The Far Horizon

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He leaned his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands, and his
shoulders shook.

"For I have talent," he cried, in a curiously thin voice. "Before God I
have. They may refuse to publish me, refuse to play me, force me to pick
up scraps of hack-work on fourth-rate papers to earn a bare subsistence--
at times hardly that. Yet all the same, no supercilious beast of an
editor or actor-manager--curse the whole stinking lot--shall rob me of my
faith in myself--of my belief that I am great--if I had justice, nothing
less than that, I tell you, nothing less than great."

Dominic Iglesias drew himself up, sitting very still, his lips rigid, not
from defect, but from excess of sympathy. The restaurant was empty now,
save for a man, four tables down, safely ensconced behind the pink pages
of an evening paper, and for a couple, at the far end, in the window--a
young Frenchwoman, whose coquettish hat and trim rounded figure were
silhouetted against the yellow silk curtain, and a precocious black-
haired youth, with a skin like pale, pink satin, round eyeglasses and an
incipient moustache. His attention was entirely occupied with the young
woman; hers entirely occupied with herself. And of this Dominic Iglesias
was glad. For the matter immediately in hand was best conducted without
witnesses. He found it strangely engrossing, strangely moving. However
vain, however madly exaggerated even, de Courcy Smyth's estimate of
himself, there could be no question but that his present emotion was as
actual and genuine as his past hunger had been. The man was utterly spent
in body and in spirit. Offensive in speech, slovenly in person, yet these
distasteful things added to, rather than detracted from, Iglesias' going
out of sympathy towards him. He had rarely been in contact with a fellow-
creature in such abandonment of distress. It was terrible to witness; yet
it gave him a sense of fellowship, of nearness, even of power, which had
in it an element of deep-seated satisfaction. While he waited for the
moment when it should become clear to him how to act, his thought
travelled back to the Lady of the Windswept Dust. He saw, not her over-
red lips, but her serious eyes; saw her tearful and in a way broken, for
all her light speech, her fanciful garments, and her antics with her
absurd little dogs amid the sweetness of sunshine and summer breeze on
Barnes Common. She was far enough away, so he judged, in sentiment and
circumstance from the embittered and poverty-haunted man sitting opposite
to him. Yet though superficially so dissimilar, they were alike in this,
that both had dared to reveal themselves, passing beyond conventional
limits in intercourse with him, Iglesias. Both had cried out to him in
their distress. And then, thinking of that recently visited altar of the
dead, thinking of the one perfect relationship he had known--his
relationship to his mother--it came to him as a revelation that not
participation in the pride of life and the splendour of it--still less
association in mere pleasure and amusement--forms the cement which binds
together the units of humanity in stable and consoling relationship; but
association in sorrow, the cry for help and the response to that cry,
whether it be help to the staying of the hunger of the heart and of the
intellect, or simply to the staying of that baser yet very searching
hunger of overstrained nerves and an empty stomach. The revelation was
partial. Iglesias groped, so to speak, in the light of it uncertain and
dazzled. But he received it as real--an idea the magnitude of which, in
inspiration and application, he was as yet by no means equal to measure.
Still he believed that could he but yield himself to it, and, in
yielding, master it, it would carry him very far, teaching him that
language of the spirit which he desired to acquire; and hence placing in
his hand that earnestly coveted key to an adjustment between the exterior
and interior life, the life of the senses and the life of the spirit,
which must needs eventuate, manward and godward alike, in triumphant
harmony.

Meanwhile there sat de Courcy Smyth, blear-eyed, sandy-red bearded,
unsavoury, trying, poor wretch, to rally whatever of manhood was left in
him and swagger himself out of his fit of hysteria. The Latin, however
dignified, is instinctively more demonstrative than the Anglo-Saxon.
Iglesias leaned across the table and laid his hand on the other man's
shoulder.

"Wait a little," he said. "Drink your coffee and smoke. We need not hurry
to move."

There was a pause, during which Smyth obediently swallowed his coffee,
swallowed his _chasse_ of cognac.

"I have made an egregious ass of myself," he said sullenly.

"No, no," Iglesias answered. "You have honoured me by taking me into your
confidence. It rests with me to see that you never have cause to regret
having done so."

"I believe you mean that."

"Certainly I mean it," Iglesias answered.

Smyth's hands trembled as he took a cigar and held a match to it.

