Multitude and Solitude

by John Masefield

V

One news straight came huddling on another
Of death, and death, and death.
The Broken Heart.

The sun was golden over all the marvel of Ireland. The sea came in sight from time to time. Beyond a cliff castle a gannet dropped, white and swift, with a splash which faintly came to him a quarter of a mile away. Turning inland, he rode into the hills. Little low rolling green hills, wooded and sunny, lay ahead. On each side of him were pastures unspeakably green, sleepily cropped by cattle. He set himself to ride hard through this bright land. He spurted up the little hills, dipped down, and again climbed. He was eager to reach a gate on a hilltop, from which he could see the headland which shut him from the land of his desire. As he rode, he thought burningly of what that afternoon would be to him. Ottalie might not be there. She might be away. She might be out; but something told him she would be there. With Ottalie in the world, the world did not matter greatly. The thought of Ottalie gave him a fine sense, only properly enjoyed in youth, of his own superiority to the world. With a thumping heart, due not to emotion, but to riding uphill, he climbed the gate, and looked out over the beautiful fields to the distant headland. There it lay, gleaming, fifteen miles away. Beyond it was Ottalie. Protesters, in old, unhappy far-off times, had painted a skull and cross-bones on the gate, as, in other parts, they dug graves at front doors, or fired with lucky slugs from cover. The bones were covered with lichen, now; but the skull grinned at Roger friendly, as it had often grinned. Riding on, and glancing back over his shoulder, at risk of going into the ditch, he saw the skull's eyes fixed upon him.

The last part of the ride was downhill. He lifted his bicycle over a low stone wall, and vaulted over after it. The sea was within fifty yards of him, in brimming flood. Norah Kennedy, the old woman who kept house for him, was there at the door, looking out.

"Indeed, Mr. Naldrett," she began; "the blessing of God on you. I was feared the boat was gone down on you. It's a sad time this for you to be coming here. Indeed, I never saw you looking better. You're liker your mother than your da. He was a grand man, your da, of all the folks ever I remember. Indeed, your dinner is just ready for you. Will I wet the tea, sir?"

The old woman rambled on from subject to subject, glancing at each, so lightly, that one less used to her ways would not have suspected the very shrewd and bitter critic hidden beneath the charm of the superficial nature. Roger felt somehow that the critic was alert in her, that she resented something in his manner or dress. He concluded that he was late, or that she, perhaps in her zeal for him, had put on the joint too early. As usual, when she was not pleased, she served the dinner muttering personal remarks, not knowing (as is the way with lonely old people, who talk to themselves) that they were sometimes audible. "I'll do you no peas for your supper, my man," was one of her asides, when he helped himself sparingly to peas. "It's easy seen you're only an Englishman," was another, at his national diffidence towards a potato. Roger wondered what was wrong, and how soon he would become again "the finest young man ever I remember, except perhaps it was your da. Indeed, Mr. Roger, to see your da, and him riding wast in a red coat, you would think it was the Queen's man,* or one of the Saints of God. There was no one I ever seen had the glory on him your da had, unless it was yourself stepping." Roger's da had died of drink there, after a life passed in the preservation of the game laws.

* The late Prince Consort.

When his baggage arrived, he dressed carefully, and set out up the hill to Ottalie's house, which he could see, even from his cottage, as a white, indeterminate mass, screened by trees from sea-winds. The road branched off into a loaning, hedged with tumbled stone on each side. As he climbed the loaning, the roguish Irish bulls, coming in a gallop, at the sound of his feet, peered down at him, through hedges held together by Providence, or left to the bulls' imagination. A lusty white bull followed him for some time, restrained only by a foot-high wire.

"Indeed," said an old labourer, who, resting by the way, expressed sympathy both for Roger and the bull, "he's only a young bull. He wad do no one anny hurrt, except maybe he felt that way. Let you not trouble, sir."

Up above Ottalie's house was the garden. The garden wall backed upon the loaning. A little blue door with peeling, blistered paint, let him into the garden, into a long, straight rose-walk, in which the roses had not yet begun to bloom. A sweet-smelling herb grew by the door. He crumpled a leaf of it between his fingers, thinking how wonderful the earth was, which could grow this fragrance, out of mould and rain. The bees were busy among the flowers. The laurustine was giving out sweetness. In the sun of that windless afternoon, the smell thickened the air above the path, making it a warm clot of perfume, to breathe which was to breathe beginning life. Butterflies wavered, keeping low down, in the manner of butterflies near the coast. Birds made musical calls, sudden delightful exclamations, startling laughter, as though the god Pan laughed to himself among the laurustine bushes.

He felt the beauty of the late Irish season as he had never before felt it. It stirred him to the excitement which is beyond poetry, to that delighted sensitiveness, in which the mind, tremulously open, tremulously alive, can neither select nor combine. He longed to be writing poetry; but in the open air the imagination is subordinated to the senses. The lines which formed in his mind were meaningless exclamations. Nature is a setting, merely. The soul of man, which alone, of created things, regards her, is the important thing.

