CHAPTER XXVII
THE HOHENZOLLERN HOTEL

The Hohenzollern Hotel was both physically and spiritually remote from all the other hotels in Beachbourne.

The respectable Grand, facing the Wish, the ponderous Talbot opposite the band-stand, the perky Hydropathic perched on the rise of the hill, the Dudley by the pier, the Cecil, the Bentinck, and all the other hotels with aristocratic names and a middle-class clientele, were at the West-end of the town, interspersed among boarding-houses the whole length of the sea-front from the pier to Beau-nez.

The Hohenzollern stood aloof at the East-end on the edge of the Crumbles, as the Levels here were called.

An immense, modern caravanserai of pretentious neogothic style, it had been dumped down on the shore beyond the long-deserted Redoubt of Napoleonic times.

In front of it was the sea. On its flank, beyond the Fishing Station, stretched the marshes. Behind it, at a respectful distance, crouching in the dust, the mass of mean houses and crowded streets that constituted the East-end.

On these the Hohenzollern, aloof and lordly in its railed-off pleasure grounds, turned an unheeding back. It was unaware of their presence; or rather recognized them only to patronize.

It was a drab area, unfrequented by the fashionable and redolent of the atmosphere of cheap lodging-houses.

The parade ceased at the Redoubt, and ended for promenaders at the pier.

Beyond Splash Point nobody who was anybody ever thought it decent to penetrate. The band-stand, the winter gardens, the brick walls were at the West-end, reaching out towards Beau-nez.

And the Hohenzollern was not only inaccessible, it was self-contained and meant to be.

It possessed its own fine band, its own smooth lawns, its own strip of fore-shore with bathing rafts moored off it and bathing tents on the beach, its own tiny jetty for pleasure boats.

The hotel was German-owned and German-inspired; but it was not the centre of an extensive spy-system as certain of the patriots of East Sussex maintained.

The men and women who launched it as a business proposition were not mad. They were just cosmopolitan financiers who knew a good deal about the human heart on its shady side, and proposed to make money out of their knowledge.

In Beachbourne it was always spoken of as the German Hotel, and its character was well known and probably exaggerated.

The town, called by spiteful rivals on the South Coast Churchy Beachbourne, by reason of the number and variety of its sacred edifices, was shocked and delighted.

Started in the late nineties, the original title of the Hotel was of course the Empire; and its first chairman, Baron Blumenthal, a prominent member of the Primrose League. Then came the slump in British Imperialism after the Boer War. With the advent of a Radical Government it became correct for desperate patriots to affirm with immense emphasis in private, and with less emphasis on public platforms that they would sooner see the country governed by the German Emperor, who was at least a gentleman, than by Lloyd George—that little Welsh attorney.

At the height of this patriotic rally the German Emperor came himself to England; and Beachbourne was thrilled to hear the great and good man was to stop at the Empire Hotel to be under Mr. Trupp.

The Hotel incontinently changed its name to commemorate an event which in fact never took place. Shortly afterwards, however, a Balkan Tsar—also a Hohenzollern—happily did come, and was subjected by Mr. Trupp to the operation prepared for the head of his family.

But if the Hotel changed its name, its reputation remained the same and even grew. In Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Buda-Pesth, men talked of it; and even in India native princes whispered risquÉ stories about it to their Prime Ministers at the Council Table.

Wherever men spoke of it, they mentioned with smiles its two characteristic traits—the Third Floor and the Head Porter.

The Hohenzollern Hotel, indeed, had two sides, like many a better institution, and deliberately cultivated both.

The Third Floor represented one; and Salvation Joe the other.

There were respectable men and women who stayed regularly at the Hotel on the Crumbles, and denied quite honestly and not without heat all knowledge of the Third Floor and what it stood for. It was a convention at the Hohenzollern that nobody stopping there ever recognized anybody else. You went down to Beachbourne from town with the man who always occupied the chair next you at the club; you sat by his side in the station-bus that bore you to the portals of the Hotel; and then—you parted till Monday morning when you met once more on the platform at the station. Therefore the most staid and admirable of citizens often retired there to be undisturbed. Ministers and their secretaries during a busy Session, homely young couples on their honeymoons, even Bishops and clergymen in retreat. And for these the Hotel had its undoubted advantages. Eastwards the Levels stretched away for miles haunted by none but birds. The fore-shore was private, the sea itself secluded. There were no trippers, and, what mattered more, none of the usual Society week-enders. The former spread themselves between the Redoubt and the pier, the latter from the pier to Beau-nez.

It was for those who sought for quiet at the Hotel that the Head Porter existed. He was known far and wide as Salvation Joe, and always wore the red jersey of his kind by request of the Management; though unkind rumour affirmed that he had forfeited the right to his distinguishing habit.

On Sundays, after lunch, the second dining-room was cleared, and Salvation Joe, all glorious in scarlet apparel, held a meeting for the staff. Visitors would be welcomed, a notice in the hall announced, though as Joe often said with the splendid smile he was alleged to have copied from a recent Archbishop,

"It's only just among ourselves, sir. We call it our 'appy 'our. We just like to meet together the once a week—them and me and the Master."

That pleased the Bishops, who went back to the AthenÆum and talked about it over their coffee; it delighted the occupants of the Third Floor, especially on wet Sundays; and, to judge from the attendance, it appeared to be very popular with the staff, who, warmed by the rays from Joe's benevolent eye, sang with enthusiasm Tell me the old, old story and the like.

