Alfred Ollivant

“ He strode towards the open door between the two rooms, brushing Ruth almost rudely aside.
"Now no more of it!" he said with brutal savagery. "I've had enough!"
There was no light in the dressing-room but that which came through the uncurtained window from the moonlit sea, and the beam from the bed-room.
In the dimness the eyes of the two men clashed.
For a second the habit of discipline, of inferiority, of bowing to the other's artificially imposed authority, overwhelmed Ernie and he wavered. Then strength came to him like a tidal wave: he steadied and stood his ground. ”

“ And certainly if to be a poet is to love the familiar objects of the road, a poet Ernie was: for he loved them all—Lewes with its narrow streets, its steep hill to which you cling like a fly on a pane and look across to Mount Caburn for help; the old Pelham Arms, its walnut-tree at the back, the Fox, the Barley Mow, the Newmarket on the Brighton road; the hills running down in glorious nakedness to the highway, the tanned harvesters sitting among their sheaves; peeps of the blue Weald islanded with woods ”

“ The old folks grew to love the constant visitor, nor did he disguise the errand on which he was bent; while little Alice, with her father's eyes peeping from beneath her mother's curls, greeted her new friend with screams of joy, bangings on her drum, and the loveliest and most intimate of smiles.
Ernie made the child a cradle-swing of willow-withes, hung it from the bough of an apple-tree, in the garden, and passed many a happy hour alone with her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the sun-burnt foothills a belated farmer was working overtime to carry the last load before Sunday. The long blue wain proceeded in lurches across the hill-side to the guttural exhortations of the wagoner, all about it a little busy knot of men and women raking and pitching.
Ernie sat with his back to the hill, his arms folded, looking across the valley to the tiny hamlets clustered round a spire, the huge black barns and clumps of wood beyond the stream, and the deep hedges running caterpillar-wise up the flank of the opposing Down. ”

“ Ruth obeyed.
They drove through the gathering shadows in the sweet-scented June evening, past Ratton and Polefax, all along the foot of the Downs, the Wilmington Giant with his great staff gleaming wan and ogre-like on the hillside, and at the Turn-pike, just where the spire of B'rick church is seen pricking out of trees, turned for the gap and ran down the valley towards the Haven.
A sea-wind with a sparkle in it blowing up the Brooks seemed to meet the softer breezes of the Weald and penetrate them. A young moon hung over the sharp crest of Wind-hover. ”

“ Whatever else Ruth might feel about Captain Royal, there was no doubt that she admired him. And to do the man justice, there was not a little to admire. In any company, except the best, he shone. And on the Third Floor, in that meretricious atmosphere of fat-necked Jews, dubious foreigners, and degenerate Englishmen, Royal with his strenuous ways of the public-school boy, his athletic figure, and keen walk stood out like a sword among gamps in an umbrella-stand.
He lived too with the deliberate speed of the man who knows his goal and means to get there. ”

“ The Southdown Transport Company ran motor-lorries between Newhaven and Beachbourne, carrying seaborne coal and other merchandise from the harbour on the Ouse to the town under Beau-nez.
Ernie liked the work.
It kept him out of doors, under the sky, and in touch with the old-world elemental things he loved. The breath and bustle of the harbour at Newhaven; the long ride on the motor-lorry through the hill-country at all seasons of the year; even the pleasant acrid smell of the coal and coke in the lorry and on his overalls was pleasant and satisfying to him. ”

“ Out of the West, along the back of the Downs, dipping and dancing to the curve of the land like the wake of a ship over a billowy sea, a rough road swept up to the head, passing a dew-pond, the old race-course still fenced in, and a farm amid stacks at the head of a long valley that curled away towards a lighthouse pricking up white against the blue on the summit of the cliff in the eye of the misty morning sun. ”

“ The little river ran like a white riband across the Brooks under shaggy willows tossing silvery tails. A flotilla of ducks came down the stream and landed quacking under the white bridge clumsily to climb the bank and waddle towards Parson's Tye. On the lower slopes of Wind-hover the corn still stood in sheaves, the stubble ruddy in the sunset on the bow-backed foothill across the stream.
Ruth sat and listened to her friend; on her face the perturbed look of the good woman genuinely determined to do what is right and honestly puzzled as to her course. ”

“ Ernie was sure of it: for Royal was nothing of a diplomatist when dealing with an enemy whom he despised.
Ruth, too, avoided Ernie now.
He noticed it, and did not attempt to approach her.
The two were drawing away, and yet, Ernie sometimes thought, coming closer—for all the girl's grave reserve.
He at least was climbing heights where he had never been before.
Up there in the eternal snows it was lonely but bracing. He was putting on an armour of ice. Clothed thus, knew that nothing could hurt him. He could bear all things, conquer all men. ”