The blinds of the sunny southern front were drawn down; but the marks of carriage wheels upon the drive shewed him that she had returned. After ringing, he listened for the crackled tinkle far away in the kitchen, and turning, saw a squirrel leap from one beech to another, followed by three or four sparrows. Footsteps shuffled near. Somewhere outside, at the back, an old woman's voice asked whiningly for a bit of bread, for the love of the Almighty God, since she was perished with walking and had a cough on her that would raise pity in a martial man. A younger voice, high, clear, and hard, bidding her whisht, and let her get out of it, ceased suddenly, in her prohibition. The door opened. There was old Mary Laverty, the housekeeper.

"How are you, Mary? Are you quite well?"

"I am, sir. I thank you."

"Is Miss Fawcett in?"

"Have you not heard, sir?"

"Heard what?"

"Miss Ottalah's dead, sir."

"What?"

"She was drowned in the boat that was run into, crossing the sea, two days ago. There was a fog, sir. Did no one tell you, sir?"

"No."

"There was eleven of them drowned, sir."

"Was she ... Is she lying here?"

"Yes, sir. She's within. The burying will no be till Saturday. She is no chested yet."

"Was Miss Agatha with her?"

"Miss Agatha was not in the cabbon. She was not wetted, indeed. She had not so much as her skirrt wetted, sir. She is within, sir."

"Do you think she would see me?"

"Come in, sir. I will ask."

He stepped in, feeling stunned. His mind gave him an image of something hauled ashore. There was an image of a dripping thing being carried by men up the drive, the gravel crunched under their boots—crunch—crunch in slow time, then a rest at the door, and then, slowly, into the hall, and drip, drip, up the stairs to the darkened bedroom. Then out again, reverently, fumbling their hats, to talk about it with the cook. He did not realise what had happened. Here he was in the room. There was his photograph. There was the Oriental bowl full of potpourri. Ottalie had been drowned. Ottalie was lying upstairs, a dead thing, with neither voice nor movement. Ottalie was dead. She had sat with him in that very room. The old precise sofa was her favourite seat. How could she be dead? She had been in London, asking for him, only two days before. Her letter was in his pocket. There was her music. There was her violin. Why did she not come in, as of old, with her smiling daintiness, and with her hands in great gardening gauntlets clasping tulips for the jars? That beauty was over for the world.

He was stunned by it. He did not know what was happening; but there was Agatha, motioning to him not to get up. He said something about pity. "I pity you." After a minute, he added, "My God!" He was trying to say something to comfort her. The change in her told him that it was all true. It branded it into him. Ottalie was dead, and this was what it meant to the world. This was death, this horror.

His mind groped about like a fainting man for something to clutch. Baudelaire's lines rose up before him. The sentiment of French decadence, with its fancy of ingratitude, made him shudder. A turmoil of quotations seethed and died down in him, "And is old Double dead?" "Come away, death," with a phrase of Arne's setting. A wandering strange phrase of Grieg.

He went up to Agatha and took her hands.

"You poor thing; you poor thing," he repeated. "My God, you poor women suffer!" The clock was ticking all the time. Some one was bringing tea to the next room. The lines in the Persian rug had a horrible regularity. "Agatha," he said. Afterwards he believed that he kissed her, and that she thanked him.

"I don't know. I don't know," she said. "Oh, I'm so very wretched. So wretched. So wretched. And I can't die." She shook in a passion of tears.

"She was wonderful," he said, choking. "She was so beautiful. All she did."

"She was with me a minute before," said Agatha. "We were on deck. She went down to get a wrap. It was so cold in the fog. I had left her wraps in the dining-room. It was my fault."

"Don't say that, Agatha. That's nonsense."

"I never saw her again. It all happened at once. The next instant we were run into. I couldn't see anything. There was a crash, which made us heel right over, and then there was a panic. I didn't know what had happened. I tried to get down to her; but a lot of half-drunk tourists came raving and fighting to get to the boats. I couldn't get to the doors past them. One of them hit me with his fist and swore at me. The ship was sinking. I nearly got to the door, and then a stewardess cried out that everybody was up from below, and then a great brute of a man flung me into a boat. I hit my head. When I came to, I distinctly felt some one pulling off my rings, and there was a sort of weltering noise where the ship had sunk. One of the tourists cried out: 'Wot-ow! A shipwreck; oh, Polly.' Everybody was shouting all round us, and there was a poor little child crying. I caught at the hand which was taking my rings." Here she stopped. There had been some final humiliation here. She went on after a moment: "The men said that every one had been saved. I didn't know till we all landed. Nor till after that even. It was so foggy. Then I knew.

"There was a very kind Scotch lady who took me to the hotel. She was very kind. I don't know who she was. The divers came from Belfast during the night. Ottalie was in the saloon. She was wearing her wraps. She must have just put them on. There were five others in the saloon. The inquest was ghastly. One of the witnesses was drunk, and the jury were laughing. The waiter at the hotel knew me. He wired to Leslie, and Leslie hired a motor and came over. Colonel Fawcett is in bed with sciatica. Leslie is arranging everything."

"Is Leslie here?"

"No. Maggie has bronchitis. He had to go back. He'll be here late to-night."

"I might have been with you, Agatha. If I'd stayed in another minute on Tuesday morning, I should have seen her. I should have travelled with you. It wouldn't have happened. I should have gone for the wraps."

"We saw you at your play, on Monday."