Moreover it was noticed by the curious that when the men were asked by sceptical visitors whether they really enjoyed it, the invariable answer given in the same sort of voice with the same sort of smile was,

"We calls it our 'appy 'our, miss."

Salvation Joe was not perhaps more of a humbug than most of us: that is to say, he humbugged himself just as much as he humbugged others. At one time he had quite certainly found religion; and if with the advent of middle age he lost it, it is by no means sure that he was aware of his loss.

Certainly he was invaluable to the Management as a counterpoise; and they paid him accordingly. Salvation Joe never took tips. That impressed every one, especially the Third Floor. Through this idiosyncrasy Joe indeed acquired a European reputation. On Monday mornings he stood in the great marbled hall, under a tall palm, among bustling porters and stacks of luggage, a majestic presence, refusing with a martyr's smile the coin that corrupts. His real name was Joseph Collett; and in the boot-room in the basement he was known irreverently as J.C.

The staff attended the service because it paid; and they had to live.

There was only one man who never went; and that man was Ernie.

Joe met him in the passage one day, after he had been at the Hotel a month or more, and stopped him.

"I suppose you haven't got a soul to save then, Caspar?" he began, his great chest rising and falling beneath the flaming jersey.

Ernie grinned sheepishly.

"Well, Mr. Collett, as to that, I guess I've got the same as most."

"But you're too proud to save it," continued the other in a voice like battalions on the march. He laid a frank and friendly hand on Ernie's shoulder. "Come and confess your Redeemer, my lad!" he called. "Come to the foot of the Cross! Throw the burden of your sins on Him! He'll carry em—next Sunday—two o'clock—second dining-room—sharp."

Ernie never went.

It was not that he wished to stand or fall by a principle: Ernie had no hankerings for a martyr's crown. It may have been that he inherited from his father a fine reserve in matters spiritual and that somewhere in the deeps of him there was an invincible repugnance to the methods of the seducer, or merely that he was one of the simple of earth—far too honest to see the path of expediency and follow it.

The other men saw and winked. They did not admire Ernie for refusing to bow the knee, nor was there anything to admire.

"Bloody mug," was all their comment.

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE THIRD FLOOR

But if Ernie was simple, he was not blind. When he was not on the lift, he acted as Boots for the Third Floor; and no man could work there without seeing what he saw.

Mr. Pigott, once meeting his old pupil in Church Street, asked him how he liked his job.

"Not so bad, sir," Ernie answered without enthusiasm. "Some I likes; and some I dislikes; and most I don't mind."

The work indeed, in the slack seasons at all events, was by no means hard, the wages moderate; the tips many, and sometimes extravagant.

Ernie was the only man on the staff who frequented the Third Floor. No waiters ever came there. All the waiting that was done—and there was plenty—was done by the maids.

Most of these were foreign; and the few who were not had adopted foreign names. They were pretty and pert; and they called Ernie—"Ernie Boots." It was the common gossip that the Manageress chose them herself—"with care," the knowing added with a wink.

Madame, as she was familiarly known, was in fact a Bavarian, who must have been beautiful in her day, with an immense bust that concealed a most kind heart, and piles of fair hair, obviously her own, that she amassed in pyramids on the top of her head. There was generally a cigarette between her lips, and she used a lorgnette lavishly. She was in fact an efficient woman of the world, saved from the dreadful vices of the efficient by a genuinely benignant nature. And she avowed openly that it was her mission in life to give people what they wanted—propriety to the proper, and pleasure to the pleasure-seeking.

Ernie had been at the hotel nearly a year when there came to the Third Floor a maid who seemed strangely out of her element.

He noted her advent at once with surprise and a sense of shame. Amid her saucy colleagues she seemed a lily of the valley blowing stately amid artificial flowers. A big young woman and beautiful, she held herself apart, moving among the others, apparently unconscious of them, and ignorant of the meretricious atmosphere, as a Madonna walking through the ballet of a music-hall revue.

Her presence filled him with acute personal discomfort. He did not like the tone of the Third Floor, but he accepted it as he accepted everything with the easy tolerance that was his weakness. This majestic young woman with her aloof and noble air, her accusing innocence, her damning purity, filled him with shame and pity—shame for himself and his weak-kneed benevolence, pity for those others whom she with her unconscious dignity made appear so small and vulgar.

Her name was Ruth, so much Ernie knew, and she was English too, though she scarcely looked it: for she was very dark, her hair black as a horse's mane, with a skin that had a peculiar ruddy warmth, and the large brown eyes full of splendid darkness and mellow lights, that are so rare and therefore so noticeable when found among the working-classes that fringe the North Sea. Her brows, black as her hair and broadly splashed, almost met; but there was nothing of ferocity about her.

Her natural habit, Ernie saw, was that of a great and mysteriously growing tree, its roots deep in the red earth; its massive foliage drinking of the goodness of sunshine and wind and rain; but now there was about her a note of restraint, even of stress. The easy flow of her nature was being dammed. She seemed out of place and dumbly aware of it, like a creature of the wilderness in a strange environment. The profound and quiet joyousness of woman, maturing to ripe perfection, which should have been hers to an unusual degree, was not.

Ernie was desperately shy of her.

He would peep at her as she passed him on her swift way; she never looked at him.

