Mr. Iglesias crossed Trimmer's Green in the dusty sunshine. He had
engaged to stay; and, indeed, he asked himself what person, what
objects or interests there were to take him else-whither? Nevertheless,
the promise seemed, somehow, a limiting of possibility and of hope. It
was destiny. London, very evidently, having got him, did not mean to
let him go. And London was not attractive this evening, but blouzy and
jaded from the heat. He passed on into the great thoroughfare and
turned eastward, absorbed in thought. Children cried. A pungent scent
of over-ripe fruit came from barrows in the roadway and open doors of
green-grocers' shops. Tempers appeared to be on edge. Workmen, pouring
out from a big block of flats under construction on the left, jostled
him in passing, not in insolence, but simply in inattention. Their
language was starred with sanguinary adjectives. The noise of the
traffic was loud. Iglesias turned up one of the side streets leading on
to Campden Hill. It was quieter here and the air was a trifle purer.
Halfway up the hill he hesitated. There was a shrine to be visited in
these regions--in it stood an altar of the dead. And above that altar,
in Iglesias' imagination, hung the picture of a woman, beautiful, and,
to him, infinitely sad.
He turned eastward again and made his way into Holland Street. He
rarely had the courage to go back there. He had never reentered the
house. But this evening he was taken by the desire to look on it all
once again. For he was still pursued by the disquieting question as to
whether he had shirked the possibilities of his life, or had sacrificed
them to a higher duty than any duty of personal development. If the
latter, however barren of active happiness both past and present, he
would be in his own eyes justified, and desolation would cease to have
in it any flavour of self-contempt. Perhaps this dwelling-place of his
childhood, youth, and what should have been the best of his manhood,
might help to answer the question and set his doubts at rest.
A board--"To Let"--was up on the narrow iron balcony of the
dining-room. Iglesias rang, and after brief parley with the
caretaker--a neat bald-headed little old man, in carpet slippers and a
well-brushed once-smart brown check suit, altogether too capacious for
his attenuated person--was admitted.
"The place is quite empty save for my bits of sticks in the basement,
sir," he said. "You are at liberty to go where you please. I am
afflicted with the asthma and am glad to avoid mounting the stairs." He
ended up with a husky little cough. So Iglesias passed through the
vacant house unattended.
He received a pathetic yet agitating impression. The rooms were even
smaller than he had supposed. They were gloomy, too, from the worn
paint of the high wainscots and discoloration of the low ceilings. All
the windows were shut and the atmosphere was close and faint. The
corners were thick with crouching shadows, merely awaiting the cover of
night, as it seemed to Iglesias, to take definite shape, stand upright,
and come forth to possess and people all the house. Even now it
belonged so sensibly to them that his own reverent footsteps sounded to
him harshly intrusive upon the bare, uneven floors. At intervals,
downstairs in the basement, he could hear the little old caretaker's
husky cough.
And it was strange to him to consider what those crouching shadows
might represent. Not the ghosts of human beings--in such he had small
belief--but an aftermath of human emotions, purposes, and passions,
formulated or endured in this apparently so innocent place. To his
knowledge the origins of revolution had seethed here. The walls had
listened to details of political intrigue, of projected assassination,
to vehement declarations of undying hate. Of the men who had plotted
and dreamed here, uplifted in spirit by the magic of terrible ideas,
none were left. One by one they had gone out into the silence to meet
death, swift-handed or heartlessly lingering, as the case might be. And
what had they actually accomplished? he asked himself. Had their death,
often as must be surmised of a sufficiently hideous sort, really
advanced the cause of humanity and helped on the birth of that Golden
Age, in which Justice shall reign alongside Peace? Or had these men
merely wasted themselves, adding to the sum total of human confusion
and wrong; and wasted the hearts and happiness of those allied to them
by ties of friendship and of blood, leaving the second generation to
repair, in so far as it might, the ruin which their violence had
worked? Dominic Iglesias could not say. But this at least, though it
savoured of reproach, he could not disguise from himself--namely, that
out of the intemperate heat and fierceness of these men's thought and
action had come, as a necessary consequence, the narrow opportunities
and cold isolation of his own.
"As physically, so morally, spiritually, socially," he said to himself,
"the younger generation pays the debts contracted by the generation
immediately preceding it. Justice, indeed, reigns already, always has
done so--. justice of a rather tremendous sort. But peace?--Peace is
still very much to seek, both for the individual and the race."
