Produced by Al Haines MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE BY JOHN MASEFIELD Author of "The Everlasting Mercy," "The Widow in the Bye Street," "The Daffodil Fields," "Captain Margaret," etc. New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 TO MY WIFE MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE I What play do they play? Some confounded play or other. Let's send for some cards. I ne'er saw a play had anything in't. _A True Widow._ 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, critical as a first-night audience always is, had begun to fidget. He watched his failure without much emotion. He had lived through his excitement in the days before the production; but the moment interested him, it was so unreal. The play was not like the play which he had watched so often in rehearsal. Unless some speech jarred upon him, as failing to help the action, he found that he could not judge of it in detail. In the manuscript, and in the rehearsals, he had tested it only in detail. Now he saw it as a whole, as something new, as a rough and strong idea, of which he could make nothing. Shut up there in the box, away from the emotions of the house, he felt himself removed from time, the only person in the theatre under no compulsion to attend. He sat far back in the box, so that his friend, John O'Neill, might have a better view of the stage. He was conscious of the blackness of John's head against the stage lights, and of a gleam of gilt on the opposite boxes. Sometimes when, at irregular intervals, he saw some of the cast, on the far left of the stage, he felt disgust at the crudity of the grease paint smeared on their faces.