"I am unaccustomed to meeting with kindness," he said in a low voice. Then
recovering himself somewhat, he began to speak volubly again. "Of course
I understand it all well enough. They are simply afraid of my work, those
beasts of editors and playwrights. It is too big for them, they dare not
face it and the consequences of it. It is strong stuff, Mr. Iglesias,
strong stuff with plenty of red blood in it, and with scholarship, too.
And so they pigeon-hole my stories and drames in self-defence, knowing
that if these once reached the public, either in print or in action,
their own fly-blown anaemic productions would be hissed off the stage or
would ruin the circulation of the periodical which inserted them. It is
all jealousy, I tell you, Mr. Iglesias, rank, snakish jealousy, bred by
self-interest out of fear--a truly exalted parentage!"

He shifted his position restlessly, again setting his elbows upon the
table and fingering the broken bread upon the cloth.

"At times, when I can rise above the immediate injustice and cruelty
which pursue me," he went on, "I glory in my martyrdom. I range myself
alongside those heroes of literature and art, who, because they were
ahead of the age in which they lived, were scorned and repudiated by
their contemporaries; but they found their revenge in the worship of
succeeding generations. My time will come just as theirs did. It must--I
tell you it must. I know that. I am safe of eventual recognition; but I
want it now, while I am alive, while I can glut myself with the joy of
it. I want to see the men who lord it over me, just because they have
influence and money, who affect to despise me because they are green with
envy and fear of me, brought to their knees, flattened so that I can wipe
my boots on them. And--and"--he looked full at Dominic Iglesias,
spreading out both hands across the narrow table, his pale prominent eyes
blood-shot, his face working--"I want to see someone else--a woman--
brought to her knees also. I want to make her feel what she has lost--
curse her!--and have her come back whining."

"And if she did come back," Iglesias asked, almost sternly, "what would
you do? Forgive her?"

De Courcy Smyth's hands dropped with a queer little thud on the table.

"I don't know. I suppose so. If she wanted to she could always get round
me." Then he turned on Iglesias with hysterical violence. "But what do
you know? Why do you ask that? Are you among her patrons? I trusted you.
I believed you were a gentleman in feeling--and it is a dirty trick to
get me in here and fill me up with food and liquor, when you must have
seen my nerves were all to pieces, and then spring this upon me. Oh!
hell!" he cried, "is there no comfort anywhere? Is everyone a traitor?"

And seeing his utter abjectness, Iglesias' heart went out to the unhappy
man in immense and unqualified pity.

"I am grieved," he said gently, "if I have pained you unnecessarily. But
truly I have sprung nothing upon you. How could I do so? I know nothing
whatever of your circumstances save that which you yourself have told me
during the last hour."

"Then why did you ask that question about--about her?"

"Because," Dominic answered, "I am ready to fight for you, in as far as
you will allow me to do so; but I do not fight against women."

"You must have had uncommonly little experience of them then," Smyth
answered with a sneer.

To this observation Mr. Iglesias deemed it superfluous to make any
answer. A silence followed. The restaurant was empty, but for the
waiters, who stood in a little knot about the door amusing themselves by
watching the movement of the street. Looking round to make sure no one
was within hearing, Smyth rose unsteadily to his feet.

"You meant what you said just now, Mr. Iglesias--that you were ready to
fight for me?" he asked ungently yet cringingly.

"Certainly I meant it," Dominic replied, "the proviso I have made being
respected."

"Yes, yes, of course--but what do you understand by fighting for me?
Money?"

Dominic had risen, too. He remained for a moment in thought.

"Within reasonable relation to my means, yes," he said.

"I only want my chance," the other asserted. "The rest will follow as a
matter of course. You would risk nothing, Mr. Iglesias. It would be an
investment, simply an investment. The play is not finished yet--I have
been too disheartened and disgusted recently to be able to work at it.
But it is great, I tell you, great. When it is done will you give me my
chance, and take a theatre for me and finance a couple of _matinees?_"

Again Dominic Iglesias thought for a moment, and again, driven by that
strange necessity of fellowship--though knowing all the while he was
putting his hand to a very questionable adventure--he replied in the
affirmative.

