Multitude and Solitude

by John Masefield

IV

There's hope left yet.
The Virgin Martyr.

At seven o'clock he went to the station, hoping (against his better judgment) that he might see Ottalie at the train. The train was very crowded. The travellers wore the pleased, expectant look with which one leaves an English city. Ottalie was not among them. He went down the train twice, in opposite directions, without success. She was not there. She must have started that morning. He had missed her.

He sat down on one of the station benches. His world seemed slipping from him. He told himself that to-morrow he would have to work, or all these worries would destroy him. He felt more lonely than he had ever felt in his life. A week before, he would have had O'Neill, Pollock, and another friend, now abroad. O'Neill was gone, without a farewell. Pollock was fighting his own battles, with poor success. Ottalie was thundering across France, or, perhaps, just drawing into Paris.

A longing to see some one drove him out of the station. He walked to Soho, to a Spanish restaurant, where some of his friends sometimes dined.

Here, at night, the curious may visit Spain, and hear the guttural, lisping speech, and munch upon chuletas, and swallow all manner of strangeness in cazuelas. Very bold young men cry aloud there for "Mozo," lisping the z. The less bold signal with the hand. The timid point, and later, eat that which is set before them, asking no question, obeying Holy Writ, though without spiritual profit.

On entering the place, he bowed to the Scotch-looking, heavily-earringed Spanish woman, who sat at the desk reading Blanco y Negro. She gave him a "Buenas tardes," without lifting her eyes. Then came, from his right, a cry of "Naldrett!"

Two painters, a poet, and proportionable woman-kind, were dining together there, over the evening papers.

"How are you?" said one of the painters.

"We've just been reading about you," said the other.

"Reading the most terrible things," said the poet.

"Shew him The Orb. The Orb's the best."

"No. Shew him The Planet. The one who says he ought to be prosecuted."

Roger, refusing Orb and Planet, shook hands with one of the ladies. She was a little actress, delicate, fragile, almost inhuman, with charm in all she did. She said that she had been reading his book of The Handful, and had found it very "interesting." She wanted Roger to come to tea, to talk over a scheme of hers. It dawned on Roger that she was saving him from his friends.

"You're the man of the moment," said the poet.

"Don't you pay any attention to any of them," said the painter who had first spoken. "You may be quite sure that when one has to say a thing in a hurry, as these critics must, one says the easiest thing, and the thing which comes handiest to say. If I paid attention to all they say about me I should be in a lunatic asylum. Besides, what does it matter what they say? Who are they, when all is said?"

The talk drifted into a wit combat, in which the seven set themselves to define a critic with the greatest possible pungency and precision. Having done this, to their own satisfaction, they set themselves to the making of a composite sonnet on the critic, upon the backs of bills of fare. One of the painters drew an ideal critic, in the manners, now of Tintoret, now of Velasquez, now of Watteau. The other, who complained that old masters ought to be ranked with critics, because they spoiled the market for living painters, drew him in the manner of Rops.

After dinner, Roger walked home by a roundabout road, which took him past his theatre. A few people hung about outside it, staring idly at a few others who were entering. His play was still running, it seemed, in spite of the trouble. Falempin was brave.

He walked back to his rooms, wondering why he had not gone to Ireland that night. London oppressed and pained him. He thought it an ugly city, full of ugly life. He was without any desire to be a citizen of such a city. He disliked the place and her people; but to-night, being, perhaps, a little humbled by his misfortunes, he found himself wondering whether all the squalor of the town, its beastly drinking dens, its mobs of brainless, inquisitive shouters, might not be changed suddenly to beauty and noble life by some sudden general inspiration, such as comes to nations at rare times under suffering. He decided against it. Patience under suffering was hardly one of our traits.

On his sitting-room table was a letter from Ottalie, bearing the London post-mark across the Greek stamps, and underneath them the legend, "2d. to pay." By the date on the letter it had been ten days in getting to him. He opened it eagerly, half expecting to find in it the very letter of the dream, though something told him that the dream-letters had contained her essential thoughts, the letter in his hand the worldly covering of those thoughts, translated into earthly speech with its reservations and half-heartedness. He learned from this letter that she had been for a month in Greece, and was now coming home. She would be for four days, from the 7th to the 11th, at her flat in London. She hoped to see him there, before she returned to Ireland. To his amazement the postscript ran: "I have read your last book. It reads like the diary of a lost soul," the very words seen by him in dream. For the moment this did not move him so deeply as the thought that this was the 11th of the month. She had been in London with him for the last three or four days, and he had never known it. He had seen her light blown out the night before. If he had had a little sense he would have called on her early that morning before he had breakfasted. Had he done so, he would have seen her, he would have driven with her to the station, he could, perhaps, have travelled with her to Ireland. The bitterness of his disappointment made him think, for a moment, meanly of Agatha, who, in his fancy, had kept them apart. He suspected that Agatha had held back the letter. How else could it have been posted in London with Greek stamps upon it?

