The Far Horizon

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He turned away from the window and took a turn the length of the room--a
tall, distinct, and even stately figure in the thickening dusk. He felt
rather horribly desolate. He was fairly frightened by the greatness of
the emptiness, within and about him, engendered by absence of employment.
He had little to reproach himself with. His record was cleaner than most
men's--he could not but know that. He had sacrificed personal ambition,
personal happiness, to the service of one supremely dear to him. Not for
a moment did he regret it. Had it to be done all over again, without
hesitation he would do it. Still there was no blinking facts. Here was
the nemesis, not of ill living, but of good--namely, emptiness,
loneliness, homelessness, Old Age here at his elbow, Death waiting there
ahead.

"The routine has gone on too long," he said to himself bitterly. "I have
lost my pliability, lost my humanity. I am a machine now, not a man. To
the machine, work is life. Work over, life is over; and the machine is
just so much lumber--better broken up and sent to the rag and bottle
shop, where it may fetch the worth of its weight as scrap-iron."

He turned, came back to the open window again and stood there, rather
carefully avoiding the three reproachful eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-
room gaselier, and fixing his gaze on that sullen fierceness of sunset
still hanging in the extreme northwest.

"Unluckily there is no rag and bottle shop where superannuated bank
clerks of five-and-fifty have even the very modest market value of scrap-
iron!" he went on. "Of all kinds of uselessness, that of we godlike human
beings is the most utterly obvious when our working day is past. Mental
decay and bodily corruption as the ultimate. And, this side of it, a few
years of increasing degradation, a mere senseless killing of time until
the very unpleasing goal is reached--along with a growing selfishness,
and narrowness of outlook; along, possibly, with some development of
senile sensuality, the more detestable because it lacks the provocations
of hot blood. Oh! Dominic Iglesias, Dominic Iglesias, is that the ugly
road you are doomed to travel--a toothless greed for filling your belly
with fly-blown dainties off the refuse-heap?"

And through the open window, in sinister accompaniment to little Mr.
Farge's sophisticated and unpastoral pipings, came the voice of the great
city herself in answer--low, multitudinous, raucous, without emphasis but
without briefest relief of interval or of pause. And this laid hold
strongly of Iglesias' imagination, reminding him of all the intimate
wretchedness of that first stranding of the ship of his fate. Reminding
him of his long and fruitless trampings in search of employment--good
looks, energy, youth itself, seeming but an added handicap--when London
revealed herself to him in her solidarity, revealed herself as a
prodigious living creature, awful in her mysterious vigour, ever big with
impending birth, merciless with impending death. As she showed herself to
him then, with life all untried before him, so she showed herself still
when, in the blackness of his present humour, all life worth the name
appeared over and passed. He had changed, so he believed, to the point of
nullity and final ineptitude. She remained strong, active, relentless as
ever. As long ago, so now, she struck him as monstrous. Yet now, though
all the conditions were changed, he had, as long ago, an instinct that
from her there was no escape.

"I have served you honestly enough all these years," he said--since she
had voice to speak, she had also ears to hear, mayhap--"and you have
taken much and given little. To-day you have turned me off, told me to
quit. But where, I ask you, can I go? I am too stiffened by work,
unskilled in travel, too unadaptable to begin again elsewhere. Moreover,
you hold the record of my experience, all my glad and sorrowful memories.
I might try to leave you, but it's no use. I am planted and rooted in
you, monstrous mother that you are. If I know myself, I should go only to
come back."

For the moment the calm of long self-control was broken up within him.
Dominic Iglesias dwelt, consciously and sensibly, in the horror of the
Outer Darkness--which horror is known only to that small and somewhat
suspect minority of human beings who are also capable, by the operation
of the divine mercy, of dwelling in the glory of the Uncreated Light. The
swing of the pendulum is equal to right as to left. He was staggered by
the misery of his own isolation--a stranger, as he suddenly realised, by
temperament and ideals, as well as by race! Then resolutely he turned his
back on this, with an instinct of self-preservation directing his thought
to things practical and average.

