The curtains had disappeared from the windows of Whittingham Street. The brass of the doors had lost its polish. The women who had tripped along in an earnest display of finery were replaced by blowsy unkempt females who stood at the doors and gossiped. Once more the corners emphasized by the sordid public-houses were the idling-ground of groups of men, more numerous, shabbier even than of old. But these men had not the shiftless look of their predecessors. In their faces, thin and white, was a hardness which was odd in an urban population. In the eyes which followed the progress of a stranger up the street was a dangerous glare. The flags of the War Shrine had disappeared; its gilt-inscribed panel was dingy and splashed with mud. At the far end of the street the great chimneys of Hathaway's works stuck up, clean of smoke, into a clear sky. The massive entrance gates were a closed wall across the vista.
In the little room to which Jim Swain had returned—after the days unnumbered of life in the open trenches, wet dykes in the winter, and in summer dusty sunken avenues where death struck suddenly in the glare; after the countless nights of clear stars rising to a wondrous infinity of multitude and distance above the dark bank of parapet—Ann bent over a soap-box cradle where a child whimpered in faint misery. The room was utterly bare of any furniture save the poor substitutes of a number of packing-cases of various sizes. The little home which Jim had established, which Ann had worked so passionately to improve, was a home no longer. It was merely a squalid shelter for squalid human animals.
Ann, on her knees by the child, looked up to the three figures in the centre of the room, her attention suddenly challenged by the clash of angry voices.
A tall man, fierce, with a shock of untidy hair falling on a narrow brow, a vivid red tie overwhelming the soft collar which kept it in place, was pointing a quivering finger at her husband's breast.
"You call yourself the leader of these men," he was saying, in a rage of scorn, "and you flaunt that scrap of coloured rag—you advertise your pride that you helped the bourgeois to fight his war! Take it off, man—fling it down and trample on it! The red on it is the blood of your fellow-workers!"
"Aye, that's just what it is, Laurence," said the ex-soldier with equal anger. "And I am proud of it. I'm proud that I did my bit for England—for England's ours, too, as well as the capitalists', and the war was our war, the war of the crowd of us—and we went out and risked our lives while you and your cowardly kind stayed at home and helped the enemy all you could. That's your patriotism! And now to hear you talk one would think England was an enemy country! I tell you it's our country as much as anybody's and our war that we fought for it! The red on this medal ribbon is the red of the blood of the chaps that died for it if you like—and I'm mighty proud to wear it. And, by God, Laurence, while I'm the leader of these poor chaps I won't have any traitor talk—is that clear?"
"Your country!" the other laughed bitterly. "What right have you got to a ha'porth of it?—you, who are being chucked out into the street—you, who haven't even the right to demand work and earn your bread! Bah! Militarism has rotted the soul of you!"
"It taught me to know a true man when I see him, anyway, Laurence—and you're none o' that kind! You, poisoning the minds of starving men——"
"And who keeps 'em starving? Who prevents 'em from helping themselves in the nearest baker's shop——"
"Now, lads—now, lads!" intervened the third man, a thick-set fellow in black coat and turned-up trousers over yellow boots. A smug self-confidence was native to his podgy countenance, was the complement of the cunning, scheming eyes. "There's no use quarrelling. What we've got to do is to 'elp each other—we working-men. The Union's bust, Jim, an' that's the fact of it—an' if Mr. Laurence's organization 'ere can't give us a 'and—well, I don't know what'll happen. This last trick of 'Athaway's, chucking the whole street out o' doors, fairly puts the lid on it!"