school now," he said more gently. "He'll settle down once he's got his nose to the grindstone."

Later, at the meeting of the Bowling Green Committee, in the Moot, the schoolmaster reported Mrs. Caspar's saying to Mr. Trupp.

"She's a hard un," he commented.

"She's need to be," growled the other.

"What's that, Doctor?" asked Mr. Pigott.

"If she let go of him, he'd be dead in a month," mumbled Mr. Trupp.

"Mr. Caspar would?"

The Doctor looked at the grey church-tower bluff against the sky.

"But she won't let go," he added. "She's got her qualities."

"She has," said Mr. Pigott, treading the green. "She's a diamond—as hard, as keen."

The two always sparred when they met and loved their friendly bouts. Both were radicals; but they had arrived at their convictions by very different routes. The schoolmaster had inherited his opinions from tough, dissenting ancestors, the man of science had acquired them from Huxley and Darwin. Politics the pair rarely discussed, except at election time; for on that subject they were in rough agreement. But the two men wrangled genially over religion, the ethics of sport, even the two Caspar boys; for Mr. Trupp was the one man in Old Town who alleged a preference for the younger boy—mainly, his wife declared, because he must be "contrary."

Mr. Pigott now told the stubborn man almost with glee the story of Alf's treachery.

"What d'ye think of that now?" he asked defiantly.

"Why," grunted the Doctor, "what I should expect."

"Of course," said the sarcastic Mr. Pigott.

"He's got the faults of his physique," continued the other. "He's afraid of a thrashing because he knows it'd kill him. Self-preservation is always the first law of life."

"He's a little cur," said Mr. Pigott. "That's what your young Alf is."

"I've no doubt he is," replied the Doctor. "You would be too if you'd got that body to live in."

"I'd be ashamed," shouted the other. "I'd commit suicide offhand."

"The wonder is he's alive at all," continued Mr. Trupp, quite unmoved. "Must have some grit in him somewhere or he'd have died when he was born."

"That's you and his mother," said the schoolmaster censoriously. "Saving useless human material that ought to be scrapped. And you call yourself a Man of Science! In a properly ordered community you'd stand your trial at Lewes Assizes, the two of you—for adding to the criminal classes. Now if we were back in the good old days, they'd have exposed Alf at birth—and quite right, too."

"Quite so," said Mr. Trupp. "Your Christianity has a lot to answer for, as I've remarked before."

It fell to Mr. Pigott to find a job of work for Ernie when his favourite left school: for at that date there were no Labour Bureaux, no Juvenile Advisory Committees, no attempt to make the most of the country's one solid asset—its Youth. And the rich had not yet made their grand discovery of the last twenty-five years—that the poor have bodies; and that these bodies must be saved, even if it cost a little more than saving their souls, which can always be done upon the cheap.

Mr. Pigott had little difficulty in his self-imposed task, for he did not mean to remain a schoolmaster all his life, and was already dabbling in the commercial life of the growing town.

Ernie started as an office-boy in a coal-merchant's office in Cornfield Road by the Central Station, which formed the junction between the Old Town and the New.

Before the boy embarked on his career, Mr. Pigott invited him to tea and lecture.

"It's your own fault if you don't get on," said the schoolmaster aggressively after the muffins. "Rests with yourself. Office boy to President—like they do in America. Make a romance of it."

"I shall try, sir," cried Era, with the easy enthusiasm characteristic of him.

"I'll lay you won't, then!" retorted the other rudely. "I'll lay all the work I've put into you these ten years past goes down the drain. Now your grandfather..."

He stopped short, remembering Mrs. Caspar had told him that their origin had been kept from the two boys....

At his new job Ern did not work very hard. It was not in him to do that; for he had his father's complete lack of ambition. But he worked just enough to keep his place, to pay his mother for his keep by the time he was seventeen, and have some "spending money," as he called it, over, with which to buy cigarettes, and join the cricket club. In time he even attained to the dignity of an office stool: for his handwriting was excellent, his ability undoubted, and his education as good as most.

"Ern don't lick the stamps no more. He writes the letters," was Alf's report at home.

The younger brother too had now launched out upon the world. But Alf was very different from Ern. He had his own ideas from the start and went his own way. Somehow he had ferreted out the facts about his grandfather's career; and that career it was his deliberate determination to surpass.

Those were the early days of the motor industry and the petrol engine. Alf made his mother apprentice him to Hewson and Clarke, an enterprising young engineering firm in the East End, off Pevensey Road.

"No Old Town for me," he said knowingly. "New Town's the bird!"

And the boy worked with the undeviating energy of an insect. All day he was busy at the shop, and in the evening came home, grimy and tired, to have a wash and then settle down in the kitchen to study the theory of the petrol-engine.

His mother, ambitious as her son, watched him with admiration, guarding his hours of study jealously from interruption.

"He's his grand-dad over again," she confided to her husband in one of their rare moments of intimacy.

Edward Caspar shook his head. He was interested in his second son, although in his heart of hearts he disliked the boy. He disliked ambitious men—their restlessness, their unhappy egoism, their incapacity to give themselves to any cause from which they would not reap personal advantage, offended his spiritual sense; and he followed with amused benevolence the careers of his contemporaries at Harrow and Trinity who were reaping now the fruits of Orthodoxy, and just becoming Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, and the like.

