Parkins, removing a collar and shirt-front combined, began to whistle.
“I’ll show you comin’ buttin’ in and runnin’ after respectable girls!” he announced hoarsely. “Blighter!”
O’Hagan dropped the monocle and laid his cane upon the counter. At the moment that Parkins stood upright and squared his chest, the Captain snatched up Mr. Crichton’s day-book—a heavy, leather-bound volume—and hurled it full at the pugilist’s head. One of the precepts of the Higher Jiu-jitsu, or “Art of Gentle Thought,” he will tell you, is to avail yourself of any missile within reach. His aim, then, is deadly. The day-book struck Parkins edgewise across the face, felling him like a stricken bullock—felling him utterly, brutally.
He crashed into the corner by the door—and lay still. (“A dreadful blow was struck at every gentleman when the sword was taken from him,” O’Hagan will say. “One cannot soil one’s gloves with the blood of churls.”)
“If you compel me to deal with you,” said the Captain, as Parkins returned to groaning consciousness of his injuries, “I shall cut your ears off!”
Do not judge my friend harshly. He was born three centuries too late, that is all. The claim of Democracy to an equality with Aristocracy is as unintelligible to him as it must have been to Denis O’Hagan, who upheld the Stuart cause whilst he had breath, and died at last like a gentleman at Worcester, having demonstrated his distaste for plebeian company by personally dispatching seven Roundheads. Or perhaps the autocratic soul of Patrick O’Hagan lives again within Bernard. This member of the family, sometime of the Mousquetaires du roi, narrowly escaped the Bastille for decapitating a Paris grocer who insulted a lady and attaching the erring tradesman’s head to his own shop-sign.
Parkins dizzily strove to get upon his feet. Mr. Crichton, trembling, was seeking to reach the telephone.
“Sit down, Mr. Crichton,” directed O’Hagan, turning the monocle upon him.
“This is my shop—and that’s one o’ my friends——”
“Sit down, Mr. Crichton.”