There was a footfall on the dank quays. The bohemians were creeping home to their dingy beds to sleep away the day, turning life upside down, making day into night, night into day—drab symbol of their misconception of the realities.
CHAPTER LXXIX
Wherein the Honourable Rupert Greppel shows Hidalgic
In a large shed in the workmen’s quarter, on a platform, under the flare of gas-jets high hung in the dim rafters of the great place, there sat three men at a table; and before them, languid and self-possessed, his frock-coat close-buttoned and his scented being attired in the general air and pose of the dandy, stood a man of pale countenance, who, with the calm measured accents that are the habit of self-possession, spoke to the upturned faces of a dark mass of men that swept in a vast attentive hush from before his feet.
He spoke with facile precision of thought and accent, holding himself easily, airily, and with picturesque insolence. There was in the air with which he spoke a quiet indifference as to whether he pleased his hearers or not which had something of that strange distinction that marked everything this man did or said—for Rupert Greppel, whatever his faults, had a conspicuous and sincere belief in his own dignity. He stood there calmly hidalgic, swaggering, self-reliant. He never forgot, nor allowed others to forget, that his mother was a French countess, and of the oldest of the old noblesse.
He was speaking the last words of an academic appeal to aristocratic anarchy as the solution of the great human problem. He treated with contempt the aspirations and the beliefs in all socialistic ideals, laughed at the good of the largest number. The masses did not even believe in themselves, said he. The strong man, strong in himself and of the breed of those that had belief in themselves through the habit of generations of tyranny and of rule, was alone fit to govern——
“Down with all aristocrats!” cried an ugly-looking fellow at the back of the great seething mass of listening humanity.
Rupert Greppel never so much as frowned. A little smile played about his eye-pits and lips. And he was greeted with a storm of counter-cheers from a group of students and friends, amongst whom sat Myre and Noll and others.