Multitude and Solitude

JOHN MASEFIELD
Author of The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow in the Bye Street, The Daffodil Fields, Captain Margaret, etc.
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916
TO MY WIFE

MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE
What play do they play? Some confounded play or other. Let's send for some cards. I ne'er saw a play had anything in't. A True Widow.
Roger Naldrett, the writer, sat in his box with a friend, watching the second act of his tragedy. The first act had been received coldly; the cast was nervous, and the house, critical as a first-night audience always is, had begun to fidget. He watched his failure without much emotion. He had lived through his excitement in the days before the production; but the moment interested him, it was so unreal. The play was not like the play which he had watched so often in rehearsal. Unless some speech jarred upon him, as failing to help the action, he found that he could not judge of it in detail. In the manuscript, and in the rehearsals, he had tested it only in detail. Now he saw it as a whole, as something new, as a rough and strong idea, of which he could make nothing. Shut up there in the box, away from the emotions of the house, he felt himself removed from time, the only person in the theatre under no compulsion to attend. He sat far back in the box, so that his friend, John O'Neill, might have a better view of the stage. He was conscious of the blackness of John's head against the stage lights, and of a gleam of gilt on the opposite boxes. Sometimes when, at irregular intervals, he saw some of the cast, on the far left of the stage, he felt disgust at the crudity of the grease paint smeared on their faces.
Sometimes an actor hesitated for his lines, forgot a few words, or improvised others. He drew in his breath sharply, whenever this happened, it was like a false note in music; but he knew that he was the only person there who felt the discord. He found himself admiring the address of these actors; they had nerve; they carried on the play, though their memories were a whirl of old tags all jumbled together. It was when there was a pause in the action, through delay at an entrance, that the harrow drove over his soul; for in the silence, at the end of it, when those who wanted to cough had coughed, there sometimes came a single half-hearted clap, more damning than a hiss. At those times he longed to be on the stage crying out to the actors how much he admired them. He was shut up in his box, under cover, but they were facing the music. They were playing to a cold wall of shirt-fronts, not yet hostile, but puzzled by the new mind, and vexed by it. They might rouse pointed indifference in the shirt-fronts, they might rouse fury, they would certainly win no praise. Roger felt pity for them. He wished that the end would come swiftly, that he might be decently damned and allowed to go.