He seldom saw her speak to the other maids. Yet it was clear to him that this isolation was unnatural to her, and that she was made for quiet intercourse and noble mirth. Unlike the other maids she was always busy. She never romped, gossiped, or flirted.

One evening Ernie saw a fat-necked Jew in a sleeping suit, his mouth stuffed with a cigar, his eyes hot and bibulous, standing in the door of his bedroom.

The dark beauty came by.

The Jew chirped at her.

"Pretty tartie!" he called in his luscious voice. "Come inside then. I've got something to show you."

The girl passed on, unheeding.

The Jew followed her with moist eyes that glistened.

A fair chamber-maid emerging from another room winked at Ernie.

"She's white," she said, and jerked her head in the direction of the disappearing girl.

The chamber-maid was a little cockney from Clapham who had taken to herself the name of CÉleste.

"None the worse for that, I dare say," said Ernie with unusual acrimony.

CÉleste flirted on her way.

"Tra-la-la!—ta-ta-ta!" she taunted with a little mocking flutter of her fingers. "I suppose you're white too, Ernie Boots."

"No," grinned Ernie. "I'm grey."

"Baa-baa, black sheep!" mocked the naughty one. "I'd be one or the other. Grey's a silly sort of tint."

Then the Jew's sodden voice came wheezing down the corridor.

"Here, kid!—You'll do. You're not a bloody iceberg, are you?"

CÉleste shook her carefully-coiffed head.

"I'm engaged, Soly. So sorry!—Go back to bed, there's a dear old thing!"

Ernie woke that night in the belief that Ruth was bending over him.

"Ruth!" he answered quietly. "Is that you?" But there was no reply.

Next morning he took the plunge.

"Good morning, Miss," he said as she passed him.

The other's curiously impassive face flashed into life.

"Good morning, Mr. Boots," she answered in a deep and humming voice like the sound of wings.

She said the words quite simply, and he saw she was not chaffing. She honestly believed Boots to be his name.

CÉleste, dusting in an adjoining room, looked through an open door.

"She's an innocent," she said discontentedly. "She knows nothing. Ought to go back to her mother. Madame's got no business to put her here."

Ernie went on his way, that deep voice still thrilling in his ears.

Thereafter he sought and found chances of serving the girl.

One day he came on her tugging a heavy basket of washing along the passage. It was clear that she had been too proud to ask another maid for help, preferring to trust her own magnificent physique to accomplish the task alone.

"Let me, Miss," he said.

"You take yon end," she answered. "I'll take this. Then atween us like."

"Ah," said Ernie, gathering courage. "I see what it is. You think you're the only strong one." Deliberately and without an effort he swung the basket on to his shoulder and bore it jauntily to its destination.

Then he slid it down and faced the girl.

"Now then!" he cried.

She dropped her eyelids, and he saw the length and curl of her lashes.

"You are strong," she said, with a dainty irony he found as delightful as it was surprising. "I allow you'll be purty nigh half as strong as I be."

He pointed an accusing finger at her.

"You're Sussex!" he cried, falling into the old broad speech in his turn. "I'd knaw ye anywheres."

Her whole face gladdened slowly as she heard the familiar accent.

"Never!" she said, still faintly ironical, and added more sedately. "I was bred and born in Sussex, and never been outside it."

"And never mean to be," chaffed Ernie. "That's your style. I knaw ye."

"I was borrn in the Brooks at Aldwoldston," she continued, pronouncing the word Auston. "Along under the church by the White Bridge across Parson's Tye. Dad was Squire Caryll's keeper till he was ate up with the rheumatism." Her speech broadened even as she spoke, deliberately, he thought, to meet his own.

He followed suit.

The pair began to ca-a-a away at each other like a couple of old rooks in an elm in May.

"What might be your name then?"

"Ruth Boam, I believe."

Ernie nodded sagaciously.

"'Twould be surely. Boam or Burgess or Ticehurst or Woolgar. Something with a bit o Saxon in it, as dad says." He added hopefully: "I'm Sussex too. I was dragged up in Old Town agin the Rectory there," jerking his head. "Cerdainly I was."

She regarded him mischievously.

"I knew you was no'hun of a foreigner then," she told him.

Ernie feigned surprise.

"How did you knaw that then?"

She chuckled like a cuckoo.

"Hap I aren't the only one," she answered.

Then she was gone; and it struck him suddenly that this grave and stately damsel had been chaffing him.

Ernie stood a moment amazed. Then he nodded his head.

Suddenly he seemed to have crossed a border-line into a new country. Behind him was the stale old past, with its failures, its purposelessness, its dreary hag-tracks; before him was adventure, the New world—and what?

He wasn't sure. But there it was beckoning him and he should follow, true child of Romance that he was.

And it was time he moved on.

He had been a year now at the Hotel and was, as always, tending to grow slack.

Salvation Joe was watching him, waiting his chance, and Ernie knew it.

Now a change stole over him. A nucleus, small at first, but always growing, round which the dissipated forces of his spirit could rally, had been forming in his heart, unknown to him, ever since Ruth's advent to the Third Floor. He was becoming firm of purpose, gathering himself, making good. His eyes, his face, his gait, testified to the change.

Mr. Trupp, the observant, remarked on it to Mr. Pigott.

"He's growing," he said.

"The right way, let's hope," answered the other. "That place you sent him to is a queer kind of forcing house."

"He wants forcing," said Mr. Trupp. "We all do."