CHAPTER IX

On that same evening, and at the same hour at which Dominic Iglesias
bound himself to the practical assistance of a personally unsavoury and
professionally unsuccessful playwright, a conversation was in progress
between two persons of more exalted social station in the drawing-room of
a pleasant house in Chester Square. The said drawing-room, mid-Victorian
in aspect, was decorated in white and gold and unaggressive green. The
ground of the chintz was very white, sprinkled over with bunches of
shaded mauve roses unknown to horticulture. Lady Constance Decies' tea-
grown was white and mauve also. For she was still in half-mourning for
her father, the late Lord Fallowfeild, who had died some eighteen months
previously at a very venerable age, and with a touching modesty as though
his advent in another world might savour of intrusion. He had always been
a humble-minded man. He remained so to the last.

The windows stood open to the balcony. And the effect of the woman, and
of the soft lights and colours surrounding her, was reposeful. For at the
age of fifty Lady Constance, though stately, was a mild and very gentle
person upon whom the push of the modern world had laid no hand. All the
active drama of her life had been crowded into a few weeks of the early
summer of her eighteenth year; since which, now remote, period she had
enjoyed a tranquil existence, happy in the love of her husband and the
care of her children. Her pretty brown hair was beginning to turn grey
upon the temples. Her eyes, set remarkably far apart, had a certain
vagueness and a great innocence of expression. She was naturally timid,
and cared but little for any society beyond that of her near relations.
To-night she was particularly content, mildly radiant even, thanks to the
presence of her favourite brother, the present Lord Fallowfeild, and his
avowed admiration of her younger daughter--a maiden of nineteen, who
stood before her, with shining eyes, in all the delicate splendour of a
spotless ball-dress.

"Yes, darling, you look very sweet," she said. "Just lean down--the lace
has got caught in the flowers on your _berthe_. That's right. Don't keep
your father too late."

"And in all things be discreet"--this from Lord Fallowfeild. "It's been
my motto through life, as your mother knows. And you couldn't have a
brighter example of the excellent results of it than myself. Good-night,
my dear. Enjoy yourself," and he patted her on the cheek, avoiding the
kiss which she in all innocence proffered him. "Pretty child, Kathleen,
uncommonly pretty," he continued as the door closed behind the graceful
figure. "It strikes me, Con, your girls have all the good looks of the
family in the younger generation, with the exception of Violet Aldham.
But she's getting pinched, a bit pinched and witch-like. Then she makes
up too much. I have no prejudice against a woman's improving upon nature
where nature's been niggardly. But it is among the things that'll keep.
It's a mistake to begin it too early. In my opinion Violet has begun it
too early--might quite well have given herself another ten years'
grace.--Maggie's girls are gawky, you know; and, between ourselves, so
terribly flat, poor things, both fore and aft. Upon my word, I'm not
surprised they don't marry."

"I am afraid Maggie feels it a good deal," said Lady Constance.
Satisfaction mingled with pity in her soul. The disabilities of other
women's children are never wholly distressing to a tender mother's heart.
"You see, she's so anxious the girls should not marry the bishop's
chaplains; and yet really they hardly see any other young men. I think it
is a very difficult position, that of a bishop's wife."

Lord Fallowfeild smiled, settling himself back in the corner of the wide
sofa and crossing his long legs. He had thought more deeply on a good
many subjects than the majority of his acquaintance supposed; with the
consequence that he occasionally surprised his fellow-peers by the
acuteness of his observations in debate. Lord Fallowfeild, it may be
added, took his recently acquired office of hereditary legislator with a
commendable mixture of humour and seriousness.

"Their position is an anomalous one," he said; "and an anomalous position
is inevitably a difficult one--ought to be SO; in my opinion. But that's
not to the point. We were talking, not about the episcopal ladies, but
about this little business of Kathleen's. So you believe Lady Sokeington
has views and intentions?"

"I know that she has. But you see, Shotover," Lady Constance went on,
returning to the name which that gentleman had rendered somewhat
notorious in earlier years by a record in sport, in debts, in amours, and
in irresistible sweetness of temper--"I want to be quite sure he is
really good. Because the affair has not gone very far yet and it might be
put a stop to--at least I hope and think it might--without making darling
Kathleen too dreadfully unhappy. You do believe he really is good?"

Lord Fallowfeild leaned forward and rubbed a hardly perceptible atom of
fluff off his left trouser leg just above the ankle.

"My dear Con," he answered, "you are very charming, but you are a trifle
embarrassing, too, you know. Haven't you learned, even at this time of
day, that very few men in our world are good in a good woman's sense of
the word?"

Lady Constance's smooth forehead puckered into fine little lines.

"Shotover, dear," she said, "you're not getting embittered, I hope?"