For example, that question of the pension--concerning which he now found,
to his slight surprise, he was no longer the least in doubt. This money
was his by right. The hard strain in his nature was dominant--to the full
he would claim his rights. And since in moments of despair the human mind
invariably requires a human victim, be it merely a simulacrum, a waxen
image of a man to melt in the fires of its humiliation and revolt,
Iglesias remembered, with much contemptuous satisfaction, the ironical
portrait of Sir Abel Barking adorning the wall of the latter's private
room at the bank. He hailed the diabolic talent of the artist who had
laid bare with such subtle skill the flatulence of his sitter. It was a
pretty revenge, very assuaging just now to Iglesias. For the real man, as
he reflected, was not the man who sat heavily self-complacent in a
library chair, exuding platitudes and pride of patronage; but the man who
hung upon the wall forever ridiculous while paint and canvas should last.
Thus would he go down to posterity! And to Dominic Iglesias, just now, it
seemed very excellent that posterity should know him for the wind-bag
hypocrite he essentially was. Securely entrenched behind his own large
prosperity, uxoriousness, paternity, had he not counted his, Iglesias',
blessings to him; counselling amusement, rest, congratulating him on just
all that which made for his present distress--namely, his obscure
position, his enforced idleness, his absence of human ties, the general
meagreness of his state in life? The more he thought of the incident, the
more it filled him with indignation and disgust. Therefore, very
certainly he would claim his pension; claim an infinitesimal but actual
fraction of this man's great wealth; would live long so as to claim it as
long as possible, till the paying of it, indeed, should become a
weariness to the payer. And he would spend it, too, unquestionably he
would. Mr. Iglesias' rare and gracious smile had an almost cruel edge to
it.

"The machine shall become a man again," he said. "And the man shall amuse
himself. How, I don't yet know, but I will find out. Work has made me
dull and inept."

He straightened himself up, tired, yet unbroken, defiant, aware--though
the horror of the Outer Darkness was yet upon him--of purpose still
militant and unspent.

"Play may make me the reverse of dull and inept. I have always been
diligent and methodical. I will continue to be so. This enterprise admits
of no delay. I will begin at once, begin to-morrow, to amuse myself."

It is characteristic of the Latin to see things written in fire and
blood, which the slower-brained Anglo-Saxon only sees written in red
paint--if, indeed, he ever arrives at seeing them written at all. To-
night the Latin held absolute sway in Dominic Iglesias. With freedom had
come a curious reversion to type. His humour, like his smile, was a
trifle cruel. He observed, criticised, judged, condemned unsparingly, all
mental courtesies in abeyance. When, therefore, at this juncture the
three eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-room gaselier winked slowly, and
closed their lids--so to speak--ceasing to watch and to supplicate, he
suffered no self-reproach. The good, simple couple were shutting up house
and going to bed, he supposed. They sought repose betimes; and, unless
supper had been more aggressively cold and heavy than usual, slept, till
broad day, a dreamless sleep. Decidedly it was well he had not taken his
hat and stepped across to visit them, for, beyond all question, they
would not have understood! The voice of London, for instance, meant
nothing to them. They had no notion London had a voice. Still less had
they any notion she was a prodigious living creature. London was the
place where they resided--that was all, and, since the streets are
admittedly noisy and dusty, they had taken a house in this genteel and
convenient suburb. Of the tremendous life and force of things, miscalled
man-made and inanimate, they had no faintest conception. Small wonder
they went to bed betimes and slept a dreamless sleep! Thinking of which--
notwithstanding their kindness and affection--they became, just now, to
Iglesias as truly astonishing phenomena in their line as Sir Abel Barking
in his. He saw in them merely specimens, though good ones, of the great
majority of the British public, a public so overlaid and permeated by
convention, so parochial in outlook, so hidebound by social tradition and
insular prejudice, that it is really less in touch with everlasting fact
than the animals it pets, demoralises, and eats. These at least have
instinct, and so are at one with universal nature. In perception, in
spontaneity of action, good Mrs. Lovegrove was as an infant compared to
her parrot or her pug. So was little Mr. Farge with his sophisticated
warblings--so, for that matter, were all the other persons among whom
his, Iglesias', lot was cast. His sense of isolation deepened. If
amusement was his object, most certainly the society of Trimmer's Green
would not supply it. He must look further afield for all that.

