Thus had the chapter of labour ended, and that of leisure opened. And
it was with the sadness of things terminated very strongly upon him
that, as Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, finished clearing the
dinner-table and departed, Mr. Iglesias looked forth over the neatly
protected verdure of Trimmer's Green in the evening quiet. The smugly
pacific aspect of the place irritated him. He was aware of a great
emptiness. And very certainly the scene before him offered no solution
of the problem of the filling of that emptiness. And somehow or other
it had to be filled--Iglesias knew that, knew it through every fibre of
him--or life would be simply insupportable. Meanwhile from the public
drawing-room below came sounds of revelry, innocent enough yet hardly
calculated to soothe over-strained nerves. Little Mr. Farge--whose thin
and reedy tenor carried as does a penny whistle--gave forth the refrain
of a song just then popular in metropolitan music-halls.
"They're keeping latish hours at the Convalescent Home," piped Mr.
Farge; while his friend and devout admirer, Albert Edward Worthington,
tore at the banjo strings and the ladies tittered.
Iglesias listened in a somewhat grim spirit of endurance. On the far
side of the Green he could see the gaslights in the Lovegroves'
dining-room. These appeared to watch him rather uncomfortably, as with
three supplicating and reproachful eyes. He debated whether he would
not take his hat, step across, and tell his old friend what had
happened--it would at least relieve him of the sound of little Farge's
serenading. But his pride recoiled somehow. Good souls, man and wife,
they would be full of solicitude and kindness; but they would say the
wrong thing. They would not understand. How, indeed, should they, being
wholly at one with their surroundings--unimaginative, domestic, British
middle-class, with its virtues and limitations aggressively in
evidence? George Lovegrove would suggest some minor municipal office,
or membership of the local borough council, as a crown of consolation.
His wife would skirt round the subject of matrimony. She had done so
before now; and Iglesias, while presenting a dignified front to the
enemy, had inwardly shuddered. She was an excellent, estimable woman;
but when ponderously arch, when extensively sly! Oh, dear no! It didn't
do. Her gambols were too sadly suggestive of those of a skittish
hippopotamus. Dominic Iglesias was conscious that he had a skin too
little to-night; he could not witness them with philosophy. The
kindliest intention, the best-meant words, might cause him extravagant
annoyance.
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.