CHAPTER IV
ALF
Then a child lifted its tiny sail on the far horizon. Its rippling approach across the flood-tides absorbed Ruth and helped Ernie: for he had in him much of his father's mysticism, and was one of those men who go through life rubbing their eyes as the angels start up from the dusty road, and they see miracles on every side where others only find the prosaic permutations and combinations of mud. And this particular miracle, taking place so deliberately beneath his roof, a miracle of which he was the unconscious agent, inspired and awed him.
"Makes you sweat to think of it," he said to a mate in the yard.
"By then you've had half-a-dozen and got to keep em, you'll sweat less," retorted his friend, who had been married several years.
Mr. Trupp looked after Ruth.
Great man as he was now, he still attended faithfully those humble families who had supported him when first he had established himself in Old Town thirty years before, young, unknown, his presence fiercely resented by the older practitioners.
When Ruth's time came, Ernie sat in the kitchen, shaken to the soul, and listening to the feet in the room above.
It was a dirty night, howling, dark and slashed with rain. Outside in the little dim street that ran below the Kneb on which loomed the shadowy bulk of the parish-church, solid against the cloud-drift, stood the doctor's car.
Once Ernie went to the rain-sluiced window and saw Alf with his collar turned up crouching behind the wheel.
Ernie went out into the flapping night.