Multitude and Solitude

by John Masefield

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.