"I didn't know you were in town. Oh, if I had only known!"

"It was my fault that you did not know. I kept back her letter to you. I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me."

"Don't think of that now," said Roger gently. He had known it from the first. "Is there anything which I can do, Agatha? Letters to write?"

"There are stacks of letters. They all say the same thing. Oh, I am so wretched, so very wretched!" The shuddering took hold of her. She wept in a shaking tremble which seemed to tear her in pieces.

"Agatha," said Roger, "will you come to Belfast with me? I will hire the motor in the village. I must get some flowers. It would do you good to come."

"No. I must stay. I shall only have her two days more."

He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained, in the presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not flick her jealousies. Ottalie was lying just overhead, within a dozen feet of him. Ten minutes ago he had been thinking of her as a lover thinks of his beloved. His heart had been leaping with the thought of her. There she was, in that quiet room, behind the blinds, lying on the bed, still and blank. And where was what had made her so wonderful? Where was the spirit who had used her as a lodging? She had been all that makes woman wonderful. Beautiful with beauty of mind; a perfect, perfect spirit. And she was dead. She was lying upstairs dead. And here were her two lovers, listening to the clock, listening to the spade-strokes in the garden, where old John was at work. The smell of the potpourri, which she had made the summer before, seemed as strong as incense. The portrait by Raeburn, of her great-grandfather, looked down dispassionately, with eyes that were very like her eyes. The clock had told the time to that old soldier when he went to be painted. It had gone on ticking ever since. It had been ticking when the old soldier died, when his son died, when his grandson died. Now she was dead, and it was ticking still, a solemn old clock, by Frodsham, of Sackville Street, Dublin, 1797, the year before the rising. It would be ticking still, perhaps, when all the hearts then alive would have ceased to tick. There was something pitiless in that steady beat. Three or four generations of Fawcetts had had their lives measured by it, all those beautiful women and noble soldiers. All the "issue" mentioned in Burke.

He went out into the light. All the world seemed melted into emotion, and poured upon him. He was beaten. It poured upon him. He drew it in with his breath. Everything within sight was an agony with memories of her. "I must be doing something," he said aloud. "I must get flowers. I shall wake up presently." He turned at the gate, his mind surging. "Could Agatha be sure that she is dead? Perhaps I am dead. Or it may be a dream." It was not a dream.

At the bottom of the loaning he met a red-haired man from whom in old time he had bought a boat.

"It's a fine day, sir," said the man.

"John," said Roger, "tell Pat Deloney I want the car, to go to Belfast at once. I shall want him to drive. Tell him to come for me here."

"Indeed, sir," said John, looking at him narrowly. "There's many feeling that way. There was a light on her you'd think it was a saint, and her coming east with brightness."

After John had gone down to the village, there limped up an old, old, half-witted drunken poet, who fiddled at regattas. He saluted Roger, who leaned on a gate, staring uphill towards the house.

"Indeed, Mr. Roger," said the old man; "there's a strong sorrow on the place this day. There was a light burning beyant. I seen the same for her da, and for her da's da. There was them beyant wanted her." He waited for Roger to speak, but getting no answer began to ramble in Irish, and then craved for maybe a sixpence, because "indeed, I knew your da, Mr. Roger. Ah, your da was a grand man, would turn the heads of all the women, and they great queens itself, having the pick of professors and prime ministers and any one they'd a mind to."

After a time, singing to himself in Irish, he limped on up the loaning to the house, to beg maybe a bit of bread, in exchange for the fact that he had seen a light burning for her, just as he had seen it for her da, her da's da, and (when the kitchen brandy had arisen in him) her da's da's da years ago.

The car came snorting up the hill, and turned in the broad expanse where the loaning joined the highway. John opened the door for Roger. "If I was a young gentleman and had the right to do it," he said, "I would go in a cyar the like of that cyar down all the craggy precipices of the world." The car shook, spat, and darted. "Will ye go by Torneymoney?" said Pat. "There's no rossers that way."

"By Torneymoney," said Roger. "Drive hard."

"Indeed," said Pat; "we will do great deeds this day. We will make a strong story by the blessing of God. Let you hold tight, your honour. There's holes in this road would give a queer twist to a sea-admiral."

The funeral was on Saturday. About a dozen men came. There were five or six Fawcetts and old Mr. Laramie, who had married Maisie Fawcett, Ottalie's aunt, one of the beauties of her time. The rest were friends from the countryside, Englishmen in faith, education, and feeling. They stood with bared heads in the little lonely Protestant graveyard, as Roman soldiers may have stood by the pyres of their mates in Britain. They were aliens there. They were part of the garrison. They were hiding under the ground something too good and beautiful to belong to that outcast country. Roger had the fancy that God would have to be very strong to hold that outpost. He had not slept for two nights. Sentiments and fancies were overwhelming him. It was one of those Irish days in which a quality or rarity in the air gives a magic, either alluring or terrible, to every bush and brook and hillock. He had often thought that Ireland was a haunted country. He thought so now, standing by Ottalie's grave. Just beyond the graveyard was the river, which was "bad," and beyond that again a hill. The hill was so "bad," that the beggarwomen, passing in the road, muttering at "the mouldy old Prots, playing at their religion, God save us," crossed themselves as they went by it. Roger prayed that that fair spirit might be at peace, among all this invisible evil. His hand went into his breast pocket from time to time to touch her letter to him. He watched Leslie Fawcett, whose face was so like hers, and old Mr. Laramie, who had won the beauty of her time, and an old uncle Fawcett, who had fought in Africa, sixty years before. The graves of other Fawcetts lay in that corner of the graveyard. He read their names, remembering them from Burke. He read the texts upon the stones. The texts had been put there in agonies of remorse and love and memory by the men and women who played croquet in an old daguerreotype in Ottalie's sitting-room. "He giveth His beloved sleep," and "It is well with the child," and one, a strange one, "Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay Thee all." They had been beautiful and noble, these Fawcetts. Not strong, not clever, but wonderful. They had had a spirit, a spiritual quality, as though for many, many centuries their women had kept themselves unspotted by anything not noble. An instinct for style running in the race of the Fawcetts for centuries had made them what they were.