Then came the thought that she had not gone to Ireland that morning. He had never known her go back to Ireland by the day-boats. She liked to sleep in the train, and save the daylight for life. His knowledge of her told him what had happened. She had taken her luggage to the station, soon after breakfast. Having done this, she had passed the day in amusement, dined at the station hotel, and now—

He sat down, beaten by this last disappointment. Now she was steaming north in the night express to Port Patrick. She had only just gone. She was within a dozen miles of him. The train did not start till eight. It was now only fourteen minutes past. If he had not been a fool; if he had only come home instead of going to the station!

"Selina," he cried down to the basement, "when did this letter come? This letter with the foreign stamp."

"Just after you'd gone out this morning, sir."

Five minutes' patience would have altered his life.

"A lady come to see you, sir."

"What was her name?"

"She didn't leave a name, sir."

"What was she like? When did she come?"

"She came about a few minutes before nine, sir. She seemed very put out at not finding you."

"Had she been here before?"

"I think she was the lady come here one time with another lady, a dark lady, when you 'ad the suite upstairs, sir. I think she come in one evenin' when you read to them."

Ottalie had been there. It must have been Ottalie.

"I told her you was gone awy, sir. You 'adn't said where to."

He thanked Selina. He bit his lips lest he should ask whether the visitor had worn earrings. He went back into his room and sat down. He had not realised till then how much Ottalie meant to him. A voice rang in his brain that he had missed her, missed her by a few minutes, through his own impatience, through some chance, through some juggling against him of the powers outside life. All his misery seemed rolled into a leaden ball, which was smashing through his brain. The play was a little thing. The loss of John was a little thing. Templeton was farcical, the critics were little gnats, but to have missed Ottalie, to have lost Ottalie! He tasted a moment of despair.

Despair does not last long. It kills, or it goads to action. With Roger it lasted for a few seconds, and then changed to a passion to be on the way to her. But he would have to wait, he would have to wait. There were all those interminable hours to wait. All a whole night of purgatory. What could he do meanwhile? How could he pass that night? What could he do? Work was impossible. Talk was impossible. He remembered then, another thing.

He opened his Bradshaw feverishly. Yes. There was another boat-train to Holyhead. He could be in Dublin a little after dawn the next day; "8.45 from Euston." He could just do it. He would catch that second boat-train. It was a bare chance; but it could be done. He could be with Ottalie by the afternoon of the next day. But money; he had not enough money. Five minutes to pack. He could spare that; but how about money? To whom could he go for money? Who would have money to lend upon the instant? It would have to be some one near at hand. Every second made his task harder. Where would there be a cab? Which of his friends lived on the way to Euston? Who lives between Westminster and Euston? It is all park, and slum, and boarding-house. Big Ben, lifting his voice, intoned the quarter.

He caught a cab outside Dean's Yard. He drove to a friend in Thames Chambers. The friend lent him a sovereign and some loose silver. He had enough now to take him to Ireland. He bade the cabman to hurry. The newsboys were busy in the Strand. They were calling out something about winner, and disaster. He saw one newsbill flutter out from a man's hand. "British Liner Lost," ran the heading. He felt relieved that the monkey-mind had now something new to occupy it. The changing of the newsbill heading made him feel cleaner.

Up to the crossing of Holborn, he felt that he would catch the train. At Holborn the way was barred by traffic. The Euston Road was also barred to him. He missed the train by rather more than a minute. He was too tired to feel more disappointment. The best thing for him to do, he thought, would be to sleep at home, catch the boat-train in the morning and travel all day. That plan would land him in Ireland within twenty-four hours. He could then either stay a night in port, or post the forty miles to his cottage. In any case he would be with Ottalie, actually in her very presence, within forty hours. By posting the forty miles he might watch the next night outside her window, in the deep peace of the Irish country, almost within sound of the sea. The thought of the great stars sweeping over Ottalie's home, and of the moon coming up, filling the valley, and of the little wind which trembled the leaves, giving, as it were, speech to the beauty of the night, moved him intensely. In his overwrought mood, these things were the only real things. The rest was all nightmare.

