The narrow lane, running back at right angles to the great
thoroughfare, was filled with blurred yellowish light and covered in
with gloom, low-hanging and impenetrable. The high, blank buildings on
either side of it looked like the perpendicular walls of a tunnel, the
black roof they apparently supported being as solid and substantial as
themselves. The effect thereby produced was suspect and prison-like, as
of a space walled in and closed from open air and day. Outside the
stage entrance of the Twentieth Century Theatre a small crowd had
collected and formed up in two parallel lines across the pavement to
the curb, against which a smart single brougham and some half a dozen
four-wheelers and hansoms were drawn up. The crowd, which gathered and
broke only to gather again, was composed for the main part of persons
of the better artisan class, respectable, soberly habited, evidently
awaiting the advent of relations employed within the theatre. There was
also a sprinkling of showy young women, attended by undersized youths
flashily dressed. On the fringes of it night-birds, male and female, of
evil aspect, loitered, watchful of possible prey; while two or three
gentlemen, correct, highly-civilised, stood smoking, each with the air
of studied indifference which defies attempted recognition on the part
of friend or foe.
And among these last Dominic Iglesias must be counted; though, in his
case, indifference was not assumed but real. His surroundings were
novel, it is true, and produced on him clear impressions both pictorial
and moral; but those impressions were of his surroundings in and for
themselves, rather than in any doubtfulness of their relation to
himself. For his mind was occupied with problems painful in character
and difficult of solution; and to the said problems, heightening the
emotional strain of them, his surroundings--the sense of feverish life,
of all-encompassing restless humanity; the figures anxious, degraded,
of questionable purpose or merely frivolous, which started into
momentary distinctness; the scraps of conversation, caught in passing,
instinct with suggestion, squalid or passionate; along with the
ceaseless tramp of footsteps, and tumult of the great thoroughfare just
now packed with the turn-out of neighbouring places of
entertainment--supplied a background penetratingly appropriate.
For a good half-hour Mr. Iglesias stood there. At intervals the doors
of the stage entrance swung open, causing a movement of interest and
comment among the crowd. One by one hansoms and four-wheelers,
obtaining fares, rattled away over the stones. Yet the Lady of the
Windswept Dust tarried. It grew late, and Iglesias greatly desired her
coming, greatly desired to speak with her, and speaking to find
approximate solution, at least, of some of the problems which lay so
heavy upon his mind. Meanwhile, the crowd melted and vanished, leaving
him alone in the blurred yellowish light beneath the low-hanging roof
of impenetrable gloom, save for the haunting presence of some few of
those terrible human birds of prey.
He was about to turn away also, not particularly relishing the
remaining company, when, with a rush, Poppy was beside him, in stately
garments of black velvet and glimmering tissue of silver; her head and
shoulders draped with something of daring and magnificence, in her
blue-purple jewelled dragon-embroidered scarf. She caught Iglesias'
right hand in both of hers and held it a moment against her breast. And
during that brief interval he registered the fact that, notwithstanding
her beauty, the force of her personality and richness of her dress, she
did not look out of place in this somewhat cut-throat alley, with the
questionable sights and sounds of midnight London all about her; but
vivid, exultant, true daughter of great cities, fearless manipulator of
the very varied opportunities they offer, past-master, for joy and
sorrow, in the curious arts they teach.
"Get into the brougham, dear man," she said, "and let me talk. There,
put up the window on the traffic side. I have been in the liveliest
worry about you. Had the house turned out of windows to find you--and
gave things in general the deuce of a time.--The brougham's
comfortable, isn't it? Fallowfeild's jobbed it for the winter for
me.--All the same I played like an angel, out of pure desperation,
thinking you might be ill. I made the audience cry big, big tears,
bless 'em. And it wasn't the part--not a bit of it. It was you, just
simply you.--And then I dawdled talking to Antony Hammond about some
lines in the second act I want altered, so as to let myself down easy
before digesting the disappointment of driving back to Bletchworth
Mansions alone. I wanted so very badly to have you see me. Beloved and
most faithless of beings, why the mischief didn't you come?"
And Iglesias sitting beside her watching her joyous face, crowned by
her dark hair, set in the gleaming folds of her jewelled scarf, as
passing lights revealed it clearly, or shifting left it in soft shadow,
divined rather than actually seen, became sadly conscious that the
problems which oppressed him were not only hard of solution but hard of
statement likewise. It seemed heartless to propound them in this, her
hour of success. Yet, unless he was deeply mistaken, the statement of
them must tell for emancipation and relief in the end.