A hope burned up in Roger like inspiration. All that instinct for fineness, that fastidious selection of the right and good which had worked to make Ottalie, from long before her birth, and had flowered in her, was surely eternal. She had used life to make her character beautiful and gentle, just as he had used life to discipline his mind to the expression of his imagination. "What's to come" was still unsure; but he felt sure, even as the trembling old incumbent reminded them that St. Paul had bidden them not to sorrow, that that devotion was stronger than death. Her spirit might be out in the night, he thought, as in time his would be; but what could assail that devotion? It was a strong thing, it was a holy thing. He was very sure that nothing would overcome it. Like many young men, ignorant of death, he had believed in metempsychosis. This blow of death had brought down that fancy with all the other card-houses of his mind. His nature was now, as it were, humbled to its knees, wondering, stricken, and appalled by possibilities of death undreamed of. He could not feel that Ottalie would live again, in a new body, starting afresh, in a new life-machine, with all the acquired character of the past life as a reserve of strength. He could only feel that somewhere in that great empty air, outside the precise definition of living forms, Ottalie, the little, conquered kingdom of beauty and goodness, existed still. It was something. Newman's hymn, with its lovely closing couplet, moved him and comforted him. One of the Fawcetts was crying, snuffling, with a firm mouth, as men usually cry. He himself was near to tears. He was being torn by the thought that Ottalie was lonely, very lonely and frightened, out there beyond life, beyond the order of defined live things.

He walked back with Leslie Fawcett. Agatha's mother was at the house; Leslie was stopping in the cottage with him.

"Poor little Ollie," said Leslie gently.

"She was very beautiful," said Roger. He thought, as he said it, that it was a strange thing for an Englishman to say to a dead woman's brother. "She was very beautiful. It must be terrible to you. You knew her in an intimate relation."

"Yes," said Leslie, looking hard at Roger, out of grave level eyes. "She was a very perfect character."

They were climbing the cliff road to the cottage. The sea was just below them. The water was ruffled to whiteness. Sullivan's jobble stretched in breakers across the bay from Cam Point. Gannets, plunging in the jobble, flung aloft white founts, as though shot were striking.

"You were very great friends," said Roger. "I mean, even for brother and sister."

"Johnny was her favourite brother, as a child," said Leslie. "You did not see much of Johnny. He was killed in the war. And then he was in India a long time. It was after Johnny's death that Ottalie and I began to be so much to each other. You see, Agatha was only with her about five months in the year. She was with us nearly that each year. She was wonderful with children."

"Yes," said Roger, holding open the gate of the little garden so that his guest might pass, "I know." He was not likely to forget how wonderful she had been with children. They went into the little sitting-room where Norah, in one of her black moods, gave them tea. After tea they sat in the garden, looking out over the low hedge at the bay. At sunset they walked along the coast to a place which they had called "the cove." They had used to bathe there. A little brook tumbled over a rock in a forty-foot fall. Below the fall was a pool, overgrown later in the year with meadow-sweet and honeysuckle, but clear now, save for the rushes and brambles. The brook slid out from the basin over a reddish rock worn smooth, even in its veins and knuckles, by many centuries of trickling. Storms had piled shingle below this side of water. The brook dribbled to the sea unseen, making a gurgling, tinkling noise. Up above, at the place where the fall first leapt, among some ash-trees, windy and grey, stood what was left of a nunnery, of reddish stone, fire-blackened, among a company of tumbled gravestones.

Of all the places sacred to Ottalie in Roger's mind, that was the most sacred. They had been happy there. They had talked intimately there, moved by the place's beauty. His most vivid memories of her had that beautiful place for their setting.

"Roger," said Leslie, "did you see her in town, before this happened?"

"No."

"You did not see her?"

"No. Not this time."

"She was going to see you."

"I believe she came just before she started. I had just gone out. We missed each other."

Leslie lifted his pince-nez. He was looking at Roger, with the grave, steady look by which people remembered him. Roger thought afterwards that his putting on of the pince-nez had been done tenderly, as though he had said, "I see that you are suffering. With these glasses I shall see how to help you."

"You were in love with her?" he asked, in a low voice.

"Yes. Who was not?"