"Alf hasn't got my father's physique," he said.

"You wait," Anne replied. "He'll conquer that too. Last time Mr. Trupp saw him he said he'd do now—if he took care."

Ern watched his brother's feverish activities with ironical smiles.

"He's like a little engine himself," he said. "No time to look around and take a little pleasure in life. All the while a-running along the lines—puff-puff-puff!—with his nose to the ground. Not knowin where he's goin or why; only set on getting somewhere, he don't know where, some day, he don't know when."

Himself he preferred the leisurely life, and was known among his friends as Gentleman Ernie. The office, which prided itself upon its tone, for in it worked a youth who said he had been at a public school, had taken the country accent off his tongue. Ern was indeed a bit of a dandy now, who oiled his hair, and took an interest in his ties; while Alf never spent a penny on his clothes, was always shabby, and seldom clean. The dapper young clerk and the grimy little mechanic, on the rare occasions when they appeared in the streets together, formed a marked contrast, of which Ernie at least was aware.

"You'd never know em for brothers," the passers-by would remark.

Both had arrived at the age when the young male joins a gang, curious about women, but inclining to be suspicious of them. Alf, however, strong in himself, continued on his prickly and independent way. He was not drawn to others, nor were others drawn to him. Companionable Ern, on the other hand, who was everybody's friend, was absorbed into a gang; but he was different from his gang-mates. He used less hair-oil than they did, and wore more modest ties. Moreover, there was nothing of the hooligan about him.

"Such a gentlemanly lad," said Mrs. Trupp. "That's his father coming out in him."

"May the resemblance end there," muttered Mr. Trupp.

The lady speared her husband on the point of her needle.

"Croakie!" she remarked.

Ern could have been a leader among his mates, had he chosen to assume authority. His quiet, his distinction, his happy manner, and above all the fact that he was a promising cricketer and had made half a century on the Frying Pan at Lewes for the Sussex Colts against the Canterbury Wanderers, marked him out. But Ern would not lead. He spent his evenings in the main at home rather than in the lighted streets, and was at his happiest sitting in the study opposite his father. On these occasions the two rarely spoke, but they enjoyed a silent communion that was eminently satisfying to them both. Just sometimes the father would touch the revolving book-case on his right; take out one of the little blue poetry books Ern knew so well, and read The Scholar Gypsy or The Happy Warrior.

Ern loved that, but he was far too indolent to pursue the readings himself. When his father had finished, he would return the book to its place and say,

"You should read a bit yourself, Boy-lad," and Ern's invariable reply would be,

"I will, dad, when I got the time."

But Ern was one of those who never had the time and never would have.

Then the two would relapse into smoke and silence and vague dreams, out of which Edward Caspar's voice would emerge,

"Where's Alfred?"

To which Ern would answer with a faint smirk,

"Studyin in the kitchen."

Ern's tendency to be a masher, as the phrase of the day went, delighted Mr. Pigott. He looked on it as the best sign he had yet detected in the boy.

"Who's the lady, Ern?" he chaffed, meeting the lad.

The boy smiled shyly. At such moments, in spite of his plainness, he looked beautiful.

"Haven't got one, sir," he said.

It was true, too. His attitude towards girls was unlike that of his mates. He neither chirped at them in the streets, nor avoided them aggressively, nor was self-conscious in their presence. He was always friendly with them, even affectionate; but he went no farther. Some of the Old Town maidens wished he would. But, in fact, this was not Ern's weakness.

The Destroyer, who lies in wait to undo us all, if we give him but a crevice through which to creep into our citadel, was taking the line of least resistance, as he does in every case.

There began to be rumours in Old Town. His father's weakness, known to all, lent these rumours wing. In Churchy Beachbourne, as the enemy called the town by reason of the number and variety of its consecrated buildings, people were swift to believe, eager to hand on their beliefs.

Prebendary Willcocks—which was his proper title—or Canon Willcocks—as he had taught the locality to call him—who had reasons of his own for disliking Edward Caspar, heard and shook his aristocratic head, repeating the rumour to all and sundry in a lowered voice. The Lady Augusta Willcocks, that indefatigable worker in the parish for God and the Tory Party, entirely lacking in her husband's delicate feeling, echoed it resonantly.

Mr. Pigott was honestly aghast.

"Never!" he cried, and added—"God help him if his mother hears!"

He was so genuinely concerned indeed that he went round to 60 Rectory Walk to find out by indirect examination if Mrs. Caspar had heard.

She had; and was distraught.

"If he takes to that, I'll turn him out of the house!" she cried savagely. "Straight I will!"

And there was no question that she meant what she said.

"The best way to make trouble is to meet it half-way," muttered the schoolmaster, cowed for once by the woman's terrible emotion. "Give the boy a chance—even if he is your own son."

"Alf says he was blind at the match," the other answered doggedly.

"Alf!" scoffed Mr. Pigott, savage in his turn. "I wouldn't care that what Alf says about his brother. I know your Alf."

"And I don't then," said Mrs. Caspar. "I try to keep it fair between em—for all what folks may say different."

That evening Mr. Pigott met Alf in Church Street.

