Joe practised what he preached, and was himself unmarried. Apart, indeed, from an occasional fugitive physical connection as a youth with some passing girl, he had never fairly encountered a woman; never sought a woman; never, certainly, heard the call that refuses to be denied, spirit calling to spirit, flesh to flesh, was never even aware of his own deep need. Women for him were still a weakness to be avoided. They were the necessaries of the feeble, an encumbrance to the strong. That was his view, the view of the crude boy. And he believed himself lucky to be numbered among the uncalled for he was in fact a sober fanatic, living as selflessly for his creed as ever did those first preachers of unscientific Socialism, the Apostles and Martyrs of the first centuries of our era. Even in the shop he had his little class of students, pouring the milk of the word into their ears as he set their machines, and the missionary spirit drove him always on to fresh enterprise.
The Movement, as he always called it, was well ablaze by the second decade of the century in the Midlands and the North, but in the South it still only smouldered. And when Hewson and Clarke started their aeroplane department at Beachbourne, and began to build machines for the Government, Joe Burt, a first-rate mechanic, leapt at the chance offered him by the firm and crossed the Thames with his books, his brains, his big heart, to carry the Gospel of Redemption by Revolution to the men of Sussex as centuries before, his spiritual ancestor, St. Wilfrid, he too coming from the North, had done. In that strange land with its smooth-bosomed hills, its shining sea, its ca-a-ing speech, he found everything politically as he had expected. And yet it was in the despised South that he discovered the woman who was to rouse in him the fierce hunger of which till then he had been unaware except as an occasional crude physical need.
As on Saturday or Sunday afternoons at the time the revelation was coming to him he roamed alone, moody and unmated, the rogue-man, amid the round-breasted hills he often paused to mark their resemblance to the woman who was rousing in his deeps new and terrible forces of which he had previously been unaware. In her majestic strength, her laughing tranquillity, even in her moods, grave or gay, the spirit mischievously playing hide-and-seek behind the smooth appearance, she was very much the daughter of the hills amid which she had been bred.
Ruth was as yet deliciously unaware of her danger. She was, indeed, unaware of any danger save that which haunts the down-sitting and up-rising of every working woman throughout the world—the abiding spectre of insecurity.
She liked this big man, surly and self-conscious, and encouraged his visits. Not seldom as she moved amid her cups and saucers in the back-ground of the kitchen, she would turn eye or ear to the powerful stranger with the rough eloquence sucking his pipe by the fire and holding forth to Ernie on his favourite theme. It flattered her that he who notoriously disliked women should care to come and sit in her kitchen, lifting an occasional wary eyelid as he talked to look at her. And when she caught his glance he would scowl like a boy detected playing truant.
"I shan't hurt you then, Mr. Burt," she assured him with the caressing tenderness that is mockery.
His chin sunk on his chest.
"A'm none that sure," he growled.
Ernie winked at Ruth.
"Call him Joe," he suggested. "Then hap he'll be less frit."