"The play has gone well, and you are happy?" he asked her.
"Gorgeously--I grant you I was a bit nervous as to whether during these
years of--well--love in idleness, I had not lost touch with my art. But
I haven't. I have only matured in mind and in method. I am not
conceited, dear man, truly I am not; but I am neither too lazy nor too
modest to use my brains. What I know I am not afraid to apply. I've
very little theory, but a precious deal of practice--and that's the way
to get on. Don't talk about your ideas--just use them for all you're
worth.--But this is beside the mark. You're trying to head me off. Why
didn't you come?"
"I would gladly have come," Iglesias answered. "My disappointment has
been quite as great as yours."
"Bless your heart!" Poppy murmured under her breath.
"But it was impossible for me to come. I was detained until it was too
late." He paused, uncertain how best to say that which had to be said.
"Oh! fiddle!" Poppy cried, with a lift of her head. "I stand first. You
ought not to have let yourself be detained. After all, it's not every
day someone you know blazes from a farthing dip into a star of the
first magnitude. You might very well have crowded other things aside. I
feel a trifle hurt, dear man, really I do."
"Believe me, no ordinary matter would have prevented my coming,"
Iglesias answered. To his relief the carriage just then turned into the
comparative peace of Langham Place. It became possible to speak softly.
"There was a death in the house last night," he went on, "that of a
person with whom I have been rather closely associated. He died under
circumstances demanding investigations of a distressing character. No
one save myself was qualified, or perhaps willing, to assume the
responsibility of calling in the authorities."
Iglesias glanced at his companion, conscious that while he spoke her
attitude and humour had altered considerably. She was motionless. He
saw her profile, dark against the square light of window-glass. Her
mouth was slightly open, as with intensity of attention.
"Well--well--what then?" she said.
"The man had just suffered a heavy reverse. He had staked all his
hopes, all his future, upon a single venture. It proved a failure. He
could not accept the fact, and believed himself the victim of gross
injustice and of organised conspiracy."
"Do you believe it, too?"
"No," Iglesias answered. "I have an immense pity for him, as who would
not. Still, I am compelled to believe that failure came from within,
rather than from without. He overrated his own powers."
Poppy held up her hand imperiously. "Wait half a minute," she said, in
an oddly harsh voice. Leaning forward she put down the front glass and
called to the coachman:--"Don't go to Bletchworth Mansions. Drive on.
Never mind where, so long as you keep to empty streets. Drive on and
on--do you hear?--till I tell you to stop."
She put the window up again and settled herself back in her place,
dragging the scarf from off her head and baring her throat. She looked
full at Mr. Iglesias, her face showing ghostly white against the dark
upholstery of the carriage. Her eyes were wide with question and with
fear, which was also, in some strange way, hope.
"Now you can speak, dear friend," she said quite steadily. "I shall be
glad to hear the whole of it, though it is an ugly story. The man was
miserable, and he is dead, and the circumstances of his death point
to--what--suicide?"
In reply Iglesias told her how that morning, the servants failing to
get any response to their knocking, the upper part of the house being,
moreover, pervaded by a sickening smell of gas, help had been called
in; and, de Courcy Smyth's door being forced open, he had been found
lying, fully clothed, stark and cold upon his bed, an empty phial of
morphia and an empty glass on the table beside him, both gas-jets
turned full on though not alight.
At the top of Portland Place the coachman took his way northwestward,
first skirting the outer ring of Regent's Park and then making the
gradually ascending slope of the Finchley Road. The detached houses on
either side, standing back in their walled gardens, were mostly blind.
Only here and there, behind drawn curtains, a window glowed, telling of
intimate drama gallant or mournful within. The wide grey pavements were
deserted; the place arrestingly quiet, save for the occasional heavy
tread of a passing policeman on beat, and the rhythmical trot of the
horse. And the Lady of the Windswept Dust was quiet likewise, looking
straight before her, sitting stiffly upright, her hands clasped in her
lap, the shifting lights and shadows playing queerly over her face and
her bare neck, causing her to appear unsubstantial and indefinite as a
figure in a dream. Yet a strange energy possessed her and emanated from
her, so that the atmosphere about her was electric, oppressive to
Iglesias as with a brooding of storm. Her very quietness was agitating,
weighed with meaning which challenged his imagination and even his
powers of reticence and self-control. Opposite Swiss Cottage Station,
where the main road forks, a string of market waggons--slouching,
drowsy car-men, backed by a pale green wall of glistening cabbages,
nodding above their slow-moving teams--passed, with a jingle of
brass-mounted harness and grind of wheels. This roused Poppy, and the
storm broke.