"Bah!" growled Mr. Pigott. "You and your Lash."

CHAPTER XXIX
THE MAN OF AFFAIRS

Once a week Ernie had a half-day off, which he invariably spent in the same way.

He took the bus from the Redoubt up to Old Town, went home, and coaxed his father out for a walk to Beech-hangar or the Downs above the chalk-pit. Then back to tea, and a long and quiet smoke in the study.

In this matter he always had a faint resistance to overcome, part real, part simulated: his father's excuse for not going being the curious one that he was too busy.

"You forget that I'm a man of action now," he would say, the imp dancing remotely in his blue eyes. "I've an official position."

It was true too in a sense. Edward Caspar, during Ernie's absence in India, had been appointed a visitor to the workhouse at the back of Rectory Walk. And there in that cess-pool of our civilization, into which filtered drop by drop the sewage of all our defective social processes, amid the derelicts of the vast ocean of Empire, prostitutes sickening to death, the idiot offspring of incestuous intercourse, the half-witted mother who had fallen a prey to the prowling male, the decent girl who had succumbed to her own affections, the young man broken in the industrial arena, the middle-aged who were not wanted, the old for whom there was no place beside the fire at home, amid all those of every age and class whom Society was too cruel to kill, and not capable as yet of stimulating to life, Edward Caspar wandered vaguely like a cloud, full of sunshine, blessing alike and blessed.

In his old-fashioned roomy tail-coat of a country gentleman, always fresh, his beautiful linen, that showed Anne Caspar's care, his blue tie of an artist running loosely through a gold ring, he became a familiar figure in the wards of the Bastille, with his beard, his spectacles, his morning air, radiating a mild warmth of love and pity.

Almost daily he might be seen, sitting at the bedside of some broken boy picked up off the roads to be patched up and flung again under the wheels of the Juggernaut car of modern Industrialism that had crushed him, or listening to the tale of some ancient in corduroys—not seldom according to his own account the scion of an illustrious but ruined house—who had laboured on the land for sixty years, to be cast alive into the cess-pool when he had been broken in the service of his country.

All the inmates of the Bastille, from the unwanted babies in the nursery, to the grannies and daddies propped up like dreadful dolls in bed in the wards of the Infirmary, liked the visits of this shambling man who said so little and looked so much.

The Lady Augusta Willcocks, a fierce and efficient Guardian, tramping the wards in short skirts, broad-toed boots, and cropped woolly white hair, cross-questioned the Master as to what Mr. Caspar said to the inmates.

The Master, a kind man, something of a mystic himself, answered:

"He don't seem to say much. Mostly he listens."

"Oh, that's all right," said the lady with relief. "Only we don't want a lot of nonsense talked in here."

"Seems to soothe em," continued the Master. "Afore now when I've had them violent in the casuals' cells I've sent for him. They call him the Prophet."

The Master smiled to himself as the masterful lady tramped on her way.

He had noticed that Edward Caspar invariably left the ward when the Reverend Spink entered to hold Divine Service; and that if the Archdeacon marched through the wards like a conqueror amid the dreadful human debris of a battle-field the visitor, sitting quietly at the bedside of some cast-away, never seemed to see him.

In spite of the pressure of affairs, Ernie rarely failed to lure his father out into the sunshine on the hill.

Once, as they sat together by the roadside in Beech-hangar, Ernie propounded a solemn question.

"Dad."

"Well."

"Didn't you once say there was a Spanish strain in the real old Sussex peasant stock?"

The father eyed his son obliquely.

"So they say," he answered. "A Spanish galleon in the days of the Armada wrecked in Ruther Haven. That's the story. And I'm inclined to think there's something in it. Any way there's more foreign blood in the genuine peasantry of Sussex and Kent than in all the rest of England. Propinquity to the Continent, you see. All the refugees came here first—Dutchmen in the days of Alva; Huguenots after the Revocation; Royalists during the Terror; and smugglers of all sorts all the time from the days of CÆsar."

That evening, as Anne Caspar brushed her hair in the bedroom before going to bed, she heard her husband in the little dressing-room talking to himself as his manner was.

She stayed the sweeping motion of her hand and listened.

"I met Mr. Pigott in Church Street this evening," she called. "He stopped me and said, 'What's come to Ernie?'"

There was a silence; then the voice from next door answered,

"She's dark. That's all I know."

CHAPTER XXX
REALITY

A few days after his conversation with his father, Ernie took a telegram up to the Third Floor in the afternoon, and was about to descend when he heard a bedroom bell ring violently for the maid on duty.

There was no maid visible.

He went along the corridor. At the end of it was a passage-landing with a window looking over the sea.

On the window-sill Ruth was sitting in the sun, perched as a woman riding, her work beside her.

She did not see him, and for a moment he watched her fascinated: the lines of her figure, almost majestic for so young a woman; the dignity of her face; the lovely curve of her neck and shoulders; the warmth of her colouring. Her thimbled finger flashed to and fro; and the sun caught her hair, simply massed beneath her cap, and revealing in its blackness just a note of tan.

Every now and then, as the sea thumped and hissed and poured on the fore-shore, she looked up.

There was for once a wonderful content upon her face, the look that Ernie had often sought and never found there before. The strain had vanished. This girl possessed her soul in love and peace for the moment at least.

Ernie was reluctant to disturb her, for she gave him the impression of one who prays.