The schoolmaster stopped, holding with his eye the youth in the stained blue overall. Alf approached him delicately, with averted face and a sly smile.

It was clear that he courted the encounter.

Mr. Pigott came to the point at once.

"How's Ern?" he boomed in a voice of challenge.

Alf dropped his eyes.

"Beg pardon, sir," he said, "our Ern's goin the same way as dad."

Mr. Pigott gazed at him as one stupefied.

Then in a flash he understood ... Mr. Trupp was right. The boy was abnormal: his spirit dwarfed and stunted by the miserable tenement in which it was forced to dwell.

This sudden peep into one of the sewers of Nature, this illumination of what before had been to him obscure, this swift suggestion of Evil lurking obscenely in the dusk to leap on the unwary, brought him up abruptly. His anger passed for the moment. Something between fear and pity laid hold of him.

"I suppose you're glad," he said quietly.

Alf smiled that satyr-like smile of his, sickly and uncertain.

"Ah, you never did like me, Mr. Pigott!" he sneered.

"I don't," answered Mr. Pigott. "I never did. But I'm beginning to understand you. You're possessed."

He went on down the street and called at the Manor-house.

Mrs. Trupp was, he knew, a staunch friend of Ernie's.

The lady was playing with her children in the garden. But she gave both her ears to her visitor when she knew his errand. Had she heard anything?

Mrs. Trupp coloured. She had heard something which greatly perturbed her pure and beautiful spirit.

Her Joe, home from Rugby, had reported that on the way back from a match at Lewes Ernie Caspar had taken a drop which had made him funny.

"It was only a little," the lady ended. "Joe said it wasn't enough to make an ordinary canary queer. But it upset Ernest for the moment."

Mr. Pigott marched on down the hill to the railway station.

It was shutting-up time, and the object of his concern was just leaving the office.

Mr. Pigott unceremoniously seized the boy by the hand.

"For God's sake take a pull, Ern!" he said, most seriously.

Ernie looked up surprised, read the distress in the other's bearded face, and burned one of those sudden white flares of his.

"I see!" he said. "Alf's been at it again!" and he broke away.

Swiftly he went home, passed the study door, and entered the kitchen.

His mother was out.

Alf, his elbows on the table, and his chin on his hands, was studying a model-engine under the gas-light.

He looked up surlily as Ern entered.

"Keep out of it!" he ordered. "You've heard what mother says. The kitchen's mine at this time. I don't want you."

"But I want you, my lad," answered Ernie, brutal in his bitterness.

He locked the door, and took off his coat.

"Been tellin the tale again!" he trembled, as he rolled up his sleeves. "I've had more'n enough of it. Put em up! You're for it this journey!"

Alf had risen. He knew that look upon his brother's face, and was afraid.

"You mustn't touch me!" he screamed, shaking a crooked finger at the other. "I'm delicit, I am."

It was the ancient ruse which had stood him in good stead many a time at home and in the playground.

"Else you'll tell mother!" sneered Ern. "Very well. Have it your own way!"

He seized the model engine on the table, and smashed it down on to the floor. It lay at his feet, a broken mass, with spinning wheels.

Then Ern unlocked the door and went out.

At supper that evening he was still burning his white flare.

Alf saw it and was cowed; Mrs. Caspar saw it too and held her peace. Edward Caspar was, as always, away in the clouds and aware of nothing unusual when he looked in to say good-night.

CHAPTER XIV
EVIL

Alf took no overt steps to avenge himself. Like old Polonius he went round to work, lying in wait for the chance he knew would come. He had not to wait long.

On the August Bank Holiday there was a big dance at the Rink in Cornfield Road. Ern attended. He danced well and was sought after as a partner.

Alf went too.

Ern was surprised to see his brother there, and pleased: for it was not in his nature to bear malice long.

"Hullo, Alf!" he chaffed. "Didn't know you was a dancing-man. Let me find you a partner then."

Alf shook his head, smiling that shifty smile of his.

"I ain't," he said. "I only come to watch."

That was true; but the words carried no sinister meaning to Ern's innocent ear.

Alf watched.

He sat by himself on one of the faded plush-seats that went round the hall. Nobody spoke to him, nobody heeded him. The seats on either side of him were left vacant.

Sour, shabby, ill at ease, yet sure of himself, he watched with furtive eyes the flow of boys and girls swirling by him in the dance.

One of Ern's friends pointed his brother out to him.

"I know," laughed Ern. "Let him alone. He don't want us. He's above larking, Alf is."

"Never seen him at a hop before," remarked the friend. "And now he don't look happy."

The evening was hot, the dancers thirsty, the drinks good. Alf observed his brother go to the bar once, twice, and again. Then he rose to go home, nodding to himself.

Ern passed him in the dance and stopped.

"What, Alf! You're off early!"

"I got a bit of reading to do," answered Alf.

"So long, then," said Ernie. "Shan't be long first myself." And he joined the current again, with flushed face and loquacious tongue.

It was just ten when Alf entered the kitchen.

His father had already retired to bed; his mother was sitting up.

"You're late," she remarked sharply. "Where's Ern?"

"Heard em say he was at the Rink," Alf answered sheepishly.

Mrs. Caspar's face darkened. The Puritan in her rose in arms.

"Dancing?" she asked.

