CHAPTER XL

CLASH OF MALES

Ernie, carrying his roses, mounted the bus.

Opposite the _Star_, he marked a gaunt figure, standing on the steps of the Manor-house. There was something of the kindly vulture about the figure's pose that was strangely familiar. Ernie leapt to sudden life. It was the Colonel--without his sun-helmet. Ernie was off the bus in a moment, and sidling shyly up to the object of his worship.

The Colonel, waiting on the steps, watched the antics of the approaching devotee with satirical indifference.

"Contemplating assault or adoration?" he asked mildly. Then he stooped, extending a skinny claw.

"What, Caspar!" he called, his cadaverous face lighting up.

"That's me, sir," grinned Ernie, wagging his tail with furious enthusiasm.

Just then a chocolate-bodied car drove up, and Ernie was aware of Alf looking at him. The door of the car opened; and Captain Royal stepped out.

"Ah, Colonel!" he cried in his brisk hearty voice.

The Colonel laid a finger on the other's sleeve.

"You remember Caspar, Royal?" he said.

"I do," replied Royal briefly. "Coming in, sir?" as Mr. Trupp's door opened at last.

Ernie turned down the hill, burning his white flare. The Captain's brutal insolence had gone home.

The Colonel reported the incident to his wife that evening.

"I could have struck the swine!" he said with unusual ferocity. "Conky Joe was right. He never was a white man. A piebald from birth, that feller."

Mrs. Lewknor churned the incident in her mind. It was a slur on the Regiment, and therefore a capital offence.

"What a cad!" she said. "Our dear Caspar too! Royal's the only officer in the Regiment would behave like that. Where's he stopping?"

"My dear, where would Royal stop?" said the Colonel. "The Hohenzollern--Third Floor--where Caspar's working."

He nodded his big head discreetly.

"How do you know?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, eyeing him.

"Trupp told me," replied the Colonel.

Ernie returned to the Hotel with his roses.

Later that evening he went to the door of the dressing-room of 72 and knocked quietly.

There was no answer. He entered and laid the roses on the table.

As he did so the door between the two rooms opened, and Ruth stood in it, watching him with hostile eyes.

In the room behind her Ernie could see the Captain in his smoking-jacket before the fire with a cigarette between his lips. Then the Captain saw him too. His easy expression changed in a flash; and he acted as always without a moment's hesitation.

He strode towards the open door between the two rooms, brushing Ruth almost rudely aside.

"Now no more of it!" he said with brutal savagery. "I've had enough!"

There was no light in the dressing-room but that which came through the uncurtained window from the moonlit sea, and the beam from the bed-room.

In the dimness the eyes of the two men clashed.

For a second the habit of discipline, of inferiority, of bowing to the other's artificially imposed authority, overwhelmed Ernie and he wavered. Then strength came to him like a tidal wave: he steadied and stood his ground.

In the eyes of his enemy he recognized in a flash the Eternal Brute, domineering, all-devouring, ruthless in the greed of its unbridled egotism, whose familiar features had been stamped indelibly, from the beginnings of Time, upon the retentive tablets of his race-memory.

Ernie was face to face with something in which he had never entirely believed--the Ogre of whom the Socialists spoke: Capitalism incarnate, stripped of its Church-trimmings, the Monster remorseless and obscene, to whom the Children of Men were but as the grass of the fields that went to feed the unquenchable fires in its sagging belly.

Quite suddenly the veil had been drawn aside, the roseate mists of sentimentality dispersed; and he beheld Human Nature, naked and terrible--the Animal who called himself Man--an Animal inspired beyond belief by the Devil of Lust and Cruelty, glowering out at him now from the ambush of a face created after the likeness of the Son of God.

He said slowly, more to himself than to his enemy:

"My Christ!" and left the room.

In the basement, Don John, bare-necked as a bird of prey, his cheek bulging with cheese, sat in a dingy apron and expounded his philosophy to a little group of disciples as tired and dirty as himself.

"Take advantage!--Of course dey take advantage! So would I, so would you--if we was in their shoes. Dey would be just pluddy fools not to. Dere is only so much in de world. Dey take what dey can get; and the veak to the vall. Shentlemen and Christians! Dere is no such tings. Tell the tale to mugs!--Dere is just Man and Woman, both worms, wriggled up out of the mud. Man wants Woman; and Woman wants it cushie. So de rich man buys her. Can you compete against him?--Is your body sleek with food and wine and lying in bed?--Is your spirit nourished on books and music and plays?--Can you fill her eye with your fatness, and clothe her body in furs, and adorn her hair with jewels, and fill her lap with gold?--No; de rich man buys what he wants, and he wants de best all de time. For you and me what is left over when he haf finished. Dat is so all de way through--women, wine, horses, what you vill. Touch your hat and say--Tank you, sair. Vair much obliged. It is always de same." He wagged a yellow fore-finger. "Dere is only two tings Ruling Class leaves to you and me." He cackled horribly. "One is Work"--he pronounced it vurk--"and de udder is War."