In the far northwest the last of the sunset had faded; only the cloud
remained. Yet the horizon, above the broken line of the house-roofs and
chimney-pots, pulsed with light--the very earthly light which, in great
cities, flares out when the light of heaven dies, to walk the streets,
with much else of doubtful loveliness, till it is shamed by the cold
chastity of dawn. And along with that outflaring, a certain meretricious
element introduced itself into the aspect of Trimmer's Green. Across the
roadway, the gaslamps showed cones of vivid yet sickly brightness,
bringing at regular intervals the sharply indented leaves of the plane
trees and the shivering silver of the balsam-poplars into an arresting
and artificial distinctness. Between were spaces of vacancy and gloom.
And from out such a space, immediately opposite, slowly emerged a
shambling and ungainly figure, in which Dominic Iglesias recognised the
third of his fellow-lodgers, Mr. de Courcy Smyth. His acquaintance with
the said lodger was of the slightest, since the latter had but recently
entered into residence and rarely appeared at meals. Mrs. Porcher
habitually referred to him with a pitying respect as "a gentleman very
influential in literary and professional circles, but unfortunate in his
married life"; ending with a sigh and upward glance of her still fine
eyes, as one who could sympathise, having herself been through that gate.
Influential or not, it occurred to Iglesias that the man presented a
sorry spectacle enough. For a minute or so he stood aimlessly in the full
glare of a gaslamp. His thin, creasy Inverness cape was thrown back,
displaying evening dress. He carried a soft grey felt hat in one hand.
His whole aspect was seedy, disappointed, dejected; his face pale and
puffy, his sparse reddish hair and beard but indifferently trimmed. It
was borne in upon Iglesias, moreover, that the man was hungry, that he
had not--and that for some time--had enough to eat. Voluntary poverty is
among the most beautiful, involuntary poverty among the ugliest, sights
upon earth; and to which order of poverty that of de Courcy Smyth
belonged, Mr. Iglesias was in no doubt. This was a sordid sight, a sight
of discouragement, adding the last touch to the melancholy which
oppressed him. The seedy figure crossed the road, fumbled for a minute
with a latchkey. Then nerveless footsteps ascended the stairs, passed the
door, and took their joyless way up and onward to the bed-sitting-room
immediately above.

Down below the music had ceased, while sounds arose suggestive of a
little playfulness on the part of the two young men in bidding their
hostess and Miss Eliza Hart good-night. Very soon the house became
silent. But Dominic Iglesias, though tired, was in no humour for sleep.
He drew forward a leather-covered armchair and sat near the open window,
in at which came a breathing of night wind. This was soothing, touching
his forehead as with delicate pressure of a cool and sympathetic hand; so
that, without any sense of surprising transition, he found himself in the
garden of the little house in Holland Street, Kensington, once again. The
laburnum was in full blossom, and the breeze uplifted the light drooping
branches of it, making all their golden glory dance in the sunshine.
There must have been rain in the night, too, for the stone basin was full
of water, in which the sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny
iridescent jets and fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was
delicious to Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill-
favoured tabby cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows.
Twice it climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice
the little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white
face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. It declared it only
caught sparrows for their good and for the good of the community. It
assured Dominic he was guilty of a grave error of judgment in attempting
to interfere. It said a great deal about moral responsibility and the
heavy obligations persons of wealth and position owe to themselves.

Just then Pascal Pelletier, carrying a square Huntley Palmer's biscuit
tin, containing an infernal machine, under his arm, his angelic
countenance radiant in the sunshine, came down the steps from the dining-
room window. And, while Dominic ran to greet him, the cat crept back
again--its face was the face of Sir Abel Barking, and it made a spring at
the sparrows. But the pillar broke and the basin toppled over, pinning
it, across the loins, down on to the clinkers under the edge of the stone
lip.

"Oh! you've spoilt my garden, you've spoilt my garden!" Dominic cried.
"The basin has fallen. The sparrows will never wash in it any more."

But Pascal Pelletier patted him on the head tenderly.

"Do not weep over the fallen basin, very dear one," he said. "Rather sing
aloud Te Deum in praise of the glorious goddess of Social Revolution who
has delivered the enemy of the people into our hands. This is no affair
of cat and bird, but of the capitalist and the proletariat on which he
battens. So for a little space let the unholy creature lie there
writhing. Let it understand what it is to have a back broken by the
weight of an impossible burden. Let it try vainly to drag its limbs from
beneath an immovable load. Observe it, let it suffer. Very soon we will
finish with it, and explode the iniquitous system it represents. See, in
the name of humanity, of labour, of the unknown and unnumbered millions
of the martyred poor, I set a match to this good little fuse, and, with
the rapidity of thought, blow blasphemous tyrant Capital into a thousand
fragments of reeking flesh and splintered bone!"

But to the little boy, words and spectacle alike had become unendurably
painful.