"The bell's going, Ruth," he said at last gently.

She put down her work and dismounted from the sill in that swift business-like way of hers. There was a rhythm about her every movement that satisfied the deepest need of Ernie's soul.

"What number?" she asked.

"Seventy-seven."

Her face clouded.

It was the sodden Jew, clamant once more.

"I'll go," said Ernie.

It was no job of his, but go he did. And he was glad he had, for Soly surpassed himself.

"You!" stertorously. "What good are you to me? Send that Spanish gypsy here! She's the one I want. I like 'em brown."

Just outside the door Ernie met CÉleste.

"He wants you, Miss," he said, and admired the readiness of his lie.

Then he walked thoughtfully back to Ruth, who had resumed her work.

"It's all right," he said shyly.

She lifted her face to him slowly, almost stealthily.

Then there flashed a lovely light into her eyes.

"Thank-you, Mr. Boots," she said.

He advanced a step on her.

"That ain't my name."

She hid again in her work.

"What is then?" she asked.

"Ernie," he said. "Call me that."

He was curiously peremptory, almost imperious.

She did not answer him—threading her needle deliberately against the light.

Suddenly doors flung wide, and his whole being leapt forth as from a furnace, caught her up, and rapt her in a living flame of love.

She seemed to feel it beating about her, devouring her, and stirred as a tired bird stirs in its nest at night after a long flight.

Ernie was trembling till it seemed to him that his heels rat-a-tatting on the floor must betray him.

Then he went on his way.

The transfiguring experience that comes perhaps once in a life-time to the pure in heart had come to him in full flood. A new life was his, sweeping away old land-marks, and bearing him he knew not whither. He drifted with that mighty tide, content to be borne along. He had been alive for twenty-five years, yet dead. Now he rose from the tomb, at this his astounding Ascension-tide. In a second he had been rapt up from the earth, had suffered miraculous conversion, and would never again see life as he had once seen it.

It was curious, wonderful, and above all it revolutionized old values.

The men and women he met in the passage looked different, especially the women.

They were coarse, commonplace.

CÉleste passed him with a quip.

What she said he didn't know, but he thought how opaque and material she was in such a spiritual world; and what a pity it was; and how sorry he was for her.

Madame stopped him and gave him orders. He heard and carried them out.

But all the while this new spirit was at work on its own business in the deeps of him. His intellect, a mere cockle-shell afloat on an Ocean of Mind, dealt with the superficial mechanism of life.

He was elsewhere. For the first time Ernie became aware of a Double Life going on within him, of Two Minds, related, yet apart, each pursuing its own ends.

He entered the room in the basement where the men cleaned the knives, blacked the boots and ate their hurried meals. It was cool, almost cavernous. He was amazed that he had never before seen beauty in this bleak room, the beauty of the woods for which he longed.

He sat down and was glad.

About him were men of all nationalities, some in aprons, some in their shirt-sleeves, some snatching a desultory snack, chattering or silent.

Ernie, aware of them, yet deep in himself, was conscious of two impressions: These men were monkeys—and knew it; and they were Sons of God—and as yet unconscious of it.

One of the men, a sallow Austrian with a stringy moustache, who went by the name of Don John among his mates, put down the Arbeiter Zeitung which he had been reading, watched Ernie awhile sardonically, and then made a jeering remark to a neighbour, who replied.

Ernie caught the words "Third Floor."

Instantly he emerged from his deeps, his intellect alert, paramount, and defensive.

Don John continued caressingly, his cheek bulging with cheese, and a clasp-knife in his hand.

"Pluddy mug!" he jeered. "Thinks they're for him. They're for de toffs on de top—not for you! You're unter-tog. Nozzing for unter-tog in this world only de crumbs that don't fall from de rich man's table. De girls are for de Chairman Jews. They can buy em. Can you?—Nice English girls are cheap."

CHAPTER XXXI
THE RIDE ON THE BUS

The Thursday following his great experience, Ernie went as usual to the Redoubt which was the terminus of the bus that ran to Billing's Corner.

He was early; and there was as yet only one passenger on the roof, a young woman simply dressed in black, her bare throat girt about with yellow amber, and wearing a felt hat of terra-cotta colour.

She was sitting on the front seat.

The large and graceful indolence of her pose gave him pause.

He stayed on the last step, regarding her.

Then she turned her face sea-wards and he saw her profile.

Another moment and he stood above her.

"Ruth," he said.

She looked up at him.

"O, it's you, Ernie!" she answered quite simply, and without a thought of coquetry.

His heart moved within him.

"That's a little better!" he muttered, and proceeded to sit down beside her.

She made room for him, friendly and entirely unconscious.

They began to talk, and once she glanced at him from under her hat with tranquil eyes that seemed to pour their soft light into his.

He held them with his own.

The two streams met and mingled in mysterious communion that thrilled him till he trembled faintly.

He was the first to turn away.

"You look just all right," he said.

She was a changed girl. The restraint had left her. A new life danced within her. She was quivering with it, almost communicative.

"I feel it," she answered joyously. "I'm off till ten. I'm going away back home to Dad and Mother. I most in general doos o Sadadays if I gets off."

She was broadening her speech again, as though to throw off the corrupting town, and draw near once more to the country which had bred her.

He heard her with delight; and answered her easily and in kind.

"Auston, aren't it?" he asked.

She eyed him slyly, taking his humour, and nodded.

