The Far Horizon | Page 9

with contempt." Justice said, "You have no quarrel
with the firm as a whole; accept it." Common sense, pricked up by
anger, said, "Claim your own, take every brass farthing of it." While
personal dignity, winding up the case, admonished, "By no means give
yourself away. Make no impetuous demonstration. Go home and think
it quietly over." And with the advice of personal dignity Mr. Iglesias
fell in.
Yet he was still very sore, the heat of anger past, but the smart of it
remaining, when he journeyed back from the city later in the day. And
not only that after-smart, but a perplexity held him. For two strange
faces had looked into his during the last few hours--those of Loneliness
and Freedom. He had taken for granted, in a general sort of way, that
such personages existed and exercised a certain jurisdiction in human
affairs. But in all the course of his laborious life they had never before
come close, personally claiming him. He had had no time for them. But
they are patient, they only wait. They had time for him--plenty of it.
Suddenly he understood that; and it perplexed him, for his estimate of
his own importance was modest. He even felt apologetic towards them,
as one at whose door distinguished guests alight for whose
entertainment he has made no adequate provision. He was embarrassed,
his sense of hospitality reproaching him.
It so happened that, on this same return journey, he occupied the seat
on the right, immediately behind that of the driver. The sky was
covered, the atmosphere close. The horses, grey ones, showed a thick
yellowish lather where the collar rubbed their necks and the traces their
flanks. They were slack and heavy, and the omnibus hugged the curb.
Within it was empty, and on the top boasted but three passengers
besides Iglesias himself. It followed that, carrying insufficiency of
ballast, the great red-painted vehicle lumbered, and jerked, and swayed
uneasily; while the lighter traffic swept past it in a glittering stream, the
dominant note of which was black as against the dirty drab of the
recently watered wood-pavement. And the character of that traffic was
new to Dominic Iglesias, though he had travelled the Hammersmith
Road, Kensington High Street and Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge and
Piccadilly, back and forth daily, these many years. For the exigencies

of business demanding that the hours of his journeying should be early
and late, always the same, it came about that the aspect of these
actually so-familiar thoroughfares was novel, as beheld in the height of
the season at three o'clock in the afternoon.
At first Iglesias saw without seeing, busy with his own uncheerful
thoughts. But after a while he began to speculate idly on the scene
around him, turning to the outward and material for distraction, if not
for actual comfort. And so the stream of carriages and hansoms, and the
conspicuously well-favoured human beings occupying them, began to
intrigue his attention. He questioned whom they might be and whither
wending, decked forth in such brave array. They seemed to suggest
something divorced from, yet native to, his experience; something he
had never touched in fact, yet the right to which was resident in his
blood. And with this he ceased, in instinct, to be merely the highly
respected and respectable head clerk of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking--now superannuated and laid on the shelf. A gayer, fiercer,
simpler life, quick with violences of vivacious sound and vivid colour,
the excitement of it heightened by clear shining southern sunshine and
blue-black shadow--a life undreamed of by conventional, slow-moving,
rather vulgar middle-class London--to which, on the face of it, he
appeared as emphatically to belong--awoke and cried in Dominic
Iglesias.
It was a surprising little experience, causing him to straighten up his
lean yet shapely figure; while the burden of his years, and the long
monotony of them, seemed strangely lifted off him. Then, with the air
of courtly reserve--at once the joke and envy of the younger clerks,
which had earned him the nickname of "the old Hidalgo"--he leaned
forward and addressed the omnibus driver. The latter upraised a broad,
moist and sleepy countenance.
"Polo at Ranelagh," he answered, in a voice thickened by dust and the
laying of that dust by strong waters. "Club team plays 'Undred and First
Lancers."
The words had been to the inquirer pretty much as phrases from the
liturgy of an unknown cult. But it was Iglesias' praiseworthy

disposition not to be angry with that which he did not happen to
understand, so much as angry with himself for not understanding it.
"Only an additional proof, were it needed, of the prodigious extent of
my ignorance!" he reflected in stoically humorous self-contempt. His
eyes dwelt, somewhat wistfully, on the glittering stream of traffic,