CHAPTER I

THE HOSTEL

Dr. Trupp of Beachbourne, as he was generally known–Mr. Trupp, to give
him his correct title–was a genuinely great man.

His father had been a book-seller in Torquay; and he himself never lost
the greater qualities of the class from which he sprang. He was very
simple and very shrewd. Science had not blunted the fine intuitions
which his brusque manner half concealed. Moreover, he trusted those
intuitions perhaps unconsciously as do few men of his profession; and
they rarely played him false. In early manhood his integrity, his
sound common sense, and practical idealism had won for him the love of
a singularly noble girl who might have married one of the best of her
inevitably artificial class. Later in life indeed Evelyn Trupp often
would amuse her father and annoy her mother by affirming that she was
far prouder of being the wife of Mr. Trupp of Beachbourne than of
having been Miss Moray of Pole. And she had good cause. For her
husband was no longer the country doctor at whom the county families
had sniffed. He was “Trupp of Beachbourne,” whose fame had spread,
quietly it is true, from Sussex, through England to the outer world.
And if there was some difference of opinion as to whether Mr. Trupp had
made Beachbourne, or Beachbourne had made him, there was no question
that the growth of the town, and its deserved popularity as a
health-resort was coincident with his residence there.

At least the event justified the young surgeon’s courage and
originality in the choice of a site for his life-long campaign. Indeed
had he stayed in London it is certain that he would never have achieved
the work he was able to consummate in the town girdled by the southern
hills and washed by Northern Seas. And that work was no mean
contribution to the welfare of the race. Mr. Trupp was a pioneer in
the organized attack on perhaps the deadliest and most pertinacious
enemy that threatens the supremacy of Man–the tubercle bacillus. And
his choice of a _point-d’appui_ from which to conduct his offensive was
no small factor in his success.

He was, moreover, one of the men who in the last years of the
nineteenth century and the earlier years of this set himself to stem
the tide of luxury which in his judgment was softening the spines of
the younger generation. And the helpful buffets which gave him his
name, and were responsible at least for some of his triumphs, were not
the outcome of spasms of irritability but of a deliberate philosophy.

For Mr. Trupp, despite his kind heart, never forgot that Man with all
his aspirations after heaven had but yesterday ceased to be an animal
and still stood on the edge of the slough from which he had just
emerged, up to his hocks in mud, the slime yet trickling from his
shaggy sides.

“Don’t give him sympathy,” he would sometimes say to an astonished
father. “What he wants is the Big Stick … Stop his allowance. He’ll
soon get well. Necessity’s the best doctor…. Take her mother away
from her. The mothers make half the invalids…. Let her get up early
in the morning and take the kitchen-maid tea in bed. _She’s_ a useful
citizen at all events.”

He saw his country, so he believed, sinking into a dropsical coma
before his eyes, just for want of somebody to kick it awake; and the
sight made him sick and fearful.

Often riding with his daughter of evenings after the day’s work he
would pause a moment beside the flag-staff on Beau-nez and look North
East across the waste of sea dull or shining at his feet.

“Can you hear him growling, Bess?” he asked his companion once.

“Who?”

“The Brute.”

Bess knew her father’s ogre, and the common talk.

“Is Germany the Brute?” she asked.

Her father shook his head.

“One of them,” he answered. “Wherever Man is there the Brute is–keep
that in mind when you’re married, my dear. And he’s always sleeping
after a gorge or ravenous before one. Our Brute’s asleep now he’s got
his belly full. Theirs”–nodding across the water–“is prowling for
his prey.”

To Mr. Pigott he confided his belief that there was only one thing that
could save England.

“What’s that?” asked the old school-master.

“A bloody war,” replied Mr. Trupp.

Many other men were saying the same thing, but few of his intellectual
calibre, and none of his radical views.

His own part in staying the rot that in his belief threatened to
corrupt the country he loved with such a deep if critical love, was
clear enough. It was the business of him and his colleagues to give
the nation the health that made for character, just as it was that of
the school-master to give them the character that made for health. And
he tackled his side of national education with a will: the Sun, the
Sea, the Air being the assistants in whom he trusted.

His old idea, cherished through a life-time, of an open-air hostel,
where he could have under his immediate supervision children without
their mothers, and wives without their husbands, sought always more
urgently for expression as the years slipped by. It was not, however,
till the twentieth century was well upon its way, that all the
conditions necessary for the safe launching of his project were
fulfilled.

His chance came when Colonel Lewknor and his wife crossed his path on
retirement from the Sendee.

