He walked hurriedly to the National Gallery. He remembered, when he entered, that he had made no rendezvous with Pollock. He expected to find him before the Ariadne. He was not there. He was not before his other favourite, The Return of Ulysses. He was not in any of the little rooms opening off the Italian rooms. A hurried walk round all the foreign schools showed that Pollock was not in that part of the Gallery at all. Very few people were in the Gallery at that hour. There could be no mistake. He tried the English rooms, without success. He described Pollock to the keepers of the lower stairs. "No, sir. No one's gone down like that." Search in the basement, in the little rooms where the Turner water-colours and Arundel prints are kept, showed him that Pollock was not in the Gallery. He wished to be quite certain. He made a swift beat of the French and Spanish rooms, and thence, by the Dutch and Flemish schools, to the Italian rooms. Here he doubled back upon his tracks, to avoid all possibility of mistake. He was now certain Pollock was not in the Gallery. Very probably he had never entered it. What had become of him?
He could hardly have gone to the Portrait Gallery, he thought. Yet it was possible. Pollock was in an excited state of mind. He was hardly in a fit state to be out alone. Roger felt anxious. He hurried to the Portrait Gallery. After a long search, upstairs and downstairs, in those avenues of painted eyes, he decided that Pollock was not there, either. He must have gone to Bondini's. Suffolk Street was only a quarter of a mile away. Roger hurried on to look for him at Bondini's. But no. He was not at Bondini's. Where, then, could he be?
By this time, Roger was alarmed for his friend. He thought that something must have happened to Kitty. He took a cab to Vincent Square to make sure. Pollock let him in. He was smoking a cigarette. His bandage gave him a one-eyed look, infinitely depressing.
"I'm sorry, Roger," he said; "I couldn't keep away from Kitty. She's quieter, but no better. O God, Roger, I don't know how men can be unkind to women. I don't know what I shall do without her, if anything happens to her."
"You must not lose heart, like this," Roger said. "I understand, very well, what you are feeling. But you ought not to expect evil in this way. Very, very few cases go wrong, now. I was afraid that something had happened to you. Will you come to my rooms for a game of chess? Then we could lunch together, and go on, perhaps, to Henderson's. He has finished the picture he was working on."
Pollock was not to be tempted. He would not leave Kitty. After talking with him for nearly an hour, Roger left him, promising to come back before long, to enquire.
When he got outside, into the street, with no definite, immediate object to occupy his mind, he was assailed by the memories of his succession of mishaps. He could not say that one of them hurt more than another. The loss of Ottalie, following so swiftly on the dream, made him miserable. The destruction of his play by the critics made him feel not exactly guilty, but unclean, as though the rabble had spat upon him. He felt "unclean," in the Levitical sense. He had some hesitation in going to mix with his fellows.
He kept saying to himself that if he were not very careful, the world would be flooding into his mind, trampling its garden to mud. It was his duty to beat back the world before it fouled his inner vision. If he were not very careful he would find that his next work would be tainted with some feverish animosity, some personal bitterness, or weakness of contempt. It was his duty as a man and as an artist to prevent that, so that his mind might be as a hedged garden full of flowers, or as a clear, unflawed mirror, reflecting only perfect images. The events of the night before had broken in his barriers. He felt that his old theory, laid aside long before, when he first felt the fascination of modern artistic methods, was true, after all; that the right pursuit of the artist was the practice of Christianity. He found in the National Gallery, in the battle picture of Uccello, in the nobleness of that young knight, riding calmly among the spears, a healing image of the artist. He lingered before that divine young man with the fair hair until one o'clock. He passed the afternoon at a table in the British Museum, reading all that he could find about Ottalie. There was her name in full in the Irish Landed Gentry. There were the names of all her relatives, and the names of their houses. It was an absurd thing to read these entries, but the names were all stimulants to memory. He knew these people and places. They took vivid shape in his mind as he read them. He had read them before, more than once, when the craving for her had been bitter in the past. He knew the names of her forebears unto the third and fourth generation. A volume of Who's Who gave him details of her living relatives. A married uncle's recreations were "shooting and hunting." A maiden aunt had published Songs of Quiet Life, in 1902. Her older brother, Leslie Fawcett, had published a novel, One Summer, in 1891. Both these volumes lay beside him. He read them again, for the tenth time. Both were very short works; and both, he felt, helped him to understand Ottalie. Neither work was profound; but both came from a sweet and noble nature, at once charming and firm. There were passages in the songs which were like Ottalie's inner nature speaking. In the novel, in the chapter on a girl, he thought that he recognised Ottalie as she must have been long ago.
The volume of the Landed Gentry gave him pity for the historian who would come a century hence, to grub up facts for his history. Ottalie, dear, breathing, beautiful woman, witty, and lovely-haired, and noble like a lady in a poem, would be to such a one "3rd dau.," or, perhaps, mere "issue."
At five o'clock, he put away his books. He went to drink tea at a dairy, in High Holborn. He entered the place with some misgivings, for his two emotions made the world distasteful to him. The memory of the night before made him feel that he had been whipped in public. The thought of Ottalie made him feel that the real world was in his brain. He shrank from meeting anybody known to him. That old feeling of "uncleanness" came strongly over him. The stuffy unquiet of the Museum had at least been filled by preoccupied, selfish people. Here in the tea-shop, everybody stared. All the little uncomfortable tables were peopled by pairs of eyes. He felt that a woman giggled, that a young man nudged his fellow. Stepping back to let a waitress pass, he knocked over a chair. The place was cramped; he felt stupidly awkward and uncomfortable. He blushed as he picked up the chair. Everybody stared. It seemed to him that they were saying, "That is Mr. Naldrett, the author of the piece which was booed off last night. They say it's very immoral. Millie was there. She said it was a silly lot of old-fashioned stuff. What funny eyes he's got. And look at the way he puts his feet."