“ On the bridge Ernie paused and looked across towards the village lying in the morning sunlight, a tumble of russet roofs hugger-mugger among gardens on the hill, the old brown tiles crudely patched here and there with raw red ones; beyond the roofs the bare Downs; and at the foot of the hill, just across the green, tiny Frogs' Hall with the honeysuckle about the door, and Mus Boam sitting as always on his bricks, spectacles on nose, and Book spread on his knees. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Ernie was on the lift that evening. He stood in the corridor, listening to the hubbub in the hall, and waiting for the first rush of visitors who had arranged themselves and appropriated keys, when he saw a man emerge from Madame's private sitting-room at the end of the passage.
Then he came marching resolutely down the corridor, absorbed, swift, direct, with eyes neither to right nor left, wearing a Burberry, and the short tooth-brush moustache that was still the rage in the British Army; a young man of a type so familiar to Ernie that he smiled on recognizing it. ”

“ The Big Mind's like a Great Dream—it's beautiful, like clouds, but it can't do much by itself: the Little Mind's like a tintack, sharp and to the point. Now Alf's got the one kind of Mind, and me and Dad the other. This here Little Mind helps you to get on: it thinks it's on its own, being conceited. But the Big Mind behind does the real work." His eyes burned. He spoke with a solemnity, a conviction that was overwhelming.
Mr. Pigott was awed in spite of himself.
"The Little Mind's clever like Alf. And the Big Mind's wise like your father. That's it, is it?" he said lamely.
Ernie nodded. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A solid building, comfortable and warm, with russet roof and dormer-windows under a dark sycamore, it had changed little maybe since the great days of old when Aldwoldston on the Ruther, with its tannery, its brewery, its river traffic, and procession of pilgrims passing through from Sea-foord to Michelham Priory, had challenged the supremacy of Lewes on the Ouse, and been something of a city when Beachbourne was still but a tiny hamlet on the hill between the sheep-runs of Beau-nez and the snipe-haunted Levels. ”

“ Ernie was face to face with something in which he had never entirely believed—the Ogre of whom the Socialists spoke: Capitalism incarnate, stripped of its Church-trimmings, the Monster remorseless and obscene, to whom the Children of Men were but as the grass of the fields that went to feed the unquenchable fires in its sagging belly. ”

“ The Reverend Spink was a sleek little man, solid in body if not in mind, and full of rather shoddy enthusiasms.
"Poor old Ernie!" said Alf. "He's been a bad brother to me. I will say that for him. But I wouldn't wish my worst friend to come to that."
"But you must save him from himself!" cried the curate. "Go out into the highways and hedges and drag them in!—that's the command. Fling out the life-line!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 river ran in front of him a few yards away. On the other bank, immediately opposite him, was a clump of willows. There too was a big young woman in a tan overall.
She was sitting on the tow-path, her back against a tree, her arms bound about her knees, her feet in heavy boots pressed close together in an attitude expressing doggedness. She was bare-headed; and her orange turban lay at her feet. Ernie marked her gypsy colouring, red and gold, and the yellow necklace that bound her throat. ”

“ On the morrow of the night on which the hidden voice refused longer to be hushed, she went away by herself on to the Crumbles: that bird-haunted waste of stagnant pools and tussocky shingles which stretches along the edge of the Bay to Pevensey. There at least she would be sure of being alone save for a rare creature of the Wilderness, snipe or wild duck, hare or slow-winged heron. Half a mile from the great Hotel, rising sepulchre-wise from the surrounding desolation, her back to the town, and her face to the sea, she sat down on the lonely beach and girdled her knees with her arms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That goal was India.
The Shiny was the Private Soldier's Paradise, the old hands would tell the young in the canteens at night.
"Things are different there, my boy. In the Shiny a swoddy's a gentleman. Punkah-wallahs to pull the cords in the hot weather, a tiger curled at your feet to keep the snakes at bay, bearer to clean your boots, shooting parties, bubbly by the barrel, I don't know what all."
Because of this jewel that was for ever dangled before his eyes, Ernie bore a good deal without complaining. ”

“ But England, it was clear, and Sussex in particular, had impressed their staid and ponderous selves upon the riotous foreign blood to the exclusion of all else. A gypsy queen, the mother of Madonnas, bred among the Baptists and saturated with their faith, there was about her the same atmosphere of large and quiet strength that characterized her man. And Ernie could well understand that the pair had taught chapel, as Ruth had once told him, for thirty years in the building at the back.
Mrs. Boam stood in the door and looked at the visitor. ”

“ Lewknor was trembling with fury.
Ernie, on his back in the mud, stirred and opened his eyes.
He saw wavering faces all about him.
"Guess I'm all right now," he said.
"Give him air!" ordered the Archdeacon magnificently. "Ayah, I say!" and he made a sweeping gesture with his arm to brush away the crowd who were not there.
"He's had plenty of air," retorted Mrs. Lewknor with the curt brutality that distinguished her on rare occasions. "What he wants is something more solid than he gets from the pulpit." ”