This New Thought, as the foolish called it, how old it was, how universal, how deeply embedded in the primitive consciousness of the common man! Ernie, to be sure, did not read Edward Carpenter nor the works of any of that school; but instinct and experience had led him to knock at the same door.
"And if Alf wanted something different, too?" she asked.
Ernie shook a sceptical head.
"He wouldn't—not really. That ain't Alf. Money's what Alf wants and what he gets by consequence. He's only for himself, Alf is. If he went out a'ter anything else he'd only go half-hearted like, therefore he wouldn't get it. He'd be a house divided against hissalf. So he'd fall."
The two brothers now rarely met and never spoke.
Just sometimes Ernie in his grimy overall, sitting with arms crossed and sooty face upon a load of coal in the jolting lorry, would be passed by Alf at the wheel of his thirty horse-power car, stealing by without an effort or a sound, swift as the wind, silent as the tide.
On these occasions Ernie, perched aloft on his load, would detect the smirk on his brother's face, and knew that Alf was feeling his own superiority and hoping that Ernie felt it too.
In those days Ernie learned to know the corner of England in the triangle between Lewes, the Seven Sisters, and Beau-nez as he had never known it before. And the closer grew his intimacy the greater became his love.
The quiet, the strength, the noble rounded comeliness of the hills reminded him of the woman he sought. True, she disturbed him, present or absent; while they, in act or retrospect, comforted. But their full round breasts, rising clean and clear before him, stubble-crowned, green, purple, or golden against the blue, gave him a sense of earth rooted in the immensity of spirit and washed by the winds of heaven as did nothing else he knew but the woman he had lost.
"Wish I were a poet," he sometimes said to his father. "To put it all down what I feel, so others could see it too."