Alf feigned uneasiness.

"I'll stay and let him in," he said. "He mayn't be back yet a bit."

Mrs. Caspar took her candle.

Regular as a machine, she rose always at six, and expected to be in bed by ten.

Anything that disturbed her routine she resented, surly as an animal.

"Let me know when he comes in," she said. "I'll speak to him. Keepin us up to all hours and disturbin dad's rest while he carries on. Might be a disorderly house."

She left the room.

Alf turned out the gas, and sat in the darkness, watching the dying fire, and waiting for his mouse.

A crisis in his life had come.

He was about to take the first big step along the road that was going to lead him to success or ruin.

He was aware of it, and calm as a practised gambler.

Once he rose and locked the front door to make sure his brother could not enter without his knowledge.

It was eleven o'clock when he heard feet outside.

Those feet told their own tale.

Alf turned up the light in the passage and opened the door.

His brother lolled against the side-wall like a mortally wounded man.

"Take my arm, old chap," said Alf, and supported his brother into the kitchen.

Ern sat down suddenly at the table. Alf lit the gas.

The light fell on his brother's foolish face and clearly irritated him. He put up his hand to brush it away.

"Arf a mo'," said Alf soothingly, skipped light-footed upstairs, and knocked at his mother's door.

She was half-undressed, brushing her hair, her neck and shoulders bare in the moonlight.

Alf glanced at them and even in that moment of excitement thought how beautiful they were.

Mrs. Caspar raised a finger.

Her husband was in bed and apparently asleep, Lady Blanche upon the mantelpiece staring vacantly at the form of her recumbent son.

"Ern!" whispered Alf, and jerked his head significantly. "You'd best come."

Anne Caspar slipped on a wrap. Candle in hand she descended the stairs and entered the kitchen.

Alf followed stealthily. Like a gnome he stood in the shadow at the foot of the stairs, biting his nails uneasily, as he watched with lewd, malignant eyes.

Ern sat at the table with the dreadful blind face of the living dead.

He saw his mother enter and paid no heed to her. He was too much occupied. A troubled look crossed his face, and clouded it. Then he was very sick.

That amused Alf.

His mother shut the kitchen-door.

But Alf was not to be defrauded of his spectacle.

He opened the door quietly.

His mother, busy on her knees, with a slop pail and cloth, looked up.

"It's only me, mum," muttered Alf.

Her face frightened him: so did her breathing: so did her quiet.

"Come in then," she said. "And shut the door."

Ern still sat at the table.

"You little og!" said Alf fiercely, and shook his brother.

His mother, still on her hands and knees, restrained him.

"Let him be," she said. "It's past that. It's past all."

The door opened slowly.

Mr. Caspar stood in it in the faded quilted dressing-gown that had once graced historic rooms at Trinity.

He stood there, dishevelled from sleep, a tall, round-shouldered ruin of a man, every sign of distress upon his face.

"What is it?" he asked nervously.

"Im!" said Alf.

Mr. Caspar saw Ern, and marked his wife busy on her knees. Then he understood.

The distress on his face deepened.

Anne Caspar rose sharply from her knees, the filthy rag still in her hands.

"Two of you!" she cried thickly. "It's too much!" and shoved him out of the room.

The father's slippered feet shuffled along the passage.

"Take your brother up to bed," ordered Mrs. Caspar.

Alf, too discreet to argue, obeyed.

Anne Caspar locked the door, and sat down at the table.

CHAPTER XV
MR. TRUPP INTRODUCES THE LASH

There was no doubt that Anne Caspar was a woman of character.

"Too much character," said Mr. Trupp.

His wife was somewhat shocked.

"Can you have too much character?" she asked.

Her husband was in one of his philosophical moods.

"Character's only will," he growled. "It's the repression or direction of energy. You may misdirect your energies. Most so-called strong men do. Look at this fellow Chamberlain. Willed us into this war. If it hadn't been for his superfluous character we should never have heard of South Africa."

"And your investments would never have gone down," said Mrs. Trupp delicately.

The Doctor may have been unjust to the Colonial Secretary, but he was right about Anne Caspar, whom he knew rather better.

That dour woman had, indeed, just two friends in Beachbourne. One was Mr. Trupp, and the other was Mr. Trupp's wife. Neither had ever failed her; and she knew quite well that neither ever would.

The day after the calamity she went round to see the Doctor.

"He's got to go," she said, tight-lipped and trembling. "That's flat. You know what I been through with his father, Mr. Trupp. You're the only one as does. I'm not going through it again with him. Ned's my man, and I'm going to see him through. But Ern must go his own way. Stew in his own juice, as Alf says. They say I've been hard with the boy. So I have. Because I've seen it a-comin ever since he was so high. And I've fought it and been beaten."

The gruff man was wonderfully tender with her. He saw the woman's distress and understood its cause as no other could have done.

"Don't do anything in a hurry," he said soothingly. "Think it over for a week and then come and see me again."

That evening he reported the interview to his wife.

"She'll never turn him out!" cried the kind woman.

"She will though," said Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp, pink and white with indignation, dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in them.

"I'll never forgive her if she does," she said.

"Yes, you will," retorted Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp answered nothing for a time.

"I shall go round to see her," she said at last with determination.

