And so it came about that a more tranquil spirit, touched with sober
gladness, possessed Dominic Iglesias as, leaving that house of many
memories, he pursued his way down Church Street and, passing into
Kensington High Street opposite St. Mary Abbot's Church, turned
eastward once again. A few doors short of the gateway leading into
Palace Gardens was an unpretentious Italian restaurant where he
proposed to dine. For it grew late. He had spent longer than he had
supposed in wordless prayer before the altar of his dead. The
remembrance of the book-loving little caretaker's gratitude remained by
him pleasantly, softening his humour towards all his fellow-men. Simple
kindness has great virtue, uplifting to the heart. To Iglesias it
seemed those five shillings had been eminently well invested.
The streets were clearer now; and he walked slowly, enjoying the cooler
air born of the sunset, and drawing from the leafy spaces of Kensington
Gardens and the park. Presently he became aware of a figure, not
altogether unfamiliar, threading its way among the intermittent stream
of pedestrians along the pavement a few paces ahead. His eyes followed
it reluctantly. In his present peaceful humour its aspect struck a
jarring note. Soiled white flannel trousers, a short blue boating coat,
a soft grey felt hat, tennis shoes, a shambling and uncertain gait as
of one who neither knows nor cares whither he is going or why he
goes--the whole effect purposeless, slovenly, inept.
Then followed a little scene which caused Iglesias to further slacken
his pace. For the seedy figure, reaching the open door of the
restaurant, hesitated, standing between the clipped bay trees set in
green tubs which flanked the entrance on either hand. Stepped aside,
craning upward to see over the yellow silk curtains drawn across the
lower half of the windows. Moved back to the door and stood there
undecided. Finally, as a smiling waiter, napkin on arm, came forward,
the man crushed his hat down on his forehead, forced his hands deep
into his trouser pockets and turned away with an audible oath. This
brought him face to face with Mr. Iglesias, who recognised in him his
fellow-lodger, Mr. de Courcy Smyth.
"What, you!" he exclaimed snarlingly, while his pasty face flamed.
"There seems no escape from our dear Cedar Lodge to-night."
Then with an uneasy laugh he made an effort to recover himself.
"Really, I beg your pardon, Mr. Iglesias," he continued, "but my nerves
are villainously on edge. I have just met those two young idiots, Farge
and Worthington, waltzing home arm in arm like a pair of demented
turtle-doves. Having to associate with such third-rate commercial
fellows and witness their ebullitions of mutual admiration makes a man
of education, like myself, utterly sick. I came out this evening to get
free of the whole Cedar Lodge lot. You did the same, I suppose. Pray
don't let me frustrate your purpose. I sympathise with it. I will
remove myself."
The splotchy red had died out of the speaker's face. Notwithstanding
the warmth of the evening he stood with his shoulders raised and his
knees a little bent, as a poorly clad man stands in a chill wind on a
wintry day. Iglesias observed his attitude, and in his present mood it
influenced him more than the surly greeting had done.
"I intended to dine here," he said quietly. "So, I fancy, did you."
"Oh! I have changed my mind, thank you," Smyth answered.
"In consequence of my arrival, I am afraid?"
"No, I had other reasons."
"In any case I should be very glad if you would reconsider your
decision and remain," Dominic said. "I am, as you see, alone, and I
have not often the pleasure of meeting you. I shall be very happy if
you will stay and dine with me, as my guest."
Smyth gave an odd, furtive look at the open door of the restaurant and
the row of white tables within. A light had come into his pale blue
eyes, making them uncomfortably like those of some half-starved animal.
"I am at a loss to know why I should accept hospitality from you," he
remarked, at once cringingly and insolently.
"Simply because you would give me pleasure by doing so. I should value
your society."
"I am not in evening dress."
"Nor am I," Dominic answered, with admirable seriousness. There was
something pitiful to him in the conflict, obviously going forward in
the other's mind, between hunger and reluctance to incur an obligation.
He cut it short with gentle authority. "There is a vacant table in the
corner where we can talk free from interruption. Let us go in and
secure it."
At the beginning of the meal the conversation was intermittent, the
burden of supporting it lying with Mr. Iglesias. But, as course
followed course, hot and succulent, while the _chianti_ at once
steadied his circulation and stimulated his brain, de Courcy Smyth
became talkative, not to say garrulous. Finally he began to assert
himself, to swagger, thereby laying bare the waste places of his own
nature.
"You may think I was hard on Farge and Worthington just now, Mr.
Iglesias," he said. "I own they disgust me; not only in themselves, but
as examples of certain modern tendencies which are choking the life out
of me and such men as me. You business people are on the up grade just
now, and you know it. Whoever goes under, you are safe to do yourselves
most uncommonly well. I don't mean anything personal, of course. I am
just stating a self-evident fact. Commerce is in the air--you all reek
of success. And so even shopwalkers, like Worthington, and that thrice
odious puppy Farge, grow sleek, and venture to spread themselves in the
presence of their betters--in the presence of a scholar and a
gentleman, who is well connected and has received a classical
education, like myself."
Smyth paused, turning sideways to the table, leaning his elbow on it,
crossing his legs and staring gloomily down the long room.
"But what do they know or care about scholarship?" he continued. "What
they do know is that the spirit of this unspeakably vulgar age is with
them and their miserable huckstering. They know that well enough and
act upon it, though they are too illiterate to put it into words--know
that trade is in process of exploding learning, of exploiting
literature and art to its own low purposes, in process of scaling
Olympus, in short, and ignominiously chucking out the gods."
Dominic Iglesias had listened to this astonishing tirade in silence.
The man was evidently suffering from feelings of bitter injury, also he
was his--Iglesias'--guest. Both pity and hospitality engaged him to
endurance. But there are limits. And at this point professional dignity
and a lingering loyalty towards the house of Barking Brothers & Barking
enjoined protest.
"No doubt we live in times of commerce, rather than in those of
chivalry," he remarked. "Still, I venture to think your condemnation is
too sweeping. One should discriminate surely between trade and finance."
"Only as one discriminates between a little dog and a big one. The
little dog is the easier to kick. I can't get at the Rothschilds and
Rockefellers; and so I go for the Farges and Worthingtons," Smyth
answered. "In principle I am right. Trade, commerce, finance, juggle
with the names as you like, it all comes back to the same thing in the
end, namely, the murder of intellect by money. Comes back to the
worship of Mammon, chosen ruler of this contemptible _fin de siècle_,
and safe to be even more tyrannously the ruler of the coming century.
What hope, I ask you, is left for us poor devils of literary men? None,
absolutely none. Just in proportion as we honour our calling and refuse
to prostitute our talents we are at a discount. The powers that be have
no earthly use for us. We have not the ghost of a chance."
He altered his position, looking quickly and nervously at his host.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "For the moment I forgot you were on the
other side, among the conquerors, not the conquered. Probably this
conversation does not interest you in the least."
"On the contrary, it interests me very deeply," Dominic replied gravely.
"All the same, out of self-respect I ought to hold my tongue about it,
I suppose. For I have accepted the position, Mr. Iglesias. I have
learned to do that. Only on each fresh occasion that it is brought home
to me--and it has been brought home abominably clearly to-night--my
gorge rises at it. And it ought to be so. For it is an outrage--you
yourself must admit--that a man who started with excellent prospects
and with the consciousness of unusual talents--of genius,
perhaps--should be ruined and broken, while every miserable little
counter-jumper----"
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 anæmic 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 _matinées?_"
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.