"I have something to say to you about that. Have you ever thought of what marriage means? I am not talking of the passionate side. That is nothing. I am talking of the everyday aspect of married life. Have you thought of that at all?"

"All men have thought of it."

"Yes; I grant you. All men have thought of it. But do many of them think it home? Have you? I imagine that most men never follow the thought home; but leave it in day-dreams, and images of selfishness. I don't think that many men realise how infinitely much finer in quality the woman's mind is. Nor how much more delicately quick it is. Nor what the clash of that quickness and fineness, with something duller and grosser, may entail, in ordinary everyday life, to the woman."

"I think that I realise it."

"Yes, perhaps. Perhaps you do realise it, as an intellectual question. But would you, do most men, realise it as life realises it? It is one thing to imagine one's duty to one's wife, when, as a bachelor, used to all manner of self-indulgence, one sits smoking over the fire. But to carry out that duty in life taxes the character. Swiftness of responsion, tact, is rarer than genius. I imagine that with you, temporary sensation counts for more than an ordered, and possibly rigid, attitude, towards life as a whole."

"Both count for very much; or did. Nothing seems very much at this moment."

"Ottalie loved you," said Leslie simply. "But she felt that there was this want in you, of so thinking things home that they become character. She thought you too ready to surrender to immediate and, perhaps, wayward emotions. She was not sure that you could help her to be the finest thing possible to her, nor that she could so help you."

"How do you know this?"

"She discussed it with me. She wanted my help. I said that I ought not to interfere, but that, on the whole, I thought that she was right. That, in fact, your love was not in the depths of your nature. I said this; but I added that you were too sensitive to impressions not to grow, and that (rightly influenced) there is hardly anything which you might not become. The danger which threatens you seems to me to threaten all artists. Art is a great strain. It compels selfishness. I have wondered whether, if things had been different, if you had married Ottalie, you could have come from creating heroines to tend a wife's headache; or, with a headache yourself, have seen the heroine in her. We have life before us. You are all tenderness and nobleness now. It is sad that we have not this always in our minds."

"Yes," said Roger. "We have life; and all my old life is a house of cards. Before this it seemed a noble thing to strive with my whole strength to express certain principles, and to give reality and beauty to imagined character. I worked to please her. And often I did not understand her, and did not know her. I have walked in her mind, and the houses were all shut up. I could only knock at the doors and listen. And now I never shall know. I only know that she was a very beautiful thing, and that I loved her, and tried to make my work worthy of her."

"She loved you, too," said Leslie. "Whatever death may be, we ought to look upon it as a part of life. Try to be all that you might have been with her. Never mind about your work. You have been too fond of emotional self-indulgence. Set that aside, and go on. She would have married you. Try to realise that. Her nature would have been a part of yours. All your character would have been sifted and tested and refined by her. Now let us go in, Roger. Tell me what you are going to do."

"There is not much to do. I must try to rearrange my life. But I see one thing, I think, that art is very frightful when it has not the seriousness of life and death in it."

"Yes," said Leslie. "Maggie and I went into that together. We built up a theory that the art life is strangely like the life of the religious contemplative. Both attract men by the gratification of emotion as well as by the possibility of perfection. One of the great Spanish saints, I think it is St. John of Avila, says that many novices deliberately indulge themselves in religious emotion, for the sake of the emotion, instead of for the love of God; but that the knowledge of God is only revealed to those who get beyond that stage, and can endure stages of 'stypticities and drynesses,' with the same fervour. It seems to us (of course we are both Philistines) that modern art does not take enough out of those who produce it. The world flatters them too much. I suspect that flattery of the world is going on in return."

"Not from the best."

Leslie shook his head unconvinced. "You are not producing martyrs," he said. "You do not attack bad things. You laugh at them, or photograph them, and call it satire. You belong to the world, my friend Roger. You are a part of the vanity of the world, the flesh, and the devil. You have not even made the idea of woman glorious in men's minds. Otherwise they would have votes and power in the Houses. Not one of you has even been imprisoned for maiming a censor of plays. All the generations have a certain amount of truth revealed to them. It is very dangerous to discover truth. You can learn what kind of truth is being revealed to an age by noting what kind of people give their lives for ideas. It used at one time to be bishops. Think of it."

Leslie talked on, shaping the talk as he had planned it beforehand, but pointing it so gently that it was not till afterwards that Roger, realising his motives, gave him thanks for his unselfishness. They stopped on the rushy hill below Ottalie's home, just as the sun, now sinking, flamed out upon her window, till it burned like the sun itself. To Roger it seemed like a flaming door. She had looked out there, from that window. Her little writing-table, with its jar of sweet peas, and that other jar, of autumn berries and the silvery parchment of honesty, stood just below it, on each side of the blotter, bound in mottled chintz. Leslie's talk came home to him fiercely. The clawings of remorse came. He knew the room. He had never known the inmate. She was gone. He had wasted his chance. He might have known her; but he had preferred to indulge in those emotions and sentiments which keep the soul from knowledge. Now she was gone. All the agony of remorse cried out in him for one little moment in the room with her, to tell her that he loved her, for one little word of farewell, one sight of the beloved face, so that he might remember it forever. Memories rose up, choking him. She was gone. There was only the flaming door.