"You got it," she said. "I just take bus to Billing's Corner; and then 'Lewes coach drops me at Turnpike short o B'rick. Then 'dis but little better'n a mile to traipse down the valley. I was borrun in the River House in the Brooks along o the White Bridge under the church. And where I was borrun there my folks do still live. Pretty well beknown in them paarts my folks be, I rack'n." She was almost chattering now. And as her tongue resumed with joy the habit of babyhood a ripple of deep mirth swam over her face, and spoke of profound inward content.

She became shy and confidential. "Just under the eaves outside the room where I was borrun there's a martin's nest. And in the dark o summer nights they wake and gurgle to emselves. That'll be the little uns snugglin agin their mother's breast and thinkin how cosy. I do just adore to listen to em. Kind o company like." She gurgled in her turn, and then looked away abashed and blushing at the flow of her confidences.

"That's where you was borrun, was it?" mocked Ernie. "No, it warn't then. You was borrun in de corrun one morrun all forlorrun. How do I know it? Cos you're same as I be. You're a country chap."

It was clear that she enjoyed his chaff.

"That's a sure thing, you may depend," she answered in that humming voice of hers that seemed to resound long after she had finished speaking. "It's bred in my blood. See dad's dad and his dad afoor him dey were ox-herds in the home-farm in Ruther Valley. Dad went along o the long-horns on the hill too when he was a lad. There's few teams left now except only Mr. Gorringe's at Exeat. When dad's dad was a lad it was pretty near ox-teams allwheres in Sussex—on the hill and on the Levels. Then it come horrses; and prazendly it'll be machines. The world moves faster nor it used to did one time o day, I expagd. Ya-as. Cerdainly it doos."

The bus ran along the Esplanade to the pier, the sea shining on their left. Then it swung down Cornfield Road, stopped at the Station, and took the Old Road for Lewes. As it lurched under the Chestnuts into Water Lane, the Downs were seen across Saffrons Croft through a screen of elms.

"There they be!" cried Ernie, hailing them. "What d'you think of them now?"

"Eh, but they're like mother and father to you, if you've been bred to em," answered Ruth. "I just couldn't a-bear to be parted from them nohows. They're Sussex—them and the sea. Sussex by the sea, my Miss Caryll used to call it."

They travelled up the hill; and the girl feasted her eyes on the green of Saffrons Croft.

"I allow the brown-birds holloa in them old ellums, dawn and dusk," she murmured, talking more to herself than to her companion. "That's what I misses by the sea more'n all—the song o birds. There's no loo like for em—only the anonymous bushes. Reck'n that's where it is. They like the loo'th, doos birds. But times I see a old jack-yearn flappin along over the Levels like he'd all the time before him. And the wheat-ears come from acrarst the sea and show the white of their tails that carmical about Cuckoo-fair. Hap it'll be their first landing-place. They must be tired. But there's not nigh the numbers there was one time o day. When dad was a lad there was I dunna many all along the Downs from Rottingdean to Friston."

The bus stopped, as always, at the Star.

Ernie, who felt the spirit of the show-man strong within him, pointed out the Manor-house with a certain proprietary air.

"That's where Mr. Trupp lives," he explained. "They come from all over the world to see him. He's our doctor. Has been this thirty year. Dad was one of the first in Old Town to have him. Give him his start, as you might say."

"He's a nice gentleman surely," said Ruth.

"Do you know him then?" asked Ernie, a thought jealously.

"I've knaw'd him all my life," answered the other. "He attends the Squire and family. He looked after my Miss Caryll till she died; and then me when I took bad after her death. Eh, but he was a kind gentleman."

"He brought me into the world," said Ernie with an air of finality, the desire to swagger still strong upon him. "He took the inside out of the Tsar of Dobrudja and he brought me into the world. That's what Mr. Trupp done."

She turned a deep brown eye on him.

"He done well," she said quietly.

Then they both laughed.

At Billing's Corner he helped her off the bus and on to the four-horse char-a-banc waiting outside the Billing Arms.

"Last char-a-banc home," said Ernie authoritatively. "Half after nine or so. I'll look out."

He stood beneath her in the dust.

With her jet-black hair, her colouring of a ripe peach, and those soft swarthy eyes that streamed down upon him, she perched above him, stately, mocking, mysterious.

He could not make her out. She was at once so simple and so elusive in her royal way. She teased, startled, and exalted him; she calmed and maddened him.

"Thank you, Mr. Caspar," came the quiet voice from on high.

"Call me, Ernie," he ordered, this strange passion to domineer still overmastering him.

She gazed at him with those quiet ironical eyes of hers.

Then the char-a-banc moved on.

CHAPTER XXXII
ON THE HILL

That afternoon Ernie and his father sauntered up to the chalk-pit, and lay on the green hill-side above it in the sun.

Ernie plucked the bents and chewed them.

"Dad," he began at last.

"Yes."

"What is love?"

Once years ago at a dance in Grosvenor Square, Edward Caspar had himself for a moment floated out on to the ocean of an immense and wonderful new life. Thereafter he had been captured, as such easy-going dreamy creatures are, by one of the fiercer sex. He respected his wife, admired her beauty, owed her much, and was aware of it; but for all her strength of character Anne had found herself from the start of her married relations with her husband in that position of secret moral inferiority which is even to-day, perhaps as the result of an age-long inheritance of tradition, the accustomed doom of the woman who has taken the initiative in matters of sex. Moreover as the years went by the doom grew always more oppressive, and her husband more remote....

