In relation to the story "Dusk," how is an unsuccessful person suppressed by a successful person?

Saki describes the setting of "Dusk" from the point of
view of a young man called Norman Gortsby.

readability="17">

Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the defeated.
Men and women, who had fought and lost, who hid their fallen fortunes and dead hopes as
far as possible from the scrutiny of the curious, came forth in this hour of gloaming,
when their shabby clothes and bowed shoulders and unhappy eyes might pass unnoticed, or,
at any rate,
unrecognized.

This strongly
suggests that the defeated were defeated in the general struggle for survival and not by
any particular persons. Saki is suggesting that life is bellum omnium contra
omnes (the war of all against all). If, for example, a man like Norman
Gortsby lands a good job, that means a number of other men are prevented from landing
that job. There is no hand-to-hand fighting, but there are only so many good positions,
and there must be losers as well as winners.

According to
Magill's Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition
(see reference link below):

readability="11">

Born in colonial Burma (now Myanmar) to a family
that had for generations helped to rule the British Empire, Hector Hugh Munro grew up in
a Devonshire country house where, reared along with his brother and sister by two
formidable aunts, he had the secluded and strictly supervised sort of childhood typical
of the Victorian rural
gentry.

Saki has also been
described as a Tory, a reactionary, a misogynist and an anti-Semite. He obviously has
little sympathy for "the defeated." He was most likely a "social Darwinist" who believed
that the human race is improved by the survival of the fittest in the struggle for
existence.

Gortsby is not really a successful person, nor
is he a gentleman of leisure. He is just an intelligent young man with a
better-than-average job, probably lingering on a park bench because he has been working
in an office and wants to relax in the open air before going home to his modest lodging.
He has to be someone to whom the loss of a sovereign (one pound) would be painful;
otherwise the point would be lost. In those Victorian times the average salary for a
clerk was a pound a week.

Gortsby begins by despising the
defeated people he sees around him. Then when he finds the cake of soap and assumes it
belongs to the young con man, he has a change of heart. He tells
himself:

"It's
a lesson to me not to be too clever in judging by
circumstances."

But when he
discovers that the cake of soap belonged to the elderly gentleman who had been sitting
beside him, he realizes that his original attitude of skepticism and indifference was
the correct one. Saki is suggesting that it is a mistake to feel sorry for people. As a
reactionary, he was undoubtedly opposed to government measures to help the unfortunate.
He would have found private charity acceptable but must have hated and feared the
growing socialist  movement. It was one thing to give willingly and out of sympathy, and
quite another to pass laws taxing one person to give his money to someone else, someone
who might or might not really need or might it.

There is a
strong possibility that the elderly gentleman was also a con man. Why else would he be
so sure that the cake of soap had to be near the bench? He may have left it there
deliberaely, intending to come back and use it as a ploy to start a conversation with
Gortsby. Saki seems to be suggesting that the world is full of people who want to live
without working, and that many of them come out in the dusk.