"Roger," said Leslie, in his even, gentle voice, which had such a quality of attraction in it, "Maggie asked me to bring you back with me to stay a couple of weeks."

In his confused sleep that night he dreamed that Ottalie was lying ill in her room, behind a bolted copper door which gleamed. The passage without the room was lighted. People came to the door to knock. A long procession of people came. He saw them listening intently there, with their ears bent to the keyhole. They were all the people who had been in love with her. Some were relatives, some were men who had seen her at dances, some were women, some were old friends like himself. Last of all came an elderly lady carrying a light. She was dressed in a robe of dim purple. She, too, knocked sharply on the door. She lingered there, long enough for him to study her fine, intellectual face. It was the face of Ottalie grown old. The woman was the completed Ottalie.

For a moment she stood there listening, as one listens at the door of a sick-room. Then she knocked a second time, sharply, calling "Ottalie!" He saw then that it was not a door but a flame. He heard from within a strangled answer, as though some one, half dead, had risen to open. Some one was coming to the door. Even in his dream his blood leaped with the expectation of his love.

But it was not his love. It was himself, strangling in the flames to get to her. She reached her hand to him. Though the flames were stifling, he touched her. It was as though the agony of many years had been changed suddenly to ecstasy. "Roger," she said. Her hand caught him, she drew him through the fire to her. He saw her raise the candle to look at his face. For a moment they were looking at each other, there in the passage. The agony was over. They were together, looking into each other's eyes. He felt her life coursing into him from her touch.

Voices spoke without. Norah, at the door, was haggling. "Is that all the milk ye've brought, Kitty O'Hara?"

The dream faded away as the life broke in upon him. There was some word, some song. Some one with a fine voice was singing outside, singing in the dream, singing about a fever. Ottalie was holding him, but her touch was fading from his sense, and joy was rushing from him. Outside, on the top spray of the blackthorn, a yellow-hammer trilled, "A little bit of bread and no—che-e-e-e-se," telling him that the world was going on.

The fortnight passed. Roger was going back to London. The day before he sailed he rode over with Leslie to take a last look at Ottalie's home. He left Leslie at the cottage, so that he might go there alone. He walked alone up the loaning. Within the garden he paused, looking down at the house. The smell of the sweet verbena was very strong, in that mild damp air, full of the promise of rain. A paper was blowing about along the walk. A white kitten, romping out from the stable, pounced on it, worried it with swift gougings of the hind claws, then, spitting, with ears laid back and tail bristling, raced away for a swift climb up a pear-tree. Roger picked up the paper. It would be a relic of the place. He felt inclined to treasure everything there, to take the house, never to go away from it, or, failing that, to carry away many of her favourite flowers. He straightened the paper so that he might read it.

It was a double page from a year-old London paper entitled Top-Knots. It consisted of scraps of gossip, scraps of news, scraps of information, seasoned with imperial feeling. It had been edited by some one with a sense of the purity of the home. It was harmless stuff. The wisdom of the reader was flattered; the wisdom of the foreigner was not openly condemned. Though some fear of invasion was implied, its possibility was flouted. "It was a maxim of our Nelson that one Englishman was worth three foreigners." The jokes were feeble. The paper catered for a class of poor, half-educated people without more leisure than the morning ride to business, and the hour of exhaustion between supper and bed. It was well enough in its way. Some day, when life is less exhausting, men will demand stuff with more life. Something caught Roger's eye. He read it through. It was the first thing read by him since his arrival there.

"SLEEPING SICKNESS.

"It is not generally known that this devastating ailment is caused by the presence of a minute micro-organism in the human system. The micro-organism may exist in unsuspected harmlessness for many years in the victim's blood. It is not until it enters what is known to scientists as the cerebro-spinal fluid, or as we should call it, the marrow, that it sets up the peculiar symptoms of the dread disease which has so far baffled the ingenuity of our soi-disant savants. This terrible affliction, which is not by any means confined to those inferior members of the human race, the dusky inhabitants of Uganda, consists of a lethargy accompanied with great variations of temperature. So far the dread complaint is without a remedy. Well may the medico echo the words of the Prince of Denmark:

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.'"

There was no more about the disease. The page ended with a joke about a mother-in-law. The paragraph made Roger remember an article which he had once read about the sudden rise of the sickness in some district in Africa. He remembered the photograph of a young African, who was dozing his life away, propped against a tree. The thought passed. In another instant he was full of his own misery again. But instead of throwing away the paper, he folded it, and put it in his pocket-case. It would remind him of that last visit to Ottalie's garden. He would keep it forever.

His wretchedness gave him a craving to be tender to something. He tried to attract the kitten, but the kitten, tiring of her romp, scampered to the garden wall to stalk sparrows. He plucked a leaf or two from the verbena. He went into the house.

Agatha welcomed him. She was writing replies to letters of condolence. The death had taken her hardness from her.

"Sit down and talk," she said. "What are you going to do?"

"That is like a woman," he said. "Women are wonderful. They use a man's vanity to protect themselves from his egotism. I came here to ask you that. What are you going to do?"

"I shall go on with my work," she said. "I am sure not to marry. I shall start a little school for poor girls."

"At Great Harley? But you were doing that before."

"Only in a very desultory sort of way. But now it is all different. Life has become so much bigger."