"Dominic," she said breathlessly, "do you at all know that you've just
told me means to me?"
"I have never known positively until now; but it was impossible that I
should not have entertained suspicions."
"Did he--you know who I mean--ever speak of me?"
"I think," Iglesias said, "he came very near doing so, more than once.
But I put a stop to the conversation."
"You frightened him," Poppy rejoined. "I know one could do that. It was
a last resource, a hateful one. Is there anything so difficult to
forgive as being driven to be cruel? One was bound to be cruel in
self-defence, or one would have been stifled, utterly degraded by
self-contempt, bled to death not only in respect of money but of
self-esteem."
She threw up her hands with a gesture at once fierce and despairing.
"Oh! the weak, the weak," she cried, "of how many crimes they are the
authors! Crimes more particularly abominable when the weak one is the
man, and woman--poor brute--is strong."
She settled herself sideways in the corner of the carriage, turning her
face once more full upon her companion.
"Look here," she said, "I don't want to whitewash myself. What I've
done I've done. I don't pretend it's pretty or innocent, or that I
haven't jolly well got to pay the price of it--though I think a good
deal has been paid by now. But it seems to me my real crime was in
marrying him, rather than in leaving him. It was a crime against
love--love, which alone, if you've any real sense of the inherent
decencies of things, makes marriage otherwise than an outrage upon a
woman's pride and her virtue. But, then, one doesn't know all that when
one's barely out of one's teens. And, you see, like a fool I took the
first comer out of bravado, just that people mightn't see how awfully
hard hit I was by his people interfering and preventing my marrying the
poor, dear boy who gave me this"--Poppy spread out the end of her
dragon scarf--"I've told you about him.--Stage people are absurdly
simple in some ways, you know. They live in such a world of pretences
and fictions that they lose their sense of fact, or rather they never
develop it. They're awfully easily taken in. Words go a tremendous long
way with them. And de Courcy could talk. He was appallingly fluent,
specially on the subject of himself. He made be believe he was rather
wonderful, and I wanted to believe he was wonderful. I wanted to
believe he was all the geniuses in creation rolled into one. All the
more I wanted to believe it because I wasn't one scrap in love with
him."
Poppy beat with one hand almost roughly on Mr. Iglesias' arm.
"Do you see, do you see, do you see?" she repeated. "Do you understand?
I want you so badly to understand."
And he answered her gently and gravely: "Do not be afraid, dear friend.
I see with your eyes. I feel with your heart. As far as one human being
can enter into and share the experience of another, I do understand."
"But the nuisance is," she went on, the corners of her mouth taking a
wicked twist, "you know so very much more about a man after you've
married him. Other people are inclined to forget that sometimes.
Consuming egoism is hideous at close quarters. It comes out in a
thousand ways, in mean little tyrannies and absurd jealousies which
would never have entered into one's head.--I don't want to go into all
that. It's better forgot.--Only they piled up and up, till the shadow
of them shut out the sunshine; and I got so bored, so madly and
intolerably bored. You see, I had tried to believe in him at first. In
self-defence I had done so, and stood by him, and done my very best to
put him through. But when I began to understand that there was nothing
to stand by or put through, that his talent was not talent at all, but
merely a vain man's longing to possess talent--well, the situation
became pretty bad. I tried to be civil. I tried to hold my tongue,
indeed I did. But to be bullied and grumbled at, and expected to work,
so as to give him leisure and means for the development of gifts which
didn't exist--it wasn't good enough."
Poppy put up her hands and pushed the masses of her hair from her
forehead. And all the while the shifting lights and shadows played over
her white face and bare neck, and the horse trotted on, past closed
shops and curtained windows, farther out of London and into the night.
"He didn't do anything which the world calls vicious," she continued
presently. A great dreariness had come into the tones of her voice. "He
was faithful to me, as the world counts faithfulness, simply because he
didn't care for women--except for philandering with sentimental sillies
who thought him an unappreciated eighth wonder of the world, and pawed
over and pitied him. La! La! The mere thought of it makes me sick! But
he was too much in love with himself to be capable of even an animal
passion for anybody else. And he made a great point of his virtue. I
heard a lot about it--oh! a lot!"
For a minute or two Poppy sat silent. Then she turned to Mr. Iglesias,
smiling, as those smile who refuse submission to some cruel pain.
