The Ulster Campaign was moving forward now with something of the shabby and theatrical pomp of a travelling circus parading the outskirts of a sea-side town before a performance. A dromedary with an elongated upper lip, draped in the dirty trappings of a pseudo-Oriental satrap, led the procession, savage and sulking. Behind the dromedary came the mouldy elephant, the mangy bear, the fat woman exposing herself in tights on a gilt-edged Roman chariot, the sham cow-boys with gaudy cummerbunds, and Cockney accents, on untamed bronchos hired from the local livery stables, the horse that was alleged to have won the Derby in a by-gone century, etc. And the spectators gaped on the pavement, uncertain whether to jeer or to applaud.
As the Campaign rolled on its way, the wiser Conservatives shook their heads, openly maintaining that the whole business was a direct abnegation of everything for which their party had stood in history, while the Liberals became increasingly restive: Mr. Geddes, uneasy at the inaction of the Government, Mr. Geddes truculent to meet the truculence of the enemy. The only man who openly rejoiced was Joe Burt.
"The Tory Reds have lit such a candle by God\'s grace in England as\'ll never be put out," he said to Ernie.
The engineer had always now a newspaper cutting in his waistcoat pocket, and a quotation pat upon his lips.
"They\'re all shots for the locker in the only war that matters," he told the Colonel. "And they\'ll all coom in handy one day. A paste em into a lil book nights: Tips for Traitors; an ammunition magazine, A call it."
For him Sir Edward Carson\'s famous confession of faith, I despise the Will of the People—words Joe had inscribed as motto on the cover of his ammunition magazine—gave the key to the whole movement. And he never met the Colonel now but he discharged a broadside into the helpless body of his victim.
It was not, however, till early in 1914, just when his pursuit of Ruth was at the hottest, that he woke to the fact that the Tories were tampering with the Army. That maddened Joe.
"If this goes on A shall go back to ma first love," he told Ruth with a characteristic touch of impudence.
"And a good job too," she answered tartly. "I don\'t want you."
"And you can go back to your Ernie," continued the engineer, glad to have got a rise.
"I shan\'t go back to him," retorted Ruth, "because I never left him."
The statement was not wholly true: for if Ruth had not left Ernie, since the affair of the Goffs she had according to her promise turned her back on him. When on the first opportunity that offered she had announced his fate to the offender, he had blinked, refused to understand, argued, insisted, coaxed—to no purpose.
"You got to be a man afoor I marry you again," she told him coldly. "I\'m no\'hun of a no-man\'s woman."
Ernie at first refused to accept defeat. He became eloquent about his rights.
"They\'re nothing to my wrongs," Ruth answered briefly; and turned a deaf ear to all his pleas.
Thereafter Ernie found himself glad to escape the home haunted by the woman he still loved, who tantalised and thwarted him. That was why when Joe girded on his armour afresh and went forth to fight the old enemy in the new disguise, Ernie accompanied him.
The pair haunted unionist meetings, Ernie quiescent, the other aggressive to rowdiness. Young Stanley Bessemere, who had returned from Ireland (where he now spent all his leisure caracoling on a war-horse at the distinguished tail of the caracoling Captain Smith) to address a series of gatherings in his constituency in justification of the Ulster movement, and his own share in it, was the favoured target for his darts. Joe followed him round from the East-end to Meads, and from Meads to Old Town, and even pursued him into the country. He acquired a well-earned reputation as a heckler, and was starred as dangerous by the Tory bloods. Mark that man! the word went round.
Joe knew it, and was only provoked to increased aggressiveness.
"Go on, ma lad!" he would roar from the back of the hall. "Yon\'s the road to revolution aw reet!"
There came a climax at a meeting in the Institute, Old Town. Joe at question time had proved himself unusually bland and provocative. The stewards had tried to put him out; and there had been a rough and tumble in the course of which somebody had hit the engineer a crack on the head from behind with the handle of a motor-car. Joe dropped; and Ernie stood over him in the ensuing scuffle. The news that there was trouble drew a little crowd. Ruth, on her evening marketings in Church Street, looked in. She found Joe sitting up against the wall, dazed; and Ernie kneeling beside him and having words with Stanley Bessemere, who was strolling towards the door.
"Brought his troubles on his own head," said the young member casually.
"Hit a man from behind!" retorted Ernie, quiet but rather white. "English, ain\'t it?"
"It was your own brother, then!" volunteered an onlooker.
Joe rallied, rubbed his head, looked up, saw Ruth and reassured her.
"A\'m maself," he said.
He rose unsteadily on Ernie\'s arm.
"He must come home along of us," said Ruth.
"Of course he must then," Ernie answered with the asperity of the thwarted male.
The night-air revived the wounded man. Arrived at the cottage he sat in the kitchen, still a little stupid, but amused with his adventure.
"They\'d ha kicked me in stoomach when A was down only for you, Ern," he said. "That\'s the Gentlemen of England\'s notion of politics, that is."
"You\'d ha done the same by them, Joe, if you\'d the chance," answered Ern.
The other grinned.
"A would that, by Guy—and all for loov," he admitted.
Ruth brought him a hot drink. He sipped it, one eye still on his saviour.
"I owe this to you, Ern. Here\'s to you!"
"Come to that, Joe, I owe you something," Ernie answered.
"What\'s that then?" Joe sat as a man with a stiff neck, screwing up his eye at the other.
Ern nodded significantly at Ruth\'s back.
"Why that little bit o tiddley............