"Will you tell me about it? I should like to hear about it."

"Oh, it would only bore you. I shall just teach them the simplest things. How to darn clothes, how to cook, and perhaps a little singing. It isn't as though I were a learned person."

"How kind of you."

"It isn't kind at all."

"You will be taking girls of from thirteen to sixteen?"

"Yes. I've got no flair for very little children. Besides, there is nothing which I could teach them. I want to get hold of them at an age when I can really be of use to them."

She drummed a little with one foot.

"I wish that you would let me help you," he continued.

"Thank you very much. That is very kind of you. But I must do this quite by myself."

"What are you going to do with the flat in town?" he asked. "I should like to take it if you are going to give it up."

"Oh, I shall keep it on," she said. "I shall be up for week-ends a good deal, at any rate until I have got my class in working order."

"You will let me know if you ever want to give it up?"

"Yes. Certainly I will. Will you go back? I suppose you will be going back to your work. What are your plans? You never answered my question. You went flying off into apophthegms."

"I loved Ottalie, too," he answered. "I won't say as much as you did, for you knew her intimately. I never was soul to soul with her as you were; but I loved her. I want now to make my life worthy of her, as you do. But it won't be in my work. I don't know what it will be in. You women are lucky. You can know people like her."

"Yes. I shall always be glad of that," said Agatha. "Even the loss is bearable when I think that I knew her fully. Perhaps better than any one."

"Yes," he said. He paused, turning it over in his mind. "Life is a conspiracy against women," he added. "That is why they are so wonderful and so strange. I am only groping in the dark about her."

"Roger," said Agatha, speaking slowly, "I think I ought to tell you. I knew that you were in love with her. I was jealous of you. I did all that I could to keep you apart. She was in love with you. When she saw you at the theatre before the disturbance began, she would have gone to your box if I had not said that I was sure you would prefer to be alone. In the morning she saw what one of the papers said. She insisted on going to see you at your rooms. She said that she was sure you were expecting her, or that something had kept her letters from you. I told her that it wasn't a very usual thing to do. She said that she would talk about that afterwards. Afterwards, when she had gone, and failed to see you, she was horrified at what you might think of her."

It was very sweet to hear more of her, thus, after all was over. It was something new about her. He had never seen that side of her. He wondered how much more Agatha would tell him, or permit him to learn, in years to come. He saw that she was near tears. He was not going to keep her longer on the rack.

"Agatha," he said, "we have been at cross-purposes for a long time now. We have not been just to each other. Let it end now. We both loved her. Don't let it go on, now that she is dead. I want to feel that the one who knew her best is my friend. I want you to let me help you, as a brother might, whenever you want help. Will you?"

She said, "Thank you, Roger." They shook hands. He remembered afterwards how the lustre of the honesty shewed behind her head. A worn old panther skin, the relic of a beast which had been shot in India by Ottalie's father so many years before that the hairless hide was like parchment beneath the feet, crackled as she left the room. Roger plucked some of the silvery seed vessels for remembrance.

He stood in the hall for a moment trying to fix it in his mind. There was the barometer, by Dakins, of South Castle Street, in Liverpool, an old piece, handsome, but long since useless. There were the well-remembered doors. The dining-room door, the library door, the door leading into the jolly south room, the room sweet with the vague perfume, almost the memory of a perfume, as though the ghosts of flowers strayed there. The door of that room was open. Through its open windows he could see the blue of the bay, twinkling to the wind. Near the window was the piano, heaped with music. A waltz lay upon the piano: the Myosotis Waltz. Let no one despise dance music. It is the music which breaks the heart. It is full of lights and scents, the laughter of pretty women and youth's triumph. To the man or woman who has failed in life the sound of such music is bitter. It is youth reproaching age. It indicates the anti-climax.

He walked with Leslie through the village. The ragged men on the bridge, hearing them coming, turned, and touched what had once been their hats to them. They were not made for death, those old men. They were the only Irish things which the English tourist had not corrupted. They leant on the parapet all day. In the forenoons they looked at the road and at the people passing. In the afternoons, when the sun made their old eyes blink, they turned and looked into the water, where it gurgled over rusty cans, a clear brown peat-stream. A quarter of a mile up the stream was the graveyard, where the earth had by this time ceased to settle over Ottalie's face. On the grave, loosely tied with rushes, was a bunch of dog-roses.

They climbed the sharp rise beyond the bridge. Here they began to ride. They were going to ride thirty miles to the hotel. There they would sleep. In the morning Roger would take the steamer and return to London, where he would dree his weird by his lane as best he could.

The men on the quay were loading ore, as of old, into a dirty Glasgow coaster. One of them asked Roger which team had won at the hurling.

They ploughed through the red mud churned by the ore-carts. The schooner lay bilged on the sand, as of old, with one forlorn rope flogging the air. One or two golfers loafed with their attendant loafers on the links. They rode past them. Then on the long, straight, eastward bearing road, which rounds Cam Point, they began to hurry, having the wind from the glens behind them. Soon they were at the last gloomy angle from which the familiar hills could be seen. They rounded it. They passed the little turnpike. A cutter yacht, standing close inshore, bowed slowly under all sail before them. She lifted, poising, as the helm went down. Her sails trembled into a great rippling shaking, then steadied suddenly as the sheet checked. A man aboard her waved his hand to them, calling something. They spun downhill from the cutter. Now they were passing by a shore where the water broke on weed-covered boulders. From that point the road became more ugly at each turn of the wheel. It was the road to England.

