The Far Horizon | Page 9

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, once again those two unbidden guests, Loneliness and Freedom--for whose entertainment he had made inadequate provision--sitting, as it seemed, very close on either side of him. Then that happened which altered all the values. Dominic Iglesias suddenly saw a person whom he knew.
He had seen that same person about three hours previously in the bank in Threadneedle Street, while waiting for admittance to Sir Abel's