: The Far Horizon by Malet Lucas - Fiction

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THE FAR HORIZON

LUCAS MALET

"Ask for the Old Paths, where is the Good Way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest."--JEREMIAS.

"The good man is the bad man's teacher; the bad man is the material upon which the good man works. If the one does not value his teacher, if the other does not love his material, then despite their sagacity they must go far astray. This is a mystery of great import."--FROM THE SAYINGS OF LAO-TZU.

..."Cherchons ? voir les choses comme elles sont, et ne voulons pas avoir plus d'esprit que le bon Dieu! Autrefois on croyait que la canne ? sucre seule donnait le sucre, on en tire ? peu pr?s de tout maintenant. Il est de m?me de la po?sie. Extrayons-la de n'importe quoi, car elle git en tout et partout. Pas un atome de mati?re qui ne contienne pas la po?sie. Et habituons-nous ? considerer le monde comme un oeuvre d'art, dont il faut reproduire les proc?d?es dans nos oeuvres."--GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

Dominic Iglesias stood watching while the lingering June twilight darkened into night. He was tired in body, but his mind was eminently, consciously awake, to the point of restlessness, and this was unusual with him. He had raised the lower sash of each of the three tall, narrow windows to its extreme height, since the first-floor sitting-room, though of fair proportions, appeared close. His thought refused the limits of it, and ranged outward over the expanse of Trimmer's Green, the roadway and houses bordering it, to the far northwest, that region of hurried storm, of fierce, equinoctial passion and conflict, now paved with plaques of flat, dingy, violet cloud opening on smoky rose-red wastes of London sunset. All day thunder had threatened, but had not broken. And, even yet, the face of heaven seemed less peaceful than remonstrant, a sullenness holding it as of troops in retreat denied satisfaction of imminent battle.

Otherwise the outlook was wholly pacific, one of middle-class suburban security. The Green aforesaid is bottle-shaped, the neck of it debouching into a crowded westward-wending thoroughfare; while Cedar Lodge, from the first-floor windows of which Mr. Iglesias contemplated the oncoming of night, being situate in the left shoulder, so to speak, of the bottle, commanded, diagonally, an uninterrupted view of the whole extent of it. Who Trimmer was, how he came by a Green, and why, or what he trimmed on it, it is idle at this time of day to attempt to determine. Whether, animated by a desire for the public welfare, he bequeathed it in high charitable sort; or whether, fame taking a less enviable turn with him, he just simply was hanged there, has afforded matter of heated controversy to the curious in questions of suburban nomenclature and topography. But in this case, as in so many other and more august ones, the origins defy discovery. Suffice it, therefore, that the name remains, as does the open space--the latter forming one of those minor "lungs of London" which offer such amiable oases in the great city's less aristocratic residential districts. Formerly the Green boasted a row of fine elms, and was looked on by discreetly handsome eighteenth-century mansions and villas, set in spacious gardens. But of these, the great majority--Cedar Lodge being a happy exception--has vanished under the hand of the early Victorian speculative builder; who, in their stead, has erected full complement of the architectural platitudes common to his age and taste. Dignity has very sensibly given place to gentility. Nevertheless the timid red, or sickly yellow-grey, brick of the existing houses is pleasingly veiled by ivy and Virginia creeper, while no shop front obtrudes derogatory suggestion of retail trade. The local authorities, moreover, some ten years back girdled the Green with healthy young balsam-poplar and plane trees and enclosed the grass with iron hurdles--to rescue it from trampling into unsightly pathways--thus doing a well-intentioned, if somewhat unimaginative, best to safeguard the theatre of long ago Trimmer's beneficence or infamy from greater spoliation.

Hence it follows that, certain inherent limitations admitted, the scene upon which Dominic Iglesias' eyes rested was not without elements of attraction. And of this fact, being a person of an excellent temperance of expectation, he was gratefully aware. His surroundings, indeed, constituted, so it appeared to him, the maximum of comfort and advantage which could be expected by a middle-aged gentleman, of moderate fortune, in the capacity of a "paying guest." Not only in word but in thought--for in acknowledgment of obligation he was scrupulously courteous. He frequently tendered thanks to his neighbour and old school-fellow, Mr. George Lovegrove, first for calling his attention to Mrs. Porcher's advertisement, and subsequently for reassuring him as to its import. For, though incapable of forming so much as a thought to her concrete disparagement, Mr. Iglesias was not without a quiet sense of humour, or of that instinct of self-protection common to even the most chivalrous of mankind. He was, therefore, perfectly sensible that "the widow of a military officer," who describes herself in print as "bright, musical and thoroughly domesticated," while offering "a cheerful and refined home at the West End, within three minutes of Tube and omnibus"--"noble dining and recreation rooms, bath h. and c." thrown in--to unmarried members of the stronger sex, must of necessity be a lady whose close acquaintance it would be foolhardy to make without a trifle of preliminary scouting.

Happily not only George Lovegrove, but his estimable wife was at hand. The latter hastened to prosecute inquiries, beginning with a visit to the Anglican vicar of the parish, the Rev. Giles Nevington. He reported Mrs. Porcher an evening communicant at the greater festivals, and a not ungenerous donor to parochial charities; adding that a former curate had resided under her roof with perfect impunity. Mrs. Lovegrove terminated her researches by an interview with the fishmonger, who assured her that "Cedar Lodge always took the best cuts," sternly refused fish or poultry which had suffered cold storage, and paid its housebooks without fail before noon on Thursday. She ascertained, further, from a source socially intermediate between clergyman and tradesman, that Mrs. Porcher's husband, some time veterinary surgeon of a crack regiment, had died in the odour of alcohol rather than in that of sanctity, leaving his widow--in addition to his numerous and heavy debts--but a fraction of the comfortable fortune to procure the enjoyment of which he had so considerately married her. The solid Georgian mansion was her freehold; and it was to secure sufficient means for continued residence in it that the poor lady started a boarding-house, or in the politer language of the present day, had decided to receive paying guests.

Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr. Iglesias--shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years ago--had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so far, had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of well-being and repose that he returned daily--after hours of strenuous work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in chimney-piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often goes along with these constitutes the burden and the offence.

It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the ship of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school. Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street, Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something strange, unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous superiority in regard of his near relations so common to male creatures of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that fathers and mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate and life-long results.

Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother lived--namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways, its high wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and scampered--its clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin--in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.

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