They stopped at the posting-house so that a puncture might be mended while they were at tea. Tea was served in a long, damp, decaying room, hung with shabby stuff curtains. Vividly coloured portraits of Queen Victoria and Robert Emmet hung from the walls. On the sideboard were many metal teapots. On the table, copies of Commerce, each surmounted by a time-table in a hard red cover, surrounded a tray of pink wineglasses grouped about an aspodesta. On a piano was a pile of magazines, some of them ten years old, all coverless and dog's-eared. Roger picked up one of the newest of them, not because he wanted to read it, but because, like many literary men, he was unable to keep his hands off printed matter. He answered Leslie at random as he looked through it. There was not much to interest him there. Towards the end of it there was a photograph of an African hut, against which a man and woman huddled, apparently asleep. A white man in tropical clothes stood beside them, looking at something in a sort of test-tube.

"A COMMON SCENE IN THE SLEEPING SICKNESS BELT," ran the legend. Underneath, in smaller type, was written, "This photograph represents two natives in the last stages of the dread disease, which, at present, is believed to be incurable. The man in white, to l. of the picture (reader's r.), is Dr. Wanklyn, of the Un. Kgdm. Med. Assn. The photograph was taken by Mr. A. S. Smallpiece, Dr. Wanklyn's assistant. Copyright."

"What do you know of sleeping sickness, Leslie?" he asked.

"Sleeping sickness?" said Leslie. "There was an article about it in The Fortnightly, or one of the reviews. There was a theory that it is caused in some way by the bite of a tsetse fly."

"Yes," said Roger, "I remember that."

"Then when Maggie and I were staying at Drumnalorry we met old Dr. MacKenzie. He was out in Africa a great deal, fifty or sixty years ago. He was a great friend of my mother's. He told us at dinner one night that sleeping sickness is not a new thing at all, but a very old thing. The natives used to get it even in his day. He said that the tsetse fly theory was really all nonsense. He called it a pure invention, based on the discovery that yellow fever is spread by the white-ribbed mosquito. His own theory was that it was caused by manioc intoxication."

"That seems to me to be the prejudice of an old man. What is manioc?"

"A kind of a root, like cassava, isn't it?"

"Probably. What is cassava?"

"It's what they make bread of; cassava bread. It's poisonous until you bake it. Isn't that the stuff? Are you interested in sleeping sickness?"

"Yes. It has been running in my head all day. Look here. Here's a picture of two Africans suffering from it. Do they just sleep away like that?"

"I suppose so. They become more and more lethargic, probably, until at last they cannot be roused."

"How long are they in that condition?"

"I believe for weeks. Poor fellows; it must be ghastly to watch."

"There is no cure. There's no cure for a lot of things. Tetanus, leprosy, cancer. I wonder how it begins. You wake up feeling drowsy. And then to feel it coming on; and to have seen others ill with it. And to know at the beginning what you will have to go through and become. It must be ghastly."

"Here is tea," said Leslie. "By the way, sleeping sickness must be getting worse. It attacks Europeans sometimes. MacKenzie said that in his time it never did."

"Well," said Roger, "Europeans have given enough diseases to the Africans. It is only fair that we should take some in return."

They rode on slowly in the bright Irish twilight. When they were near the end of their journey they came to a villa, the garden of which was shut from the road by a low hedge. The garden was full of people. Some of them were still playing croquet. Chinese lanterns, already lit, made mellow colour in the dusk. A black-haired, moustachioed man with a banjo sat in a deck-chair singing. The voice was a fine bass voice, somehow familiar to Roger. It was wailing out the end of a sentimental ditty:

"O, the moon, the moon, the moon,"

in which the expression had to supply the want of intensity in the writing. Hardly had the singer whined his last note when he twanged his banjo thrice in a sprightly fashion. He piped up another ditty just as the cyclists passed.

"O, I'm so seedy,
So very seedy,
I don't know what to do.
I've consumption of the liver
And a dose of yellow fever
And sleeping sickness, too.
O, my head aches
And my heart..."

The banjo came to ground with a twang: the song stopped.

"Fawcett!" the singer shouted; "Fawcett! Come in here. Where are you going?"

"I can't stop," cried Leslie, over his shoulder. He turned to Roger. "Let's get away," he said.

They rode hard for a few minutes. "Who was that?" Roger asked. "I seemed to know his voice."

"It's a man called Maynwaring," said Leslie. "I don't think you've met him, have you? He's in the Navy. He met us at a dance. He proposed to Ottalie about a year ago. Now he has married one of those pretty, silly doll-women, a regular officer's wife. They are not much liked here."

"Curious," said Roger; "he was singing about sleeping sickness. Somehow, I think I must have met him. His voice seems so familiar." He stopped suddenly, thinking that the voice was the voice of the singer in his dream. "Yes," he said to himself. "Yes. It was."

A few minutes later they were sliding down the long hill to the hotel.