The Far Horizon | Page 5

of this--sensible of a sort of hush falling on him as he crossed the
threshold, so that instinctively he left much of his wholesome young
animality outside, while his voice took on softer tones in speech, and
his quick light footsteps became more scrupulously noiseless as he ran
up the little crooked stairs.
"When your father comes home we must decide what profession you
shall follow, my Dominic," it had been his mother's habit to declare.
But, even before the time for such decision arrived the boy had begun
to understand he must see to all that unaided. For his mother was ill,
how deeply and in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed,
from all clear thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from
something indelicate, in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her,
notwithstanding a gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very
individual grace of dress and of bearing remained to her likewise. But
she was uncertain in mood, the victim of strange fancies, a being
almost alarmingly far removed from the interests of ordinary life. Long
ago, in submission to her husband's anti-clerical prejudices, she had
ceased to practise her religion, so that the services of the Church no
longer called her forth in beneficent routine of sacred obligation. Now
she never left the house, living, since poor Pascal Pelletier's death, in
complete seclusion. Little wonder then that a hush fell on Dominic
crossing the threshold, since so doing he passed from the world of
healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness, from vigorous
hoarse-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of unrelated dreams!
The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and it was
characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though rejoicing in the

reputation at school of being high-spirited enough, impatient of
restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother had always been
sacred. She remained so, even though her sympathies had become
imperfect, and she moved in regions which his sane young imagination
failed to penetrate. One thing was perfectly plain to him, though it cut
at the root of ambition--namely, that he could not leave her. So, in that
matter of a profession, he must find work which would permit of his
continuing to live at home; and, since her income was narrow, the work
in question must make no heavy demand in respect of preliminary
expense.
Here was a problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of
Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his position!
There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent in
studying and answerings advertisements; and his days, till late
afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of
possible employers and the keeping of fruitless appointments. He
would set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return
full of the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began
to reveal herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue
coal smoke --it was wintertime--which, at once hanging over and
penetrating her immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty
of mere size. He noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew
strangely and feverishly alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the
pavements. A dazzling glitter of shop windows marked the great
thoroughfares, while often the angry glare of a fire pulsed along the
sky-line. When night comes in the country, so Dominic told himself,
the land sinks into peaceful repose. But in cities it is otherwise. There
the light leaves heaven for earth; and walks the streets, with much else
far from celestial, until the small hours move towards the dawn and
usher in the decencies of day.
Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its
enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld
with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted
condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he
could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented

herself to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature, breathing,
feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and breeding, terrible
in her power and vitality, age old, yet still unspent. Presented herself to
him as horribly prolific, ever outpassing her own unwieldy limits,
sending forth her children, year after year, all the wide world over by
shipping or by rail; receiving some tithe of them back, proud with
accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or, disgraced and broken,
slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and darkness merely to swell
the numbers of the nameless who rot and die. He thought of those
others, too--and this touched his young ardour with a quick