Joe Burt had that passion for saving souls which is the hall-mark of the missionary in every age. Had he been a child of the previous generation he would have become a minister in some humble denomination and done his fighting from the pulpit, Bible in hand, amid the pot-banks of a Black Country township or the grimy streets of a struggling mining village in the North. As it was he appealed to the mass from the platform, and, a true fisher of men, flung his net about the individual in the class-room and at conferences.
Always seeking fresh fields to conquer, he had established a political footing now even in Tory Old Town. He had opened a discussion at the Institute, and actually given an address to the local Church of England's Men's Society on Robert Owen and early English Socialists; and he owed his triumph in the main to Bobby Chislehurst.
It is not without a pang that we part from the most cherished of our prejudices, and as Joe launched out into an always larger life it had come to him as something of a shock to find amongst the younger clergy some who preserved an attitude of firm and honest neutrality in the great battle to which he had pledged his life, and even a few, here and there, who took their stand on the side of the revolutionaries of the Spirit.
And such a one was Bobby.
Because of that, the young curate, who was up and down all day amid the humble dwellers in the Moot, innocent and happy as a child, was forgiven his solitary sin. For Bobby was a Scout-master, unashamed; and Joe Burt, like most of his battle-fellows of that date looked askance on the Boy-Scout Movement as one of the many props of militarist Toryism none the less effective because it was unavowed.
The Cherub, bold, almost blatant in sin, passed his happiest hours in a rakish sombrero, shorts, and a shirt bedizened with badges, tramping the Downs at the head of the Old Town Troop of devoted Boy-Scouts, lighting forbidden fires in the gorse, arguing with outraged farmers, camping in secluded coombes above the sea.
Up there on the hill, between sky and sea, Joe Burt, he too with his little flock of acolytes from the East-end, would sometimes meet the young shepherd on Saturday afternoons, trudging along, in his hand a pole in place of a crook.
"I forgive you Mr. Chislehurst, because I know you don't know what you're doing," he once said, gravely. "You're like the Israelite—without guile."
"The greatest of men have their little failings," giggled the sinner.
The two men, besides their political sympathies, had another point in common: they meant to save Ernie from himself. But Joe was no longer single-eyed. He saw now in Ernie two men—a potential recruit of value for the cause of Labour, and the man who possessed the woman he loved.