Rachel Lewknor took up the old surgeon’s plan with the fierce yet wary
courage of her race.

Here was her chance, heaven-sent. Thus and thus would she fulfil her
cherished dream and make the money to send her grandson, Toby, to Eton
like his father and grandfather before him.

Like most soldiers, she and the Colonel were poor. All through their
working lives any money they might have saved against old age they had
invested in the education of their boy; stinting themselves in order to
send young Jock to his father’s school and afterwards to start him in
his father’s regiment. On retirement therefore they had little but a
pittance of a pension on which to live. The question of how to raise
the capital to buy the site and build the hostel was therefore the most
urgent of the earlier difficulties that beset Mrs. Lewknor.

Mr. Trupp said frankly that he could lend the money and would do so at
a pinch; but he made it clear that he would rather not. He, too, was
starting his boy Joe in the Hammer-men, and like all civilians of those
days had an exaggerated idea of the expenses of an officer in the Army.
Moreover, he had determined that when the time and the man came Bess
should marry where she liked; and the question of money should not
stand in her way.

Happily Mrs. Lewknor’s problem solved itself as by miracle.

Alf Caspar, who had his garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old Town
and, in spite of the continued protests of Mrs. Trupp and Bess, still
drove for Mr. Trupp (the old surgeon refusing steadfastly to keep a car
of his own), had from the start evinced an almost prurient interest in
the conception of the hostel. In the very earliest days when Mr. Trupp
and Mrs. Lewknor talked it over as they drove through Paradise, the
beech-hangar between old Town and Meads, to visit the prospective site
in Cow Gap, he would sit at his wheel manipulating his engine to ensure
the maximum of silent running, his head screwed round and big left ear
reaching back to lick up what was passing between the two occupants of
the body of the car.

Later, when it had actually been decided to embark upon the scheme, he
said to Mr. Trupp one day in his brightest manner:

“Should be a paying proposition, sir, with you behind it.”

The old surgeon eyed his chaffeur through his pince-nez shrewdly.

“If you like to put £3,000 or so into it, Alfred, you wouldn’t do
yourself any harm,” he said.

Alf sheathed his eyes in that swift bird-like way of his, and tittered.

“Three thousand pounds!” he said. “Me!” ….

A few days later when Mr. Trupp called at the Colonel’s tiny villa in
Meads. Mrs. Lewknor ran out to him, eager as a girl.

She had received from Messrs. Morgan and Evans, the solicitors in
Terminus Road, an offer of the sum required on behalf of a client on
the security of a first mortgage.

“It’s a miracle!” she cried, her eyes sparkling like jewels.

“Or a ramp!” said the Colonel from behind. “D’you know anything about
the firm, Trupp?”

“I’ve known and employed em ever since I’ve been here,” replied the old
surgeon. “They’re as old as Beachbourne and a bit older. A Lewes firm
really, and they still have an office there. But as the balance of
power shifted East they shifted with it.”

“They don’t say who their client is,” commented the Colonel.

“I’ll ask em,” the other answered.

That afternoon he drove down to Terminus Road, and leaving Alf in the
car outside, entered the office.

He and Mr. Morgan were old friends who might truly be accounted among
the founders of modern Beachbourne.

“Who’s your client?” asked Mr. Trupp, gruff and grinning. “Out with
it!”

Mr. Morgan shook his smooth grey head, humour and mystery lurking about
his mouth and in his eyes.

“Wishes to remain anonymous,” he said. “We’re empowered to act on his
behalf.”

He strolled to the window and peeped out, tilting on his toes to
overlook the screen which obscured the lower half of it.

What he saw seemed to amuse him, and his amusement seemed to re-act in
its turn on Mr. Trupp.

“Is he a solid man?” asked the surgeon.

“As a rock,” came the voice from the window.

The other seemed satisfied; the contract forthwith was signed; and Mrs.
Lewknor bought her site.

Cow Gap was an ideal spot for the hostel.

It is carved out of the flank of Beau-nez; the gorse-covered hill
encircling it in huge green rampart that shelters it from the
prevailing Sou-West gales. Embedded in the majestic bluff that
terminates the long line of the South Downs and juts out into the sea
in the semblance of a lion asleep, head on his paws, it opens a broad
green face to the sea and rising sun. The cliff here is very low, and
the chalk-strewn beach, easy of access from above, is seldom outraged
by skirmishers from the great army peopling the sands along the front
towards the Redoubt and the far Crumbles. A spur of the hill shuts it
off from the aristocratic quarter of the town, known as Meads, which
covers with gardened villas the East-ward foot-hills of Beau-nez and
ceases abruptly at the bottom of the Duke’s Drive that sweeps up the
Head in graceful curves.

