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.