Edward answered his son,

"A door opens," he said slowly. "And you see."

"What d'you see?" persisted the young man.

His father made a curious undulating motion with his hand.

"The Infinite that lends
A Yonder to all ends,"

he said after a pause, and gestured across the Weald stretched beneath them.

"I can see it," he mused, "and hear it. So can you. It's a Tide—like the wind in willow leaves. It's silvery and it rustles. It's there—and here—and everywhere. The scientists call it ether. So it is—from their point of view. If you approach it from the other side—our side—it's what you said. It goes like so—like a billow." With fine long-fingered hand he resumed that curious rhythmic motion of his. "I once heard somebody compare Humanity to an Undulating Wave. So it is, because it's the highest expression of That. It made us, and is us. All that about the Everlasting Arms which Mr. Pigott, and the Archdeacon, and your Salvation Joe talk about, it's all true—literally true. Only they put it crudely; and for most of them it's an opinion and not a fact of experience—that a man can prove for himself at any moment." He paused. "Love is Recognition—often instantaneous. It is the I-within recognizes the Me-without."

He was sitting up now, bare-headed. A lovely colour flushed his frail complexion. To Ernie, watching his scant hair, he seemed wonderfully innocent and pure: a child talking with the wisdom of an old man.

Then his father spoke again with an emphasis that was almost startling.

"It's the profound simplicity of life that baffles us," he said. "It's too simple for us to understand. Our brains aren't big enough—as yet." He was becoming strangely excited. Ernie thought he understood now the source of that exalted look of his father's. "But we shall some day. Already there has been One Man who did. Think of it! We crucified Him for it of course. We had to. He was climbing too far a-head: so we plucked him back to earth. You mustn't go too far ahead of the Herd. They won't stand it. But He knew: He trusted It: He could float in It—like that kittiwake, ascending into heaven, descending into hell, at will."

He lay back on the turf, exhausted, his hat over his eyes, his hands on the turf beside him.

"Ernie."

"Yes, dad."

"Have you felt the Tide?"

"I think so."

The old man put his hand upon his son's.

"Let it come, Boy-lad," he said. "Trust it to do the work. All our mistakes are due to the same thing."

"What's that?" asked Ernie.

"Trying to interfere," answered the other. "Follow!—that's our human part."

That evening, after supper, before he left, Ernie asked his mother shyly for some roses. She took him out into the front-garden, tiny as it was trim, and gave him of her best.

Afterwards, as he walked away, she stood at the little gate and watched him, a beautiful look in her eyes. Then she wiped her shoes very carefully, and turned into the house.

The study-door was open, and she peeped in.

Her husband was sitting as always in the bow, looking out towards the trees stirring in the Rectory garden.

Anne stared at him.

"Has he said anything to you?" she asked at last in the voice that grew always more grumbling and ungracious with the years.

"Not yet," her husband answered.

"Well, it's about time," Anne grumbled. "Only I wish I'd had the choosing of her."

"Ernie'll choose all right," Edward answered in the peculiar crisp way he sometimes now adopted. "You needn't worry about him."

Whether there was a faint emphasis on the pronoun or not, Anne answered with asperity,

"And you needn't worry about Alf for that matter. He's far too set on himself to find room for a wife."

Ernie was at Billing's Corner half an hour before the Lewes char-a-banc was due, hanging about at the top of the rise, looking along the white road that runs past Moot Farm under the long swell of the escorting hills.

It was a perfect evening of late May. The sun had already sunk in darkened majesty against the West when the familiar cloud of dust betokened the approach of the four-horse team.

Ruth was sitting on the box beside the driver. Ernie recognized her from afar by the splotch of colour made by her hat, and was filled with an almost overpowering content.

The horses sprang the rise at a canter, the conductor blowing a flourish on his horn. The girl's hand was to her hat, and her head bowed to the wind. The char-a-banc drew up with a swagger in the open space before the Billing Arms.

She was smiling down at him.

Ernie lifted his cap: it was a trick he had from his father. No one had ever paid the girl that common courtesy before, and she beamed upon him.

The other passengers were descending by the steps.

Ernie advanced lordly.

"This way!" he ordered, and laid his roses on the driver's foot-board. "Don't wait for them! Put your foot on the wheel! Give over your hand! Now your left foot here!"

For the first time in his life he felt masterful. Powers in him, of which he had possessed no previous knowledge, were thrusting through the ice of the customary.

Ruth obeyed.

She slipped her foot into his hand. It was slight, not small, yet beautifully compact.

"It's dusty," she warned him.

"No, it ain't," he answered, still in his high mood.

He gripped it firmly. Her cool hand was in his.

Then she trusted her whole weight to him.

He felt his strength tried and answering to the test; and rejoiced in it. So did she.

For a moment he balanced her, lifted her even, let her feel the power of his manhood. Then he lowered her swiftly.

It was well, even gracefully done.

Neither spoke; Ernie took his roses from the feet of the driver, who looked down with approval.

"Go on!" he said sturdily. "That's the way!"

The motor-bus that was to take them back to the hotel was turning in the open space before the public-house.

Without a word they climbed on to the top.

The bus dropped down Church Street, past the long-backed church with its square tower standing on the grave-strewn mound solemn in the growing dusk.

Ernie placed his roses in Ruth's lap.

