Walking briskly along the cliff, turning over eternally the question whether England would be true to herself, he was aware of somebody stumbling towards him, talking to himself, probably drunk. The Colonel drew aside off the chalk-blazed path to let the other pass.
"A don't know justly what to make on't," came a broad familiar accent.
"Why, it's fight or run away," replied the Colonel, briskly. "No two twos about it."
"Then it's best run away, A reckon," answered the other, "afore worse comes on't. What d'you say, Colonel?"
The darkness drew the two men together with invisible bonds just as an hour before it had drawn the Colonel and Ernie.
"What is it, Burt?" asked the Colonel, gently.
He felt profoundly the need of this other human being standing over against him in the darkness, lonely, suffering, riven with conflicting desires.
Joe drew closer. He was sighing, a sigh that was almost a sob. Then he spoke in the hushed and urgent mutter of a schoolboy making a confession.
"It's this, Colonel--man to man. Hast ever been in love with a woman as you oughtn't to be?"
Not for the first time in these last months there was strong upon the Colonel the sense that here before him was an honest man struggling in the toils prepared for him by Nature--the Lion with no mouse to gnaw him free. Yet he was aware more strongly than ever before of that deep barrier of class which in this fundamental matter of sex makes itself more acutely felt than in any other. A man of quite unusual breadth of view, imagination, and sympathy, this was the one topic that some inner spirit of delicacy had always forbidden him to discuss except with his own kind. He was torn in two; and grateful to the kindly darkness that covered him. On the one hand were all the inhibitions imposed upon him by both natural delicacy and artificial yet real class-restraint; on the other there was his desire to help a man he genuinely liked. Should he take the line of least resistance, the line of the snob and the coward? Was it really the fact that because this man was not a gentleman he could not lay bare before him an experience that might save him?
"Yes," he said at last with the emphasis of the man who is forcing himself.