The Dictator | Page 6

to lie below and around him as in a hollow, tinged and glorified by the
luminous haze of the May day. The countless spires which pointed to
heaven in all directions gave the vast agglomeration of buildings
something of an Italian air; it reminded the beholder agreeably of
Florence. To right and to left the gigantic city spread, its grey wreath of
eternal smoke resting lightly upon its fretted head, the faint roar of its
endless activity coming up distinctly there in the clear windless air. The
beholder surveyed it and sighed slightly, as he traced meaningless

symbols on the turf with the point of his stick.
'What did Cæsar say?' he murmured. 'Better be the first man in a village
than the second man in Rome! Well, there never was any chance of my
being the second man in Rome; but, at least, I have been the first man
in my village, and that is something. I suppose I reckon as about the
last man there now. Well, we shall see.'
He shrugged his shoulders, nodded a farewell to the city below him,
and, turning round, proceeded to walk leisurely across the Heath. The
grass was soft and springy, the earth seemed to answer with agreeable
elasticity to his tread, the air was exquisitely clear, keen, and
exhilarating. He began to move more briskly, feeling quite boyish again.
The years seemed to roll away from him as rifts of sea fog roll away
before a wind.
Even Gloria seemed as if it had never been--aye, and things before
Gloria was, events when he was still really quite a young man.
He cut at the tufted grasses with his stick, swinging it in dexterous
circles as if it had been his sword. He found himself humming a tune
almost unconsciously, but when he paused to consider what the tune
was he found it was the national march of Gloria. Then he stopped
humming, and went on for a while silently and less joyously. But the
gladness of the fine morning, of the clear air, of the familiar place, took
possession of him again. His face once more unclouded and his spirits
mounted.
'The place hasn't changed much,' he said to himself, looking around
him while he walked. Then he corrected himself, for it had changed a
good deal. There were many more red brick houses dotting the
landscape than there had been when he last looked upon it some seven
years earlier.
In all directions these red houses were springing up, quaintly gabled,
much verandahed, pointed, fantastic, brilliant. They made the whole
neighbourhood of the Heath look like the Merrie England of a comic
opera. Yet they were pretty in their way; many were designed by able

architects, and pleased with a balanced sense of proportion and an
impression of beauty and fitness. Many, of course, lacked this, were but
cheap and clumsy imitations of a prevailing mode, but, taken all
together, the effect was agreeable, the effect of the varied reds, russet,
and scarlet and warm crimson against the fresh green of the grass and
trees and the pale faint blue of the May sky.
To the observer they seemed to suit very well the place, the climate, the
conditions of life. They were infinitely better than suburban and rural
cottages people used to build when he was a boy. His mind drifted
away to the kind of houses he had been more familiar with of late years,
houses half Spanish, half tropical; with their wide courtyards and gaily
striped awnings and white walls glaring under a glaring sun.
'Yes, all this is very restful,' he thought--'restful, peaceful, wholesome.'
He found himself repeating softly the lines of Browning, beginning,
'Oh to be in England now that April's here,' and the transitions of
thought carried him to that other poem beginning, 'It was roses, roses,
all the way,' with its satire on fallen ambition. Thinking of it, he first
frowned and then laughed.
He walked a little way, cresting the rising ground, till he came to an
open space with an unbroken view over the level country to Barnet.
Here, the last of the houses that could claim to belong to the great
London army stood alone in its own considerable space of ground. It
was a very old-fashioned house; it had been half farmhouse, half hall,
in the latter days of the last century, and the dull red brick of its walls,
and the dull red tiles of its roof showed warm and attractive through the
green of the encircling trees. There was a small garden in front, planted
with pine trees, through which a winding path led up to the low porch
of the dwelling. Behind the house a very large garden extended, a great
garden which he knew so