"Me? Bless you, no, never in life!" he returned, smiling very
reassuringly at her. "Don't worry yourself under that head. I quarrel
with nobody and nothing, not even the consequences of my past iniquities.
It is a very just world, take it all round, and has been kinder to me
than I deserve."

"Oh! but you do nothing, you--you are what--you won't think me rude,
Shotover?--what the boys call 'very decent' now."

Lady Constance spoke hurriedly, her colour rising in the most engaging
manner.

"As decent as I know how, you dear soul," he said, taking her hand in
his. "But that makes no difference to one's knowledge of one's own ways,
in the past, or of the ways of other men."

"But Alaric Barking?"

"Neither better nor worse than the rest."

Then Lord Fallowfeild shut his small and beautiful mouth very tight, as
though he would be glad to avoid further cross-questioning. Lady
Constance's forehead remained puckered.

"It's dreadfully difficult when one's girls grow up," she said
plaintively. "One can be comfortable about them, poor darlings, and enjoy
them when they are in the nursery--even in the schoolroom, though
governesses are worrying. They know so much about quantities of subjects
which seem to me not to matter. One never refers to them in ordinary
conversation; and if one should be obliged to it is so easy to ask
somebody to tell one. And yet they manage to make me feel dreadfully
uncomfortable and ignorant because I know nothing about them. But when
they grow up----"

"Who, the governesses?" Lord Fallowfeild inquired. "I never supposed they
stood in need of that process--thought they started out of the egg all
finished, as you might say, and ran about at once like chickens."

"No, no, the girls, poor darlings," Lady Constance replied. "One does get
dreadfully anxious about them, Shotover, really one does--specially if
one has escaped something very frightening oneself and has been very
happy--lest they should fall in love with the wrong people, or lest they
should be anything which one did not know beforehand and then everything
should turn out dreadful. I should be so miserable. I don't think I could
bear it. I know it is wrong to say that, because if one was really good,
one would accept whatever God sent without murmuring. So I could for
myself, I think. In any case I should earnestly try to. But for the
children it is so much harder. If they were unhappy I should feel ashamed
of having had them--as if I'd done something horribly selfish; because,
you see, there can be nothing so delightful as having children."

She looked at Lord Fallowfeild in the most pathetic manner, the corners
of her mouth a-shake. And he took her hand and held it again, touched by
the sincerity of her confused utterance, and the great mother-love
resident in her. Touched, perhaps, by the age-old problem of man and
maid, also.

"Dear little Con, dear little Con," he said, "I'm awfully sorry you
should be worried, but I'm afraid we've got to look facts in the face.
And it's no kindness for me to lie to you about these matters. I don't
pretend to say what's right or what's wrong; I only say what it is. We
can't make society, and the ways of it, all over again even to save
Kathleen a heartache. I don't want to seem a brute, but she must just
take her chance along with the rest of you. Marriage always has been a
confounded uncertain business, and will always remain so, I suppose. The
sort of remedies excited persons suggest to mitigate the dangers of it
are a good deal worse than the disease, in my opinion. Every woman has to
take her chance. Every man has to take his, too, you know--and the chance
strikes some of us as such an uncommonly poor one, that, upon my honour,
it seems safest to wash one's hands of it altogether."

"But you're not unhappy, Shotover, dear? You're not lonely?" Lady
Constance inquired anxiously.

"Abominably so sometimes, Con. But I manage, oh! I manage. I have my
consolations"--he smiled at her, perhaps a trifle shamefacedly. "But now
about Kathleen," he went on, "as I say, she must take her chance along
with the rest of you, poor little dear. After all, you took your chance
when you married Decies, and it has not turned out so badly, you know."

Lady Constance became radiant once more, as some mild-shining summer moon
emerging from behind temporarily obscuring clouds.

"Oh! but then," she said, "of course that was so entirely different."

Lord Fallowfeild patted her hand, his head bent, looking at her somewhat
merrily.

"Was it, my dear, was it?--I wonder," he said.

She withdrew her head with a certain dignity. Notwithstanding her
softness and tenderness, there were occasions--even with those she loved
best--when Lady Constance could delicately mark her displeasure.

"I think you are a little embittered, Shotover," she asserted.

He leaned back, still smiling, and shaking his head at her.

"Old and wise--unpleasantly old, and not quite such a fool as I used to
be, that's all," he answered.

