John Masefield

“ It makes one believe in hell."
"It's not the crime itself," said Roger. "Not knowing the criminal, I cannot judge the crime; but it's the state of mind which sickens me. The state of mind which could prompt such a thing."
"It's a common enough state of mind," said Lionel. "In business it's common enough. Business men, even of good standing, will do queer things when the shoe begins to pinch. You may say what you like about war. Business is the real curse of a nation. Business, and the business brain, and, oh, my God, the business man! Swine. Fatted, vulpine swine."
"Well," said Roger. ”

“ He would be a supreme soul. He would dominate this rabble which hooted him.
He lit another cigarette. John was like a man sent from God. John was unreal. John had marched before him with a torch. Now that ghostly master of his had thrust the torch into the road, pointing him forward with a gesture. The way to perfection lay further on, along a path too narrow for two. Far up the path he could see Ottalie, a glimmer of fragrant beauty, half hidden in a whirling dust-storm which almost swept him off the ledge. The dust should not keep him from her. ”

“ His friend was already in those secret rooms at the top of a house in Queen Square. His spirit was there, bowed over the work with the Spanish scholar; the earthly part of him was a parcel left behind in a restaurant to follow as it might. Words from nowhere floated into Roger's mind. It was as though some of John's attendant spirits had whispered to him: "Your friend is busy with some strange doctrine of the soul," said the whisperer. "This world does not exist for him. You are nothing to him; you are only a little part of the eternal, dragging a caddis-worm's house of greeds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He lived again in his past more intensely than he had ever lived. His life in Ireland, his days with Ottalie, her words and ways and looks, he realised again minutely with an exactness which was, perhaps, half imaginative. He troubled his peace with the sweetness of those visions. The more deeply true they were, the more strong their colour; the more intense the vibration of their speech, the more sharp was the knowledge of their unreality, the more bitter the longing for the reality. He was home-sick for the Irish hills which rose up in his mind so clearly, threaded by the flash of silver. ”

“ His fever of the last few hours was the initial fever. Sooner or later he would drowse off to death as Lionel was drowsing. He might have only two more months of life. Two months. Ottalie had had two startling, frightened seconds before death choked her. So this was what Ottalie had felt in those two seconds, fear, a blind longing of love for half a dozen, a thought of sky and freedom, a craving, an agony, and then the fear again. He rose up. "Even if it be all useless," he said to himself, "I will fire off all my cartridges before I go." ”

“ 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. ”

“ He knew so little of science that his thought of it was little more than a consideration of sleeping sickness. He reviewed his knowledge of sleeping sickness. He thought of it no longer as an abstract intellectual question, but as man's enemy, an almost human thing, a pestilence walking in the noonday. Out in Africa that horror walked in the noonday, stifling the brains of men. It fascinated him. He thought of the little lonely stations of scientists and soldiers, far away in the wilds, in the midst of the disease, perhaps feeling it coming on, as Lionel must have felt it. ”

“ If we are likely to go to war, we ought to be prepared for war. And we can only be prepared if we establish conscription. And if we are not prepared, we shall cease as a nation. It is your duty, as an English writer, to awaken the national conscience by a play or novel, so that when the time comes we may be prepared."
"My duty is nothing of the kind," said Roger. "I believe war to be a wasteful curse; and the preparation for war to be an even greater curse, and infinitely more wasteful. I am not a patriot, remember. My State is mind. The human mind. ”

“ He was a weak and fumbling human soul shut away from his bright beloved, not only by death, but by his own swaddled insufficiency. Lionel, on the other hand, was a crusader, dying outside the Holy City, perhaps not in sight of it, but so fired with the idea of it that death was a little thing to him. All his life had been death for an idea. All his life had made dying easier. Roger's tortured mind was not soothed by thinking how their respective souls would look after death. Some men laid up treasures in heaven, others laid up treasures on earth. ”

“ A braver man would have been awed by it. It was not all cowardice which daunted Roger. It was that animal something not yet etiolated, which on a dark night in a lonely place at a noise of stirring makes a man's heart thump like a buck's heart. To stare into the blackness with eyes still dazzled from the camp-fire gave a sense of contrast not easy to overcome. The comfort of the fire was something, something civilised, conquered, human. And the beloved figure lying ill was one of his own kind, leagued with him against the inhuman. The vastness of the inhuman overpowered his will. ”

“ It had lighted Ottalie. It had burned upon the pane when Ottalie's mother stood there. Nature was enduring; Nature the imperfect; Nature the enemy, which blighted the rose and spread the weed. Thinking of the woman who had waited for him there in his vision, he prayed that her influence in him might help to bring to earth that promised life, in which man, curbing Nature to his use, would assert a new law and rule like a king, where now, even in his strength, he walks sentenced, a prey to all things baser. ”

“ There's that hideous old crone coming out again. Poor old thing. I dare say she has seen more of the world than either of us. She may be a king's wife and the mother of kings. How merciless these savages are to the old!"
"They're like children. Children have no mercy on the old."
"I wonder what good life is to her?"
"I dare say she remembers the good days. She can't feel very much."
"No," said Lionel. "But I notice that old people feel intensely. They don't feel much. They may feel only one single thing in all the world; but they feel about that with all their strength. ”

“ Roger stared stupidly at them. Something of a warning of death moved through the surging of his fever. He said to himself that there was death here. Words spoke in his brain, each word like a fire-flash. "No white man has ever been here before. You are the first. Take care. There is death here." Some vague fear of possible war, so vague that he was not quite certain that it was not a memory of a war-scare at home, made him look to his revolver. He thrust up the catch with his thumb, and stared at the seven dull brass discs pulled slightly forward by the extractor. ”