Iglesias visited his mother's bed-chamber. He visited his former
nursery. Then he visited the drawing-room, the heart of this very
pathetic shrine where the altar of his dead was, almost visibly set up.
To this room, during the many years of his mother's mental illness, he
had come back daily after work; and had ministered to her, suiting his
speech to her passing humour, trying to distract her brooding
melancholy, and to soothe and amuse her as though she was an ailing
child. Thank God, there was nothing ugly to remember regarding her. She
had never been harsh or unlovely in her ways. Still, the strain of
constant intercourse with her had been very great--how great Iglesias
had hardly realised until now, as he stood in the centre of the room
reconstructing its former appearance in thought and replacing its
familiar furnishings.
There to the left of the further window, overlooking the garden, she
had always sat, so that the light might fall upon her needlework--very
fine Irish lace, in the making of which nearly all her waking hours
were spent. She had learned the beautiful art as a young girl in her
convent school; and her skill in it was great. In those sad later years
when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of
delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for
her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as
another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative
language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate
speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be
laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far
horizons disclosed themselves; dainty flower-gardens, crossed by open
paths, and hedged about with curves, sinuous and full of pretty
impediments. And there were, to her, vaguely agitating and even fearful
things in this lacework also--confusions of outline, broken purposes,
multiplicity of opposing intentions, struggle of good and evil powers
in the intricacies of some rich arabesque; or monotonous repetitions of
design which distressed her as with the terrors of imprisonment and of
unescapable fate. She was filled with feverish anxiety until such
portions of her self-imposed task were completed. Then she would be
very glad. And Iglesias, glancing up silently from the pages of his
newspaper or book, would see the sorrow pass out of her face as she
leaned back in her chair and softly laughed. And he would perceive
that, in the achievement of those countless but carefully ordered
stitches, she had also achieved some mysterious victory of the spirit
which, for a time at least, would give her freedom of soul and content.
As a boy he had been rather jealous of her lacemaking, declaring that
it was dearer to her than he himself was. But as he grew more
experienced, more chastened, and, it must be added, more sad, he had
come to understand that it veritably was as speech to her--though
speech which he could but rarely interpret--expressing all that she
could not, or dared not, otherwise express, all the poetry of her
sweet, broken nature, its denied aspirations in religion, its tortured
memories of danger and of love.
Now, standing in the centre of the empty room, and looking at the place
beside the window where she habitually sat, Iglesias seemed to see once
more, as he had so often seen in the past, her fine-drawn profile and
softly waved upturned hair, her head and shoulders draped in a black
mantilla, the lines of which followed those of her figure as she bent
over her work. He could see the long delicate white hands moving
rhythmically, with the assurance of perfected skill, over the web in
its varying degrees of whiteness from the filmy transparency of the net
foundation to the opacity of the closely wrought pattern. Those hands,
in their ceaseless and exquisite industry, had troubled his imagination
at times. For too often it had seemed as though they alone were really
alive, intelligent, sentient, the rest of the woman dead. The
impression was so vivid even yet--though Iglesias knew it to be
subjective only, projected by the vividness of remembrance--that
instinctively he crossed the room, laid his left hand upon the moulding
of the high wainscot, leaned over the vacant space which appeared to
hold her image, and spoke gently to her, so that the moving hands might
find rest for a moment, while she recognised and greeted him, looking
up.
There had always been a pause before the words of greeting came, while
her consciousness travelled back, hesitatingly, to the actual and
material world around her from the world of emotion and phantasy in
which her spirit lived. There was a pause now, a prolonged silence,
broken at last by the husky cough of the little old caretaker
downstairs. The vacant space remained vacant. Nevertheless Dominic
Iglesias received both recognition and greeting, and from these derived
inward assurance that all was well--that he was justified of his past
action, that he had not shirked the possibilities of his life, but
sacrificed them to a higher duty than any individual and private one.
The present might be empty of purpose and pleasure, the future lacking
in promise and in hope; yet to him one perfect thing had been
granted--namely, a human relationship of unsullied beauty,
notwithstanding all its sadness, from first to last.
"And in the strength of that meat, one should surely be able to go many
days!" he said, as he straightened himself up. "Thank God, I never
failed her. How far she realised it or not, is but a small matter. I am
obscure, perhaps as things now stand wholly superfluous, still I have,
at all events, never grasped personal advantage at the expense of a
fellow-creature's heart."
