"The routine has gone on too long," he said to himself bitterly. "I have lost my pliability, lost my humanity. I am a machine now, not a man. To the machine, work is life. Work over, life is over; and the machine is just so much lumber—better broken up and sent to the rag and bottle shop, where it may fetch the worth of its weight as scrap-iron."
He turned, came back to the open window again and stood there, rather carefully avoiding the three reproachful eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-room gaselier, and fixing his gaze on that sullen fierceness of sunset still hanging in the extreme northwest.
"Unluckily there is no rag and bottle shop where superannuated bank clerks of five-and-fifty have even the very modest market value of scrap-iron!" he went on. "Of all kinds of uselessness, that of we godlike human beings is the most utterly obvious when our working day is past. Mental decay and bodily corruption as the ultimate. And, this side of it, a few years of increasing degradation, a mere senseless killing of time until the very unpleasing goal is reached—along with a growing selfishness, and narrowness of outlook; along, possibly, with some development of senile sensuality, the more detestable because it lacks the provocations of hot blood. Oh! Dominic Iglesias, Dominic Iglesias, is that the ugly road you are doomed to travel—a toothless greed for filling your belly with fly-blown dainties off the refuse-heap?"
And through the open window, in sinister accompaniment to little Mr. Farge's sophisticated and unpastoral pipings, came the voice of the great city herself in answer—low, multitudinous, raucous, without emphasis but without briefest relief of interval or of pause. And this laid hold strongly of Iglesias' imagination, reminding him of all the intimate wretchedness of that first stranding of the ship of his fate. Reminding him of his long and fruitless trampings in search of employment—good looks, energy, youth itself, seeming but an added handicap—when London revealed herself to him in her solidarity, revealed herself as a prodigious living creature, awful in her mysterious vigour, ever big with impending birth, merciless with impending death. As she showed herself to him then, with life all untried before him, so she showed herself still when, in the blackness of his present humour, all life worth the name appeared over and passed. He had changed, so he believed, to the point of nullity and final ineptitude. She remained strong, active, relentless as ever. As long ago, so now, she struck him as monstrous. Yet now, though all the conditions were changed, he had, as long ago, an instinct that from her there was no escape.
"I have served you honestly enough all these years," he said—since she had voice to speak, she had also ears to hear, mayhap—"and you have taken much and given little. To-day you have turned me off, told me to quit. But where, I ask you, can I go? I am too stiffened by work, unskilled in travel, too unadaptable to begin again elsewhere. Moreover, you hold the record of my experience, all my glad and sorrowful memories. I might try to leave you, but it's no use. I am planted and rooted in you, monstrous mother that you are. If I know myself, I should go only to come back."
For the moment the calm of long self-control was broken up within him. Dominic Iglesias dwelt, consciously and sensibly, in the horror of the Outer Darkness—which horror is known only to that small and somewhat suspect minority of human beings who are also capable, by the operation of the divine mercy, of dwelling in the glory of the Uncreated Light. The swing of the pendulum is equal to right as to left. He was staggered by the misery of his own isolation—a stranger, as he suddenly realised, by temperament and ideals, as well as by race! Then resolutely he turned his back on this, with an instinct of self-preservation directing his thought to things practical and average.
For example, that question of the pension—concerning which he now found, to his slight surprise, he was no longer the least in doubt. This money was his by right. The hard strain in his nature was dominant—to the full he would claim his rights. And since in moments of despair the human mind invariably requires a human victim, be it merely a simulacrum, a waxen image of a man to melt in the fires of its humiliation and revolt, Iglesias remembered, with much contemptuous satisfaction, the ironical portrait of Sir Abel Barking adorning the wall of the latter's private room at the bank. He hailed the diabolic talent of the artist who had laid bare with such subtle skill the flatulence of his sitter. It was a pretty revenge, very assuaging just now to Iglesias. For the real man, as he reflected, was not the man who sat heavily self-complacent in a library chair, exuding platitudes and pride of patronage; but the man who hung upon the wall forever ridiculous while paint and canvas should last. Thus would he go down to posterity! And to Dominic Iglesias, just now, it seemed very excellent that posterity should know him for the wind-bag hypocrite he essentially was. Securely entrenched behind his own large prosperity, uxoriousness, paternity, had he not counted his, Iglesias', blessings to him; counselling amusement, rest, congratulating him on just all that which made for his present distress—namely, his obscure position, his enforced idleness, his absence of human ties, the general meagreness of his state in life? The more he thought of the incident, the more it filled him with indignation and disgust. Therefore, very certainly he would claim his pension; claim an infinitesimal but actual fraction of this man's great wealth; would live long so as to claim it as long as possible, till the paying of it, indeed, should become a weariness to the payer. And he would spend it, too, unquestionably he would. Mr. Iglesias' rare and gracious smile had an almost cruel edge to it.
"The machine shall become a man again," he said. "And the man shall amuse himself. How, I don't yet know, but I will find out. Work has made me dull and inept."
He straightened himself up, tired, yet unbroken, defiant, aware—though the horror of the Outer Darkness was yet upon him—of purpose still militant and unspent.
"Play may make me the reverse of dull and inept. I have always been diligent and methodical. I will continue to be so. This enterprise admits of no delay. I will begin at once, begin to-morrow, to amuse myself."