Her eyes were shining, her voice soft.

"For me?" she asked in her deep thrilling voice.

For a second he laid his hand on hers.

"Oh, they are beauties!" She buried her face in them. "My Miss Caryll learned me the names of a tidy few o them when we was in the Dower-house afoor she come to Beachbourne," she said.

A motor-car stood at Mr. Trupp's door as the bus reached the Star.

The two talked quietly of the famous surgeon, their heads together.

The chauffeur got down from the Doctor's car and crossed slowly towards the bus.

He was small and wore black gaiters that glittered in the lamp-light like a wet slug.

He stood beneath them in the road, and then gave a low whistle.

Ernie looked down.

Alf was leering up at him.

CHAPTER XXXIII
UNDER THE STARS

The bus rolled on, past Saffrons Croft, the stars now twittering in the branches of the elms.

"Who was that?" asked Ruth.

"My brother," answered Ernie, a thought surlily.

"He doesn't favour you," said Ruth after a pause.

"No," answered Ernie. "He's a master-man now, Alf is. Got his own garage and men working for him and all. He drives for Mr. Trupp."

At the pier, at Ernie's suggestion, they got down. It was dark now; the sea moon-silvered and still.

They walked along, rubbing elbows. Ernie broke the silence, to ask a question that had long haunted him.

"Ruth," he said, "however did you come into service at the Hohenzollern?"

Both of them had unconsciously resumed the accent of the town as they returned to the town.

Ruth told him simply and without reserve.

She had been maid to Squire Caryll's sister at the Dowerhouse in Aldwoldston. Her mistress had been taken ill, and Mr. Trupp had ordered her to Beachbourne.

"We was going to the Grand," Ruth told him. "But it was full. So cardingly we went to the Hohenzollern till the Grand could have us. And once there we stayed there two years—till she died. See Mr. Trupp likes the Hotel for his patients. There's the lawns straight onto the sea; and the Invalids' Corner by the anonymous hedge he got Madame to build."

Madame had throughout been kind, so kind—first to her mistress and then to her; for after Miss Caryll's death Ruth had broken down from over-strain. The Manageress and Mr. Trupp had pulled her through. Then when she came round, Madame, who was clearly fond of the girl, had kept her on as personal maid, "cosseting me," said Ruth with a little laugh, "like a bottle-lamb." At Easter, when the crush came, and Ruth was quite recovered, Madame had asked her to go to the Third Floor to help, saying she would take her back if the girl didn't like it.

"I went tempory to oblige Madame," Ruth explained. "I'd do a lot for her. She's been that kind."

Ruth had been there some weeks now, too lazy or too shy to take the step that would involve another change.

"I don't ardly like to see you there, Ruth," said Ernie gently. "I don't really."

She lifted her face to him in the darkness.

"Where?"

"The Third Floor."

Ruth turned her face to him. Her wall was down. She was talking intimately almost as a woman to a woman she trusts.

"I don't hardly myself," she said in the musing voice of the disturbed. "The gentlemen are that funny. Seem scarcely respectable, some of em. And the couples too. Might not be married the way they go on. London, I suppose."

He glanced at her covertly.

She met his eyes—so frank, so fearless.

What a man of the world Ernie felt beside this white ewe-lamb straying far from the fold in the hollow of its native coombe!

They were skirting now the fosse of the Redoubt.

Before them on the shore rose the great Hotel, like a brilliantly lighted mausoleum, blocking out a square patch of stars.

They made towards it.

"Ruth," said Ernie quietly, "if I was you I'd get Madame to change you. Second Floor's more your sort. More steadified. There's a Bishop there now and his wife and three-four daughters or so. Go to bed at ten, and get up at seven. I can hear em all a-snorin in chorus like so many hoggets in a stye when I take the lift down last turn at night."

"Hap I will," said Ruth thoughtfully. "Madame'd take me back herself, only she's got a German maid now, and I wouldn't do anything to put Madame out for worlds."

A struggle was taking place in Ernie's heart. If Ruth left the Third Floor for the Second he would still see her sometimes. If she left the Hotel altogether he might lose her.

"Ruth," he said at last. "I sometimes wonder why you stay on there at all."

She glanced at him mischievously.

"Shall I tell you?" she asked, her voice deeper than ever.

"Yes."

"It's the bathin. I just do adore the swimmin. Madame arranges it nice for the maids. And the season's coming on. We start next week if this weather holds. When the season's over I shall cut my stick—if so be Madame wasn't to want me for her own maid again."

She chuckled at her own cunning.

They came to the servants' gate.

Ernie stopped.

"Good-bye, Ruth," he said. "I'll say good-night."

She looked up at him surprised.

"Aren't you comin then?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "But I'm just a-goin to finish my fag first."

She gave him a delicious look.

Innocent as she was, she understood his consideration and thanked him for it mutely.

She gave him her hand. He took it, shook it, and held it awhile, as though weighing it. It was firm and very capable.

Swiftly he lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

She made no protest, looking at him with kind eyes that knew no thought of coquetry.

Then she vanished with her flowers.

He gave her five minutes, and then followed her.

Ruth had been detained in the basement, and was vanishing up the back-stairs as he entered, her roses in her hand.

Don John, the Austrian, with his dingy face and greasy moustache, winked at Ernie as he passed.

"Peach," he whispered. "Don't you wish you ad the pickin of her?"