Yet, even so, the longing for sympathy and companionship oppressed him
as never before. The sight of this place had stirred his affections and
his spiritual sense. His soul cried out for some language in which to
express itself--even though it were a language of symbol only, such as
his mother had found in her lacemaking. How barren and vapid a thing
was the exterior life, as all those whom he knew understood and lived
it--his co-lodgers, his fellow-clerks, the good Lovegroves, his late
employer, Sir Abel Barking, even, as he divined, that sonorous
Protestant clergyman whom he had met this afternoon--as against the
interior life, suggestion of which this vacant shadow-haunted house of
innumerable memories presented to his mind! Was there any method by
which the interior and exterior life could be brought into sane and
fruitful relation, so that the former might sensibly permeate and
dignify the latter?
The comfortable inward conviction, just vouchsafed him, that he was
justified of his own past action, merely emphasised his consciousness
that he was still very much adrift, with no definite port to steer for.
He had, perhaps unwisely, promised George Lovegrove that he would stay
on at Trimmer's Green, but what, after all, did that amount to? Even
the exterior life was second-hand enough there; the interior life, as
he judged, practically non-existent. And so his staying must be
ennobled by some purpose beyond that of stepping across to smoke an
after-dinner pipe with the good, affectionate Lovegrove man, or
attending his estimable wife's "at homes." During the last ten days Mr.
Iglesias had striven, with rare, pathetic diligence, to cultivate
amusement. True, the oak palings had shut him out from Ranelagh; but,
with that and a few other exceptions, amusement, as practised in great
cities, is merely a matter of cash. Therefore he had dined at smart
restaurants, had sampled theatres and music halls, had sat in the Park
and watched the world and--in their more decent manifestations--the
flesh and the devil drive by. He had to admit that unfortunately all
this left him cold, had bored rather than entertained him. He had not
felt out of place socially. His natural dignity and detachment of mind
were alike too strong for that; but he had arrived at the conclusion
that you must have learned the rudiments of the art of amusement in
early youth if you are to practise it with satisfaction to yourself in
middle-age. And he very certainly had not learned the rudiments--not,
anyhow, according to the English fashion. He had been aware, during
these social excursions, that he was a good deal stared at and even
commented on. At first he supposed this arose from some peculiarity of
his dress or manner. Then he understood that the cause of this
unsolicited attention bore a more flattering character, and in this
connection certain remarks made by the Lady of the Windswept Dust
occurred to his mind. But, Mr. Iglesias' pride being greatly in excess
of his vanity--when the first moment of half-humorous surprise was
passed--he found that these tributes to his personal appearance
afforded him more displeasure than pleasure. He turned from them with a
movement of annoyance, and turned from those places in which they were
liable to manifest themselves likewise. No, indeed, it was something
other than this he had to find, something lying far deeper in the needs
of human nature, if the emptiness of his days was to be filled and the
hunger of his heart and spirit satisfied!
Pondering which things he went down the creaking stairs of the house in
Holland Street, Kensington, leaving the empty and, to him, sacred rooms
to the crouching shadows. He had had his answer from the one person
whom he had perfectly loved. And surely, in justifying the past, that
answer gave promise of hope for the future? The way would be made
clear, the method would declare itself. Let him have patience, only
patience, as she, his mother, had had when traversing deserts and
climbing Difficulty Hill in her lacework; and to him, also, should far
horizons be disclosed.
In the narrow hall the neat little old caretaker met him, huskily
coughing.
"The rent is low, sir," he said, "and the landlord is asking no
premium. If you should wish further particulars, or to inspect the
offices----"
But Mr. Iglesias put a couple of half-crowns into his hand.
"No," he answered, "I do not propose to take the house. Persons who
were dear to me lived here once; and so I wanted to see it. As long as
it is unlet I may come back from time to time."
The old man shuffled his slippered feet upon the bare boards, looking
with mild ecstasy at the coins.
"And you will be most welcome, sir," he said. "Your generosity happens
to be of great assistance to me--not that I wish it repeated. I am not
grasping, sir, but I am grateful. I have a taste in literature which my
reduced circumstances do not allow me to gratify. I see the prospect of
many hours' enjoyment before me. I thank you."