At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

Clytie went upstairs to the familiar room, and took off her bonnet and gloves. In a few moments the boxes were brought up. When she had unpacked these and arranged their contents, and eaten as much as she could of the meal that Mrs. Gurkins prepared for her, the glorious afternoon had melted into night. She sat by the open window and looked out upon the hurrying street below. It was a Saturday evening. The whole population of the district was astir buying their Sunday provisions or their Sunday headaches. Bands of the youth of both sexes clattered noisily past, singing hoarsely or darting from pavement to roadway in loud, dissonant gaiety. Along the kerb stretched the line of costers' barrows with flaming naphtha torches, and the faces of the sellers and buyers stood out clear in the glare. A babel of sounds arose: the confused murmur of private conversations pitched in the discordant key of the unrefined, the raucous cries of the costers offering their wares, the shrill “Buy! buy!” of the butcher a few yards away and the rapid click of his steel, the doleful nasal dirge of a tramp woman holding a vague bundle looking like a baby in her arms, the continuous scraping of feet, the roar of the 'buses and carts in the roadway.

Clytie had often before sat on Saturday evenings at her window, lost in the wonder of speculation upon the individualities of the units that composed this hurrying, bawling, laughing, cursing crowd. And now she felt the old fascination creep over her. The noise and movement acted as a counter-stimulus to the fierce whirl of emotions through which she had passed during the day. She lost for the time the sense of loneliness, soul-sickness, and bodily prostration in this external world of tumult. What did it all mean, this hurry and strain? Looked at as a whole, it seemed to indicate that life was intense, earnest, throbbing with infinite variety of passions, an end in itself, to be carried on, because it was life, to all eternity. It seemed real, practical, objective, obeying inscrutable, immutable laws. The planets circle round the sun; our solar system circles round another focal sphere. It is great, it is glorious, serving some great and glorious end; yet what that end is no man knoweth. And so with the collective life that surged beneath Clytie's window, yielding blindly to the unchanging laws that direct the cosmos. If this movement was meaningless and vain, then did the stars wander futilely in their courses. Sin and shame and misery, love and laughter and happiness, what did they matter in the progress of collective life? They are internal forces affecting its resistless march as little as the incessant motion of men affects the rotation of the earth.

But the individuals, when detached from the conglomerate mass of humanity—what was this life to them? How far was it a gracious thing to yonder bawling cheap-jack, with his red, sodden face? And the factory girl, with her feathered hat and deep fringe overshadowing pinched, soulless features, looking hungrily at his Brummagem wares; the fat, unintelligent workman's wife gossiping loudly of sickness, death, and funerals; the besotted navvy stumbling along in the grip of a soberer friend—how far were they intellectually, spiritually, cognisant of life? Again as of old these questions presented themselves to Clytie. During these latter months she had been too closely confronted with the problems of her own personality to interest herself in that of others. But now a newly awakened self-knowledge had given her a key to mysteries to the elucidation of which she had once devoted all her artistic powers. She had arrived at the truth of the relativity of individual life. There was no such thing as absolute fulness of existence. Everyone—coster, factory girl, statesman, poet—was striving, each in his way, after a completer life, but the ideal of completeness was limited by each individual's capacity for action, sensation, and thought. Hence yonder factory girl's life might be relatively as full as her own, the hunger for the unknown that would complete it as loudly clamourous. Clytie was glad for the moment, almost happy. New artistic stirrings seemed to be at work within her soul. Heretofore she had sought a solution for the problems of life through her art. Might not this newer knowledge and more extensive sympathy enable her to present finely perceived truths, thus making her art less self-centred, more universal?

This train of thought was working through her mind as she sat by the window, resting her cheek on her arm.

Gradually, however, the thoughts confused themselves into a medley of dim associations, which in their turn became lost in drowsiness. Worn out by the physical strain of the day, she fell asleep in the midst of the uproar that arose from the hurrying street.

Suddenly she became conscious of a presence beside her in the room, and, starting up, beheld Kent looking down upon her.

“You'll get cold or a stiff neck or something sleeping by the open window like that,” he said in his kindly way. “And yet I did not like to wake you.”

“I do feel a little cramped,” said Clytie, rising. “But the night is hot. Bring another chair and sit down. I shall not go to sleep again.”

Kent did as she bade him, and they sat on either side of the window, Clytie with face half averted looking into the street, Kent leaning forward, gazing at her with troubled eyes. For some moments neither spoke. At last Kent broke the silence.

“Clytie!”