Dominic Iglesias stood on Hammersmith Bridge looking upstream. The
temperature was low for the time of year, the sky packed with
heavy-bosomed indigo-grey clouds in the south and west, whence came a
gusty wind chill with impending rain. The light was diffused and cold,
all objects having a certain bareness of effect, deficient in shadow.
The weather had broken in the storm of the preceding night; and, though
it was but early September, summer was gone, autumn and the melancholy
of it already present--witness the elms in Chiswick Mall splotched with
raw umber and faded yellow. The tide had still about an hour to flow.
The river was dull and leaden, save where, near Chiswick Eyot, the wind
meeting the tide lashed the surface of it into mimic waves, the crests
of which, flung upward, showed against the gloomy stretch of water
beyond, like pale hands raised heavenward in despairing protest.
Steam-tugs, taking advantage of the tide, laboured up-stream in the
teeth of the wind, towing processions of dark floats and barges. Long
banners of smoke, ragged and fleeting, swept wildly away from the
mouths of the tall chimneys of Thorneycroft's Works, which rose black
into the low, wet sky. The roadway of the huge suspension bridge
quivered under the grind of the ceaseless traffic, while the wind cried
in the massive pea-green painted iron-gearing above. There was a sense
of hardly restrained tumult, of conflict between nature and the
multiple machinery of modern civilisation, the two in opposition, alike
victims of an angry mood. And Iglesias stood watching that conflict
among the crowd of children, and loafers, and decrepit, who to-day--as
every day--thronged the foot-way of the bridge.
Poppy St. John stood on the foot-way, too. She had crossed from the
southern side. But, though by no means insensible to the spirit or the
details of the scene around her, she was less engaged in watching the
drama of the stormy afternoon than in watching Dominic Iglesias--as yet
unconscious of her presence. His tall, spare, shapely figure, grave,
clean-shaven face, and calm, self-recollected manner--which removed him
so singularly from the purposeless neutral-tinted human beings close
about him--delighted her artistic sense.
"If one had caught him young," she said to herself, "if one had only
caught him young, heavenly powers, what a time one might have had, and
yet stayed good--oh! very quite good indeed!"
Then she made her way between much undeveloped and derelict humanity.
"Look at me, dear man," she said, "look at me--really I am worth it. I
got home late last night and I was possessed by a great longing to see
you.--Excuse my shouting, but things in general are making such an
infernal clatter.--I was determined to see you. I set my whole mind to
making you come. And I felt so sure you must come that this afternoon I
have journeyed thus far to meet you. And here you are, and here I am."
Poppy stood before him bracing her back against the hand-rail of the
bridge.
"Tell me, are you glad?" she said.
And Dominic Iglesias, surprised, yet finding the incident curiously
natural, answered simply:
"Yes, I am, very glad."
"That's all right," she rejoined; "because, after all, coming was a
pretty lively act of faith on my part. I have superstitious turns at
times; and the weather, and things that had happened, had made me feel
pretty cheap somehow. I don't mind telling you as you are here that if
you'd failed me there would have been the devil to pay. I should have
been awfully cut up."
Iglesias still smiled upon her. Poppy presented herself under a new
aspect to-day, and that aspect found favour in his sight. She was no
longer the Lady of the Windswept Dust, arrayed in fantastic flowery hat
and trailing skirts, but was clothed in trim black workman-like
garments, which revealed the delicate contours of her figure and gave
her an unexpected air of distinction. Yet, though charmed, the caution
of pride--which, in his case, was also the caution of modesty--made him
a trifle shy in addressing her. He paused before speaking, and then
said, with a certain hesitancy:
"I fancy my attitude of mind last night was the complement of your own.
I, too, had fallen on rather evil days. I wanted to see you. I came out
this afternoon to find you. If I had failed to do so, it would have
gone a little hard with me, too, I think."
Poppy looked at him questioningly, intently, for a minute, her teeth
set. Then she whirled round, leaned her elbows on the hand-rail, pulled
her handkerchief out of the breast pocket of her smartly fitting coat
and dabbed her eyes with it, finely indifferent to possible comment or
observation.
Iglesias remained immediately behind her, but a little to the right, so
as to save her from being jostled by the passers-by. He had a sense of
being only the more alone with her because of the traffic and the
crowd; a sense, moreover, of dependence on her part and protection on
his; a sense, in a way, of her belonging to him and he to her. And this
was very sweet to him, solemnly sweet, as are all things of beauty and
moment holding in them the promise of enduring result. Old Age ceased
to threaten and Loneliness to haunt. Over Iglesias' soul passed a wave
of thankful content.
Suddenly Poppy straightened herself up and faced him. Her lips laughed,
but her eyes were wet.
"I'll play fair," she said; "by the honour of the mother that bore you,
I'll play fair."
Then she laid her hand on his arm and pointed London-wards.
"Now, come along, dear man, for I have got to pull myself together
somehow. Let us walk. Take me somewhere I've never been before,
somewhere quiet--only let us walk."
Therefore, desiring to meet her wishes, a little way up the broad
straggling street Dominic Iglesias turned off to the left into the
narrow old-world lanes and alleys which lie between the river frontage
and King Street West. The district is a singular one, suggestive of
some sleepy little dead-alive seaport town rather than of London.
