Alf was on the way now, in truth, to becoming a rich man. Yet he lived simply enough above his original garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old Town. And from that eyrie, busy though he was, he still made time to watch with interest and pleasure his brother's trousers coming down and indeed to lend a helping hand in the process: for he worked secretly on his mother, who regarded Ernie when he came to Rectory Walk to take his father out with eyes of increasing displeasure; for her eldest son was shabby and seedy almost now as in the days when he had been out of work after leaving the Hohenzollern. The word failure was stamped upon him in letters few could mis-read. And Anne Caspar had for all those who fail, with one exception, that profound sense of exasperation and disgust which finds its outlet in the contemptuous pity that is for modern man the camouflaged expression of the cruelty inherent in his animal nature. It seemed that all the love in her--and there was love in her as surely there is in us all--was exhausted on her own old man. For the rest her attitude towards the fallen in the arena was always _Thumbs down_--with perhaps an added zest of rancour and resentment because of the one she spared.
"She has brought you low," she commented one evening to Ernie in that pseudo-mystical voice, as of one talking in her sleep, from the covert of which some women hope to shoot their poisoned arrows with impunity. This time, however, she was not to escape just punishment.
Anne Caspar had struck a spark of reality out of the moss-covered flint; and now--as had happened at rare intervals throughout his life--Ernie made his mother suddenly afraid.
"Everyone," she said, lamely, trying vainly to cover her retreat.
"Ah," said Ernie, nodding. "I knaw who, and I'll let him knaw it too."
"Best be cautious," replied his mother with a smirk. "He's your landlord now. And you're behind."
"He may be my landlord," he cried. "But I'm the daddy o he yet."
Sullenly he returned to the house that was now for him no home: for the woman who had made it home was punishing not without just cause the man who had betrayed it.
Ruth was standing now like a rock in the tide-way, the passions of men beating about her, her children clinging to her, the grey sky of circumstance enfolding her.