"No, no, Pascal, you cannot cure everything that way. It is not just," he
cried. And running forward with all his strength he lifted the stone
basin off the wounded creature--cat, man, beast of prey, modern
financier, be it what it might. He stopped to gather it up in his arms,
and, repulsive though it was, to comfort and protect it. But just then
came a thunderous rattle and crash knocking him senseless.

Mr. Iglesias sat bolt upright in his chair, uncertain of his identity and
surroundings, shaken and bewildered.

Upstairs, de Courcy Smyth--spent and stupefied by the writing of a would-
be smart critique on the first-night performance of a screaming farce,
for one of to-morrow's evening papers--had stumbled, upsetting the fire-
irons, as he slouched across his room to bed. Iglesias heard the creak of
the wire-wove mattress as the man flung himself down; and that familiar
sound restored his sense of actualities. Yet all his mood was changed and
softened. The return to childhood had made a strange impression upon him,
filling him with a great nostalgia for things apparently lost, but
exquisite; and which, having once been, might, though he knew not by what
conceivable alchemy of time or chance, once again be. Meanwhile, he must
have slept long, for the wind had grown chill. The voice of London, the
monstrous mother, had grown weak and intermittent. And the earthly light,
pulsing along the horizon, had grown faint, humbled and chastened by the
whiteness of approaching dawn.

CHAPTER IV

A quarter-mile range of high unpainted oak paling, well seasoned, well
carpentered, innocent of chink or shrinkage, impervious to the human eye.
Visible above it the domed heads of enormous elm trees steeped in
sunshine, rising towards the ample curve of the summer sky. At intervals,
with tumultuous rush and scurry, the thud of the hoofs of unseen horses,
galloping for all they are worth over grass. The suck and rub of breeches
against saddle-flaps, the rattle of a curb chain or the rings of a bit.
A call, a challenge, smothered exclamations. The long-drawn swish of the
polo stick through the air, and the whack of the wooden head of it
against ball, or ground, or something unluckily softer and more sentient.
A pause, broken only by distant voices, and the sound, or rather sense,
of men and horses in quiet and friendly movement; followed by the
tumultuous rush and scurry, and all the moving incidents of the heard,
yet unwitnessed, drama over again.

For here it was that gallant and costly game beloved of Oriental
princes--rather baldly described to Mr. Iglesias yesterday by the driver of
the Hammersmith 'bus as a "kind of hockey on horseback"--in very full swing
no doubt. Only unfortunately Iglesias found himself on the wrong side of
the palings. And, since he had learned, indirectly, from the observations
of the monumental police-sergeant--directing the stream of carriages at
the entrance gates--to other would-be spectators, that to the polo
ground, as to so much else obviously desirable in this world, there is
"no admission except by ticket," on the wrong side of these same palings
he recognised he was fated to stay. It was a disappointment, not to say
an annoyance. For he had come forth, in accordance with his
determination, to make observations and inquiries regarding that same
matter of amusement. And, since the influence of that which is to be acts
upon us almost, if not quite, as strongly as the influence of that which
has been, the handsome, eager countenance of young Alaric Barking and the
graceful figure of his fair companion, as seen from the 'bustop, occurred
very forcibly in this connection to Dominic Iglesias' mind. He would go
forth and behold that which they had gone forth to behold. He would
witness the sports of the well-born and rich. From these he elected,
somewhat proudly, to take his first lessons in the fine art of amusement.
So here he was; and here, too--very much here--were the palings,
spelling failure and frustration of purpose.

Fortunately unwonted exercise and the pure invigorating atmosphere tended
to generate placidity, and agreeable harmony of the mental and physical
being. It followed that active annoyance was short-lived. For a minute or
two Mr. Iglesias loitered, listening to the moving music of the unseen
game. Then, walking onward to the end of the enclosure, where the palings
turn away sharply at the left, he crossed the road and made for a wooden
bench just there amiably presenting itself. It was pleasant to rest. The
walk had been a long one; but it now appeared to him that the labour of
it had not been wholly in vain. For around him stretched a breezy common,
broken by straggling bramble and furze brakes, and dotted with hawthorn
bushes, upon the topmost branches of which the crowded pinkish-white
blossoms still lingered. From one to another small birds flitted with a
pretty dipping flight, uttering quick detached notes as in merry question
and answer. Through the rough turf the bracken pushed upward, uncurling
sturdy croziers of brownish green. Away to the right, beyond the railway
line, rose the densely wooded slopes of Roehampton and Sheen; while,
against the purple-green gloom of them, the home signals of Barnes
Station--hard white lines and angles tipped with scarlet and black--stood
out in high relief like the gigantic characters of some strange alphabet.
Down the wide road motors ground and snorted; and carriages moved slowly,
two abreast, the menservants sitting at ease, talking and smoking while
waiting to take up at the police-guarded gate, back there towards the
heat and smoke of London, when the polo match should be played out.