Quaint water-ways, crossed by foot-bridges, burrow in between small low
cottages and warehouses. Some of these have overhanging upper stories
to them, are half-timbered or yellow-washed. Some are built wholly of
wood. There is an all-pervading odour of tar and hempen rope. Small
industries abound, though without any self-advertisement of plate-glass
shop fronts. Chimney-sweeps and cobblers give notice of their presence
by swinging signs. Newsvendors make irruption of flaring boards upon
the pavement. Little ground-floor windows exhibit attenuated stores of
tinware, string, and sweets. Modest tobacconists mount the image of a
black boy scantily clothed or of a Highlander in the fullest of tartans
above their doors. Cats prowl along walls and sparrows rise in flights
from off the ill-paved roadways. But of human occupants there appear to
be but few, and those with an unusual stamp of individuality upon them;
figures a trifle strange and obsolete--as of persons by choice hidden
away, voluntarily self-removed from the levelling rush and grind of the
monster city. The small heavy-browed houses are very secretive, seeming
to shelter fallen fortunes, obscure and furtive sins, sorrows which
resist alleviation and inquiry. Seen, as to-day, under the low-hanging
sky big with rain, in the diffused afternoon light, the place and its
inhabitants conveyed an impression low-toned, yet distinct, finished in
detail, rich though mournful in effect as some eighteenth-century Dutch
picture. A linnet twittered, flitting from perch to perch of its cage
at an open window. A boy, clad in an old mouse-brown corduroy coat,
passed slowly, crying "Sweet lavender" shrilly yet in a plaintive
cadence. Occasionally the siren of a steam-tug tore the air with a
long-drawn wavering scream. Otherwise all was very silent.
And, as they threaded their way through the maze of crooked streets,
Dominic Iglesias and Poppy St. John were silent also; but with the
silence of intimacy and good faith, rather than with that of
embarrassment or indifference. Each was very fully aware of the
presence of the other. So fully aware, indeed, that, for the moment,
speech seemed superfluous as a vehicle for interchange of thought.
Then, as they emerged on to the open gravelled space of the Upper Mall
with its low red-brick wall and stately elm trees, Poppy held out her
hand to Mr. Iglesias.
"You are beautifully clever," she said. "You give me just what I
wanted. I'm as steady as old Time now. But what a queer rabbit-warren
of a place it is! How did you find your way?"
"I came here often, in the past," he said, "at a time when I was
suffering grave anxiety. I could not leave home, after my office work
was over, for more than an hour together. And in the dusk or at night,
with its twinkling and evasive lights, the place used to please me,
leading as it does to the river bank, the mystery of the ebbing and
flowing tide, the ceaseless effort seaward of the stream, and those
low-lying spaces on the Surrey side. It was the nearest bit of nature,
unharnessed, irresponsible nature, which I could get to; and it
symbolised emancipation from monotonous labour and everlasting bricks
and mortar. I could watch the dying of the sunset, and the outcoming of
the stars, the tossing of the pale willows--there on the eyot--in the
windy dusk, undisturbed. And so I have come to entertain a great
fondness for it, since it tranquillised me and helped me to see life
calmly and to bring myself in line with fact, to endure and to forgive."
While he spoke Poppy's hand continued to rest passively in his.
"You are a poet," she said, "and you are very good."
Dominic Iglesias smiled and shook his head.
"No," he answered. "I am neither a poet nor am I very good. Far from
that. I only tried to keep faith with the one clear duty which I saw."
Poppy moved forward across the Mall and stood by the river wall,
looking out over the flowing tide. It was high now, and washed and
gurgled against the masonry.
"You did and suffered all that for some woman," she said. "A man like
you always breaks himself for some woman. I hope she was worth
it--often they aren't. Who was she? The woman you loved? Your wife?"
"The woman I loved," Iglesias answered, "but not my wife."
Poppy looked at him sharply, her eyes full of question and of fear, as
though she dreaded to hear very evil tidings.
"Not your mistress?" she said. "Don't tell me that. The Lord knows I've
no right to mind. But I should mind. It would be like switching off all
the lights. I couldn't stand it. So, if it's that, just let us part
company at once. I've no more use for you.--I know where I am now. If I
go up into St. Peter's Square I can pick up a hansom and drive back
home--I suppose I may as well call it home, as I have no other. And as
for you, if you've any mercy in you, never let me see you again. Never
come near me. I have no use for you, I tell you. So leave me to my own
devices--what those devices are is no earthly concern of yours."
She paused breathless, her eyes blazing, her face very white. She
seemed to have grown tall, and there was a tremendous force in her of
bitterness, repudiation, and regret.
"After all," she cried, "I don't so much as know your name; and so,
thank heaven, it can't be so very difficult to forget you."
Her aspect moved Iglesias strangely, seeming as it did to embody the
very spirit of the angry sky, of the gloomy river, all the sorrow of
the dead summer and stormy autumn light. For a moment he watched her in
silence. Then he took both her hands in his and held them, smiling at
her again very gently.
"No, dear friend," he said, "the woman was not my mistress. She was my
mother." His voice shook a little. "I never talk of her. But I think of
her always. She was very perfect and very lovely. And she suffered
greatly, so greatly that it unhinged her reason. Now do you understand?
For years she was mad."