"You won't move her," the Doctor answered, grimly cheerful.

"No," said Mrs. Trupp. "She hasn't got a heart. As Mr. Pigott says, she's hard as the nether millstone in a frost."

Mr. Trupp put down his coffee-cup and licked his lips like a cat.

"My dear," he said, "you haven't been through her mill."

"Perhaps not," the other answered warmly. "But I am a mother."

The sympathetic creature, all love and pity, was as good as her word.

Mrs. Trupp was always full of indignation against Mrs. Caspar when away from her, and in her presence touched by the tragedy of the woman's loneliness.

She found things at Rectory Walk as she had expected or worse.

Ern had lost his job. His escapade at the Rink had reached his employers' ears. None too satisfied with the quality of the lad's work, they had seized the excuse to dismiss him.

"There he is!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "Just turn eighteen and back on my hands. Nobody won't have him, and I don't blame em neether."

"Where is he?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

The interview between the two women was taking place in the back sitting-room, where Mrs. Caspar always saw her rare visitors.

Anne nodded in the direction of the study.

"Settin along o dad," she said briefly. "Nothing but trouble along of it all. I took his cigarettes away. If he don't earn neether shan't he smoke, as Alf says. And now dad won't smoke because Ern can't. Sympathetic strike, Alf calls it. And it's dad's one pleasure. I allow him a shilling bacca-money a week. It's just all I do allow him."

"We all make mistakes—especially when we're young," said Mrs. Trupp gently.

The other was adamant.

"There's slips and slips," she retorted. "If he'd gone with a girl I'd have said nothing. But this!"

Mrs. Trupp was steadfast in her tranquil way, as her opponent was dogged.

"I know if my Joe made a mistake what I should do," she said.

"What then?" sharply.

"Forgive him," replied the other.

Mrs. Caspar flared up.

"You wouldn't, not if your Joe's father——"

She pulled up short.

Loyalty to her husband was the soul of Anne Caspar.

On her way home the Doctor's wife met Mr. Pigott.

The sanguine little man stopped short.

"You've heard?" said Mrs. Trupp.

The other nodded, surly as a baited bear.

"Ern was round at my place first thing Sunday to tell me. He kept nothing back." Mr. Pigott dropped his voice like a stage-conspirator. "That young Alf's at the bottom of this, I'll lay."

Mrs. Trupp was shocked.

"Did Ernie say so?"

"No," fiercely. "He wouldn't give his brother away—not he. But I know." He came closer. "I tell you the Devil's in that boy. I can see him leering at me from behind the mask of Alf's face. There is no Alf Caspar. He's only a blind. But there is a Devil!"

"O, Mr. Pigott!" murmured the lady.

"Yes, you may O Mr. Pigott me!" cried the wrathful man. "But I've watched. I know. He's the cuckoo kind, Alf is. He wants the place to himself. It's me and mum all the time. His father don't count; and Ern's to be jostled out of the nest. Then there'll be room for him to grow. I curse the day Mr. Trupp saved his miserable little life."

"Hush! hush! hush!" said the lady.

"Yes, I know Alf's one of Mr. Trupp's darlings," continued the other. "And I know why. You know my old bicycle they all laugh at. I bought it for ten shillings from a pedlar and patched it up myself. It's the worst bike in Old Town, but I saved it from the scrap-heap, so I think the world of it. Same with Mr. Trupp and young Alf."

Mrs. Trupp reported to her husband that Mr. Pigott had become almost blasphemous over Alf.

"I know," grunted the Doctor. "He's not fair to the boy. Alf's stunted; of course he's stunted. He's grown up all wrong. The wonder is he's grown up at all. He's a standing witness to the power of Nature to make the most of a bad job."

It was next day that Mrs. Caspar came round, as appointed, to see the Doctor, who was much more to her than a physician.

Mr. Trupp had now come to a decision as to the best course to be taken.

"You must send him right away," he said. "That's his best chance."

"Dad won't hear of the Colonies," the other replied. "Says it's so far and he'll never see the boy again once he gets out there. Stood up and fought me fairly!" And it was clear from the way she said it that the resistance encountered from her husband had been as rare as it was astonishing.

"I didn't mean the Colonies," the other replied.

"What then?"

"The Army."

Mrs. Caspar's face fell. She was momentarily shocked: for she belonged to a sect that had for generations been despitefully used by the powers that be. And the weapon of the powers that be is always in the last resort the Army.

"Discipline is what the boy wants," said Mr. Trupp. "It's what we all want."

Anne Caspar nodded dubiously.

"If it's the right sort," she said.

"It may save him," continued her mentor. "It can't do him any harm. And anyway, it's worth trying. You send Ernie round to me. I'll have a talk with him, and I'll drop in to-morrow and have a chat with his father."

Ernie, when approached, made no difficulty.

He was young; his enthusiasms were easily stirred; and the most famous of South Country regiments, the Forest Rangers, known in history as the Hammer-men, had been more than living up to its reputation in South Africa.

"You'll travel," Mr. Trupp told him. "Go to India as like as not and see a bit of the world. Our Joe's going to Sandhurst next year. Nothing'll do but he must be a Hammer-man—like his grandfather before him. I dare say he'll join you out there."