But immediately London, the heat, and smoke, and raucous voice of it,
seemed far enough away, the wholesome charm of the country very present.
For a while Dominic Iglesias yielded himself up to it. Receptive,
quiescent, contented, he basked in the sunshine, his mind vacant of
definite thought. But for a while only. For as physical fatigue wore off,
definite thought returned; and with it the sense of his own loneliness,
the oppression of a future empty of work, the bitterness of this enhanced
by the little disappointment he had lately suffered. He leaned forward,
his hands clasped between his knees, looking at the bracken croziers
pushing bravely upward through the rough turf to air and light. Even
these blind and speechless things worked, in a sense, fulfilling the law
of their existence. He went back on the dream of last night, on his own
childhood, the happiness, yet haunting unspoken anxiety of it, his
father's fanaticism, fierce revolutionary propaganda, and mysteriously
uncertain fate.

"And to think that was the pit out of which I, of all men, was digged!"
he said to himself. "Have I done something to restore the family balance
in respect of right reason, or is the shame of incapacity upon me? Have I
sacrificed myself, or cowardly have I merely shirked living? Heaven
knows--I don't, only----"

But here his uncheerful meditations were broken in on by a voice,
imperative in tone, yet perceptibly shaken by laughter.

"Cappadocia!" it called. "Cappadocia! Do you hear? Come here, you little
reprobate."

Then Dominic Iglesias perceived that he had ceased to be sole occupant of
the bench. A dog, a tiny toy spaniel, sat beside him. It sidled very
close, gazing at him with foolishly prominent eyes. Its ears, black edged
with tan, soft and lustrous as floss silk, hung down in long lappets on
either side its minute and melancholy face. The tip of its red tongue
just showed. It was abnormally self-conscious and solemn. It planted one
fringed paw upon Iglesias' arm and it snored.

"Cappadocia!--well, of all the cheeky young beggars----"

This time the voice broke in unmistakable merriment, wholly spontaneous,
as of relief, even of mischievous triumph; and Mr. Iglesias, looking up,
found himself confronted by a young woman. She advanced slowly, her
trailing string-coloured lace skirts gathered up lazily in one hand.
About her shoulders she wore a long blue-purple silk scarf, embroidered
with dragons of peacock, and scarlet, and gold. These rather violent
colours found repetition in the nasturtium leaves and flowers that
crowned her lace hat, the wide brim of which was tied down with narrow
strings of purple velvet, gipsy fashion, beneath her chin. Under her arm
she carried another tiny spaniel, the creature's black morsel of a head
peeping out quaintly from among the forms of the embroidered dragons,
which last appeared to writhe, as in the heat of deadly conflict, as
their wearer moved. Her face was in shadow owing to the breadth of the
brim of her hat. Otherwise the sunshine embraced her whole figure,
conferring on it a glittering yet singularly unsubstantial effect, as
though a column of pale windswept dust were overlaid, here and there,
with splendour of rich enamel.

And it was just this effect of something unsubstantial, in a way
fictitious and out of relation to sober fact, which struck Dominic
Iglesias, robbing him for the moment of his dignified courtesy. Frankly
he stared at this appearance, so strangely at variance with the realities
of his own melancholy thought. Meanwhile the little dog snuggled up yet
closer against him.

"Yes--pray don't disturb yourself," the young lady went on volubly "It's
too bad, I know, to intrude on you like this. But as Cappadocia refuses
to come to me, it is clear I have to come after Cappadocia. It's simply
disgraceful the way she carries on when one takes her out, making
acquaintances like this, casually, all over the place. The maids flatly
refuse to air her, even on a string. They say it becomes a little too
compromising. But, as I explain to them, she's not a bit the modern
woman. She belongs to a stage of social development when pretty people
infinitely preferred being compromised to being squelched." The speaker
laughed again quietly. "I'm not altogether sure they weren't right. When
you are squelched, finished, done for, it matters precious little whether
you've been compromised first or not. Don't you agree? Any way,
Cappadocia's not going to be squelched if she can help it. She's horribly
scared, or pretends to be, at motors. Let one toot and she forgets all
her fine-lady manners, and just skips to anybody for protection. She'll
take refuge in the most unconventional places to escape."

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