Driving back from Euston, he noticed another affiche, bearing the words, "Steamer Sunk. Lives Lost." He paid no attention to it. He wondered vaguely, as he had often wondered in the past, what kind of a mind browsed upon these things. A disaster, an attack upon the Government, and a column of betting news. That was what God's image brooded upon, night after night. That was what God's image wrote about nightly, after an expensive education.

He was very tired; but there could be no rest for him till he had enquired after Mrs. Pollock. She had given birth to a little girl, who was likely to live. She herself was very weak, but not in serious danger. Pollock was making good resolutions in a mist of cigarette smoke. Roger was not wanted there. He went home, to bed, tired out. He slept heavily.

He was fresh and merry the next morning. He packed at leisure, breakfasted at ease, and drove away to the station, feeling like a boy upon a holiday. He was leaving this grimy, gritty wilderness. He was going to forget all about it. In a few hours he would be over the border, in a new land. That night he would be over the sea, so changed, and in a land so different, that all this would seem like a horrid, far-away dream, indescribably squalid and useless. London was a strong, poisonous drug, to be taken in minute doses. He was going to take a strong corrective.

The train journey was long and slow; but after Carlisle was passed, his mind began to feel the excitement of it. In a couple of hours he would be in a steamer, standing well forward, watching for the double lights to flash, and the third light, farther to the south, to blink and gleam. The dull, low, Scottish landscape, where Burns lived and Keats tramped, gave way to irregular low hills, indescribably lonely, with boggy lowland beneath them and forlorn pools. He looked out for one such pool. He had often noticed it before, on his journeys that way. It was a familiar landmark to him. Like all the rest of that Scottish land, it was associated in his mind with Ottalie. All the journey was associated with her. He had travelled past those hills and pools so often, only to see her, that they had become a sort of ritual to him, a part of seeing her, something which inevitably led to her. After the hill with the cairn, he saw his landmark. There glittered the pool under the last of the sun. The little lonely island, not big enough for a peel, but big enough, years ago, for a lake-dwelling, shone out in a glimmer of withered grass. A few bents, bristling the shallows, bowed and bowed and bowed as the wind blew. A reef of black rocks glided out at the pool's end, like an eel swimming. Roger again had the fancy, which had risen in his mind before a dozen times, when passing the pool, that he would like to be a boy there, with a toy boat. Another landmark tenderly looked for, was a little white house rather far from the line, high up on the moor. He had once thought (in passing) that that would be a pleasant place for a week's stay when he and Ottalie were married. The tenderness of the original fancy lingered still. It had become an inevitable part of the journey. After a few minutes of looking, it came into view, newly whitewashed, or, it may be, merely very bright in the sunset. A woman stood at a little garden gate. He had seen her there once before. Perhaps she looked out for this evening train. It might be an event in her life. She must be very lonely there, so many miles from anywhere. After this, he saw only one more landmark, a copse of spruce-fir by the line. A faint mist was gathering. There was going to be a fog. The boat would make a slow passage.

The mist was dim over everything when the train stopped. He got out on to a platform which was wet with mist. Wet milk-cans gleamed. Rails shone below his feet. A bulk of a mail-train rose up, vacant and dim. People shouted and passed. There was a hot whiff of ship's engine. A man passed, with nervous hurry, carrying two teacups from the refreshment-room. Somebody cried out to come along with the mails. An Irish voice answered excitedly, with a witty bitterness which defined the owner to Roger, in vivid outline. Mist came driving down under the shed. A few moist steps took him to a rail of chains, beyond which was motionless sea, a dim, grey-brown under the mist, with a gull or two drifting and falling. A row of lights dimly dying away beyond, shewed him the steamer. The gangway slanted down, dripping wet from the handrail. A man was saying that "Indeed, it was," in the curt, charming accent of the hills.

He did not recognise the steamer. Her name, seen upon a life-belt, was new to him. He did not remember a Lady of Lyons on this line. He laid his bag in a corner of the saloon, where already timid ladies were preparing for the worst, by lying down, under rugs, with bottles of salts at hand. The smell of the saloon, the smells of disinfectant, oil, rubber, and food, mixed with the sickliness of a place half aired and overheated, drove him on deck again. An elderly man was telling his wife that it had been a terrible business. The lady answered with the hope that nothing would happen to them, for what would poor Eddie do?