But if Ern was too young to fight his own battles, there was one doughty warrior who meant to fight them for him.

Mr. Pigott came round to see the Doctor in roaring wrath.

The South African War was in full swing. The frenzy of lusty paganism, called Imperialism, which was sweeping the country, had revolted the schoolmaster and many more. In the estimation of these, the horrors enacted at home in the name of God and Empire surpassed the obscenities of the war itself. Mr. Pigott saw Militarism as a raddled prostitute dancing on the souls and bodies of men.

He burst like a tempest into Mr. Trupp's consulting room.

"The Army!" he cried. "You're going to send that boy into the Army! Take him a first-class ticket to Hell at once! Where's your Militarism led us? The war's costing us half a million a week! Over a thousand casualties at Paardeberg alone! Rowntree stoned in York; Leonard Courtney boycotted in London; Lloyd George escaping for his life over the house-tops for daring to preach Christ! And you call yourself a Radical, Mr. Trupp!—Shame on you!"

Mr. Trupp listened, amused and patient.

"It's discipline he wants," he said at last. "He's soft and slack. He'll never do any good without it. The artist type like his father."

The other began to blaze again.

"Discipline!" he cried. "You talk like a Prussian drill-sergeant. I tell you that lad's got a soul. You discipline beasts of the field—with a Big Stick; but you grow souls."

Mr. Trupp shook his head.

"We're only just emerging from the mud," he said. "The Brute still lurks in all of us. Watch him or he'll catch you out. And remember the only thing the Brute understands is the Big Stick. Without it he'll either go to sleep—like Ernie; or pounce on some one who has gone to sleep—like Alf."

Mr. Pigott drew himself up. There was about him the dignity of conviction.

"Mr. Trupp," he said. "Fear never made a man yet. Faith's the thing."

The Doctor lifted his shrewd kind face, and eyed the other through his pince-nez.

"Fear plays its part too," he said. "We none of us can do without the Lash as yet."

CHAPTER XVI
FATHER, MOTHER AND SON

There was no difficulty with Edward Caspar.

He had made an immense effort and fought about the Colonies. Easily spent, he would not fight again. Moreover, Ernie committed to the Army was committed for a few years only, and not for life; and some of his service might very well be passed in England. In Edward Caspar too, pacifist though he personally inclined to be, there was no inherited prejudice to overcome: for the Beauregards had been soldiers for generations.

Mr. Trupp came to talk things over; and that evening, as father and son sat together in the study, Edward Caspar said out of the silence, very quietly,

"Boy-lad, it's best you should go."

"I shall go all right, dad," the boy answered, feigning a cheerfulness he by no means felt. "Don't you worry."

"Mother wants it," the other continued.

"She's all right, mother is," said the lad.

It was settled that the boy should go over to Lewes and enlist in the Hammer-men at the depot there, on Saturday.

The decision made, his mother relaxed somewhat. While she still kept Ernie without money, she allowed him cigarettes.

Father and son sat together and smoked in the evenings, watching the trees swaying against the blue in the Rectory Garden across the road.

Alf reported surreptitiously to his mother that Ern was smoking with dad.

"What's it to do with you if he is?" answered the other tartly.

The catastrophe which had severed the frayed string that joined the mother and her eldest son had reacted unfavourably on her relations with Alf.

The few days before Ern's departure went with accustomed speed.

On the last evening, as he and his father sat together, studying their toes in the twilight, a small fire flickering in the grate, Edward Caspar spoke out of the dark which he had been waiting to cover him.

"Boy-lad, I can't do by you as I should wish," he said tremulously. "But here's a bit of something to show you I mean well."

In the half light he thrust an envelope towards his son.

Ern opened it and saw that it contained a five-pound note.

The great waters surged up into his throat and filled his eyes.

"Here! I can't keep this, dad," he said chokily. "I'm all right. I've got..."

The old man—for such he was to his son, though not yet fifty—waved his hand irritably.

"Put it away," he said, "put it away. Let's hear no more of it."

Ernie sat dumb, moved and wondering.

Where had dad got the money from?

He knew very well that his mother jealously controlled the family purse, doling out rare sixpences or shillings to his father; and he knew why.

The boy's brain moved swiftly.

"What's the time, dad?" he asked, and lit the gas.

The clock on the mantel-piece never went: for it was Edward Caspar's solitary household task to wind it up.

The father, by no means a match for his artful son, produced from a baggy pocket a five-shilling Waterbury watch in place of the old gold hunter that had come to him from Lady Blanche's father, the twelfth Earl Ravensrood.

His ruse successful, Ernie delivered a direct attack.

"Where's the ticket, dad?" he asked casually.

"What ticket?"

"The pawn-ticket."

"I don't know," irritably. "Don't worry me. Turn out the light. I want to get a nap."

Ernie obeyed.

Soon Edward Caspar's breathing told its own tale.

Ernie rose, and, knowing his father's habits well as he knew his own, put his hand into the Jacobean tankard that stood on the book-shelf.

There he found what he sought.

Quietly he went out into the passage.

On the ticket was the name he expected: Goldmann, the Jew pawn-broker in the East-end off the Pevensey Road.

For a moment he paused, fingering the brown cardboard ticket under the gas light.

