Multitude and Solitude

Roger Naldrett, the writer, sat in his box with a friend, watching the second act of his tragedy. The first act had been received coldly; the cast was nervous, and the house, cr...

Outside the stage door, in the alley leading to the street, several idlers waited idly for an opportunity for outrage. In the street itself a crowd had gathered at the theatre e...

He finished his salted almonds regretfully, remembering that he was out of olives. He lighted another cigarette, and lay there smoking, trying to get calm. It was very still but...

A second letter from the same lady enclosed a "Poem on My Cat Peter," which had been accidentally omitted from the other envelope. His agent sent him a very welcome cheque for £...

A lively desire sprang up in him to know whither she had gone. This (he thought) he could find out, without difficulty, from a Bradshaw. If she were going to Greece, she would g...

Up to the crossing of Holborn, he felt that he would catch the train. At Holborn the way was barred by traffic. The Euston Road was also barred to him. He missed the train by ra...

"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 saloo...

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....

They talked animatedly for ten minutes about the prospects of French literature as compared with our own. Presently the little man caught sight of his wife. He nodded to Roger a...

"Pretty bad," said Lionel. "I suppose that a couple of hundred thousand men and women have died of it during the last seven years. I don't know how many animals besides. The tse...

"I don't get insomnia," said Lionel. "No. They inject bits of me into a monkey, and then wait to see if the monkey develops the organism. The monkey's very fit indeed, so they r...

Ten months later Roger sat swathed in blankets under mosquito netting, steering a boat upstream. He was in the cold fit of a fever. The bows of the boat were heaped with the cag...

At the further end of the village Roger found evidence which helped him to make a theory of what had happened. Just outside the palisade were the bones of a few bodies, which, a...

Not long after that it broke. The stars came out. The wind ceased from her whirling about continually. She blew steady, in a brisk fresh gale, bringing up the clearing showers....

"We may not have any at all?" said Roger. Lionel produced a small screw-top bottle from his pocket. It had once contained tabloids of anti-pyrin. It was now about half full of a...

"They must come out of here, now," he said. "They must live with us for to-night. We can't do more now. We've done enough for one day. To-morrow we must rig them up a shanty up...

He knelt down by the cot in a whirl of jarring suggestions. What was he to do? Anxiety had lifted him out of himself on to another plane, a plane of torturing emotion. He felt a...

He stood looking out for a little while before some rally of delirium called him within to his friend. Later, when he had finished his work for the night, he thought gloomily of...

Again he was successful. The monkeys shewed no symptoms of poisoning. The sera, whatever they might be, were evidently harmless to the "homologous" animal. But the success made...

The title piece in this new volume is a dramatic poem of sixty pages, the action of which takes place in the time of Christ. The characters introduced include Pontius Pilate, Jo...