“ Ottalie, and himself, and the Craga' Burn, the rush sway trailing, the pleasant, faint smell of the blight on the patch beyond, the whiff of turf smoke. Ottalie. Ottalie. Ottalie in the blind grave with the dogrose on her breast.
Living alone fosters an intensity of personal life which sometimes extinguishes the social instinct, even in those who live alone by the compulsion of accident. It had become Roger's lot to look into himself for solace. Most of those things which society had given to him during his short, impressionable life were useless to him. ”

“ He thought of Ottalie. He saw her more clearly than of old. In the old days he had seen her through the pink mists of amatory sentiment. The sentiment was gone. Action had knocked it out of him. He saw her now as she was. She was more wonderful in the clearer light; more wonderful than ever; a fine, trained, scrupulous mind, drilled to a beautiful unerring choice in life. She was near and real to him, so real that he seemed to be within her mind, following its fearlessness. ”

“ He was drawn to them all, but Lionel attracted him the most strongly. Some of his liking for Lionel was mere instinctive recognition of an inherent fineness and simplicity in the man's character. But there was more than that. He had often felt that in life, as in nature, there is a constant effort to remedy the unnatural. The inscrutable agency behind life offers always wisely some restoration or readjustment of a balance disturbed. He felt that a tide had quickened in his life, at the last ebbing of the old. In the old life all had been to please Ottalie. Life was more serious now. ”

“ The visitor was free to enter. "Think all gone away," said Merrylegs. "Slave man he catch."
Roger did not now believe in the theory of slave man.
"It is nonsense," he said. "Nonsense. There must be death here." He stood by the gate, breathing heavily, not quite knowing, from time to time, what he was doing, at other times knowing clearly, but not caring. Little things, the crawling of a tick, the cluck of a hen, the noise of his own breath, seemed important to his fever-clogged brain. ”

“ He thought that John O'Neill would be distant music to him henceforth. Perhaps the dead look on the living souls as notes in a music, and play upon them, making harmony or discord, according to the power of their wills and the quality of their nature. He could imagine John, who had stricken so many living souls to music, playing on in death, not hampered by the indifference of any one note, but playing upon it masterly, rousing it to music, by striking some kindred note, reaching it through another, as perhaps our dead friends can. But life would be terrible without John. ”

“ His heart turned to her; he would go to her. He could not live without love.
The play had ended before ten o'clock. It was now half-past eleven. Roger paid his bill, and turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, thinking that within thirty-six hours he would be set free. This dusty tumult would be roaring to other ears. He would be by the waters of Moyle, among magical glens, knocking at his love's door, walking with her, hearing her voice, sitting with her over the turf fire, in that old house on the hills, looking over towards Ailsa. That would be life enough. ”

“ There came a sharp pattering of heavy rain-drops, which beat the ground like shot falling on to tin. In the glimmer of a long flash, which burnt for a full ten seconds, Roger saw Lionel probing the ground for snakes with an outstretched foot. He was hooded and cowled with tarpaulin from the boat. He was scratching a match, sleepy with heat-damp, to get a light for a cigarette. The match flared, putting the face in strong colour below the shade of the cowl. The sky was being charged by a dark host. ”

“ They would halt at the smoke. They would land and camp. Nothing could be done till the leaders were cured. If the men deserted, he would trust to luck to be able to hire new men. He could not go on like this; Lionel might die. The fever closed in upon his mind again, surging and withering. The air seemed strangely thick. Merrylegs wavered and blurred. The boat grounded on a mud-bank, and brushed past some many-shimmering reeds with a long swish. The dying negro, stirred by some memory, which the noise had awakened in him, raised himself faintly, asking something. ”

“ He would have to go back to Pollock. He could not leave his friend alone in that wild state of mind. A smaller man would perhaps have felt resentment against the cause. Roger was without that littleness. He saw only the tragic irony. He saw life being played upon a great plan. He felt himself to be a fine piece set aside from his own combination by one greater, stronger, more wonderful. It seemed very wonderful that he had been kept (so unexpectedly) from Ottalie, by the one thing in the world strong enough so to keep him. Nothing but a matter of life and death could have kept him from her. ”

“ People got up blunderingly to leave the theatre, treading on other people's toes, stumbling over their knees, with oaths in their hearts, and apologies on their lips. The play had come to an end. The cast waited for the noise to cease. Miss Hanlon, the sword at her throat, stood self-possessed, ready with her line and gesture, only waiting for quiet. Two of the actors talked to each other, looking straight across the stage at the dim mob before them. Roger could see their lips move. ”

“ Roger, in a dreadful state of mental anguish, stayed with them till they were dead, trying remedy after remedy. He felt that he had killed them all. He felt that their blood was on his hands. He felt that all those people might still have been alive had he not tried his wretched nostrum on them. There was no doubt that the sera had caused their deaths. Those who had had no serum injections were no worse than they had been. He wondered how long it would be before these symptoms of swelling and high fever appeared in himself and Lionel. ”

“ When life has been made glorious, as I can see that it could be made, then you artists could set to work to decorate it as much as you like."
"So, then," said Roger, "there are three ways to perfection, by admitting women to the suffrage, by driving men into the army, and by substituting the College of Surgeons for the Government. Now an artist is concerned above all things with moral ideas. He is not limited, or should not be, to particular truths. His world is the entire world, reduced, by strict and passionate thinking, to its imaginative essence. ”