It would not take him an hour to get down to Goldmann's and back; for the tram almost passed the door; but he hadn't got the redemption money. He hadn't got a penny in the world. Alf had seen to that.

With the impetuous gallantry peculiar to him he made up his mind and opened the kitchen-door. Where Ernie loved he would risk anything, face anybody—even his mother.

She sat in her Windsor chair by the fire, a Puritan, still beautiful, reading her Bible as she always did at this hour; and her silvering hair added to her distinction.

All their married life the pair had sat thus of evenings, Edward in the study, Anne Caspar in the kitchen.

The strange couple rarely met indeed except at night. And the arrangement was not of Edward Caspar's making, but of his wife's. It may be that in part the woman preferred the kitchen as the environment to which she was most used: it was still more that she had determined from the outset of their union never to intrude upon her husband's spiritual life, or attempt to encroach upon a mind she could not understand. Her duty was as clear to her from the first as were her limitations. She could and would cherish, support, protect, and even chasten her husband where it was necessary for his good. For the rest she was resolved to be no hindrance or inconvenience to him. He should gain by his marriage and not lose by it. Therefore from the start she had slammed the door without mercy or remorse on her own relatives.

When Ern entered, she looked up at him not unkindly through her spectacles.

"What is it, Ernie?" she asked.

He rushed out his request.

"Please, mum," he panted, "could you let me have a shilling?"

He was determined not to give his father away.

To his relief his mother rose without a word, went to a drawer, unlocked it, took out half a sovereign and gave it to him.

Ernie ran out without his hat, took the old horse-bus at Billing's Corner, and riding on the top under a night splendid with stars that hung in the elms of Saffrons Croft, he went down the hill, through the Chestnuts, past the railway station, and along the gay main-street.

Just before Cornfield Road reaches the sea he exchanged the horse-bus for the electric tram that swung him down Pevensey Road through the thronged and always thickening East-end.

At the Barbary Corsair in Sea-gate he descended, turned down a side-street, and entered a door over which hung the three golden balls taken from the coat-of-arms of the banker Medici.

Mr. Goldmann was a short, fair Jew, without a neck, immensely thick throughout, though still under thirty. When he walked he carried his arms away from his side as though to aid him to inflate; and winter or summer he could be found behind his counter, perspiring freely. His trousers were always too short, and his little legs protruded from them like pillars. He spoke Cockney without a trace of Yiddish. His manner was hearty; but he was honest of his kind. The police had nothing against him, while his innumerable clients complained less of him than of his rivals.

Ern in the past had dealt with him.

"How much?" he asked, presenting the ticket.

"Only two-pence," said Goldmann, and took the watch out of the case.

He handled it with care, almost covetously, burnishing it on his sleeve.

"What arms is them?" he asked, displaying the back.

Ernie didn't know.

"If it had been any man but your father left it, I'd have communicated with the police," said the pawn-broker cheerfully.

"Will you do it up in a piece of paper, please?" Ern requested.

The Jew obeyed.

"Lend me your stylo alf a mo," said Ernie, and wrote on the paper covering the word Dad.

Then he raced home and re-entered the kitchen.

It was after ten, but his mother was still up, and apparently unconscious of the lateness of the hour.

Ern, panting from the speed at which he had travelled, paid nine shillings and four pence into his mother's lap.

Tram and bus had cost him sixpence, and the redemption money the rest.

"Eightpence all told," he gasped, "what I wanted. Only a little something for dad. I'll send you the odd money when I draw me first pay." He put the little packet on the mantel-piece. "Will you give that to dad, please, when I'm gone, mum?"

His mother looked at him, a rare sweetness in her eyes.

"You may keep the change, Ern," she said gently.

Collecting the money from her lap, she handed it back to him.

A moment he demurred, taken aback; then slipped the cash into his trouser pocket, mumbling and deeply moved.

"Thank you kindly, mum," he muttered.

Her eyes were still on his face, and he could not meet them.

"You're a good lad, Ern," she said quietly.

The words, and the way of saying them, moved the lad more than all her rebuffs and brutalities in the past had done. His chest began to heave. She stood before him stiff as a blade of steel, as slight and straight.

For a second she laid her hand, fine still for all its toil, upon his arm.

"Go up to bed now," she said in the same very quiet way.

He went hurriedly.

There were few things which happened in that house of which Anne Caspar was not aware. That morning on rising she had missed her husband's watch on the dressing-table—and had said nothing. Later she had found the pawn-ticket in the tankard—and again had held her peace.

A wife before all things, yet to some extent a mother, she had known, had understood, had perhaps sympathized.

CHAPTER XVII
ERNIE GOES FOR A SOLDIER

Next day, after dinner, when she heard Ern's feet slowly descending the stairs, and knew he was coming to say good-bye, Anne Caspar shoved Alf roughly out of the kitchen.

"You wait your brother outside," she said. "Take his bag now, and carry it to the bus for him. Be a brother for once!"

"Well, I was going to," answered Alf, aggrieved.

Since the catastrophe he had kept discreetly in the background.

Ern entered the kitchen, uncertain of himself, uncertain of his reception; but, true to the best that was in him, trying to carry a pale feather of gallantry.

"I guess it's about time to be off, mum," he remarked huskily.