For a time there was silence, both brother and sister thinking their own
thoughts. Then the latter spoke. Like many gentle persons, she was
persistent. She always had been so.

"I should be so grateful if you would tell me, because I think I ought to
know, and then I should try to turn the course of darling Kathleen's
affections before it all becomes too pronounced. Is there any
entanglement, anything amounting to what one calls an impediment, in--
well--you understand--against Alaric Barking?"

Lord Fallowfeild got up, took a turn across the room, came back, and
stood in front of her.

"I wish you wouldn't, Con," he said. "Upon my soul, I wish you wouldn't.
It's a nasty thing for an old man, who has gone the pace in his day
pretty thoroughly, to give away a lad who may have made a slip just at
the start, and who is doing his best to get his feet again and run
straight. Alaric Barking's a good fellow. I like him. I never have been
and never shall be partial to that family. Your sister Louisa cried up
their virtues and their confounded solvency, in the old days, till she
made them a positive nuisance. She's not a happy way of inculcating a
moral economic lesson, hasn't Louisa. But I own I'm fond of this boy.
He's far the best of the whole lot--gentlemanlike, and a sportsman, and
good-looking--unusually so for one of that family--and, my dear, he's
downright honestly in love with Kathleen. I've watched him--did so when
he was down at Ranelagh one day last month with her and Victoria
Sokeington--and I know the real thing when I see it."

"But--but, I am afraid, Shotover, you mean me to understand there is some
impediment?" Lady Constance repeated.

"Oh! well, hang it all, I'm awfully sorry, but if you are determined to
have it, Connie, perhaps there is. Only for heaven's sake don't be in too
much of a hurry. Between ourselves, I happen to know the boy's doing his
best to shake himself free in an honourable manner. So don't rush the
business. Like the dear tender-hearted creature you are, have a little
mercy on the poor beggar. Let the whole affair drift a little. It may
straighten out."

Lady Constance meditated for a minute or so.

"It's very dreadful that there should be any impediment," she said.

"I'll back Alaric to agree with you there," Lord Fallowfeild answered.

"You'll do what you can, Shotover, won't you, to help Kathleen? I never
forget how you helped me once!"

Lord Fallowfeild's handsome face expressed rather broad amusement.

"I'm afraid the two cases are hardly parallel, my dear," he said.

CHAPTER X

"The play's on the other side, the crowd's on the other side, all the
fun's on the other side, and I am on this side with nothing more lively
than you, you little shivering idiot, for company."

Poppy St. John drew the spaniel's long silky ears through her fingers
slowly.

"I am bored, Cappadocia," she said, with a yawn which she made not the
slightest effort to stifle, "bored right through to my very marrow. Oh
dear, oh dear, oh dear, how I do wish something would happen!"

Poppy sat, propped up with scarlet silk cushions, in a cane deck-chair,
on the white-railed balcony upon which the first-floor bedroom windows
opened. Around her were strewn illustrated magazines and ladies' papers;
but unfortunately the stories in the former appeared to her every bit as
silly as the fashion-plates in the latter. Both had equally little to do
with life as the ordinary flesh and blood human being lives it. She was
filled with a rebellious sense of the banality of her surroundings this
afternoon. Even from her coign of vantage upon the balcony, whence wide
prospects disclosed themselves, everything looked foolish, pointless, of
the nature of an unpardonably stale joke.

The said balcony, divided into separate compartments by the interposition
of wooden barriers, extended the whole length of the terrace of twenty-
seven houses. And these were all precisely alike, with white wood and
stucco "enrichments," as the technical phrase has it. Cheap stained and
leaded glass adorned the upper panels of the twenty-seven front doors,
which were approached by twenty-seven flights of steps--thus securing a
measure of light and air to the twenty-seven basements. The front doors
were set in couples, alternating with couples of bay windows. There was a
determination of cheap smartness, a smirking self-consciousness about the
little houses, a suggestion of having put on their best frocks and high-
heeled shoes and standing very much on tiptoe to attract attention. The
balconies, narrow where the upper bays encroached on them, wide where the
house fronts were recessed above the twin front doors, broke forth into a
garland of flower-boxes. Cascades of pink ivy-leaf geranium, creeping-
jenny, and nasturtiums backed by white or yellow Paris daisies, flowed
outward between the white ballusters and masked the edge of the woodwork.
The effect, though pretty, was not quite satisfactory--being suggestive
of millinery, of an over-trimmed summer hat.

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