"I wasn't born bad, dear man," she said, "and I held out longer than
most women in my profession would, where morals are easy and it's
lightly come and lightly go in respect of lovers and love. But one fine
day I packed up my traps and cleared out. He'd been whining for years,
and some little thing he said or did--I really forget exactly
what--raised Cain in me, and I thought I'd jolly well give him
something to whine about. I knew perfectly well he wouldn't divorce me.
He wanted me too much, at the end of a string, to torment, and to get
money from when times were bad. Not that I cared for a divorce. I
consider it the clumsiest invention out for setting wrongs right. I
have too great a respect for marriage, which ought, if it means
anything, to mean motherhood and children, and a clean, wholesome start
in life for the second generation. When a woman breaks away and crosses
the lines, she only makes bad worse, in my opinion, by the hypocritical
respectability of a marriage while her husband is still alive. Let's be
honest sinners any way, if sin we must."
Again she paused, looking backward in thought, seeing and hearing
things which, for the honour of others, it was kindest not to repeat.
The carriage moved slowly, the horse slackening its pace in climbing
the last steep piece of hill which leads to the pond on Hampstead Heath.
"And now it's over," Poppy said, letting her hands drop in her lap.
"Done with. The poor wretched thing's dead--has killed himself. That is
a fitting conclusion. He was always his own worst enemy.--Well, as far
as I am concerned, let him rest in peace."
"Amen," Iglesias responded, "so let him rest. 'Shall not the judge of
all the world do right,' counting his merits as well as his demerits,
making all just excuses for his lapses and wrong-doings; knowing, as we
can never know, exactly how far he was and was not accountable for his
own and for others' sins. And now, dear friend, as you have said, this
long misery is over and done with. Whatever remains of practical
business you can leave safely to me. His memory shall be shielded as
far as foresight and sympathy can shield it, and your name need not
appear."
The Lady of the Windswept Dust took his hand and held it.
"I don't know," she said brokenly, "why all this should all come upon
you."
"For a very simple reason," he answered. "What did you tell me
yourself? You stand first. And that is true."
But it may be remarked in passing that there are limits to the passive
obedience of even the best-trained of men-servants. Those of Poppy's
coachman had been reached. At the top of the hill he drew up,
vigorously determined to drive no farther into the wilderness, without
renewed and very distinct information as to why and where he went,
perceiving which Dominic Iglesias opened the carriage door and stepped
out.
"The night is fine and dry," he said. "Let us walk a little, and then
let us drive home. You have your work to-morrow--or, rather,
to-day--and you must have a reasonable amount of rest first. The stream
of your life has been arrested, diverted from its natural channel; but
it still runs strong and clear yet. You have genius, real, not
imagined, so you must husband your energies.--Come and walk. Let the
air soothe and calm you; and then, leaving all the past in Almighty
God's safe keeping, go home and rest."
Here the high-road stretches along the ridge of the hill, a giant
causeway, the broken land of the open heath falling away sharply to
left and right. It was windless. The sky was covered, and the
atmosphere, though not foggy at this height, was thick as with smoke;
so that the road, with its long avenue of sparse-set lamps--dwindling
in the extreme distance to faintest sparks--was as a pale bridge thrown
across the void of black unsounded space. All, save the road itself,
the lamps, and seats, and broken fringe of grass edging the raised
footpath of it, was formless and vague, peopled by shapes, dark against
darkness, such as the eye itself fearfully produces in straining to
penetrate unyielding obscurity. The effect was one of intense
isolation, of divorce from humanity and the works and ways of it, so
present and overpowering it might well seem that, reaching the far end
of that pale bridge, the wayfarer would part company with the things of
time altogether and pass into another state of being.
And this so worked upon Poppy that, some fifty yards along the
causeway, her black and silver skirts gathered ankle-high about her,
she stopped, drawing very close to Iglesias and laying her hand upon
his arm.
"Listen to the silence," she said. "Look at the emptiness. I don't
quite like it, even with you. It's too suggestive of death, death with
no sure hope of life beyond it.--I am quite good now, quite sane and
reasonable. I have put aside all bitterness. I'll never say another
hard word of him, or, in as far as I can, think a hard thought."
Then turning, suddenly she gave a cry, perceiving that east and south
all London lay below them--formless, too, indefinite, enormous, a City
of the Plains, unseen in detail but indicated through the gloom as a
vast semi-circle of smouldering fire.
Poppy stretched out both arms, letting her splendid draperies trail in
the dust.
"Ah! how I love it, how I love it," she cried. "Let us go back, dear
man. For it belongs to me and I belong to it. In the name of my art I
must try conclusions with it. I must play to it, and conquer it, and
enchant, and possess it, since I am free at last--I am free."