His mother shut the door behind him gently, and drew him to her.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

The boy gasped and obeyed.

"Now go and say good-bye to dad," continued his mother, quiet, firm, authoritative.

As he went into the passage, he heard the kitchen-door close behind him.

Ern was his father's son, and nothing was to be allowed to intrude in the parting between the two.

Edward Caspar stood before the fire in quilted dressing-gown, somewhat faded now.

In its appointed place on the chair beside his chair lay the familiar manuscript, much as Ern had known it since his childhood, save that the titles on the covering page were typewritten now—The Philosophy of Mysticism, Part I, The Basis of Animism.

His father's colourless hair was greying fast and becoming sparse; while his always ungainly figure was losing any shape it had ever possessed.

At fifty Edward Caspar was already old. But age had enhanced the wistfulness which had marked him, even in youth. His was the face of a man who has failed, and is conscious of his failure; but it was the face of a Christian, gentle and very sad. Here clearly was a man of immense parts, scholar, thinker, artist, who, somehow baffled by the wiles of Nature, had failed to make good.

Yet in spite of his failure there were few who could more surely rely upon the limitless resources of the Spirit in the hour of his need than Edward Caspar.

And now in this great moment of his life, when he was parting from his dearest, he summoned to his aid all the powers that, massed unseen in the silence, await our call.

There was a wonderful dignity and restraint about him.

Ern, the most intuitive of lads, felt it and drew from his father's strength.

Simply and beautifully father and son kissed.

A moment the eyes of each rested in the other's.

Then it was over.

No one of us is entirely inhuman.

Something of the spirit of the scene enacted in the study had conveyed itself even to Alf awaiting in the road outside, Ern's bag at his feet.

He was blinking when his brother, blowing his nose, joined him.

Ern glanced at the green rampart of the Downs rising like a wall at the end of the road, and huge Shadow Coombe where the lambs were folded in March and where once he had passed a night in the shepherd's hut.

Ern waved to them and Beech-hangar beyond.

"Good-bye, old Downs!" he called. "You and me been good old pals!"

Then they set off for the bus at Billing's Corner, neither speaking, neither wishing to, Alf carrying his brother's bag. Both youths were slight and colt-like, yet with loose unshackled limbs; Ern rather smart, Alf distinctly shabby.

The Rector, tall and titupping, emerged from his gate as they passed, but refrained from seeing them. He did not approve of the two Caspar boys—in the main because they were the sons of their father.

Canon Willcocks aped—successfully enough—the walk and deportment of a thoroughbred weed. His face—which was aquiline—inspired his pose, which was aristocratic and satirical. His solitary hero was Louis Napoleon, whom he had worshipped from childhood. And he bore himself habitually as one who is too fine for the coarse world in which he dwells perforce. The two brothers nudged each other as he stalked by. Then they climbed to the box-seat of the old bus and established themselves beside the driver.

"Where away then?" he asked, seeing the bag.

"Off to see the world, Mr. Huggett," answered Ern, already cheering up. "Goin for the week-end to the North Pole, me and Alf!"

The bus jolted down the street, past the long-backed church with its mighty tower looking down upon the Moot as it had done for five centuries, and stopped opposite the Star. Ern for the last time touched the old coaching bell with the driver's whip. As it clanged sonorously, a window in the Manor-house opened.

Ern looked up to see Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, a fair flapper now, waving at him with eyes that smiled and shone.

"Good-bye!" they called. "Good luck!"

Saffrons Croft was white with cricketers as they passed. The honest thump of the ball upon the bat, the recumbent groups under the elms, even the imperious voice of Mr. Pigott umpiring on Lower Pitch, moved Ern strangely.

Alf's presence somehow helped him to be hard.

At the Central Station the boys got down.

They paced the platform, waiting for the train.

Alf babbled at large, his brother paying little heed.

"Be the making of you!" Alf was saying in his rather patronizing way. "See the world!—knock about!—come home a full-blown Hammer-man with a fat pension and a V.C. on your chest and a Colonel's commission! And we'll all meet you at the stytion with a brass band playing See the Conquering Hero Comes! and be proud of you. I'd come along meself for company, only I'm too small."

Ern roused from his dreams.

"What will you do then?" he asked, faintly ironical.

"Me?" cried Alf, starting off on his favourite topic. "I ain't a-goin to stop in Beachbourne all me life, you lay. When I'm through me apprentice they may send me to the River Plate. Got a big branch there. England's used up. There's chances in a new country for a chap that means to get on."

Ern installed himself in a smoking carriage.

"O, reservoir," said Alf, facetious to the end.

"See ye again some day," answered Ern, puffing away and exhibiting a man-of-the-world-like stoicism he did not feel.

He took off his Trilby hat, unbuttoned the overcoat with the velvet collar, and opened his orange-coloured Answers.

The train moved on. The brothers waved. Alf stood on the platform, a mean little figure with a dishonest smile; his clothes rather shabby, his trousers too short and creased behind the knees.

Then he turned to the bookstall and asked if Motor Mems, the paper on the new industry, had arrived yet.

Ern leaned back in his corner; and his eyes sought, between hoardings and roofs of crowded railway-shops, the familiar outline of the Downs which would accompany him to Lewes—and far beyond.