In this secluded coombe, that welcomes the sun at dawn, at dusk holds
the lingering shadows, and is flecked all day with the wings of passing
sea-birds, after many months of delay and obstructions victoriously
overcome, Mrs. Lewknor began to build her house of bricks and mortar in
the spring of the year Ruth and Ernie Caspar set out together to
construct the future in a more enduring medium.

The house, long and low, with balconies broad as streets, and windows
everywhere to catch the light, rose layer by layer out of the turf on
the edge of the cliff. All the summer and on into the autumn it was
a-building. A white house with a red roof, plain yet picturesque, it
might have been a coastguard station and was not. Partaking of the
character of the cliffs on which it stood and the green Downs in which
it was enclosed, it seemed a fitting tenant of the great coombe in
which, apart from a pair of goal-posts under the steep of the hill at
the back, it was the only evidence of the neighbourhood of Man.

Mr. Trupp watched the gradual realisation of the dream of a lifetime
with the absorbed content of a child who observes the erection of a
house of wooden bricks. And he was not alone.

When at the end of the day’s work Alf now drove his employer, as he
often did, to Cow Gap to study progress, he, too, would descend and
poke and pry amid skeleton walls and crude dank passages with sharp
eyes and sharper whispered questions to labourers, foreman, and even
the architect. Never a Sunday passed but found him bustling across the
golf-links before church, to ascend ladders, walk along precarious
scaffoldings, and march with proprietory air and incredible swagger
along the terraces of the newly laid-out gardens that patched with
brown the green quilt of the coombe.

Once, on such a Sunday visit, he climbed the hill at the back to obtain
a bird’s-eye view of the building. Amid spurting whin-chats and
shining gossamers, he climbed in the brilliant autumn morning till he
had almost reached the crest. He was lost to the world and the beauty
lavished all about him; his eyes shuttered to the whispered suggestions
of the infinite; his heart closed to the revealing loveliness of Earth,
round-limbed and bare, as he revolved in the dark prison-house of self
the treadmill of his insect projects. The sidesman of St. Michael’s,
spruce, scented, oiled, in fancy waistcoat, with boots of glace kid,
and waxed moustache, moving laboriously between sky and sea, was
civilised man at the height of his imperfection and vain-glorious in
his fatuous artificiality.

Suddenly a bare head and collarless stark neck blurted up out of a deep
gorse-clump before him.

“Who goes there?” came a challenge, deep and formidable, as the roar of
some jungle lord disturbed in his covert.

Alf collapsed as a soap-bubble, blown from a clay pipe and brilliant in
the sunshine, bursts at the impact of an elemental prickle. He fled
down the hill incontinently.

The man who had barked, shoulder-deep in gorse, his eyes still
flashing, turned to the woman squandered beneath him in luxurious
splendour. Native of the earth on which she lay, and kin to it as some
long-limbed hind of the forest, she regarded him with amused content.
The sudden battle-call of her male roused what there was of primitive
in her, soothed, and flattered her womanhood. Comfortably she fell
back upon the sense of security it called up, delighting behind
half-drawn lids in the surprising ferocity of her man. That roar of
his, startling the silence like a trumpet-note, had spoken to her
deeps. Swiftly, and perhaps for the first time, she recognised what
the man above her stood for in her life, and why one with whom she did
not pretend to be in love so completely satisfied her most urgent
present need. He was a break-water behind which she lay with furled
sails after a hazardous voyage over uncharted deeps. Outside was still
the roar and batter of seas. The sound of guns booming overhead as she
lay, stripped of her canvas, and rocking pleasantly in the inner
waters, did not alarm, rather indeed lulled, her to sleep: for they
spoke to her of protection at last.

“Who was it, Ernie?” she murmured, raising a lazy head from the hands
on which they were pillowed, the dark hair strewn about her like
wind-slashed rain.

The man turned, outraged still and bristling.

“Alf!” he snorted. “Just bob me head over the hawth at him. That was
enough–_quite_ enough! I knaw the colour of Alf’s liver.”

He stood above her with his air of a fighting male.

She had never seen him like that before; and she regarded him
critically and with approval.

“Ern,” she called quietly, with a chuckle, deep and secret as the
gurgle of water pouring from a long-throated jug; and with a faint
movement of her hips she made room for him in the sand beside her.