Somebody near the gangway, a hills-man by his speech, probably the ticket-collector, or mate, was speaking in the intervals of work. He was checking the slinging-in of crates, and talking to an acquaintance. Roger had no wish to hear him. He was impatient for the ship to start. But sitting down there, wrapped in his mackintosh, he could not help overhearing odds and ends of a story among the clack of the winches. Something terrible had happened, and Tom would know about it, and, indeed, it was a sad thing for the widow O'Hara; but it was a quick death, anyway, and might come on any man, for the matter of that. Indeed, it was a quick death, and the fault lay in these fogs, which never gave a man a chance till she was right on top of you. What use were sidelights, when a fog might make a headlight as red as blood? She had come right into her, just abaft the bridge, and cut her clean down. They never saw a stim of her. She wasn't even sounding her horn. Yes. One of these big five-masted Yankee schooners. The John P. Graves. Just out of Glasgow. They hadn't even a look-out set. Taking her chance. Her crowd was drunk. And one of the dead was an English wumman only married that morning. No. The man was saved. Like a stunned man. The most of the bodies was ashore to the wast of the light. There was a fierce jobble wast of the light.

There had been a collision somewhere. There were always being collisions. Roger listened, and ceased to listen, thinking of that "Steamer Sunk, Lives Lost" on the London placard. He thought that these vivid, picturesque talkers, professional men; but full of feeling, gave such an event a kind of poetry, and made it a part of their lives, while the paper-reader, very far away in the city, glanced at it, among a dozen similar events, none of them closely brought home to him, or, indeed, to be understood by him, and dismissed the matter with an indifferent "Really. How ghastly!" He reproved himself for thinking thus. This collision had affected the men near him in their daily business. Londoners were affected by disasters which touched themselves. This disaster, whatever it was, did not touch him. He was in a contrary, bitter mood, too much occupied with himself to feel for others. He was thinking that the men who did most were self-centred men, shut away from the world without. A snail, suddenly stung on the tender horn, may think similarly.

It was dark night, but clear enough, when they reached Ireland. The lights in the bay shone as before. The lights on the island had not changed. One, high up, which he had often noticed, was as like a star as ever. Little glimmers of light danced before him, as he dined in the hotel, attended by a grave old waiter. The hotel was fuller than usual at that time of year. It was full of restless, anxious, sad-looking people, some of whom had been with him in the boat. They gave him the fancy that they had all come over for a funeral. After supping, he went hurriedly to bed.

In the morning, at breakfast, there were the same sad-looking people. They sat at the next table, talking in subdued voices, drinking tea. They were breakfasting on tea. An old woman with that hard, commercial face, assumed by predatory natures without energy, mothered the party. Her red eyes, swollen by weeping, emphasised the vulpine in her. A late-comer rustled up. "Alice won't come down," she said. "She'll have some tea upstairs."

The old woman, calling a maid, sent tea to Alice. A pale girl, daughter to the matron in all but spirit, snuffled on the perilous brink, worn out by grief and weariness. The old woman rebuked her. "We shall have to be starting in a minute." She had that cast-iron nature limited to itself. Roger wondered whether in old Rome, or Puritan England, that kind of character had been consciously bred in the race. He changed his table.

The waiter brought him a newspaper. He fingered it, and left it untouched. He was not going to open a paper till he could be sure that the uproar about him had been forgotten. He was a timorous, hunted hart. The hounds should not follow him into this retreat. He debated as he ate, whether he should bicycle, take the "long car," a forty-mile drive, or take train. Finally, seeing that the roads were dry, and the wind not bad, he decided to ride, sending his baggage by the car. He liked riding to Ottalie. It was a difficult ride, he thought, owing to the blasts which beat down from the hills, but there came a moment, as he well remembered, rather near to the end of the journey, when the hills gave place to mountains. Here the road, topping a crest, fell away, shewing a valley and a stretch of sea. Hills and headlands rolled north in ranks to a bluish haze. The crag beyond all rose erect from the surf, an upright, defined line in the blueness. From Ottalie's home, high up, he could see that great crag. With an opera-glass he could see the surf bursting below it. It was now eight o'clock. The morning boat was coming in. He would start. By lunch-time he would be in his little cottage above the sea. He would swim before lunch. After lunch he would climb through the long grey avenue of beeches to Ottalie's home. The old excitement came over him to give to his ardour the memory of many other rides to her.

Riding through the squalid town he found himself reckoning up little curious particular details of things seen by him on similar journeys in the past. The clatter of the "long car" behind him made him spurt ahead. It was a point of vanity with him to beat the car over the forty-mile course. The last thing noticed by him as he cleared the town was a yellow affiche, bearing the legend:

"LOSS OF THE 'LORD ULLIN'
"CORONER'S VERDICT."